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 Have you ever been reading a book and after being interrupted by something for a minute gone back, resumed reading, and after about ten seconds realized that you had just read the paragraph you're reading? You feel like an idiot because you were paying attention to what you were reading before the interruption but now you're seeing words, phrases, even entire sentences that you didn't notice before. It makes you wonder how much you get out of any book you read.
 [a:Robert Macfarlane|435856|Robert Macfarlane|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1369335601p2/435856.jpg]'s [b:Underland: A Deep Time Journey|53121631|Underland A Deep Time Journey|Robert Macfarlane|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597184024l/53121631.SY75.jpg|68561061] was like that for me more than any book I've read in months, maybe a few years. That's praise, as much as it troubles me.
 His prose is profound, literary and dense for a nonfiction work in the way [a:Helen Macdonald|314021|Helen Macdonald|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1400594607p2/314021.jpg]'s [b:H is for Hawk|18803640|H is for Hawk|Helen Macdonald|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1661766699l/18803640.SY75.jpg|26732095] is. You can read some books written with high literary aspects and get much out of them, but I think it would be hard to do with this one. The language and the narrative are so well intertwined.
 You'll want a dictionary when reading this, and even my decent ones didn't have definitions for some of the words Macfarlane uses, and others are British variants. A few of the words I didn't know: ammonite, swallet, kists, skyring, baize, halight, coppice, sinter, curtilage. Of those nine, just one, baize, was flagged as a misspelling as I keyed them in here. I would have liked it if he'd included a few simple maps to show where he traveled to but like most Americans I am deficient in my knowledge of geography.
 As the titles suggest, Underland would be an ideal companion to [a:Richard Powers|11783|Richard Powers|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1263155076p2/11783.jpg]'s [b:The Overstory|40180098|The Overstory|Richard Powers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562786502l/40180098.SY75.jpg|57662223], even though that's fiction.
 An excerpt:

 The Piave is heavy with silt from the mountains, moving with a pewter simmer, more stone than water to the eye. A sense of high peaks out of sight to the north, there in the darkening of the sky. Maize fields. Wild acacia groves in the lost ground under flyovers. Pale doves lifting in flocks off turned brown earth. Abandoned factories with pantile roofs, buddleia filling the window frames. Farmhouses lost in ivy. Everything wearing the heat like a cloak.

 I haven't read [a:Jennifer Egan|49625|Jennifer Egan|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1231143470p2/49625.jpg]'s [b:A Visit from the Goon Squad|7331435|A Visit from the Goon Squad|Jennifer Egan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356844046l/7331435.SX50.jpg|8975330], which [b:The Candy House|58437521|The Candy House|Jennifer Egan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1642351487l/58437521.SY75.jpg|86707532] is said to be a sort of companion to. If I had, I might have had a better idea of what's going on, though I've read that's not true. More likely, I'd have gotten more out of The Candy House if I were thirty years younger.
 It's a fascinating book and I'm glad I read it, but there were long passages that, while interesting on their own, I couldn't see how they were connected. This is especially true of a chapter of messages among several people concerning the possible making of a documentary about an actor's love of speed boats.
 Egan strikes me as someone who's smart and creative as hell. I picture her going through her day always with access to a notebook or, given the times, her phone, and noting ideas and perceptions she has as her day progresses. She probably has ten great ideas a day and the best one or two of them make it into her prose. The result is fascinating reading she well deserves her Pulitzer Prize for.
 The Candy House is like an ensemble TV series, with many characters in the center at different times, few of them chronological. As much as I liked that, I sort of miss novels with one or two strong central characters. I also think Egan got so wound up in the multiple stories she was telling that she didn't go into race and gender issues as much as the book's beginning made me think she would.

