My Friend is Sad by Mo Willems

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

This is another picture book from Mo Willems. I still do not have much to say.

Elephant Gerald is sad! Pig tries to cheer him up by dressing up.

Light on plot, with simply drawn characters against a blank background. Elephant is not as cute as pig. I blame his trunk. In the second half of the story, however, Elephant's expressions bespeak great joy and suffering, which works quite well.

Kids like silly faces, right? Elephant is suitably exaggerated to be entertaining, if the pig dressed up as a robot did not do it.

Amazon link

Expected publication: March 2007

Today I Will Fly! by Mo Willems

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

I rarely have much to say about picture books. This is a cute one.

Pig wants to fly! Elephant Gerald does not think that she can, although she tries getting help from her friends.

And that's about it for the plot. Short sentences, few words, with animals playing across the page. Pig is cute. Her eyes say much. She and Elephant work against a blank canvas, so the images are simple.

I would not make a special trip to the library for a picture book, but if you are there and have children of the relevant age, this is an option.

Amazon link

Expected publication: March 2007

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

Normally, when I hate every character, that is a sign to stop reading. In this case, it means that Tom Wolfe is a great writer.

Sherman McCoy is a bond-trading Master of the Universe, forging deals that bring him millions and almost keep up with his affluent New York lifestyle. A wrong turn brings the crime-ridden Bronx crashing into his mid-life crisis, and with the help of self-aggrandizing prosecutors and journalists, we explore the expensive vacuousness and dirty jungles lying a few blocks apart in New York's burroughs.

Tom Wolfe is weighty reading. Some books are light and fluffy, and some earn their ratings by being quick reads. Tom Wolfe will never fall into either of these categories. My edition of Bonfire is 700 pages of small, dense text. You are committing yourself to something if you plan to read this.

The book is at least as much an exercise in language as in storytelling. Have a dictionary and maybe an anatomy text handy as you read. The men spend a fair amount of time fantasizing about their own musculature, which concerns me about the anatomy that must be explored at length in Charlotte Simmons. You will see some signs of a thesaurus in use during writing.

This is not something that would skim well. The language is much of the point. Entire scenes are done as single sentences that show a flow of conversation and inebriation. The telling is not subtle, but it is thorough. The variable commitment to rendering accents and vernacular does not succeed as well as it might, especially the obsession with "he don't" versus "he doesn't."

So what about the story? It dates itself pretty quickly. This is a period piece written at the tail end of that period. Does a Tom Wolfe book signal the end of an era, safely documented and about to be filed away? The main character is a bond-trader in the bond-trading surge that ended almost as the book was published; when stocks rebounded from the recession, they and the dot-com boom were the story. The 1980s crime wave was ebbing at the same time, although I have no idea if race relations in New York have improved since then. Reverend Bacon is still a fair depiction, as Al Sharpton is still prominent somehow.

The use and abuse of journalists remains a solid depiction as well. The manufactured protests and news events were classic. Had I not been involved with such complicity before, I might have thought it was a cynical exaggeration, but no, the media coordination of spontaneous outbursts is common and ongoing.

Those of us not living the rich and glorious lifestyle hope that it really is like that. We all want to hear that the affluent are walking more of a financial wire with the rest of us, and we secretly suspect that they are living hand-to-mouth while living it up. Is Sherman uniquely harried while surrounded by old money, as he seems to feel, or are his friends similarly dancing by a cliff? It might be interesting to get some tidbits from the minor characters, to see whether they notice themselves in a morality play about wealth, class, pride, and envy.

Can we explore that for a moment? Everything in the book has a price tag. Sherman outlines his finances and explains why he Can! Not! Survive! on something like a million dollars a year. Every item his wife bought for the house is a specific financial wound. He and Kramer both note how much shoes, coats, and suits cost. (Assistant DA) Kramer recites everyone's salary as he looks around the court. It's all about money, who has it, who can get it, and who can show it. Sherman's job is moving piles of money around, and his wife is a decorator who helps people show off their affluence to their friends.

Is everyone clear on the distinction between income, wealth, and affluence? Income is a flow, how much you make per week/month/year. Wealth is a stock, how much you have total, which usually affects your income. Affluence is the outward flow, how much you spend and show. Sherman has a great deal of income but very little wealth, since his money goes out as quickly as it comes in. Affluence will do that to you. You probably know quite a few wealthy people, but you do not know that they are wealthy because they are not affluent; if they were spending the money to show you how much they had, they would not have it anymore.

