Used Books Blog

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde is an entertaining, inventive read but doesn’t quite measure up to the Thursday Next series.

Reduced down to a simple scale, The Big Over Easy is very good, while most of the Thursday Next series (including The Well of Lost Plots) are great. Fforde is a victim of his own creativity.

The Big Over Easy is a mystery novel that follows detective Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crimes Division (NCD). Yes, he’s that Jack Spratt and in this alternate world nursery characters are real and live among us.

The NCD is under the microscope after Spratt fails to secure a conviction against the three pigs for death by scalding of Mr. Wolff. And now Humpty Dumpty has been murdered!

That’s the set-up and Fforde delivers with great nursery references (many of which I’m guessing I missed) and his usual absurd humor.

There’s nothing wrong with The Big Over Easy and yet, it’s not quite as inventive as The Eyre Affair, the first in the Thursday Next series. As much as I tried to simply enjoy The Big Over Easy for what it was, I couldn’t help but compare.

It didn’t help that Fforde draws at least one of his characters (Lola Vavoom) from the Thursday Next series into The Big Over Easy.

Comparisons aside, it’s a fun novel and yet again showcases Fforde’s ability to create a world populated with literary characters. This time it’s even more absurd because Fford draws on everything from a gigantic egg to a Greek Titan. Yes, Prometheus winds up living at the Spratt residence as he seeks asylum, escaping his daily liver pecking imprisonment.

The plot line of The Big Over Easy is satisfactory but nothing surprising. It’s a bit like a nursery version of CSI. That’s not why you read Fforde. Instead you get the clever newspaper excerpts at the beginning of each chapter and literary humor on nearly every page.

Read The Big Over Easy and become a fan of Fforde. Then read everything else he’s written.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes is an interesting blend of history, biography and mystery. Rich in description, Barnes is able to provide a compelling biography for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his relationship with the George Edalji case. In doing so, Barnes creates both a tense mystery and a personal account of a historic event.

Arthur & George succeeds on many levels. It is an intricate character study, a period piece, a mystery and a biography. However, it does fall short in some areas. At times Arthur & George takes a turn into Jane Austen like territory. The incessant honor, decorum and love themes became tedious. If that’s your thing, great, but it wore thin for me.

In addition, Barnes seeks to finish off his character study and biography which detracts from the natural conclusion of the story. In other words, there’s about 30 or so pages that seem superfluous at the end of the novel. Because of this, it took nearly as long to get through those final pages as it did to get through half of the entire novel.

But there’s far more to like than not in Arthur & George.

The portrait of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle alone makes Arthur & George worthwhile. I don’t read many biographies but am thrilled when I get to learn about a historic figure in the context of a novel. Barnes does this with great elegance, giving the reader a real portrait of the famed author. In particular, Doyle’s views on religion are eye opening.

The other central figure in the story, George Edalji, allows Barnes to explore the period, from matters of race and society to industrialization and technological progress. Because George is a ‘different sort’ of person, Barnes can reveal and expose more about the time and surroundings. It’s a clever device that never feels forced.

Yet, the novel really works because of the mystery. It’s here that you’re turning the page, wondering in the back of your mind, ‘did George do it?!’ Doubting the protagonist in the story creates a pleasant friction and anxiety. You want to believe George, and for the most part you do, but somehow Barnes conjures doubt out of nothing.

Perhaps it’s the knowledge that Doyle is involved, and that a Sherlock Holmes story can be surprising. Whatever the reason, the doubt draws the reader further into the narrative. And when that part of the mystery is resolved, Barnes effortlessly transfers it toward another building climax. (I’m working hard here not to give anything away.)

Arthur & George will likely not appeal to the typical beach reading mystery lover. Instead, I recommend Arthur & George by Julian Barnes for those who enjoy history, biography and literary mysteries. Get through the over-wrought spots and you’ll find an enjoyable multi-faceted novel.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is a beautifully written novel that captures the difficulty of growing up while delivering a unique view of family and society in England circa 1982.