 This was a pick by one of the two book groups I’m in and I’m wondering why. Published in 2016, it’s already well out of date. Reading it is like coming across someone’s newspaper clippings on the subject of microbes they compiled from 2010 to 2015. Much of what’s in this book has been covered and updated in the semi-popular press.
 There are other problems with it.
• The title is misleading. You think it’s going to be all about the microbes humans carry inside them, but at best, just twenty percent of it’s about that. Most of it is about microbes in general, and we learn a lot about microbes in insects. For some reason, there’s a long part about the degradation of coral reefs, an important topic, yes, but it’s been well covered elsewhere.
• There are far too many notes (376 over 264 pages), and you don’t know which ones add enough to the text to bother flipping to versus ones that just provide citations without reading them. You can try looking at the notes before beginning a chapter and remembering when to go to the ones you should read, but that’s hard. (Was it 23 or 25?) Many of the notes could have easily been incorporated into the text without breaking the flow or slowing things down. Doing it the way Yong has makes the book seem like a weird mix of academic writing and popular science writing. He clearly tried to make it readable to the layperson, which you can tell by the title and by the way all the chapter titles are either directly or derived from familiar phrases.
• There are more errors and typos than I like to see in a professionally published book like this, but that’s the old crank in me speaking. For much of one chapter, the note numbers and the notes don’t match.
• Much of what is advocated in this book is laughable now due to the pandemic, as sound ideas as they may be. It’s unlikely that anyone these days will try to incorporate more bacteria into their lives than they do now. In one passage, Yong even suggests that cleaning toilets as often as we do does more harm than good, a concept no single man should ever hear.
 When the book is good, though, it is informative.
 An excerpt:

To control a microbiome is to sculpt an entire world—which is as hard as it sounds. Remember that communities have a natural resilience: if you hit them, they bounce back. They are also unpredictable; if you tweak them, the consequences ripple outwards in capricious ways. Add a supposedly beneficial microbe, and it might displace competitors that we also rely on Lose a supposedly harmful microbe, and an even worse opportunist might rise to take its place. This is why attempts at world-shaping have so far led to a few magnificent successes, but also many puzzling setbacks.

 While having lunch with a friend today who works in a bookstore and leans toward cutting edge fiction, I mentioned just having finished reading Nevil Shute's 1950 A Town Like Alice. She gasped; it is one of her favorite books ever.
 This surprised me because it's an old fashioned kind of book, the voice that of a London lawyer in his seventies (it was published when Shute was fifty-one), formal, careful. A widower. But the story is a dynamic one, with the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II as the background of most of the first half, and the striving of a remarkable young woman there in that part and the rest of it, which takes place in rugged parts of the Outback, the huge, little populated region of Australia's inner landmass.
 There are horrific scenes in the first half involving the Japanese occupation which may rankle some these days, but they are accurate. Other things also wouldn't make it into print were the book written today: as admirable as the main character, Jean Paget, is, her attitude toward indigenous Australians is respectful, but hardly progressive.
 Parts of A Town Like Alice made me think of those video games in which you construct a city, like the Sims. I've never played those games so I'm not sure I'm right about that, but I liked how Jean's business acumen and desire to create manifested itself.

 By the time they had been two days in this country several of them were suffering from fever, a fever that did not seem quite like the malaria that they were used to, in that the temperature did not rise so high; it may have been dengue. They had little by that time to treat it with, no so much because they were short of money as because there were no drugs at all in the jungly villages that they were passing through. Jean consulted with the sergeant, who advised them to press on, and get out of this bad country as soon as possible. Jean was running a fever herself at the time and everything was moving about her in a blur; she had a cracking headache and it was difficult to focus her eyes. She consulted with Mrs Frith, who was remarkably well.

 Like everyone else, I don't have the time to read all the books I'd like to, so I try to be selective and read books that have been recommended by critics or friends I trust, of that have won awards, like [a:Damon Galgut|64459|Damon Galgut|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1246536783p2/64459.jpg]'s [b:The Promise|59704786|The Promise|Damon Galgut|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1637946442l/59704786.SY75.jpg|85240090] did—it won the 2021 Booker Prize.
 As a result, most of the books I read are books I'd call good or even great. The Promise is one of the few I'd call a Wow! of a book. The writing is so good that you get mad at it, as if Galgut is stealing phrasing and ideas you could have had in the future but if you do you can't use them now because he already did. He does things in it that have been done before, like breaking the fourth wall, but he does them all so well that they are fresh and make you remember that writing can be that dynamic and new, a thing people have thought at varying times since the early part of the last century. The unique qualities The Promise has reminded me of [a:Emma Klein|1152233|Emma Klein|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]'s [b:The Girls|26893819|The Girls|Emma Cline|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492065338l/26893819.SY75.jpg|42856015].
 The story and characters are all perfect, and you learn or relearn a lot about South Africa's last three decades. In doing this, Galgut doesn't pull his punches. There are good people and bad on both sides.
 The best advice on this book is the blurb from Harper's Magazine on the front cover of the edition I got: "Simply: you must read it."

