“That’s right; think it over,” said Eddie. “It’s a good proposition and that ain’t no dream. He’s not exactly pretty, but he’s there with a bundle of kale that would choke the Panama. He’d set you up in a swell apartment, plaster sparklers all over you, and give you a year-after-next model eight lunger and a shuffer. You’d be the only cheese on Michigan Boulevard.”

needs more demons? a smidge of historical perspective might help, but demons would not.

Bray explicitly references Don Quixote throughout, but the picaresque novel Going Bovine most called to my mind was Candide, or perhaps even more, a slightly updated and mostly de-ribaldized Candy. (Like Candide, Cameron is young and naive.) Cameron bounces rather fecklessly between various groups of people (Mardi Gras revelers, cultists, and reality show producers among them). Bray doesn’t offer the nastiness of truly great satire, but provides trenchant observations throughout. This bit:

It’s one of those places full of useless junk — state spoons, frosted pecans with a half-life of about two hundred years, tea towels decorated with cranky observations about life, novelty cookbooks, and trivets shaped like lighthouses because apparently the world is clamoring for cute things they can place piping hot casserole dishes on. It’s hard to believe people buy this shit, and even harder to believe they give it to other people as mementos, like, “Hey, we went on this awesome vacation but we brought you back some pickled peppers in a festive, dancing jalapeno jar. Thanks for feeding our cat!”

was particularly fun to encounter in a resort town, with friends looking after our felines.

needs more demons I liked this novel quite a bit, but Cameron’s passivity bugged me, the tone was a bit inconsistent, and I’m a bit ambivalent about the ending. But I give it credit for being much more ambitious than typical supernatural YA fare. And you may never look at snow globes the same way.

Conti is a computer scientist who researches things like security and information disclosure. As this job description requires, he’s both sharp and paranoid. I bookmarked a dozen or so passages that showcased one attribute or another. He starts out by saying that he considers Google “a sovereign entity equivalent to a nation . . . because of its top-tier intellectual talent, financial resources in the billions of dollars, and world-class information-processing resources,” a viewpoint which strikes me as patently absurd. Throughout there are asides like, “every time an old friend contacts you from a webmail account, a little piece of your privacy dies.” But in the chapter on maps, Conti offers this provocative scenario:

Let’s say [your company] has 1,200 employees located at 10 locations, some not publicly known. Imagine mapping activity form the IP address ranges used by our corporate headquarters, as well as the other locations, all seeking directions from Ministeri Pistarini International Airport in Buenos Aires to the street address of a meeting site at the outskirts of the city. Because this activity is out of the norm, you’ve just created a unique set of characteristics that ties together your various company offices with a potentially sensitive meeting. You’ve also disclosed with a high probability, the travel plans of the meeting participants, as well as given a clue to the strategic importance of Argentina to your company’s planning.

In the chapter on cross-site tracking via embedded content, after dissecting the roles of the (many) sites involved in serving up content for a typical MSNBC.com page, he makes the trenchant point that, “your real privacy in terms of visiting a web site is the equivalent of the worst [privacy] policy of all the sites embedded there.”

Far from accepting Google’s famous “don’t be evil” precept at face value, Conti continually ascribes the worst possible motivations to Google. He makes insinuating comments like, “Note that these are the publicly acknowledged uses of machine processing of communications. It is a safe bet that many other uses will never be discussed overtly.” In discussing the Google Analytics javascript, which has been through a “minification” process that makes the code hard to read, he saves the admission that “the density of code could also be seen as an attempt to reduce the size of the file, to improve response time.” He fails to mention that minifying javascript for performance reasons is standard practice for high-performance, real-time websites. Conti assumes Google (ab)uses information in ways it has publicly states it does not; one could imagine that at least some of the data mining Conti describes might be technically challenging even for an organization like Google.

But Conti makes another interesting point: Google won’t endure forever, certainly not in its current form***. The individuals who defined Google’s culture and ethics won’t live forever, and there is no guarantee that their principles will be adhered to indefinitely. If Google doesn’t, or even can’t, exploit data in certain ways now, it’s impossible to say with absolute certainty that that will always be true. This sorts of threat isn’t even hypothetical to me — when I signed up for a Flickr account, I was comfortable with Flickr’s privacy policy. I was not at all comfortable with Yahoo!’s privacy policies, which are the ones that matter now.

I don’t plan to make many changes to my web browsing habits as a result of reading Conti’s book, mostly because I already aggressively filter tracking cookies and minimize my use of problematic sites like FaceBook. But I did find it interesting and thought provoking, if sometimes a little shrill.

