Reading life review: June

■ The Unwritten, Vol. 1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity (Mike Carey)
Graphic series. Recommended to me by Girl Detective, who writes about the volume here.

■ Alan's War: The Memories of GI Alan Cope (Emmanuel Guibert)
Graphic biography. Absolutely brilliant. (Related entry here.)

■ Fractured (Karin Slaughter)
Mystery/Thriller. Serviceable entertainment for the minutes between the completion of paper-grading and the return of my morning swimmers.

■ Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Cory Doctorow)
Science fiction. While I loved Doctorow's Little Brother (related entry here), this was just all right.

■ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)
Classic. With the Misses. (Related entry here.)

■ Death without Tenure (Joanne Dobson)
Mystery. The early Karen Pelletier novels (Quieter Than Sleep, The Northbury Papers, and The Raven and the Nightingale) were entertaining enough, if mostly implausible and somewhat predictable (as most mysteries featuring female English professors are, with the notable exception of the early Amanda Cross efforts). But each subsequent entry into the series became less and less satisfying, so believe me, there's actually a hint of praise in my assertion that at least Death without Tenure was better than The Maltese Manuscript.

■ The Sixty-Eight Rooms (Marianne Malone)
Juvenile fiction.
■ Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl (Marianne Malone)
Non-fiction.
Our June/July read-alouds. The first has, of course, has inspired plans for another trip to the Art Institute. And the latter? Well, we love birds, don't we?

■ Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers--and How You Can Too (Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Y. Kim)
Education. Supported by anecdotes from their own experience and that of some of their acquaintances, much of the practical advice the authors offer is simply a restatement of familiar parent-teaching maxims (e.g., "Play an active role in your child's education" and "Teach your child to value academic success over popularity"). The rest of the volume comprises perplexing assertions about, for example, the value of choosing a career for its income potential. Not recommended.

■ Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917 (Stephanie D'Alessandro and John Elderfield)
Art. An excellent follow-up to our recent visit.

■ The Passage (Justin Cronin)
Fiction. Some notes on this tome here.

■ The Core (Leigh A. Bortins)
Education. Observations about this title can be found here, but in a nutshell, The Core reads like a well crafted study aide for those who have no intention of reading an 800-plus-page book on classical education.

■ The Confessions of Max Tivoli (Andrew Sean Greer)
Fiction. In the June 15 issue of Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum writes, "David Nicholls owes a plot finder's fee to When Harry Met Sally… for his irresistible way-we-were novel One Day." (You'll find the complete review here.) If I may take my cue from Schwarzbaum, then, Andrew Sean Greer owes a plot finder's fee to F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" for his sincerely delivered (if somewhat overwrought) love-at-first-sight-and-forever novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a book I think everyone else read five or six years ago. I know it has been on my shelves for at least four years, which means, Yes, Mr. M-mv, I think maybe I just might get to all of these books. Eventually. Anyway, back to Max. He made for pleasant-enough companionship during a swim meet. Is that a recommendation? You decide.

■ Ex Machina, Vol. 1: The First Hundred Days (Brian K. Vaughan)
■ Ex Machina, Vol. 2: Tag (Brian K. Vaughan)
■ Ex Machina, Vol. 3: Fact v. Fiction (Brian K. Vaughan)
■ Ex Machina, Vol. 4: March to War (Brian K. Vaughan)
Graphic series. I loved Y: The Last Man (related entries here and here) so I thought I'd give this a go. Not bad. Not bad, at all.

■ Bamboo People (Mitali Perkins)
YA fiction. As I mentioned here, Book Moot's review prompted me to pick this up, and, boy, am I grateful. I was both moved and informed by Perkins' exploration of the antagonism between the Burmese government and the Karenni people and the difficult lives young people on both sides face.

■ Faith of Our Sons: A Father's Wartime Diary (Frank Schaeffer)
Memoir. This is the follow-up to Keeping Faith, which I reread in January, when Master (now PFC) left for boot camp. I now realize that while I certainly (over)identified with Frank Schaeffer's angst in the first volume, I much preferred his son's measured and, in the end, more compelling voice -- a voice overpowered in the second volume by his father's shrill, self-absorbed narrative.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

"Google is reading my mind—or trying to."