 The house is empty at this moment. It's been deserted for a couple of hours, apparently inert but making tiny movements, sunlight stalking through those rooms, wind rattling the doors, expanding her, contracting there, giving off little pops and creaks and burps, like any old body. It seems alive, an illusion common to many buildings, or perhaps to how people see them, filled with mood and expression, windows like eyes, but nobody is her to witness it, nothing stirs, except for the dog in the driveway, leisurely licking his testicles.

 If you can't read [a:Joan Silber|93485|Joan Silber|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1371659931p2/93485.jpg]'s [b:Secrets of Happiness|54338144|Secrets of Happiness|Joan Silber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1599340636l/54338144.SY75.jpg|84793244] in a day, two days at the most, you're a slow-witted person with a poor attention span. It took me five days.
 It zips along. Some books do that because the author has a talent for writing in a way that it's easily taken in, but those books aren't always interesting, memorable or good. Secrets of Happiness is.
 Reading reviews of it, which I only do after I've read a book, it seemed to me that the critics weren't getting the main idea of it. I was wrong. They are. But it's not that I wasn't; it's that the book, a series of narratives by a variety of people all connected though one family—though that's not the only connection they have to others in their lives—it's hard to single one of them out. Yes, if you had to choose one person as an anchor to everyone else it'd be Ethan, whose narrative brackets everything else, but Silber portrays everyone else in it so well that they are as substantial as Ethan. It's like if you and a friend met the same person and later were talking about them and your friend commented on one characteristic and you another and even though both characteristics were equally significant when describing that person you both feel that the other didn't perceive the person the same way even though you pretty much did.
 Each chapter is a first-person narrative by one person and the stories they tell can stand alone; much of Secrets of Happiness was published that way in different publications. Yet they all combine. I did a dumb thing even for me, which was not to push on and read the last chapter instead of putting the book away and saving it for the next day. It had gathered a momentum and doing that severed a thread that lost some of it. This would be a good choice for a book to read twice.

 My father, who meant well about some things and not about others, died at seventy, not that old. He'd been living in our house in New Jersey, with caretakers around him, and in the front window was a bumper sticker that said, Get US Out! of the United Nations. He'd once been a member of the very-far-right John Birch Society and maybe always was (we didn't keep in close touch). In our years together, when the Cold War was still on, my father took pride in never being duped by the insidious plots of those trying to turn the U.S. into a socialist hell, a pride that rode on urgency. Every day he woke up to important work. The sticker in the window did not look that old, actually.

 The blurbs on book jackets aren't usually interesting or trustworthy, but the ones on the hardback edition of [a:Lauren Groff|690619|Lauren Groff|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1330389831p2/690619.jpg]'s [b:Matrix|57185348|Matrix|Lauren Groff|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617287438l/57185348.SY75.jpg|87447766], which refer to earlier works, defined the writing in this book for me:

"Groff is an original writer, whose books are daringly nonconformist....The prose is not only beautiful and vigorously alert; it insists on its own heroic registration." —The New Yorker

"Groff's command of allusions, imagery, and the puzzle pieces of her characters and plot thrill."
—The Boston Globe

 (If I used a phrase like "vigorously alert" everyone would call me a pretentious jerk and they'd be right to do so.)
 It would help in reading this is you had some knowledge of church words used in 1200 A.D. and what was going on between England and France at that time, but there're no holes you can't fill with a few online searches and even if you don't bother, you'll know what's going on.
 Throughout the book, which is about an abbey, Groff makes no direct reference to the male sex. He, his, him, man, men, boy, boys, fellas. Those words are not used even once, even when talking about animals. This kind of thing verges on stunt writing, like [a:Ernest Vincent Wright|682865|Ernest Vincent Wright|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1371286964p2/682865.jpg]'s [b:Gadsby|1454666|Gadsby|Ernest Vincent Wright|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1234140401l/1454666.SX50.jpg|1445436] and [a:Gilbert Adair|15924|Gilbert Adair|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1244793381p2/15924.jpg]'s [b:A Void|28294|A Void|Georges Perec|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388699493l/28294.SY75.jpg|2310135], translation of [a:Georges Perec|15923|Georges Perec|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615651252p2/15923.jpg]'s [b:La Disparition|28336|La Disparition|Georges Perec|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1416833332l/28336.SY75.jpg|2310135], none of which use the letter "e," the most common letter in English, but it works.
 There are a few sex scenes, which made me think briefly of lesbian pulp fiction from the 1950s, but that's just me being silly.
 Villeinesses are serfs, sort of.