* I also didn’t remember the author or the exact title. I made a game of trying to track down the book without using Google, pretending that showing interest in this book might set some blackmark flag in Google’s servers. I searched on Amazon, Yahoo!, and even Bing. But I couldn’t track it down without recourse to Google.

** Or at least that someone is trying to establish a connection, which may be interesting in an entirely different way.

*** If nothing else, the end of normal matter in the universe will eventually impose significant changes on Google’s technical infrastructure.

needs more demons? I wouldn’t want to wish more demons on Conti; he seems to have enough of his own.

Presumably the draw for most fans of Project Runway’s congenial but incisive mentor figure Tim Gunn (certainly for me) is the promise of some juicy insider chat, which Gunn delivers a good bit of. You might hope for Gunn to dish about fashion world figures like Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley (yes), assorted Project Runway contestants (yes), Parsons (oh my, yes, that bridge is burnt), and Heidi, Micheal, and Nina (not a chance).

But Gunn is, I think, too sincerely principled to want to produce a gossip-centric volume, and what results is a peculiar mish-mash of gossip, memoir, and Gunn’s (as the subtitle puts it) “[Life's] Little Lessons for Making It Work.” Gunn’s guidelines are reasonable, pithily expressed and ably supported (his suggestions for giving design critiques are particularly useful). There’s nothing holier-than-thou about it, either; Gunn is not all reticent about criticizing himself. But the general tone of the volume is distinctly anti-snark, so there’s a slight tension between the book’s message and its contents. At times I almost felt like there was an implicit quid pro quo: eat your healthy precepts, then you can have your catty gossip.

My vague unease with the book was exacerbated by the absence (largely) of Gunn’s distinctive voice. Project Runway’s editors leave in many instances of Gunn’s vivid and precise vocabulary (he’s a use-exactly-the-right-word kind of guy), and my ideal of a Tim Gunn book would send the less erudite portion of the readership scurrying for a dictionary at least a few times. But Calhoun (I suspect) has largely excised Gunn’s most flavorful language. On page 74 I found a glimmer of what I felt was lacking (”Every corpuscle of every society in the history of this globe has religion at its core!” I brayed at him.), but moments like those are thin on the ground throughout.

Warning: from time to time you may be overcome by a strong desire to give Tim Gunn a hug and say, “there, there.”

needs more demons? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe needs a less assertive editorial/co-authorial hand.

Two thematic thrusts vie with each other for prominence. On one hand, Doyle twists the familiar trope of adolescents with fantastic abilities. Usually there’s a strong component of wish-fulfillment in identifying with the protagonist of these stories: you are special and unique; you do carry the weight of the world; you’re not related to the intensely embarrassing creatures that raised you. Instead, Doyle pushes his characters’ natural anxieties about what the adolescent hormonal storm is doing to their bodies to absurd, even nightmarish extremes. Doyle is not particularly subtle about serving this up; one of his characters is revealed at one point to literally not have a penis; another suffers a malady in which secondary sexual characteristics assume unbalanced prominence.

The other major thematic aspect is more generalized socio-politcal satire. The actual monster/sci-fi flicks of the 50’s were clearly informed by the twin fears of nuclear annihilation and the Red Peril; in Doyle’s version the saucer folk literally replace these fears, with Joe McCarthy ranting against Hollywood’s secret aliens. Doyle’s PLEX, a sort of Internet with Orwellian and Tesla-esque attributes, arises, representing the loss of faith in the benevolence of our government with which often we endow the idealized retrospective view of the fifties.

Both of these angles seem well capable of supporting a novel on its their own, so it didn’t surprise me that Doyle, among other credits, has written for The Simpsons, a show which often managed to cram what on almost any other show would be an hour-long plot into a half hour. And also like The Simpsons, Go, Mutants! is ridiculously dense with explicit allusions to other creative works. The Day the Earth Stood Still is probably the most important touchpoint for Go, Mutants!, but there are sly nods to literally dozens of other sci-fi/horror movies — everything from classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers to schlocky, sub-B-grade fare like Robot Monster. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone with a Mystery Science Theater 3000-flavored appreciation of cinema not having fun playing “spot-the-reference.” (I suspect nods to juvenile delinquent cinema are nearly as thick on the ground in Go, Mutants! as the sci-fi, but I’m not nearly as well versed in the arcana of that.)

I can’t write about this book without mentioning how gorgeous a physical object it is, and just how note-perfect the design choices are. The cover is a wonderful pastiche of one of the sleazier paperback houses (Beacon, for instance), right down to the relative position and size of “A novel by” and “Larry Doyle.” And the left-side drop-shadow. The opening page of each chapter is printed in white-on-black, with titles like “Science Gone Wild!” and “Charged with Million-Volt Excitement!” in the same screamingly dramatic typefaces as the posters and movie title frames they evoke –sometimes the crazy typefaces even creep into the main body of the text. (The book’s website, gomutants.com ably embodies its aesthetic, but might spoil some of the surprises.)