If all goes according to the current plan, two books from my pile of recent acquisitions -- Mitali Perkins' Bamboo People and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows (another related entry here) -- will fill the hours following our early-morning bike rides this weekend. So naturally, Carr's short piece in the July/August issue of The Atlantic attracted my attention.

From "Googlethink":

I like Google—it’s a cuddly company, and endlessly helpful—but I also resent it. It’s like a nosy mother, intent on knowing everything her children are doing and thinking. Worse, it’s like a meddlesome mother, the kind who can’t let her kids do anything on their own. Start typing a keyword, and she immediately butts in, trying to finish it for you. At first you enjoy the hyperactive solicitousness. But then you begin to bridle. You’re being smothered.

An aside: Toward the end of the piece, Carr quotes Matthew Crawford. Crawford, you may recall, is the wide-and-far-ranging mind behind Shop Class as Soulcraft, a book that grew from an essay of the same title, first published in The New Atlantis four years ago. (Related M-mv entry here.) Pushing the mind's pencil from one mental dot to the next -- Synthesis! Serendipity! Synchronicity! -- I was struck afresh by the connections the reading life affords.

Chapbook entry

An Education (Lynn Barber)

p. 46
I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of "living a lie." I came to believe that other people -- even when you think you know them well -- are ultimately unknowable. Learning all this was a good basis for my subsequent career as an interviewer, but not, I think, for life. It made me too wary, too cautious, too ungiving. I was damaged by my education.

p. 48
I had felt that I knew everything and now realised I knew nothing. More importantly, everything I had learned or assimilated from my parents I now regarded as unreliable, and needing to be rethought from scratch. In fact, I probably went further -- I felt that everything my parents believed was by definition wrong, and that if I ever found myself in agreement with my parents I should immediately recant. [...] But in a way what they said wasn't the problem: what I was more worried about was the attitudes, prejudices, beliefs I might have picked up from them subconsciously or before I was old enough to know what I was learning. Effectively, I had to question everything I believed, and never accept my own instincts. It required constant vigilance; it was intellectually exhausting.

p. 71
I still get furious with people -- including, alas, many of my journalist colleagues -- who knock media studies as a somehow worthless or frivolous pursuit. I know that the calibre of teaching is not always great, but I don't see how anyone can fault media studies as a subject, given that we live in such a media-dominated age. Isn't it important to give young people some idea of how the media works? Can anyone seriously maintain that Latin is more relevant?

p. 77
I think people who try to run their marriages according to other people's expectations are insane. It is quite hard enough to keep a marriage together till death do you part -- which I think should be the aim, even if it can't always succeed -- without trying to do it to please other people. A good marriage is whatever suits the participants, and our marriage suited us fine.

p. 123
I accepted a few of these invitations but soon realised that I found such occasions depressing, and would come back feeling obscurely dejected. At first I couldn't work out why but then I realised -- all these people who wanted to meet me were clearly disappointed when they did meet me. Whatever they were hoping for, I wasn't it. [...] But there was more than that -- people expected me to talk as I write, i.e. crisply and decisively, whereas actually I am a terrible waffler and of course burdened with an elocution accent. If I could communicate only by words on a page, how much more satisfactory I would be!

p. 135
I felt as outraged as if he'd told me he'd been having an affair for years now. But perhaps this is what goes wrong with long marriages -- you state your opinions, your likes and dislikes, at the beginning and then forget to mention when they change.

______________________________

As I mentioned here, I was mesmerized by Carey Mulligan's performance in the film based on one section of Barber's brilliant memoir. Both book and movie come with my highest recommendation.

Play me. I'm yours.