 Marie is thirty-eight.
 There has been trouble among the villeinesses, and come summer, three of the unmarried women are swelling at the belly like rosehips. They are not nuns, true, they are not sworn to virginity, but Marie feels shame that she cannot control these bodies under her care, what the larger world would think of the abbey if they knew. Great scandal. She would be removed as prioress. Thank goodness she has trained her superiors well with her flattery and competency, they are never here at the abbey any longer to oversee. She speaks to Goda, who explains to her some finer points of procreation by use of animal metaphors, the moment exactly at which children ripen to adults. At last, she has the whole community, over fifty nuns and eighty-one others, gather beyond the garden.

 I wish I knew more about the formal aspects of literature, like what constitutes a plot and how to discern the main themes in a work. As far as I can tell, [a:Charlotte McConaghy|2869149|Charlotte McConaghy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1573700805p2/2869149.jpg]'s [b:Migrations|42121525|Migrations|Charlotte McConaghy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1612818084l/42121525.SY75.jpg|65230718] sort of has a plot—a woman named Franny is out to follow what might be the last migration of Arctic terns—but it's really more of a character study of that woman. What she's like and how she got that way. And themes? In the discussion questions at the end of the edition I have, it asks about the meaning of home to Franny, yet early on she describes her life as being wherever she is and there's really no place that she would call home. Even at the end of the book she's about to go someplace else.
 I'm sounding negative but I don't mean to. The writing is great and it's often moving, and even though it skips around chronologically it's clear and easy to follow. The time jumps make sense. Being the kind of reader I am I was smacked by an error that shouldn't have been in the book. Franny's husband, Niall, tells her not to touch a crow's egg she's found because the smell of a human will keep the mother from tending to it. This is not true and comes from folklore. Birds have a weak sense of smell, and that's especially true of corvids. Why does this bother me, you ask? Because Niall is an ornithologist, that's why. How does a book so professionally produced, with all the beta readers, copy editors, friends and proofreaders get all the way to the trade paperback stage without someone catching something that a moron like me caught?
 I have to stop letting that kind of thing bother me. It's a very good book, despite its large vein of hopelessness. (It takes place in a near dystopian future.)

 But there won't be any more journeys after this one, no more oceans explored. And maybe that's why I am filled with calm. My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million. It's a relief to at last have a purpose. I wonder what it will feel like to stop. I wonder where we go, afterward, and if we are followed. I suspect we go nowhere, and become nothing, and the only thing that saddens me about this is the idea of never seeing Niall again. We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it's precious, and maybe it's enough, and maybe it's right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it's right that our consciousness rests. The thought is peaceful.

 [b:Bewilderment|56404444|Bewilderment|Richard Powers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1632843882l/56404444.SY75.jpg|87106649] is [a:Richard Powers|11783|Richard Powers|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1263155076p2/11783.jpg]'s thirteenth novel and coming after his 2018 [b:The Overstory|40180098|The Overstory|Richard Powers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562786502l/40180098.SY75.jpg|57662223], which won a Pulitzer Prize, and is the only other of his novels I've read, I approached it with that uh-oh, he's-got-a-high-bar mentality. But they're completely different kinds of books, so I lost that view quickly.
 I loved everything about Bewilderment. The prose borders on poetry, and parts border on [a:Kurt Vonnegut Jr.|2778055|Kurt Vonnegut Jr.|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1433582280p2/2778055.jpg] territory, which is a compliment. (Remember that English teacher you had in ninth grade who pooh-poohed Vonnegut? That teacher was wrong.)
 Bewilderment is, technically, science fiction, which is a better way to say science fiction, but it's so grounded in things that are happening now that its view of life in the very near future (I'd guess around seven years) is accurate. Many books, TV shows and movies that try to do things like Powers does here come off as just silly. (Best example in a recent movie: Netflix's Don't Look Up.)
 Powers and I are like minded. In many ways, he's like a much smarter version of me who can write brilliantly and be disciplined enough to work at getting a believable lattice on which to hang his fiction.
 If what you know of this book is only from Tracy K. Smith's review of it in the New York Times October 3, 2021 review of it, you are ill informed. Smith somehow made race a large part of it, when it has zero to do with the novel. I assume the main two characters in it, a single father and his troubled nine-year-old son, are white, but only because of a few times when skin tone changes due to cold weather, though yes, I know the author is white and the novel is written in the first person.
 To me, Powers is in a prime of sorts. Now in his mid 60s, his writing skills and observational powers are sharp but added to it now is a great degree of wisdom.