Doyle’s language is frequently colorful and dramatic. I clogged up the book with strips of paper identifying especially noteworthy passages, from the opening “Enter right, SCREAMING: THE GIRL, in high distress and heels,” to

The story on [her] was that she had been engaged to a soldier before the unpleasantness, and when her fiancé was devoured by a tree that ate women but was bi-curean, she went to work for the CIA, using the nom de guerre Ida Day, where she seduced and tortured hundreds of alien combatants, often at the same time, which led to her career in higher education.

and

Like most of Manhattan’s matrons, [she] had been a great beauty in her youth, but time and decapitation had taken their toll. Years of meanness were gouged into her face, which no amount of cosmetic troweling could ameliorate.

or just lovely coinages like the, “Rattarachirotacacean, a rat-spider-bat-crab from Mars.”

I loved a lot of things about this book, but still found it less than completely satisfying. I’m sure that’s partly because the opening handful of chapters set my expectations stratospherically high, but I think the book also has some pacing/structural issues. It would be stronger if it was shorter and punchier, or alternatively if the plot delivered more actual surprises, or perhaps even if Doyle didn’t hold his characters at such an emotional remove — the narrative voice is arch and omniscient, which seems appropriate, but is more than a little distancing.

needs more demons? Demons are the wrong genre, but I still felt like a tiny something was missing.

Berger thought that the book was the best thing Blomkvist had ever written. It was uneven stylistically, and in places the writing was actually rather poor — there had been no time for any fine polishing — but the book was animated by a fury that no reader could help but notice.

…words which could easily be applied to the novel itself. Like the protagonist Blomkvist’s book, which is mostly fact-dump appendices, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is angry, and its twin plots are intricately detailed, very much in favor of other niceties.

One of the issues Larsson is angry about is sexual violence perpetrated on women. Another thing I found problematic about this book is how Larsson deals with this theme. Like the old saw about anti-war films inadvertently glorifying war, this can be tricky territory to write about. It took a long time for Larsson to convince me that he was wasn’t just being lurid, sensational, exploitive, and playing to exactly the wrong audience; some readers might lose patience (or their lunch) waiting for the authorial viewpont to become clear.

Finally, what with the author and the male protagonist both being magazine editors, it’s tempting to suspect that Blomvkist might be an idealized version of Larsson himself. Given that, the proportion of the novel’s female characters who throw themselves at Blomvkist sexually seemed more than a little icky, not to mention a bit juvenile.

needs more demons? I realize there’s a lot of hubris involved in making value judgments about a book as popular as this, but if your taste is similar to mine, you might prefer to invest your time in a slightly more literary thriller.

On the bright side, although it’s the first of three volumes, it delivers closure on its plot and character arcs, so there’s no lingering hunger for resolution to impel me to read further.

needs more demons? not so much.

Jacobs’ blend of ingredients is not dissimilar to Spurlock’s: a lot of subjective experience, a dab of underlying science, a few gags, a bit of analysis, a few insights. (Probably my favorite aspect of The Guinea Pig Diaries, much of which was originally published as articles for Esquire, are the codas to each essay, in which Jacobs discussed how each project did (or didn’t) continue to affect his life after its conclusion.) But I think it’s fair to say that the emphasis is on entertainment, with educational value as a secondary focus.

Jacobs’ nine “experiments” and the resulting chapters all follow the same basic template. Some seemed goofier than others. I thought “What Would George Washington Do?” was the weakest, but it demonstrates the general form. In it, Jacobs follows Washington’s personal code of conduct for a month (sort of an abbreviated, watered-down version of Jacobs’ own The Year of Living Biblically) with a side-order of biographical tidbits; in the process he comes to realize how uncivil our society is, and how much he dislikes shaking hands.

The fascinating meta-lesson of Jacobs’ experiments, though, is that he consistently finds that adopting a given behavior — even very artificially and deliberately — winds up changing his attitudes about the behavior he’s adopted. Funnily enough, I recently arrived at the same realization (perhaps sparked by some of the things I read in Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open) and so I’m currently engaged in a few different Jacobs-style experiments with the goal of altering my mindset through behavioral changes. (For instance, I’m trying to defuse my anger at unsafe and law-breaking bicyclists. So far, it seems to be helping.)

needs more demons? the essays do get a bit samey if you read them all back-to-back (which is awfully easy to do). The incursion of an extra-dimensional evil entity would have broken up the pace a bit, for sure.