I’d read a number of negative reviews prior to reading Black Swan Green. Many readers seemed unwilling to stray from Mitchell’s multi-narrative structure (as seen in Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten) or couldn’t relate to Jason Taylor, the 13 year old stammering protagonist.

To those naysayers I say this: you are wrong.

Readers who really pay attention to Black Swan Green will recognize that it is a multi-narrative structure. Instead of stories from far flung reaches of the globe or throughout time they are simply stories from a year in the life of one person. Yet, what is packed into the year in the life of a 13 year old boy can be quite varied. They’re like the tracks on an eclectic CD compilation. Mitchell levels his unflinching prose on war, unemployment, acceptance, friendship, death and divorce.

In addition, Mitchell paints incredible stories through the lens of Jason Taylor. It’s not just about Jason’s coming of age story, it’s about all the adult issues swirling around him. You’ve missed substantial portions of Black Swan Green if you’re simply reading what is written on the page. Mitchell’s genius is in his ability to create stories that live off the page, that blossom out of a few simple sentences into the known spaces of understanding and feeling.

While reading I often turn the corner down on a page if I find a phrase or passage particularly interesting. Black Swan Green is filled with turned down corners! Here’s an example that is both evocative and intimately linked to the time period.

I crossed the flooded clinic car park leaping from dry bit to dry bit like James Bond froggering across the crocodiles’ backs.

Or this incredible observation in relation to how an alcoholic parent can be so different but the same person.

Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone?

And then this supreme example of the inability to define beauty.

Beauty is immune to definition. When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty Toronto, one’s new lover in an old cafe, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is.

Mitchell can also put down on paper and describe a feeling that I am certain many of you have experienced.

School corridors’re sort of sinister during classtime. The noisiest spaces’re now the silentest. Like a neutron bomb’s vaporized human life but left all the building standing. These drowned voices you hear aren’t coming from classrooms, but through the partitions between life and death.

In revisiting a elementary school Mitchell delivers another thought-provoking turn of phrase.

Primary school seemed so huge then. How can you be sure anything is ever its real size?

Finally, something that sums up much of what Black Swan Green is about.

The world won’t let things be. It’s always injecting endings into beginnings.

Many of these passages were jaw dropping, enough for me to stop reading and put the book down to marvel and think. Black Swan Green confirms and maintains Mitchell’s position as one of the best writers of this generation.

Going To See The Elephant by Rodes Fishburne is a pleasant and readable first novel with colorful characters and interesting ideas. However, it lacks depth and a consistent tone that would have made it a truly great book.

Going To See The Elephant follows Slater Brown, a budding writer who has traveled to San Francisco to launch his career. He winds up writing for a long-standing but third-rate newspaper, gaining scoops through a unique and strange method.

Brown becomes a local celebrity, incurring the ire of a colorful and voracious mayor. He also falls in love with a beautiful chess player, who is on a collision course with Milo Magnet a eccentric inventor.

Fishburne does an admirable job in creating interesting characters, from grumpy, gruff, grizzled newspapermen to an eager government entourage. He creates small worlds which resonate with the reader. The newspaper. City Hall. The mad scientist’s lab. Alone, they are actually quite good. Together they begin to lose focus.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like in Going To See The Elephant. The pacing is spot-on and you can’t help but be carried quickly through the story and enjoy the characters.

Yet, the theme of the book is about self-discovery and being true to your dreams. This subject matter deserves greater attention. It is in these instances where Fishburne seems to tell instead of show the reader how the characters deal with these internal conflicts.

In addition, the tone of the novel is uneven and is not cohesive. Is it supposed to be playful and humorous or is it supposed to be heartfelt and introspective? I’m not saying you can’t have both, but one should be consistent throughout, letting the other be the surprising and infrequent foil.

Science. Politics. Media. Love. There’s a lot packed into Going To See The Elephant and I can’t help but think what might have been. Could Fishburne have held back some of the ideas and used them in a future novel? Perhaps fewer concepts would have made it easier to keep Going To See The Elephant focused? I could easily have read an entire novel about Milo Magnet and his experiments.