Of course, it is not really all about money. There is also sex, lust, and adultery. Sherman and Kramer both note all the desirable females who enter the scene. What would it take to seduce that one, or why shouldn't he have something shiny like that financier's nubile fourth wife? Are the women actually desirable sexually or just as objects to be shown off? Actually mounting the trophy wife seems to be a secondary concern to showing off. What could be more expensive than a bimbo (who wants to show off to her friends)? There is some serious economic signalling going on here.

For all the talk of race and class, and its role as a driver in the story, it gets surprisingly little attention. Class warfare is a tool or an inexplicable force. We constantly hear about Jews and Irish and blacks and WASPs, but the whys and details of the races and shifting demographics and economics go unexplored. We get the language from the anatomy text without any thought to why or how those muscles work -- they are just sources of power.

The book does drag around the middle. The set up is surprisingly subtle, and while it takes a long while, it is steady rather than a slog. Once the worm is on the hook, however, Mr. Wolfe lets him wriggle there for a couple hundred pages. Drawn out suffering makes sense in some cases and works quite well in individual scenes, but Sherman is not undergoing Dante's torments. The banality and feebleness may be the point, but it still drags.

Despite that, the book generally succeeds despite great length and unlikeable characters. I do not know how his storytelling could work without them.

If you want the book in a microcosm, read chapter 26. You get it all right there: class envy, racial disharmony even amongst the Caucasian divisions, taking advantage of others' wealth and connections, greed and deceit, brilliant affluence, pain and suffering, social awkwardness, and the vanity of human wishes.

Amazon link

Ratings Policy

Ratings at Zubon Book Reviews come down to two binary questions: is this book worth reading, and if so, is it worth reading more than once?

The first question is fundamentally the reason why this site exists. After reading book x, would I recommend it to someone else? Each book is judged by the standard it sets for itself. You expect different things from academic non-fiction, hard science fiction, or epic romance. You are judged according to what you are (or seem to be) trying to do, rather than what someone else might have wished the book to be.

There is also a benefit-cost analysis incorporated in there. If you write a thousand-page book, it better be worth one thousand pages of reading. If you only have four hundred pages of content, you will probably get savaged on review. If it is difficult to read, you need to bring more to the table. If you have a picture book with ten words on a page, you need not write the Great American Novel to make it worth reading that book. Good fast food that costs $1 gets rated higher than expensive but mediocre cuisine.

The second question is whether I would read the book again. Life is short, and more text is written each year than you could read in a lifetime, so being worth multiple reads is something special. Also, if you are only going to use something once, there is no need to own it. Rent or borrow it. This is why we have libraries, second-hand book shops, movie rental stores, NetFlix, whatever. I only rate a book worth buying if I plan to read it more than once.

I note this partly as an apology to authors, since a great many books that I like do not get the BUY IT stamp. It is a hard standard to meet, but most people are not going to have as many bookshelves as I do. If I could get everyone to read one book a month, I would be giddy. If I were sane, I would recommend only buying a book if I plan to re-read it frequently, since I can still use the library if I need the book one week in five years.

So, the actual ratings:

4: worth reading multiple times (buy it)
3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
2: not worth reading (skip it)
1: not worth considering (burn it)

If you are a librarian, a 3 still means "buy it," since everyone in your community should read the book. Everyone, so get at least one copy and start recommending it, if you please.

A rating of 1 is something special, more rare than a 4. This goes beyond not worth reading. A 1 means that the book makes the world a worse place. Appalling writing and/or illustrations may get you there. The most common route is going to be non-fiction with disinformation. Disagreement or mistakes are not enough; a 1 means that you might know less about an issue after reading the book than when you started. A 1 on a fiction book means that the book brings negative enjoyment: not just "not worth it," but actual suffering (this may be the case for 1-rated non-fiction as well). Yes, I am aware that some things I rate as 1s are on college syllabi. This is a failing of the professoriate, not the ratings system.