For better or worse, in the wake of Twilight’s success (not to mention Harry Potter’s, Buffy’s and the more explicit books of Hamilton’s, Harris’s, et al) there’s a lot of supernaturally-themed young adult fiction being published these days that shares many common attributes. These books generally use supernatural abilities as a metaphor for ordinary adolescent alienation. Many of them employ themes of humans consorting with the not-quite-human to deliver mildly illicit thrills (whether or not the characters actual consort). The overall vibe is generally escapist, with plot more prominent than theme or character development. (In fact, I think some of these books — although not the best of them — deliberately skimp on development of the viewpoint characters to increase the degree to which the intended audience can identify with the protagonists).

If you judge Generation Dead by its cover, I think you could be excused for thinking it’s one of these books:

However, despite some common plot elements Generation Dead is a completely different sort of novel — more serious and more ambitious — and it’s hard to imagine someone looking for a Twilight-esque experience is going to be very satisfied. In fact, it’s a little hard for me to imagine many readers being completely satisfied by Generation Dead — its symbolism seems muddled, although that’s arguably deliberate, and the abrupt ending leaves many elements unresolved. The dénouement makes thematic sense, but it also feels a little as if it was chosen as an alternative to answering or addressing some of the questions the narrative raises.

But I definitely give Waters credit for trying something different, and I found his book interesting, if not completely successful. In Generation Dead some deceased teens rise again as zombies unlike virtually any other treatment of the undead I can think of. They shamble around, but they don’t rot or eat brains, and one of them even goes out for the football team. Waters plays a little with zombieness as metaphor for alienation, but he’s more interested in contrasting the zombies’ externally imposed alienation with the internally imposed alienation of teens in the goth/punk subculture. The social treatment of the undead (or in the novel’s politically correct phrase, “the differently biotic”) is also an extended metaphor for real world bigotry (and one perhaps best not too closely examined). Waters’ third-person omniscient voice delves deeply into the motivations of his human characters, including the nastiest, a memorably self-aware bully, while leaving the zombies oblique and mysterious.

Quibble: I think writing about counter-culture music credibly is something that writers from outside the culture can often best deal with by making up band names. Waters mostly acquits himself well, but the number of times Michale Graves (a.k.a. the singer for The Misfits who was neither Glenn Danzig nor Jerry Only) is mentioned suggests that Waters’ source on Graves’ prominence in the goth/horrorpunk/metal scene might have been an interview with Graves himself.

needs more demons? just a few.

I’ve mentioned Henry Jenkin’s introduction to Interfictions 2 once already. In it he makes an excellent point about genre: when we read genre fiction, we want it to conform somewhat to our expectations of the genre — but we also want it to somewhat confound our expectations to provide some measure of novelty (”It never happened quite that way before”). My biggest problem with The Gates is that I found precious little novelty in it. I’m not sure I’ve read another novel in which themes of the implications of modern experimental high-energy physics on the existence of elemental evil are juxtaposed with a plot about a plucky lad and his plucky dog who must foil a demonic invasion- — but virtually every individual element of this book seemed so familiar I still had the nagging sense I’d already read it.

Another major problem I have with The Gates is that the previous times I encountered its individual components, they were better. Connolly has a penchant, for instance, for writing longish clumps of unattributed humorous dialogue that recalls (among others) Terry Pratchett and Donald Westlake. But Pratchett and Westlake are much funnier. Connolly seems to be striving for punnish name-based humor and an outlandishly omniscient narrative point of view in the mode of Pratchett or Douglas Adams — but locales like “666 Crowley Road” strike me as goofy, not funny. I can forgive Samuel Johnson (the plucky lad) having a pooch named Boswell — blame for that bit of cutsie-poo could be laid at Samuel’s parents’ feet — but giving a present-day researcher at CERN the surname Planck just seems baffling.

My last big problem with The Gates is that it felt sloppily constructed to the point of insulting its audience. It bumps along its rollercoaster track of conflicts and resolutions without the slightest regard as to whether it all makes any sense. Members of Connolly’s demonic horde are invincible when he needs to notch up the body count, but otherwise generally susceptible to any random utensil that comes to hand.

I think I would have been disappointed by this book even if I’d encountered it when I was fourteen.

In an odd twist, the thing I enjoyed best about The Gates is that it references the universe’s reaction to the Large Hadron Collider, and I read it while stories about papers published (by Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan) asserting more-or-less that the universe is sabotaging the LHC in order to maintain its own integrity were making their way into the popular press.

needs more demons? More demons wouldn’t really help.