So I chalk this up to a writer finding his voice. Going To See The Elephant by Rodes Fishburne is an interesting novel. Flawed but enjoyable.

Woken Furies by Richard Morgan mixes hard-edge science fiction with sociology, politics and philosophy as the Takeshi Kovacs saga continues. Though a bit formulaic, Woken Furies is pure Morgan, equal parts slam-bang action and cerebral dissertation.

This is one of those instances where it’s probably best if you’ve read the other books in the series.

Woken Furies hits the ground running in a rich world of Morgan’s making. It’s a world where your essence is written to a ’stack’ - a microchip of sorts at the base of your skull. Should your body die, your stack can be retrieved and you can be ‘re-sleeved’ in a new body.

If that’s confusing … well, then you should read Altered Carbon and Broken Angels to get your bearings.

Like most Morgan novels the plot is a pursuit. In this case the pursuit seemed to be secondary and was a device for Morgan to explore the impact of the innovations he’s introduced into his world.

How would our relationships change if we were able to re-sleeve and live for centuries or longer? How would you approach the world if you could live in a virtual construct?

These are interesting topics because they actually relate to modern day issues. How are we dealing with our growing life span and the ability to hop-scotch around the globe. How does that effect our current family dynamic? I live 3000 miles away from most of my family. That’s not something that happened much even 100 years ago.

How will ‘life streaming’ on sites like Facebook and FriendFeed evolve? What about those MySpace and Facebook pages that continue long after the user has died. Is virtual sex cheating?

We’re putting more and more of ourselves online so couldn’t the endpoint be something like Morgan’s Renouncers, a religious group who have renounced the flesh, live in a virtual construct and are awaiting Upload.

And then there are the more blatantly obvious parallels Morgan draws with his political and religious themes. He explores revolution, dynamics of economic class and politics, and weaves a type of religious extremism into the heart of the story.

Yes, there’s a lot to think about in Woken Furies.

In between you get high doses of well crafted, bloody fight sequences and raunchy sex scenes. The dichotomy between the action and cerebral are more pronounced in Woken Furies. It feels more forced then in Morgan’s other novels and was distracting at times.

Despite this criticism, I enjoyed Woken Furies. I read it quickly and enjoyed both the sizzle and the steak. I recommend Woken Furies but be warned, Morgan is not for the timid.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson is an absorbing non-fiction narrative that juxtaposes the success of the World’s Columbian Exposition with the evil of serial killer Herman W. Mudgett. Larson packs the pages of The Devil in the White City with history and personality, making it both entertaining and educational.

I have a love hate relationship with history. In the wrong hands history can be unbelievably dull. Too many times a pious academic has reduced a truly interesting event into cut and dry facts that have as much life as a waterlogged tennis ball. But history is actually amazingly interesting in the right hands.

I had a professor in college who taught European Civilization. He made history come alive! He talked about the people who were part of the history, about their motivations, about the odd bits of lore that don’t make it into the textbooks. (It also helped that he had a dry sense of humor and was fond of throwing Monty Python quotes into his lectures.)

I don’t pick up non-fiction because too often it leaves me bored. Instead I find my history in fiction, blended into novels like English Passengers by Matthew Kneale or Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gould. These authors tell a story using history as a backdrop. Erik Larson, on the other hand, has a gift for telling history as it should, as a story.

The Devil in the White City chronicles the construction of the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition by following the architects who pulled off the amazing feat. Larson makes it easy for the reader to understand the enormity of the undertaking. He educates and instructs on architecture and exposes city rivalry and political intrigue that isn’t much different from the present.

Larson also delivers a palpable sense of what it was like to live in Chicago in the 1890s. It was an age where the slow, dank, filth of cities began to diminish as buildings rose to the sky. You sense a transformation - a great leap forward for America and humanity in general. One foot in the dark past and the other in the bright future.

Maybe it was the time or the task, but the number of famous figures who pop up in the narrative is amazing. You get a glimpse of people like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Clarence Darrow, Susan B. Anthony, Buffalo Bill and Frank Lloyd Wright among others.