From "Building a City of Pianists" (WSJ, June 24):

Though the event is intended as an exploration of mass creativity and shared public space, another dynamic has emerged: Musicians are piggybacking on the project to promote themselves and their music. They've planned marathon performance routes around the city. They've worked their way into TV news footage and mustered their own video teams. And, in some cases, they've used the novelty of the pianos to rustle up a few bucks from onlookers. As they become part of the mass art project, these musicians are also tapping into the city's rich history of street busking. On another level, however, they're improvising with a tangible alternative to the online marketing on which most musicians have come to rely.

May I just say, waaaay cooler than "Cows on Parade," okay? Way cooler.

"[G]ood parenting is less work and more fun than people think."

Which is pretty much what I've been saying all along. It's just not that hard. And hell, yeah: It is fun. Tom Sawyerish fun, even.

From "The Breeders' Cup" (WSJ, June 19):

The main problem with parenting pessimists, though, is that they assume there's no acceptable way to make parenting less work and more fun. Parents may feel like their pressure, encouragement, money and time are all that stands between their kids and failure. But decades' worth of twin and adoption research says the opposite: Parents have a lot more room to safely maneuver than they realize, because the long-run effects of parenting on children's outcomes are much smaller than they look.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Fine Art Friday

Silver Sun, 1929
Arthur Dove (American, 1880-1946)
See important note at the conclusion of this entry.

Silver Sun is featured in the "From the Collection" column of the July/August 2010 Art Institute Member Magazine.

Silver is not likely the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of the sun, but in this unconventionally colored work, American artist Arthur Dove conveys the sun's immense power and brilliance with various shades of metallic silver paint as well as other innovative techniques. Concentric circles of shimmering paint expand from the sun's black center to evoke the radiance of the sun. Likely mixed with wax, the viscosity of the paint used to create these surrounding rays further enhances the force of the emanating light. The awe-inspiring potency of the sun is additionally heightened by the striking disparity between the massive hovering sun and its tiny reflection in the water. And yet this diminutive watery reflection forcibly draws the viewer's eye, as it is here where the most undiluted silver paint is used.

For more information about Dove, check out this Art Story entry.

We cannot express the light in nature because we have not the sun.
We can only express the light we have in ourselves.

__________________________

Note: To see the works featured in the Fine Art Friday entries, you must click on the links that are provided. Chosen for its authority and/or clarity, each image link represents one of the most suitable of the many images of a particular work currently available on the web. The goal is to direct M-mv readers to an image that will offer sufficient detail -- enough to convey some sense of the work's appeal. Each Fine Art Friday also includes at least one link to an article or web item about the artist.

"Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart."

On June 12, 2001, I copied the following passage into my chapbook:

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Nine years ago this very week, Mr. M-mv, Master (now PFC), and I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for our family book club. Master (now PFC) was eleven-going-on-twelve years old, a year younger than Miss M-mv(ii) is now. Allow me this cliché: How quickly time has passed!

Yes, a trace of the bittersweet informs this, my fourth reading of Twain's classic.

Some reading notes

■ The Passage (Justin Cronin)
Cronin owes Stephen King's The Stand, Robert R. McCammon's Swan Song, and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend big time. No, really. BIG time. Don't get me wrong: Reading The Passage has certainly not been a chore (although, it became slower-going over the weekend). But the word derivative has come to mind too many times not to elicit a little annoyance in me. And forget lugging it to a swim meet.

■ The Man Who Loved Children (Christine Stead)
As I mentioned here, I am reading this slooooowly. After all, the Pollits can only be endured in small doses: Their dysfunction and misery weigh on a reader; it's as if someone has tossed a filthy, wet wool blanket over your shoulders on a hot, humid day. The family's rancidity lingers in the back of your throat long after you close the book, and their dysfunction continues to press -- hard -- on the back of your head. But you keep coming back to look. And I as I mince around the train wreck, I find myself wondering (speaking of debts), just how much Joyce Carol Oates owes Stead.

■ Quicksilver (Neal Stephenson)
As I mentioned, you could say that Girl Detective is making me do this. I will not be completing the Baroque Cycle this summer, though. As I shared in the comments of this post, my goal is to finish Quicksilver in 2010, The Confusion in 2011, and The System of the World in 2012. Interestingly, this is how Mr. M-mv, Master (now PFC), and I read the three books of Lord of the Rings.