We occasionally have half-ratings. These mean "in part," when part of the book merits one rating and part merits another. If the book has severable pieces, I can recommend just those pieces, and it gets the *.5 rating; if the sections cannot stand on their own, the rating probably gets rounded down, unless the parts worth reading are excellent enough to pull the entire book up. Books of essays or short stories are good opportunities for *.5 ratings.

Some books get starred ratings or notes that the rating only applies if this is your field of interest. Some picture books really are good for everyone, but most are for small children. This is part of why the reviews include text and discussion: yes it is a good book, but is it good for you?

Finally, there is a smaller category of books that you use and not just read. As I write this, the only examples have been from role-playing games, but others could include manuals, guides, and reference books. These come with the assumption that you would buy them if you plan to use them, since you will need to refer to them. The rating shifts to how broadly useful the book will be, whether I would recommend it for everyone, most, few, or no one, and even then only if you are the sort who would use that sort of book. If you do not repair cars, even the best repair guide will be useless to you; if you do not play Dungeons and Dragons, you are not going to be using those books either.

Or maybe you are like me, own too many books, and read a lot. Feel free to bump everything up a number, buy all the 3s, and help enrich our authors. They are hungry.

Rave New World by Lynne Hansen

Rating - 1: not worth considering (burn it)

Learn SAT vocabulary the easy way, with over 1000 vocabulary words laboriously crammed into a feeble story, complete with definitions like in your schoolbooks! This is the sort of industrial writing that does not have its author's name on the cover or spine. I don't know if the author requested that or SparkNotes.

As far as I could stomach reading, this is set in a standard but nebulous dystopian future, one that has not decided whether the government or corporations ruin everything. They refer to The Corporation, but it sounds more like Brave New World. Our protagonist is someone who blocks off folks' addictions/interests to make them more productive/pliant consumers/citizens/employees. The words used are consistent, but it is not clear whether there is any actual thought behind going with The Corporation/employees rather than Big Brother/citizens.

The vocabulary words are mostly used correctly, even if the diction is stilted and they are far from the best words to use most of the time. In theory, this is a better way to learn vocab than a list, because you can create associations with where you learned the words that will help you remember them. In practice, I will be trying to forget it and the vocab list might be more enjoyable.

Amazon link

Candyfreak by Steve Almond

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

Very enjoyable. [Rating update: it remains a 3, because I do not know that you will want to read it more than once in your life, but this is one of my most highly recommended books of the year. It is a really good 3.]

Steve Almond takes a tour of America's smaller candy bar producers, reveling in his passion for candy and those who share it. It is a decadent journey with cascades of chocolate, experiments in mango filling, tears for the economics of the small-scale confectioner, and Mr. Almond's personal trauma of using chocolate to fill the gaps in his emotional life.

This is a very personal book, which is partly to say that it is not a serious or studious work. Despite obviously having some, Mr. Almond explicitly scorns research in support of his candy quest. He talks to the candy makers who will talk to him. He eats the candy that falls before him, which is quite a bit when you are touring candy bar factories.

A great highlight of the book is the description of consuming various candy bars. This is obviously a passion, with great care given to half-page descriptions of just how peanuts and nougat interact in a particular bar. Care is given to tastes, smells, textures, and how they change in the eating process. This is book is not just about candy bars, it is about eating candy bars. Pornography expresses less vivid sensual joys.

I respect Mr. Almond's scorn for haughty chocolate. You can find candy descriptions that sound like wine snot guides, with descriptions of a particular woody taste from beans harvested under the full moon in a certain region of Ghana. This is mostly crap. Mr. Almond's descriptions of the eating experience are not like that, though he exhibits a love for various kinds of chocolate, along with a hatred of shredded coconut (like all good-hearted people). When I see a $5 candy bar, I assume that someone is trying to get away with something, rather than "this could be the best candy bar of my life." But I might try a Five Star bar.

The book is also personal in that Mr. Almond inserts himself into it at various points in a non-candy-sensitive context. He repeats that he has always used candy as a support when his relationships with others have let him down, back to his childhood. His therapist gets several mentions. And then he goes back to saying how much he really likes candy bars. He successfully suggests both that this is a serious problem, that Americans consume in an attempt to fill the gaping holes in our souls, but that he is not taking himself entirely seriously. Except for the last chapter, which could be entirely excised, this is an effective sprinkling throughout the book.

