Book Reviews: Magic, Parenting, and Fake Facts

There are several reasons I have not been blogging as much lately. There are the standard ones like family, work, and the holidays, but I've also been reading a lot. I don't think there's been a point in my life since I was about 7 that I didn't have at least one book going, but lately I've had 2-3 going at a time, and I've just felt more like reading than blogging. But now I'm gonna blog a bit about what I've been reading, so there you go.

Lev Grossman's The Magicians
There is no way to describe the plot of this book without making it sound derivative of at least two famous fantasy series: Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia. Quentin Coldwater, our anti-hero, is recruited into a school of magic, and eventually ends up learning that the fantasy world he's been reading about since he was a child, Fillory (which is basically Narnia), is real. That's not much of a spoiler, trust me.

The twist here is that instead of young, relatively squeaky-clean British kids visiting these magic settings, we have older, far-from-innocent American kids doing so. The novel can in some ways be read as a long thought experiment. Yes, many of us grow up reading about kids who learn to do magic or travel to magical lands, and of course we always wanted to be those kids, right? Grossman takes a step back and asks, really? Would you? If you had magic powers and could do virtually anything you wanted, wouldn't you get bored after a while? And as far as magical lands go, how much fun do you think being in constant mortal danger actually is?

I can't say any of the characters are particularly appealing--they're all pretty much jerks. But that's kind of the point. Nice people apparently don't make particularly good magicians. Characters that don't promote a lot of sympathy aside, the story moves along quickly. It takes Harry Potter 7 books to get through Hogwarts, but it takes Quintin Coldwater 2/3 of a book to get through Brakebills Academy. If anything, the last 1/3 of the novel moves a little too quickly. Grossman could have easily stretched the time in Fillory out for another 100 pages and I wouldn't have minded a bit.

All in all, a very fun book, and I would recommend it to any reader (over the age of 13 or so) who's ever read a fantasy novel and wanted oh-so-much to escape into that book. The Magicians will definitely force you to rethink that notion.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
Though I have been a parent for nearly 3 years now, I've never been much for parenting books. Many of them seem to work along the lines of "Hey, this worked for me, so it will obviously work for you!", which as most sane parents know is complete shite. You might call it the Jenny McCarthy class of parenting books (speaking of which, hurray for The Lancet for finally retracting the vaccinations-lead-to-autism paper!). This book caught my eye, however, because it's based almost entirely on published literature and interviews with actual scientists. Indeed, the reference section alone accounts for about 10% of the books length. Though the authors share a few personal anecdotes to demonstrate their points, the book is by and large a summary of very real research.

Several topics are discussed: the importance of sleep for kids' development, the actual causes of aggression in young children, sibling rivalries, how to build a child's vocabulary quickly, and perhaps more importantly, how not to. Many parents have learned by now that the Baby Einstein series not only fails to help kids talked sooner, it can actually impede speech development. This book explains why. There's a chapter on lying, and why it's not necessarily a bad thing when kids do it. In perhaps one of the most eye-opening chapters for me, the authors tackle the dogma that thrusting a child into a multi-ethnic environment will help make them "color blind". And in my favorite confirms-my-suspicions chapter, the authors essentially trash the idea that kindergartens for "advanced" kids are worth a damn.

All of this is presented in easy-to-digest prose--it's a quick but informative read. NurtureShock has not become my new parenting bible, but it has changed the way I interpret the behavior of my children, in what I have to believe is a good way. I would even go so far as to recommend this book for non-parents, because chances are you will have to interact with children some day, even if they aren't necessarily your own.

John Hodgman's More Information Than You Require
I can direct you to my earlier review of Hodgman's first book, and that would pretty much cover my bases here. This book is basically a continuation of The Areas of My Expertise--the page numbers even start where the last book's left off. Only this time we have a list of mole man names instead of hobo names, and Hodgman himself was a bit more famous when he wrote this book. Is it essential reading? Absolutely not. Is it still pretty damn funny? Yes. That is all.

Paternity Leave Reading

I'm currently wrapping up my paternity leave. My brand spanking new daughter is awesome, but let's face it, infants are kind of boring. She has about 20 minutes a day that she's awake and not nursing, and I enjoy those minutes. I've used some of the other time to catch up on some reading.

I recently finished Steven Millhauser's short story anthology, Dangerous Laughter. It was my first book by Millhauser, and I wasn't even halfway through the 13 stories presented here before I knew I'd be reading more of him. Millhauser's biggest claim to fame, outside literary circles, is that the relatively recent movie The Illusionist was based on one of his short stories (the story, "Eisenheim the Illusionist," is not in this anthology). It was a pretty decent movie, and Millhauser is a very clever, thought-provoking writer. Many of the stories force the reader to consider some aspect of the world that we take for granted--a Tom and Jerry cartoon, laughter, words, household objects, our sense of touch--from a completely new, slightly skewed perspective.

"History of a Disturbance" made me incredibly self-conscious about the words that came out of my mouth for days. Even as I think of the story now, weeks after I initially read it, it makes my mind feel kind of itchy. In the story "The Other Town", which isn't so much a story as it is a narrative description, we are introduced to a town that has created an exact doppelganger of itself; a copy that is kept updated minute by minute whenever a fork is shifted in a drawer or a leaf falls from a tree. How the town maintains this replica is vaguely interesting; why the town puts forth such an effort is much more intriguing.

Some of the stories feel like sci-fi or fantasy, but none fall easily into either genre. Some are character driven, some don't even have characters. Nearly all the stories were entertaining, and all of them made me think. Dangerous Laughter was easily the best anthology I've read in ages and I would highly recommend it.

On a much, much lighter note, I also finished John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise (or if you prefer the complete title, An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order By Me, John Hodgman, A Professional Writer, In The Areas of My Expertise). Most of the world knows Hodgman as the PC guy in the Mac vs. PC ads. He's also a frequent contributor to This American Life, for you NPR fans out there. I remember hearing an interview with Hodgman a few years ago when this book came out and thinking it sounded cool. I promptly forgot about it, then found the book relatively recently and decided to check it out. I'm glad I did.

A book consisting of entirely made-up facts probably won't appeal to everyone, but I found it highly amusing. Consider one of Hodgman's favorite topics, hoboes. He devotes several pages to a list of 700 Hobo names. And in one of the more amusing passages, he describes part of Hobo history:

At his inauguration in 1933, a new crippled president named Roosevelt addressed the nervous crowd: "The people of the United States have not failed. In their need, they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. An so I will kill all the hoboes, and together we will gnaw on their bones." It was time for a comprehensive Hobo Eradicaiton Plan called "The New Deal."

And so on. He also expounds upon facial hair, how to win a fight, failed palindromes (e.g. Slow speed: deep owls), and eels, among several other things. It's all very absurd, but you have to actually be somewhat well-read and reasonably intelligent to understand just how absurd some of this stuff is. In other words, you might appreciate the book more if listen to NPR (or its Canadian equivalent). It's not something I would recommend reading in one sitting--or even 10 sittings--but it's a fun book to pick up once in a while for a good chuckle.