Dirty Snow, by Georges Simenon

A little boy, born to a prostitute, raised in a village by others and only infrequently visited by his mother. How can we expect good things to come of this? As the story opens we find Frank, now a late teen, living with his mother who runs a whorehouse out of her apartment in German-occupied France during the Second World War. Frank doesn't seem to have young male angst or teenage burdens of identity and acceptance. He is dangerously unfettered - the German soldiers, police, older men who frequent the taverns, mother's customers, prostitutes, Holst and his daughter, Sissy, who live across the hall all have potential to act as either physical or psychological influences on Frank. Yet, he has little or none. He only seeks the companionship of bad people who lurk in bars, who steal and connive, but doesn't try to impress. Frank does bad things - kills a man for no good reason and takes his gun. Kills a woman he knew as a child so that he may steal her watches. But his actions do not reverberate in his conscience; Simenon spends little time in allowing Frank to rationalize his actions. Does he have a developed amygdala? In many ways he is Camus' stranger - amoral, sociopath. However, one cannot help but to blame his environment. After being imprisoned for passing stolen currency, it is a woman in an apartment window keeping house in a building across from the prison that consumes Frank. He weaves a narrative of the woman's life, married with a small baby. We see in his fantasies his lost childhood and lost adulthood. He will never now have the opportunity to marry a woman and have a child of his own. And the time has past for a loving, nurturing childhood. Sissy, from across the hall, was Frank's one chance for love. And it is her love, or expression of love, that serves as the pinnacle, culmination, of his life. Somewhat ironically, it is his mother who seemingly spends more time visiting Frank and sending him stuff while in prison, now too late to make a difference. I don't read this tale only as an existential exercise. Nor do I think of Frank as a complete sociopath. The tale and its lessons are found in the simple grit and poverty of war and occupation and how a young person without guidance is at great risk of failing to develop a proper sense of self and conscience. 

A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin

I held out for years on the HBO series, not for any philosophical or ideological reason, and only have recently watched them - if you have seen the series, like it, and have not read the books, you should - there is an enormous amount of wonderful stuff missing from the show (understandably) - and, frankly, I don't know how you can watch the show having not read the books - way too confusing. I thought that if the series is that good, the book(s) are probably worth some time. And they are. Caveat - you have to be patient. The novels run some 800 to over 1000 pages apiece; the first 600 pages of the first volume (Game of Thrones) deal mainly with character development and the history of the land, Westeros - a necessity for the complexity of the story to come. Don't have much to say about the text itself - it's reasonably well written and paced (I guess) appropriately - though some will drown I suppose with the plodding course through the first half of Game of Thrones (the pace is veritably brisk when compared with Robert Jordan's novels - aagh, I gave up after four of those). The plot certainly picks up steam with the second installment, A Clash of Kings, and then roars through the third, A Storm of Swords, before settling down a bit in A Feast For Crows - nevertheless, the storyline continues to evolve with new characters appearing. The fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, is more of the same and makes me wonder if the story will ever resolve. I am a bit fatigued, but if you are interested in fantasy/adventure, these are worth your time.

Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

You'd think I spent the summer lounging without a book; two months and counting since my last comment. I'm muscling my way through at least three books, one of which I managed to finish last evening. Embarrassingly, despite my affection for SciFi, I had read very little Asimov. I may have read one of his robot books a long time ago but cannot remember for certain and cannot pick it out from a list of the hundreds of books he wrote. I like this book for it's philosophical bent and its landscape is littered with cool little futuristic gadgets. The thrust of the story is the idea that the past, with appropriate statistical modeling, can be used to predict the future - when presented at a conference of mathematicians it sets off a cat and mouse chase. Crisp dialogue and some really thoughtful ideas on what it might mean to be able to predict the future make it appealing. Asimov also tackles the arc of history - humans had been settling the galaxy for over 12,000 years when the story takes place. One idea is that even though technology is excellent at recording history, the repeated reading and writing of the information to the media is still flawed and, over the millennia, old records are lost. I don't know how well that holds up to reality but it does call to mind DNA replication - despite its accuracy, the DNA polymerase still makes mistakes and the repair mechanisms are not perfect - introducing mutations and subsequent loss of fidelity. Repeat thousands of times and the product looks markedly different. I think I'll read Foundation next.

Endurance - Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing

Makes pale in comparison any other trial. It's hard to imagine how they survived. A great tale.