Of course you also get a chilling look at Herman Mudgett or H.H. Holmes as he was better known. Larson paints a disturbing portrait of a personable killer who excels in gaining the confidence of his victims. It’s frightening how easily Holmes was able to con and cajole people, and how he was able to perform such treachery right under the noses of so many observers.

I was also left with the odd sense of similarity in the intense drive of lead architect Daniel Burnham and H.H. Holmes. Though the aims of each are diametrically opposed, the passion with which they both pursued their tasks are eerily the same. It is not the city of Chicago, or the World’s Columbian Exposition, but the zeal of each that truly binds the two narratives together.

I highly recommend The Devil in the White City if you have any interest in history or enjoy chilling murder mysteries. Erik Larson will convince you that history is far from dead.

As I’ve mentioned before I like TV and am not one of those Kill Your Television type of bibliophiles. The other night I’m catching up on TiVo and watch the latest episode of Fringe, which has gotten progressively better, so tune back in if the first two or three episodes left you cold.

This episode, “Ability”, led the characters to a rare book store where we witness a customer selling a copy of Jonathan Carroll’s Land of Laughs. The appearance of Land of Laughs was an illuminating look at the influence literary fiction is having on TV writers. There’s no question this wasn’t a coincidence as Carroll is well known for his amazingly surreal novels which dovetails nicely with the general theme of Fringe.

I’ve read a good deal of Carroll including Land of Laughs, Sleeping in Flame and The Wooden Sea among others. I read all of them before starting this blog so they aren’t currently reviewed. I am reminded that I should do a retro review to highlight the eerie, quirky genius that is Jonathan Carroll. Seriously, go out and read one of his many books. You will not be disappointed.

This is the second time I’ve noticed a J.J. Abrams show paying homage to and telegraphing plot and themes via literary works. The first time was on Lost, when I noticed Benjamin Linus reading a copy of VALIS by Philip K. Dick. Anyone who read VALIS immediately understood that there was an element of time travel involved on the island.

Literature is the fuel for our entertainment, regardless of the final medium and channel. So a big thank you to J.J. Abrams for putting these great writers in front of a mass audience.

Book stumpers! Those books that you recall but just can’t quite remember. Maybe it’s a childhood book you read, or something you picked up while on vacation a decade ago on a white sandy beach. You know the characters and the plot. You know when you read it and might even know the color of the book, but for the life of you … you can’t remember the author or title.

It’s right there on the tip of your tongue!

Try as you might you can’t remember it and Google has failed to turn up anything except odds and ends, many of which you may have preferred not to have discovered.

That’s a book stumper.

From time to time I get email from readers who have run into a book stumper. Just the other day I got one.

It was written in the 70s about a painter who lost his family in a car crash, met a new woman, then found he had a terminal disease. I think he was named Paul. Last line is “Black,” said the painter “is the purest of all colors.” It is in a dream of him looking into his grave. I thought it was “The Place He Made” But after looking at the author’s site I wasn’t so sure. I don’t know if I can read a book in 1979 that was printed in 1995! Please help, thank you.

I’ll do some poking around on my own to see if I can help, but most of the time I hand them off to the book stumper experts at Loganberry Books. Since 2003 they’ve been accepting book stumpers for the paltry sum of $2. The book stumper is then posted and literary crowdsourcing begins. Over 5,000 book stumpers have been submitted, with nearly 51% of them being solved.

Trust me, it’s more difficult than it seems. Sometimes the clues provided are scant at best.

I’m a fan of book stumpers for a number of reasons.

It is confirmation that what we read sticks with us for longer than we imagine. I find that both comforting and frightening. Comforting that some of my favorite books have influenced me and become part of who I am. Vonnegut’s Player Piano and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land still surface as reference points today. It’s frightening in that some may not read at all or may read absolute drivel. The latter still being far superior to the former.

Book stumpers are also a testament to the inability of the almighty search engine to solve all our problems and answer all our questions. I make my living on the Internet (and I’m grateful for that), but at the same time I like that technology is still unable to interpret the clues locked in our heads and pinpoint the correct author and title. Where’s the fun in that?