The other sprinkling is political and economic commentary. There are gratuitous attacks on President Bush and the Republican party, often couched with the same "of course, I'm a sad sack" self-deprecation. There are several pages on chocolate being the result of exploiting the third world for the instant gratification of a rapacious, obese America. And then he goes back to saying how much he really likes candy bars.

The real economic commentary is about the elephant in the room, the big candy bar makers. The cover font is letters cut from various candy bars, many of which are never mentioned in the text. He avoids Hershey, Mars, Nestle, etc. Partly this is because they are secretive about their recipes and methods; Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka spy drama was based on fact. Mostly this is because he wants to talk about all the little producers who make wonderful little products that you might not see on your local shelves.

It costs something to get on Wal-Mart's shelves or in the impulse items rack. You pay for placement, you give a discount, you supply a nationwide chain, that sort of thing. The little guys cannot do that, so they face a much smaller market, competing against larger and more accessible brands. And then he eats a Snickers bar.

The production of candy bars is shown as an intimate process, and not just at the factories that hand-make them. We see a chocolate engineer who is experimenting with different nations' chocolate and different types of cherry in making a new high-end confection. One Midwestern producer makes a delicate product that ruptures at high altitudes, so it cannot be transported across mountains or by plane. Several have issues with not being able to ship into hot areas because they cannot afford refrigerated delivery trucks. The company president might hand-service finicky machinery, while others are working on recipes for new candy bars.

The variation between candy bars can be subtle but very important. Does this one have too many peanuts? not enough nougat? should we layer them differently? Mr. Almond emphasizes that an important factor in determining what is "right" is what we are used to. Brand loyalty perpetuates itself as you develop a taste for a sort of chocolate. This reinforces the difference between the big and small producers, as you come to expect a particular candy experience. It also opens up a great deal of room for variation, specialization, and getting it all just right, along with the chance for Mr. Almond to describe another bar in its sensual glory.

I wish to pull out two bits that are noted then walked away from. One is that kids today have more candy bar options than they did when there were more candy bar options. Wait, what? Large national distributors have brought a panoply of colors to the candy aisle, as opposed to whatever local brands were available 100 years ago. Things are more similar nationwide, but more diverse locally.

The other bit is that the scale of the multi-national conglomerates leaves opportunities for smaller producers. Wal-Mart is not interested in a small regional market for high end chocolates. They sell millions of bars for a quarter. If you want to run a multi-million dollar boutique business, you are not even competing with them. You are filling in the gaps created by the system that spreads those national brands. We may not all be able to get Peanut Chews or GooGoo Clusters, but there will always be room for small scale production and specialized products.

The secret is, you need to buy them. The national brands will always be cheaper at Wal-Mart, so you need to decide whether that Twin Bing is worth the extra effort to find and buy. You know what you are getting from Hershey; you get to experiment with whether a Spud bar is really for you.

Congratulations to Mr. Almond for successfully combining several threads of writing where I have often condemned others for failing. The political, economic, and personal commentaries rarely jar, and they create an effective side-story to the central action of orgasmic chocolate bliss.

I have previously encouraged you to donate to Room to Read. This time I encourage you to eat a candy bar.

Amazon link

Saffron and Brimstone by Elizabeth Hand

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

This is a collection of magical realist short stories. The first story was a quarter of the book and failed to entertain, so I skimmed the next few and set it aside. The magic was an incoherent fog over the realism, an inexplicable veneer of surrealism on an unremarkable story. Toss in some gratuitous eroticism and call it a day. Not interesting.

Amazon link

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

This is the original (no translator listed), not the Disney version. Growing up American, you get the Disney version of everything, so it is liberating to see how very different the source material is.

Pinocchio is a living wooden puppet, the son of Geppetto, and he engages in a little boy's mischief with fairy tale exaggeration. All the familiar aspects are there, including a puppet show, a good fairy, a talking cricket, a leviathan, and boys turning into jackasses.

I did not realize at first that I had the original. I thought this was self-consciously defying Disney by recasting all the elements in a more Grimm style. When people are foolish, people suffer, and Jiminy Cricket gets smashed against the wall. Pinocchio does irresponsible things, hurts himself and/or others, then does it again next chapter.