Act of Passion, by Georges Simenon

Another of this prolific author's romans durs seeping with brooding misery. One can only hope that as a leech draws blood from its host, so to will Simenon's work absorb our own little miseries. Maybe that's why I like them? Echoes of Camus' The Stranger and even, at times, Doestoevsky's Notes from Underground decorate this confessional tale delivered in a letter to a court official after a guilty verdict of murder. The murderer takes us along as he chronicles his life and slowly loses his sanity, all the while convinced of that sanity, like most mad people are. After all, a mad person's reality is no less real to them than it is for us. I particularly like how tidy and non-convoluted this tale is. The murderer is a doctor who becomes abusive to his lover, a young, promiscuous, woman he meets in a train station. He wants to return her to a purer state before she grew up and started sleeping with men. Perhaps his obsession with her is wrapped up in his profession as a healer. Perhaps he is obsessed with her because he can control her in ways that he cannot control his wife. Or, perhaps, because he had a controlling mother. The physical violence is his poorly evolved way of dealing with the conflicts within him. The rationalization of that violence is a manifestation of the intellectually evolved, yet warped, way the mind deals with conflict. Psychic blindness and madness may be the result - clearly so in this case.

The Smartest Kids in the World, by Amanda Ripley

A nice discussion comparing the American educational system to that of three foreign countries, Poland, Finland and South Korea, which perform near the top of the PISA, "Programme for International Student Assessment" (http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/index.asp). It is heavily referenced and should be read by all American educators. Ripley follows three American teenagers as they spend one year abroad immersed in their respective country. At one point the American student asked some Finnish high-schoolers why they cared so much about school. They responded that they "had to in order to get a good job." Mind you, these Finnish students seemed to have the same general social interests (and time) as American teenagers - they just took their schooling a bit more seriously. Why? Is it because Americans don't need a quality education in order to succeed? Current data argues against this. Significant earnings are left on the table if one doesn't graduate high school. And earnings are stratified as one reaches higher levels of education (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm). Rather, Ripley argues, America has a cultural problem. Our educators don't only teach (many of them do double duty as sports coaches). Our teachers are also not the highest performers in school themselves - you can't teach what you don't know. For example, many math teachers in the U.S. were never math students. In Finland, in order to be a teacher, you must have graduated in the top third of your high school class. Similar requirements exist in other countries. The upside is that being a teacher becomes a prestigious professional occupation drawing in high performers. In Finland, too, while average teacher salaries are not significantly higher than in the U.S., they are more aligned with what doctors and other professionals earn. Ripley also explores the evidence on how we make children life-long learners. Would you believe that children of parents actively involved in the PTA and school activities don't perform any better than their peers? Rather, the most effective thing you can do for your children is read to them on a daily basis.

The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer

Why would I want to read the memoirs of a WWII German soldier? A number of years ago I listened to a podcast series about the eastern front and was (still am) amazed to learn that about 80% of all German soldier casualties for the entire war were in the east. This is not a history I learned about in school. I ran across some reviews of this memoir while looking for more material. Sajer was an Alsatian captured in France during the German occupation. Half German, he was enlisted in the German army and sent east. He fought in most of the major battles after Stalingrad. The remarkable thing about the memoir is that it gives the reader the feel of the day to day life of the soldiers - short on military tactics/battle overviews and long on the interpersonal relationships of the soldiers, the withering physical hardship of survival and routine of daily life as a solider in the Wehrmacht. If one were to believe Sajer (and it's hard not to), the soldiers knew nothing of what was going on back home - he and his surviving friends didn't even learn that the American and British forces were in Europe (let alone Germany) until the war was nearly over. The tragedy, horror and sadness Sajer describes is beyond words. And the fact that he was a German soldier counts little, if any, against the emotive force of his tale. A truly remarkable read.

Tenth of December, by George Saunders

This is my second book of Saunders' short stories (see previous entry on In Persuasion Nation). I particularly enjoy the first person narrative style in the opening and closing stories - centered on young men moved to action and wrapped (encumbered?) in the nuanced (not so nuanced?) baggage of childhood relationships with family. Unlike David Foster Wallace's short stories of doom, gloom and psychological terror, Saunders' writing is generous. While tragic and sometimes sad, they all left me with a sense of hope. If you are muscling your way through top shelf contemporary fiction, this guy needs to be on your reading list.  