■ The Core (Leigh A. Bortins)
I used Monarch Notes several times in high school -- notably, during freshman year for A Tale of Two Cities and Julius Caesar. My dad bought them for me after I had made my way through the texts. Later, I learned that some students did quite well for themselves all through high school by reading the Notes instead of the actual books. Hey, they were busy with Honors Chemistry and soccer practice! (Yes, David B. I remember your rationale. Heh, heh, heh.) I was reminded of Monarch Notes while perusing The Core, which, to me, reads like a well crafted study aide for those who have no intention of reading an 800-plus-page book on classical education.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

The recommended daily allowance

Alan's War: The Memories of GI Alan Cope (Emmanuel Guibert)

Earlier this year, Girl Detective sent me a note recommending, among other links and thinks, Alan's War, which she described simply: "a comic book memoir of a GI in WWI." I made a mental note... that was eventually blanketed by other mental notes. A couple of months later, though, I wrote about trying ink wash techniques in art class (here and here), and GD sent me a link to a video of the artist Emmanuel Guibert creating an image for Alan's War.

After watching the video, I promptly put the book on hold at the library. It took a while to come in; then, when it did, it sat unread through several renewal periods, until finally it was due -- once and for all -- so it was read it now or perhaps never.

I read it.

In two sittings.

And then I pressed it on Mr. M-mv, who read it in two train rides.

Both of us were captivated by the artwork and moved by Cope's story, which was related with both the immediacy and familiarity of a comfortable conversation. You can't help but be charmed by the narrative voice. More, you think, as each section closes. Tell me more.

Most highly recommended.

Related articles and links
■ An excerpt from Alan's War

■ "'Alan's War': A Graphic Novel Revisits WWII" (NPR, May 24, 2009)

■ A song from Alan's War performed by Emmanuel Guibert

■ "Alan's War: A Conversation Becomes a Book" (Publisher's Weekly, September 2008)

Recent acquisitions

■ The Rift (Walter J. Williams)
■ Wolf and Iron (Gordon R. Dickson)
My affection for post-apocalyptic (or "cataclysmic") fiction is well-documented in the "On the nightstand" and "RDA" entries to this site.

■ The Core (Leigh A. Bortins)
The publisher offered a review copy, but I haven't accepted those for quite some time now. Even so, the description of the book interested me, so I picked up my own copy.

■ The Magicians (Lev Grossman)
A review by Jeanne of Necromancy Never Pays prompted me to pick up this one.

■ Bamboo People (Mitali Perkins)
And Book Moot's review prompted me to pick up this one.

■ The Imperfectionists (Tom Rachman)
Everyone is raving about this, including the NYT and EW.

■ The Shallows (Nicholas Carr)
I succumbed. (Related entry here.)

■ The Passage (Justin Cronin)
EW promises that it is the summer read, and given all that is already stacked hither and thither, that's just what I needed, wasn't it? Another too-long book? Heh, heh, heh.

■ The Photographer (Emmanuel Guibert)
Because after reading Alan's War, I needed to get my hands on all of Guibert's work. (Related entry to follow soon.)

Reading notes

The Man Who Loved Children (Christine Stead)

Number 56 on Time's "All Time 100 Novels," The Man Who Loved Children is a hard book. Not because it's long. (But at 576 pages it's not short, either.) Not because its prose is difficult. (It's not. It's a little, for lack of a better word, thick in places, but the narrative drives doggedly through those bits toward a destination that, even in the book's earliest chapters, promises to be satisfying and thought-provoking, though neither pretty nor happy.)

No, it's hard because although it is fascinatingly crafted, the novel depicts a suburban nightmare -- raw and painful and and intimate and true. Stead offers us a great big trainwreck of a family that makes Frank and April's story* look like "happily ever after." In fact, from the onset, we are more than aware that the Pollits are, as a 1965 Time review suggested, "the lousiest family of all time."

