Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test, 2011. I came into a loan of this book quite fortuitously. I'd heard Ronson interviewed on The Sound of Young America and on This American Life within a week or so of one another, and was intrigued. A friend happened to have it on her desk when I was visiting, and since she won't have time to read it for a space, she loaned it to me. It's almost as though I was meant to read it.

Ronson is an entertaining and engaging writer, though a tad sporadic: there are times when his stories about his own neuroses are a meaningful help to his argument, and times when I found them off-putting. That statement may be an expression of taste: I didn't mark examples to share. The story begins when he's contacted by a neurologist about a mysterious manuscript that's been sent to a number of different scientists, all of whom are unable to decipher it. Ronson's skills as an investigative journalist help him to find the author, and lead him into musings about sanity and a variety of challenges in mental health. Those musings lead him to an interest in psychopathy, the focal point of the book. He tries to make sense of psychopathy's definition, how it is diagnosed, how it is treated, and how psychopaths live in the world. His exploration includes a look at the history of psychology, and more general issues as well. Much of the book revolves around Bob Hare and his work--the development of the test for psychopathy, and the workshops on how to use it. I was deeply amused as Ronson uses the test with a CEO best-known for firing many, many people, to assess the prevalence of psychopathy in the corporate world. These explorations aren't just funny set pieces, mere side-notes to the argument, but are a marvellous way of exploring Ronson's increasing discomfort with the assessment of psychopathy and the label in general.

It's as he engages Scientologists and their attacks on psychiatry that Ronson's book reveals something just as fascinating as his subject matter: his own struggle as a journalist to maintain objectivity while entering into relationships that will help him engage in his research. The encounters with Tony--an incarcerated diagnosed psychopath--and Brian, a scientologist campaigning against psychiatry, are compelling and very well-written. We see it again in Ronson's depiction of his relationship with Bob Hare: though never studied as self-reflectively as that with Tony, it's even more intriguing, and we're left wondering about a certain level of monomania.

All in all, it's an unsettling book. I enjoyed it, but was left even more concerned than when I began it about how mental health labels are used, particularly in relationship to criminal justice issues. The only resolution I came away with was to decide to add The Men Who Stare at Goats to my to-read list.

Jonathan Lethem, Gun, with Occasional Music, 1994.

A marvellous science fiction detective noir, Gun, with Occasional Music presents a brilliantly realised but completely accessible dystopian world. Set in a future when it’s impolite and impermissible to ask questions, where babies and animals have been raised to sentience and functionality, where the news is all just music, and in which most citizens are heavy users of a drug called make (blended with various different amounts of Forgettol, Acceptol, Regrettol, and the like), our gumshoe protagonist stumbles into a murder mystery he’d rather not know much about. After all, Metcalf’s got problems of his own—not least of which is that, after swapping physical responses with a female friend for a weekend, she left without returning his … responses. Into his life walks Orton Angwine, a man who will soon go down for the murder of the last client of our “private inquisitor,” a man named Maynard Stanhunt. Events tumble into one another, and Metcalf soon finds himself running afoul of the Office of the inquisitors (and two in particular). Office politics, a confusing family intersection of victim and mob boss, babyheads, talking sheep and a certain nasty kangaroo working as mob muscle all combine to create a memorable read, a well-executed sci-fi noir that needs to be more widely read than it is. I wish I remember who recommended this novel to me, but I find myself reaching out excitedly to read more of Lethem’s work.

Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence, 2011.

Fish’s book is a paean to good writing. He believes that all good writing starts with writing good sentences, and that we don’t do a good job of teaching our students how to write such sentences; we get bogged down in confusing grammatical points or offer vague descriptions instead of offering good ways into good writing. Fish proposes that “(1) a sentence is an organization of items in the world; and (2) a sentence is a structure of logical relationships” (16). The essential problem with his book is revealed in this definition: the book will be appreciated and enjoyed by those people who already like sentences, and have a handle on how they work, while those who do not will neither profit much from the book nor enjoy it.

Throughout, he offers studies of good sentences and describes why they work. Fish is engaging and readable, and even entertaining at time. Where the argument wobbles is in the presentation of exercises to help the prospective writer (his audience) learn to write sentences as good as the superlative examples being studied: Fish’s own sample responses to his prompts aren’t in the same league as the originals, and feel both woefully imitative and wan in comparison. He points this fact out himself, too frequently, and both weaknesses distract from the argument. Yet his examples! And his close-readings that so wonderfully explicate why his examples are as good as they are! Fish produces an unexpected study of excerpts of some of the best writing I have ever encountered, and this book is worth reading for these choices alone.