There is still mystery in the world … and isn’t that what a good book can reveal.

Got a book stumper? Submit one to Loganberry today.

Stacey’s Bookstore announced that it will be closing in March after 85 years in business. This is sad news to anyone who cherishes independent bookstores and to San Francisco readers in particular. The SFGate has all the details.

The San Francisco area has seen a number of independent bookstores close in the last few years. Stacey’s follows Cody’s Books and Black Oak Books in particular. Both were excellent stores and Cody’s in particular was another long-time fixture. In my own neighborhood both Diablo Books and Bonanza Street Books closed their doors in the last few years. (Readers, please use the comments section to detail any other Bay Area bookstore closings in the last 3 to 5 years.)

I try to think about how books may find a wider audience through the Internet and through new social reading sites that allow exploration and discovery as you might find in a physical bookstore. It’s still unsettling to see these stores disappear from the landscape. It feels like a society that doesn’t value literature.

The continuing difficulties for Barnes & Noble and the prospect of Borders Books going out of business perpetuate the impression that books are not as valued as they once were in America. The new booksellers extraordinaire are Costco, Target and Walmart. And while I am happy to have books and literature of any sort survive, these retailers are not stocking a broad range or diverse selection of titles.

It’s at times like these that I’m proud to have worked at Alibris for 3 years, helping independent booksellers survive, and more importantly, keeping the long-tail of books in circulation.  Aggregators like Alibris, Abebooks and Biblio, online store providers like Bibliopolis, as well as social reading sites like LibraryThing, Goodreads and Shelfari should be looked upon as the ‘keepers of the flame’ so to speak.

Because the homogenization of books is a scary prospect.

With the demise of Textbook Torrents students have been looking for other ways to obtain free textbooks. Rapidshare textbooks may be filling that void.

What is Rapidshare?

Rapidshare is a file-hosting site. A really big one. What makes Rapidshare popular is the ability to share those files. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the sharing capability.

On uploading the user is supplied with a unique download URL which enables anyone, with whom the uploader shares it, to download the file. No user is allowed to search the server for content; all files have to be downloaded by following a given URL.

As you might expect, Rapidshare search engines have sprung up to collect and publish these unique URLs. To my knowledge there isn’t a search engine specifically for textbooks. That means you’ll be hunting and pecking for textbooks along with music, movies, games and porn.

Rapidshare Textbook Search Engines

Here’s a small list of Rapidshare search engines that have some degree of textbook content.

Fileshunt
Rapid Library
LoadingVault

Is Rapidshare Legal?

Depends on how you use it. If you’re using it to distribute copyrighted material (e.g. - textbooks) … no. And like Textbook Torrents, Rapidshare has been the center of a lot of legal activity. Rapidshare walks a fine line as evidenced in a October 26, 2008 quasi-blog post.

If, for example, it had been regulated by law to control all copies before the first photo copier was invented, it is very likely that these machines would have never hit the market. That’s why we are doing everything to enable this new technology - which is still very young, but already inspires millions of people every day - to be part of our future and make life more comfortable.

RapidShare, of course, is against the distribution of illegal files and as soon as we are informed about illegal distribution, we delete these files and put them on a filter.

The thing is, going after Rapidshare seems a bit like using ice cubes to put out a raging fire. A flock of similar sites have sprung up like weeds using the same technology. The folks at FreeFileHosts have a great and very detailed list of all of the file-hosting sites.

Like Torrents (which are still out there mind you, there’s just not a hub for textbook torrents which was a bit like putting a neon bullseye on your back), Rapidshare will survive and the debate over digital rights will rage on.

I see both sides of the issue on this one. The cost of textbooks is … exorbitant and publishers have exploited this captive audience for great profit. So I have little sympathy (at this point) for publishers who cry foul as a small portion of sales are siphoned off. The pendulum has yet to swing back to the point where I feel the production of textbooks is in jeopardy or that publishers are truly being hurt.