And that's hard because summer was made for lighter stuff, wasn't it? Like the horse stories and mysteries that I read and reread thirty-five summers ago. Or the secret stash of horror novels that saw me through high school summers. Or the Arthurian legends that filled the summer between junior and senior year at college.

So I am reading The Man Who Loved Children two or three sections at a time, which, by the way, is also how I am reading Quicksilver (Neal Stephenson) for Girl Detective's Baroque Summer. Now, that is not a hard book; it is simply a looooong book (927 pages), and I am already committed to so many others that it seems foolhardy to enter into an exclusive relationship with a series comprising nearly three thousand pages. So it's just Volume One for me this summer, and that's okay, I think.

Let's see. This week I also have what I now call "active bookmarks" in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Cory Doctorow) and Fractured (Karin Slaughter), two wildly different novels that have, all the same, been adequate companions for the few minutes between the time I finish correcting all of the Misses' work and the time they come out from swim practice each morning.

More notes tomorrow.
_______________________

* Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates). Related M-mv entry here.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Read. Think. Learn.

Much of the Summer 2010 issue of The American Scholar is now available online. With Bloomsday only a handful of days away, the following 'graph about Joyce's masterwork from "Hive of Nerves" attracted my attention:

The greatness of James Joyce’s Ulysses is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know. And that is the book’s horror too: some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient person on the planet. How much cruelty is occasioned simply because of the noise that is within us: the din is too great for us to realize exactly what we are doing to others, or what is being done to others in our name. Thus an offhand remark, which leaves us as easily as a breath and which we think no more of than a breath, cuts a friend to the quick. And thus a whole country can be organized toward some collective insanity because there is no space in individuals to think. Life has accelerated greatly since Joyce’s time, and now, as our selves scatter into bits and bytes, and our souls, if we are conscious of them at all, diminish to little more than a vague wish for quiet, even the linear associativeness of Ulysses can seem quaint.

A somewhat related M-mv entry here.

“Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education.”

All but on the heels of last week's post on the subject of college loans and staggering debt, this from the concluding paragraphs of "Learning by Degrees" (The New Yorker, June 7):

The skip-college advocates’ contention—that, with the economic downturn, a college degree may not be the best investment—has its appeal. Given the high cost of attending college in the United States, the question of whether a student is getting his or her money’s worth tends to loom large with whoever is paying the tuition fees and the meal-plan bills. Even so, one needn’t necessarily be a liberal-arts graduate to regard as distinctly and speciously utilitarian the idea that higher education is, above all, a route to economic advancement. Unaddressed in that calculus is any question of what else an education might be for: to nurture critical thought; to expose individuals to the signal accomplishments of humankind; to develop in them an ability not just to listen actively but to respond intelligently.

All these are habits of mind that are useful for an engaged citizenry, and from which a letter carrier, no less than a college professor, might derive a sense of self-worth. For who’s to say in what direction a letter carrier’s thoughts might, or should, turn, regardless of the job’s demands?

Related entries
■ Community college

■ Paying for college, revisited

■ Paying for college: A rant of modest proportions

■ About college

The question is...

Wait until it arrives at the library, or order it now?

My (thrifty) inclination was to wait until the library fulfilled my hold request, but then NPR's "All Things Considered" made me, well, reconsider: "'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online."

You may remember the stir Carr created two years ago with the publication of the essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (The Atlantic, July/August 2008; related M-mv entry here).

Hmmmm. Decisions, decisions.

Reading life review: May

■ DMZ Vol. 1: On the Ground (Brian Wood)
■ DMZ Vol. 2: Body of a Journalist (Brian Wood)
■ DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works (Brian Wood)
■ DMZ Vol. 4: Friendly Fire (Brian Wood)
■ DMZ Vol. 5: The Hidden War (Brian Wood)
■ DMZ Vol. 6: Blood in the Game (Brian Wood)
■ DMZ Vol. 7: War Powers (Brian Wood)
Graphic series. Civil war has reduced Manhattan to a rubble-strewn and violent demilitarized zone in this compelling comic book series. I'm not fond of the artwork, but I'm staying for the story, which in the seventh volume, returned its focus to its morally ambivalent protagonist, journalist Matty Roth. Vol. 8 is due in early June.