When he moves in the final four chapters from form to content, Fish offers a few brilliant and constructive ways to think about writing. Perhaps most significant of these is his way of describing how first sentences should work. Instead of thinking about “topic sentences,” writers should remember that “First sentences know all about the sentences that will follow them” and thus “First sentences have what I call an ‘angle of lean’; the lean forward, inclining in the direction of the elaborations they anticipate" (99). This idea is still one for people who already grasp the concept, but it is as elegant a way of thinking about how to begin a piece of writing than any I have encountered.

It is a book to read if one loves both reading and writing, and I’d advise the prospective reader to anticipate both felicities and disappointments in their time with How to Write a Sentence.

Patricia Briggs, River Marked, 2011.

We continue with the saga of Mercedes Thompson. Mercy's a VW mechanic on the days she's allowed to just go to work, but most of her clients don't know that she shifts into the form of a coyote and goes running and getting into trouble with fae, vampires, and the like in a fair bit of the time she's not at her garage. This new novel finds her recovering from her misadventures in the last, and before long, moving up her marriage to the Alpha-werewolf of their environs and going away camping for a honeymoon. Briggs weaves native American traditions and legends fairly deftly into her story, and Mercy finds herself dealing with malicious forces, river otters, and the very sources of myth all while new-husband Adam is mostly incapacitated. It's a fun romp, and eminently entertaining.

Neil Gaiman, American Gods, 2001.

I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to sit down with a book by Neil Gaiman. I’ve travelled in circles with those who admire him tremendously, and yet have never picked up Sandman or anything else until this novel, just as it reaches its tenth anniversary. It’s certainly my loss that I’ve waited so long.

Gaiman’s achievement in this novel is remarkable: he writes an entertaining and gripping story; he brings a pantheon of half-remembered deities and folktales into the context of America both in who the members were and how they have existed on this continent; and he constructs a gripping battle between the minor deities of yore and those constructs too-worshipped today. What I admire most about the writing is the balance the author strikes between vivid, realised depictions and letting the reader create and imagine as s/he reads. What’s also quite striking is Gaiman’s deftness with myth, his grasp of how stories live and breathe and the power they have.

The plot follows Shadow, just released from prison and quickly in the employ of a dark and mercurial character who seems to be working to bring about a confrontation between the Gods that were and those now more readily worshipped. Shadow’s is a dark quest: he seeks meaning and life in a world where he feels as trapped as he had inside. We learn early in the novel that he has ecountered two key learnings in prison: only do your own time, not anyone else’s; and “Call no man happy until he is dead.” (So nice to meet people, fictional or no, with a fondness for Herodotus!) As one might expect, these become the twin pillars that Shadow seeks to learn how to live. His adventure, which roams from coast to coast to the very centre of America (in Kansas, if we ignore Alaska and Hawaii), is an exploration of myth and of America itself: centred less in those major centres that we hear about so often, the novel is also a paean to Gaiman’s adopted country, reveling in the glory (and strange peculiarities!) of life in small towns unknown to all not from them and the weirdness of the various roadside attractions that can be stumbled upon.

It’s a marvellous novel, and well worth reading. Time to add some more Gaiman to my list.

I came across the Sunday Times list of “The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945” at Of Books and Bicycles.

1. Philip Larkin – I don’t know as well as I should, but quite like what I’ve read.


2. George Orwell - the two everyone has read, and some of the essays. On tea and grammar, well worth reading.


3. William Golding – had trouble staying awake


4. Ted Hughes – Paul Muldoon has rekindled my interest


5. Doris Lessing – I’m ashamed to say not


6. J. R. R. Tolkien - The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but otherwise just “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”


7. V. S. Naipaul – ah, Mr. Biswas


8. Muriel Spark – not yet


9. Kingsley Amis - only Lucky Jim, which I didn’t find as funny as I’d hoped


10. Angela Carter - no


11. C. S. Lewis - too much. Narnia, Lost Planet, and a heap of his apologetics. While once I had time for him, that phase has passed.