The Strangers in the House, by Georges Simenon

Hector Loursat may represent at some level pre-war French existential paralysis. In Moulins, where he practiced law, but now sits all day in his study poking his fire, reading his books and drinking his burgundy, it is winter, dark and moody. The large house in which he has confined himself to two rooms is drafty. It holds secrets up on the third floor. Those secrets eventually draw out misanthropic Loursat to once again practice law. But this is not primarily a story of a murder investigation. Rather, it is an exploration into the mind of a man who emerges from 18 years of self-imposed isolation. Structurally, the story's tempo is rapid and regular enough to keep your attention. Moreover, its introspection may inform the reader's own life - a mark of a great read.

The Drowned World, by J.G. Ballard

I wouldn't say that J.G. Ballard was prescient when he wrote this immersive, atmospheric and psychologically interesting story. True, the planet had flooded due to a 90 foot rise in sea levels and, true, the cause was heating. But the rise in temperature was due to increased solar activity and not due to a compositional imbalance of atmospheric carbon. Nevertheless, what is interesting is the resemblance to one of the great tales written in the past 150 years - Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (I think I wrote a little about this a few years ago). OK,  Ballard doesn't command the language like Conrad (who does?) but Ballard's tale takes the conceit of man returning to an "earlier" nature and wraps it in a fantastic world of iguanas, submerged cities, jungles and survival. Kerans is a doctor/scientist on a military expedition sent from the Arctic, the last place one may live comfortably on Earth, to document/chart/analyze the climate and the changing world. The bad guy, Strangman, is an albino privateer whackadoo piloting a hydroplane trailed by a paparazzi of crocodiles. Mirroring the Conrad story, Strangman represents the intrusive outside world much as Marlowe, the company man, meets Kurtz. However, the physical presence and mental imbalance of Conrad's Kurtz is wrapped up in Strangman, the intruder, what with his physical bearing, grandiosity, otherworldliness, charisma and seeming insanity. Strangman wants to recreate the lost world or, at least, acquire as much of its treasure as possible. His depot ship carries looted treasure from museums; he drains the lagoon and sets his minions loose on the exposed city streets of London, lost 90 years ago to the rising tides. Kerans, on the other hand, is the cerebral, introspect, who is being sucked back in time, manipulated psychologically much as Conrad's Kurtz, down an evolutionary slide, to a triassic world long before humans where the sun beats rhythmically in his head and the heat and water explode in lush cascades of tropical flora, insects and lizards. I love walking in the woods, running in the snow and, generally, being outside. In many ways this story resonates with me.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and In Persuasion Nation, by George Saunders

I've encountered this guy's work in the New Yorker from time to time but this is my first sustained experience with his writing. Stylistically and thematically, he reminds me a bit of David Foster Wallace. The stories very much are a satire on contemporary life in the United States. They certainly do have a lot to say. In very short order you may move from hilarity to darkness. Both Seussian and Edward Gorey-like ("A" is for Amy who fell down the stairs, "B" is for Basil, devoured by bears...). Phil, the robot, turns into a megalomaniacal idiot whenever his brain falls out of his "tremendous sliding rack" because the bolt holding it in place comes loose. Then there are some stories, like adams,  which left me unsettled in a way that stories seldom do (I recall one of DFW's short stories about a child accidently burned by boiling water - in of itself a horrible thing; yet that story, too, takes it to a completely different, personal, level). Phil's power-hunger will be familiar to you, darkly and comically mirroring some of the not too bright and self-serving politicians who sit in public office. The landscape is ludicrous and weird. Consumerism and marketing are skewered in jon and American policy in Brad Carrigan, American. But the stories do more - somehow they inject a deeply personal element - a humanity that left me reflective. This is good stuff.

Toms River, by Dan Fagin

What a great read! Admittedly, I am from New Jersey, once worked in the chemical industry and now work as a physician. So the subject and setting resonate particularly strongly with me. That being said, on many different levels this story is important for all of us. Among other things, it teaches us about the dynamic between corporate and individual/social interests, speculative versus scientific inquiry, role of government and how it may sometimes fail its citizens, chemistry, cancer, the history of the Toms River area of NJ, epidemiology and statistics and how sometimes it only takes a few determined people (and some luck) to effect significant change. I found the epidemiological discussion(s) among the more interesting parts of the book. The first quarter of the book takes the reader through the history of the dye industry and weaves in tales of epidemiological cancer investigations. It serves as a valuable history lesson, germane to both scientist and non-scientist types. Well worth the effort.