■ William Eggleston
Photography. Unlike March's William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008, which included several insightful essays, this volume was strictly a catalogue of the 2002 French exhibition of the photographer's work.

■ Taken (Edward Bloor)
YA fiction. Solid entertainment from the author of the excellent novel Tangerine.

■ Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith (Deborah Heiligman)
Non-fiction. The author paints a remarkable portrait of a marriage if not defined then certainly shaped by the conflict between one spouse's religion and the other's science. Replete with insights into Victorian society and excerpts from primary source materials (letters, journals), this is a near-perfect biography. One quibble: The writing is sometimes painfully simple. If the intended audience can make its way through the excerpts from Darwin's texts, the passages from Jane Austen's novels, and the quotes from family letters and journals, then it can certainly handle a more sophisticated prose style from Heiligman.

■ Hate List (Jennifer Brown)
YA fiction. In January, I read Todd Strasser's Give a Boy a Gun and promptly asserted that I much preferred Nancy Garden's Endgame, which covered similar ground more compellingly. (Related entry here.) Well, Hate List -- another entry in the YA fiction sub-genre "school shootings" -- approached the quality and impact of Endgame: thought-provoking, moving, and, yes, uncomfortable (e.g., in the aftermath of the shooting, the relationship between the protagonist and her father is simply painful). Recommended.

■ An Education (Lynn Barber)
Memoir. In April, I was mesmerized by Carey Mulligan's performance in An Education, which is based on one section of Lynn Barber's brilliant memoir. This was one of those situations in which reading the book followed watching the movie, but neither work suffered by the comparison. In fact, I highly recommend both the film and Barber's wry autobiography.

■ Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature (Robin Brande)
YA fiction. I read Brande's Fat Cat late last year (also recommended by BookMoot) and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I added Evolution to my TBR file. Realistic and likeable characters make this a quick, enjoyable read -- perfect for poolside. For me, it was also a weird-but-neat complement to Charles and Emma (see above).

■ The Perilous Gard (Elizabeth Mary Pope)
YA fiction. With the Misses. I added Gard to our collection a couple of five years ago, on BookMoot's recommendation, but the Misses and I finally pulled it out this month at Melissa's urging. Good stuff.

■ Caught (Harlan Coben)
General fiction. Coben's Hold Tight entertained me last year, so picking up his latest at the bargain price of $9.98 made good sense when I was looking to be entertained poolside during stroke clinic.

■ Matisse from A to Z (Marie Sellier)
■ Matisse (Nina Hollein)
■ Henri Matisse (Jude Welton)
Juvenile/YA non-fiction. The Misses and I read these prior to seeing the Matisse exhibit (related entry here) and, in particular, heartily recommend the series of which the third title (Welton) is a part -- Artists in Their Time. Simple without being simplistic, these introductions to such artists as Matisse, Claude Monet, and Andy Warhol include biographical data, images of the artist's work and the work of artists who inspired and/or were inspired by him, context-setting commentary on the artist's work, a timeline, and more.

■ Such a Pretty Girl (Laura Wiess)
■ Leftovers (Laura Wiess)
■ How It Ends (Laura Wiess)
YA fiction. The label "problem novel" emerged in the 1960s to differentiate contemporary YA novels about such topical social issues as poverty, rape, divorce, and homosexuality from more conventional fare. Although few critics employ the phrase now, it is precisely the description that came to mind when I was reading Such a Pretty Girl, a first novel notable for its clear prose, narrative symmetry, and unflinching approach to exceptionally gritty subject matter. Leftovers, Wiess' second novel, also offers crisp writing if less compelling protagonists, but Wiess finally earned a spot on my list of best books read in 2010 with How It Ends. Again, some pretty gritty subject matter, but what an engrossing and original story with plenty of crossover appeal.