12. Iris Murdoch – never been excited


13. Salman Rushdie - Midnight’s Children and the Satanic Verses


14. Ian Fleming – Mom wouldn’t let me when she still okayed my reading as a lad, so I devoured the lot and found them boring as a teenager


15. Jan Morris – unknown to me


16. Roald Dahl – Quite a lot, though not for some time. I was quite fond of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More


17. Anthony Burgess - no


18. Mervyn Peake – mmm… Gormenghast-y goodness


19. Martin Amis – never been excited


20. Anthony Powell - nope


21. Alan Sillitoe – I read The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner because of Belle & Sebastian. Haven’t bothered with anything else.


22. John Le Carré – decent, clever spy-thriller stuff but never got super excited


23. Penelope Fitzgerald - no


24. Philippa Pearce - no


25. Barbara Pym - no


26. Beryl Bainbridge - no


27. J. G. Ballard – no— classmates in grad school whose taste I trusted loathed Crash, so I've never bothered


28. Alan Garner - no


29. Alasdair Gray – don’t even know the name


30. John Fowles - The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Collector, The Magus


31. Derek Walcott – some of the poetry, but not much.


32. Kazuo Ishiguro – I will always buy and make time for a new Ishiguro. I adore An Artist of the Floating World


33. Anita Brookner – I don’t know her stuff


34. A. S. Byatt – I quite like some-- Possession , especially--and was bored by others


35. Ian McEwan – as variable as Byatt, but not quite reaching her heights


36. Geoffrey Hill – He may be one of my favourite poets. I have been a different person since reading “Lacrimae Amantis”


37. Hanif Kureishi – has been in the to-read pile for too long


38. Iain Banks - no


39. George Mackay Brown – haven’t even heard the name before


40. A. J. P. Taylor - haven’t even heard the name before


41. Isaiah Berlin – to-read


42. J. K. Rowling – “One of these things is not like the other”. Yes, all 7, but man did she need an editor after the first


43. Philip Pullman – I quite enjoy Pullman. His Dark Materials is brilliant, and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is fun and thought-provoking


44. Julian Barnes – mmm…. I enjoy Barnes. I do want to know to whom I loaned A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and if s/he will return it.


45. Colin Thubron - haven’t even heard the name before


46. Bruce Chatwin – I’ve had Patagonia recommended to me more than once, but others have panned it. Inertia is a significant force in my life


47. Alice Oswald - haven’t even heard the name before


48. Benjamin Zephaniah - haven’t even heard the name before


49. Rosemary Sutcliff – I read a lot as a child. Warrior Scarlet and Knight’s Fee were particular favourites


50. Michael Moorcock - haven’t even heard the name before

I should look up the people I haven’t heard of.
And the Times needs to have the heads of its staff checked for omitting David Mitchell.
And I'm appalled at how poorly I did with having read the small number of women on this list.

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1997.

This collection of essays is my first foray into reading Wallace. I’ve been meaning to spend some time with his work for a while now, and am now both glad that I have and hoping to find more time to spend with Consider the Lobster and Infinite Jest.

The writing is fun: recursive, exuberant, given to marvellous and unexpected comparisons as a way of bringing a scene to life, and richly evocative: “an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like—i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left—and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.” What I found most remarkable were the two travel pieces, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” about the Illinois State Fair, and the title piece “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” about a Caribbean cruise. They feel at first like deeply personal travelogues, essays that describe the scene and bring you into the author’s experience complete with all his entertaining and identifiable neuroses, and seem to lack coherence other than that given by the passage of time. In reading them, though, I came to see that the seemingly-relaxed structure is a front: Wallace has very deliberate points about what it means to be human and what it means to experience, that are worth discovering in his meandering and footnoted-way. And oh, the footnotes ¹ in all their parenthetical and humorous delight, never detracting from the piece but always adding something. One has to read the footnotes!

The only piece in the collection I found myself skimming rather than reading was the essay on David Lynch, and while it examines what makes Lynch a different sort of auteur than many directors, my lack of familiarity with and interest in Lynch himself wasn’t overcome by Wallace’s engaging writing.

Captivating but difficult is the essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” a piece I wish I had read many years ago. Arguing that television exists as a medium wholly invested in irony, Wallace builds on the brilliant Lewis Hyde to argue “… irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” and thus television can never be a truly effective tool for the novelist: authors of fiction have an obligation to use modern references, to be sure, but to transcend irony to create something else. He quotes Hyde’s idea from “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking” that “Irony has only emergence use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” I’m excerpting an idea from a complex piece, but it serves to present Foster Wallace as someone who, in this postmodern age, felt that fiction is more than a player in the great game of deconstruction.