This is explicitly a moral tale about how horrible things will happen to you if you are a lazy and disobedient boy. Depending on your type of mischief, you may lose your feet, be thrown in prison, gets others thrown in prison, starve, kill your friends, be eaten, get hanged, be swindled, or be set upon by assassins. Pinocchio gets to lament his ill-advised activity each chapter, sometimes with the supporting cast reminding him of what a horrible person he is; this is perhaps undermined by his ability to do so every chapter without permanent harm, with a happy ending to boot, although the original serial ended in the aforementioned hanging.

The other lesson is not to associate with people of bad character. When Pinocchio cannot get himself into trouble, there are always others there to help him stray from the straight and narrow. He is very easily led astray.

So this sets us apart from our usual Disney tales. People are not fundamentally good. Pinocchio does not really have a good heart. He would like to be a good boy, but he is vocally averse to work, study, doing what he is told, listening to good advice that he despaired ignoring last time, etc. Most people are horrible, and it leads to pain and humiliation. Even good fairies suffer and make you suffer in the course of learning lessons.

The chapters are very short, usually two to four pages. This was originally a serial, back when children had short attention spans without anyone's needing Ritalin. The chapter titles are a bit explicit, summarizing the events to come in a sentence. This is convenient if you want to refer back to something, but a strange sort of insta-spoiler for four-page increments.

Gris Grimly's illustrations are wonderful, and I want more. The style is Victorian macabre, sort of a dark take on Alice in Wonderland (a 4, read the original). Most things are ominous and twisted, as is proper for the story.

The story itself can be a touch incoherent, as fairy tales are. Why not throw in a giant talking pigeon this chapter? Animals are anthropomorphic to whatever degree is convenient. You just go with it. People are surprised by talking wood, but not by talking puppets. Also, every puppet seems to be self-directed, so it is unclear why a puppet show is any more significant than a normal show.

There are a few cultural markers that will be unclear to today's children, and you may wish to have a dictionary on hand for items that have fallen out of use.

Amazon link
Free online edition
Wikipedia

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Maybe this one was over-sold as the Greatest Western Ever Written, such that I had too high of expectations. The forward to my edition was certainly exaggerated academic nonsense about postmodern genre redefinition and being the most important book of the generation. This was my first western, and I expect it would be more enjoyable as an example of genre fiction rather than something for the uninitiated.

Jack Crabb is recounting his life story from the age of 111, starting back 100 years as his family set out west. Over time he lives with the Cheyenne, is adopted by a reverend, strikes it rich, goes broke several times, gains and loses a few wives, meets every western celebrity of the time, and is the lone white survivor of Custer's Last Stand.

This book reads like a western version of Forrest Gump (the film), being far more like it than the actual book Forrest Gump (which is a 2, by the way, skip it). Our narrator takes part in the significant events of the period and meets the related celebrities like Custer, Will Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, Calamity Jane, and Crazy Horse. He has a small supporting cast of family and friends who wander in and out of the story.

Coincidences and reappearances are a bit convenient in a way that Blue Avenger (a 3) would approach self-consciously. It strains the suspension of disbelief in a way that functional Indian magic does not. One is a convention of the genre, the other just feels improbable.

The narrative voice is colloquial, a bit thick to get into but fading over time. I do not know if it was front-loaded or if I just adapted. The vocabulary at times contradicts the characterization of Jack as an unstudied frontiersman. This is fine for me, as I worried about drowning in a self-conscious attempt at being Mark Twain.

Jack Crabb is an effective storyteller if not a terribly sympathetic character. He is an inconstant scoundrel, someone with mixed morals who goes with a situation as it comes to him rather than imposing himself upon it. I'm a settler's boy, now I'm an Indian boy, back to being white in town, a drunkard, a hunter, a field hand, an Indian a few more times, a trader, a soldier, a gambler, wherever the tide takes him. It makes things episodic, and it is a series of stories rather than Jack having made a story of his life. Also, he only learns better along the way to the extent that he keeps quiet at lets trouble happen to him rather than actively having trouble happen to him. He is still throwing himself into disastrous situations, but he seems less involved in the makings thereof.

This seems like a winning formula for a western TV series, where the cast recurs with some variation, we have a historical figure guest star for a story arc at a time, and the particulars vary as we hit town and country. As a single book it feels like everything and the kitchen sink between two covers.

It does get bonus points for having a subtle Walt Whitman reference, he appearing unnamed but clearly described.

Amazon link