Ntuple Indemnity

This week’s selection: Wonder Boys (1995) by Michael Chabon.

In brief: Chabon’s sophomore novel is the literary equivalent of a warm bath. A comic contemporary adventure about the existential crises of novelists, it fits snugly in the naturalistic mould of modern literature about the here and now, albeit with a few extra helpings of wackiness. It meanders here and there, and its lightheartedness assures you that none of the characters are ever in much danger; however, Chabon’s lucid style keeps the story at least as fluid as his recent dips into genre, if not more so. It’s not high-concept, but it’s fun.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Wonder Boys, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: The Gunslinger (1982) by Stephen King.

In brief: The first volume of The Dark Tower is an ambiguous gothic western laced with pretensions of genre-crossing, multiverse-spanning fantasy. The concept is promising, but the execution is an incoherent mess. If the rest of the seven-book series is anything like this plodding trudge through a sandbox of unrelated metaphors, consider me completely incurious.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Gunslinger, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) by J.G. Farrell.

In brief: An early winner of the Booker Prize, a prestigious annual award for the best English-language novel about India, Krishnapur is an insightful, action-packed, and surprisingly funny look at how Victorian idealists conduct themselves in the face of destruction at the hands of mutinous sepoys. As a fair assessment of India under company rule, it appreciates the complexities of empire while avoiding the trap of revisionism; as historical fiction, it is an old-fashioned delight.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Siege of Krishnapur, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) by Barack Obama.

In brief: Reading this memoir, I learned a lot more about Barack Obama than I did about race. It is impossible now to speculate on what the book must have been like before its author rose to global significance; clearly, it is all the more interesting now because of the ending that had yet to be written. Obama’s ruminations on cultural identity are nothing novel, but rest assured that of the available positions, he adopted the one that is the most confused—which is also the most mature.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Dreams from My Father, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) by Alex Ross.

In brief: Less a textbook history of twentieth-century classical music than a supreme work of historical criticism, The Rest Is Noise is a persuasive treatise on how tumultuous political landscapes shape artistic production. Ross walks a fine tightrope straddling analytical detail and popular accessibility, but nonetheless conveys a continuous lineage of ideas threading the persistent revolutions and counter-revolutions of twentieth-century composition.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Rest Is Noise, keep reading below.)

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