I look forward to the next bit of time I’ll be able to spend with his writing.


¹ and the footnotes to the footnotes ^{2
          2} and so on

Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles, 2010.

The Fry Chronicles picks up where Moab Is My Washpot left off, offering a vertiginous stream of wordplay and eloquence to describe a portion of Fry’s life—in this case, his years at university and just thereafter as he establishes his career. It ends just before Fry and Hugh Laurie are to begin a tour of England to prepare for A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and with the start of a new problem that we readers are to assume will challenge Fry’s life for some time to come.

Fry writes his story lightly, interspersed with understandable but too frequent heavy-handed apologies for the what- some-might-consider-trivial woes that mark his life story. Except for these asides, his writing is deeply engaging. We are immersed first in the world of Cambridge, and learn how he finds his way into the Footlights, and then brought into the world of television in London (and radio, and magazines, and musicals). Characteristic throughout is his sense of discomfort in his environs, always suspecting that he’ll be found out to have less talent than he has been credited with by others, and it’s this feeling that gives plot to what is otherwise a fairly linear string of events in Fry’s life. Told otherwise, his biography would seem nearly golden: despite a few expulsions and an arrest for credit card fraud, he attends Queens’ College, Cambridge, and then soars to a magnificent career as an entertainer, earning and receiving opportunity after chance and indulging tastes for cars and computers along the way. Yet this insecurity never distanced me from Fry as I read: it’s the signature element of who he is, rather than an affectation, and I found it both endearing and easy to identify with.

I’ll look forward to the next volume.

Craig Ferguson, American On Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, 2009.

I’m not sure what attracted me to Ferguson’s autobiography: I’m a fan neither of celebrity autobiographies nor of addiction memoirs, but something made me want to read this one. I’m glad I did. Ferguson’s self-deprecating humour and wry observations combine with a level of candour and openness that make for an engaging personal history. We meet his parents and his family, and learn of his yearning to be American (with a very sweet NASA story along the way), before following him into a descent into alcoholism and drumming. Fans of The Late Late Show won’t be surprised that he learns that he loves to make people laugh, leading to a career in both stand-up and film before getting sober with the help of some friends, with a first American sojourn along the way. (It is astonishing to read of both the depths of his alcoholism and his ability to remain employed.) Finally, he finds his way to LA and projects in both film and television, before landing his current gig. There’s a sweetness to the book and its stories, even when Ferguson is sharing his fear of ducks brought on by a bad acid trip (a story that’s changed and reworked in his novel, Between the Bridge and the River, blogged about here). There’s also no shortage of can-do American Dream-fulfilled optimism that shapes the telling. What you’ll read is entirely congruent with the voice you may have experienced when the sandman’s at your door and you’re watching his show anyway, and it will entertain you even as it speaks revealingly about addiction and how Ferguson has addressed it in his life.

Craig Ferguson, Between the Bridge and the River, 2006.

Ferguson’s first novel is a road-trip good-time, a weird and wacky series of pastiches that is strongly reminiscent of the work of both Douglas Adams and Tom Robbins. Ostensibly the stories of two Glaswegians who were once friends, the story careens off into strange asides and amusing characters that one might well meet in Ferguson’s comedy (and bits and pieces from Ferguson’s own life, as you’ll discover in my next blog post on his American on Purpose). We follow George, a defence lawyer dying of cancer who falls in love, and Fraser, a disgraced televangelist seeking escape at a conference of his brother televangelists in the deep South. Along the way we meet the morbidly obese and extensively depraved Saul and his brother Leon, the singer cum actor. We meet crack-heads, anorexics, and snake handlers, and are reminded that bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly... and yet they do. Oh, and Carl Jung and Virgil are key figures, too. It’s a wise-cracking tour de force that touches on sex, suicide, addiction, sex, the stories that trap us, sex, and a deeply humane view of what it should mean to us to lead our lives. From chase-like sequences in RVs to the retelling of the story of St. Francis of Assisi, Ferguson’s writing is deeply entertaining and moving, never stepping away from a sharp comedic outlook while sharing interesting asides on myoclonic twitches and the etymology of “cutting to the chase”. The book is at its best in the set pieces, and three morality tales are particularly strong. It’s well worth a read: you’ll not regret it, in your own time between the bridge and the river.