 They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Bothg search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.

 If you were raised in the 60s and 70s like I was, and probably well after those years and even now, you probably have a skewed vision of America's early history of being invaded by Europeans. [a:TaraShea Nesbit|7009309|TaraShea Nesbit|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1567525457p2/7009309.jpg];s [b:Beheld|53138226|Beheld|TaraShea Nesbit|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1614692536l/53138226.SX50.jpg|69038020] will help dispel those visions, which is useful. Many Americans these days could use a reality check that will remind them that the country was not founded solely by angelic Europeans who came to found a paradise in which all were equal. The proportions of those who were venal and greedy who hitched rides aboard The Mayflower were the same as you'd find today in any population on earth.
 Much of Beheld is written in the first person of the characters of the the time—1630—and Nesbit does a fascinating job of using the language of that era. Many of the words and phrases are authentic, but the style is of this century. Somehow, it works perfectly. Quotes are rendered in italics.

 I'm punching the dough, right, readying for my turn at the oven, and I get to thinking. Talking. John's at the table cleaning his musket, waiting on his lunch. Pushing the rod in and out. Our son Francis, good boy, out in the field. One son in the field working, one son behind our garden in a grave.
 We have every right to that meal as they do, said I.
 He said nothing.
 Master Billington. Ye hear me?
 He held the barrel up to the light. Blew. A puff of gunpowder on his moustache.
 We don't need what they are giving. I'll walk on by that way, tip my hat, let Weston know I'm watching. Maybe hold my musket in my right hand. Scare him a bit.
 John put on a growly bear of a face, but I knew he preferred to let the spiders find their way out of our house than smack them himself.

 I wasn't surprised to see that [a:Colson Whitehead|10029|Colson Whitehead|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1561996933p2/10029.jpg] got a MacArthur Fellowship. Those used to be called "genius grants" and it's clear after reading [b:Harlem Shuffle|54626223|Harlem Shuffle|Colson Whitehead|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1612449660l/54626223.SY75.jpg|85227984] that he is that. But don't let that put you off: Whitehead may be the kind of genius who can write deep things that put people like me to sleep in a paragraph, but Harlem Shuffle, one of the ten novels Whitehead has written, isn't that. His genius is his ability to tell a story so well.
 His characters are an interesting and wide variety of people in Harlem from 1959 to 1964. The story ends five years before Whitehead was born, but the tone is perfect for the era and if they're are any anachronisms, I didn't catch them. The story has to do with unsavory types, but you end up having great sympathy for them. Somehow, Whitehead injects humor into the story and the characters in it without condescending to them, making them look like hapless buffoons. That requires great balance, and how he does it so well would be worth studying by anyone who wants to write fiction.
 Harlem Shuffle goes down smooth but you do learn from it. Some history that is sadly relevant today and, curiously, about a kind of Medieval segmented sleeping regimen called dorveille.
Excerpt:

 This first hot spell of the year was a rehearsal for the summer to come. Everyone a bit rusty but it was coming back, their parts in the symphony and assigned solos. On the corner, two white cops recapped the fire hydrant, cursing. Kids had been running in and out of the spray for days. Threadbare blankets lined fire escapes. The stoops bustled with men in undershirts drinking beer and jiving over the noise from transistor radios, the DJs piping up between songs like friends with bad advice. Anything to delay the return to sweltering rooms, the busted sinks and clotted flypaper, the accumulated reminders of your place in the order. Unseen on the rooftops, the denizens of tar beaches pointed to the lights of bridges and night planes.

 Fifty years ago, when I was around the target age for books like [a:John Green|1406384|John Green|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1353452301p2/1406384.jpg]'s [b:The Fault in Our Stars|11870085|The Fault in Our Stars|John Green|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1632632557l/11870085.SX50.jpg|16827462], such books were awful things designed mostly to warn young readers about the evils of drugs. I've had no interest in reading young adult fiction but this book is an exception for two reasons. First, the author and I went to the same college. He graduated nineteen years after I did, but it was one of those small Ohio colleges that makes you feel a mild connection to anyone who went there. Second, the second main character, Augustus, has the same form of cancer that I do. He even had the same leg amputated though in his case it was when he was a child; mine was when I was in my late fifties.
 Writing about terminally ill teenagers is not a new idea. [a:John Gunther|68809|John Gunther|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1235985796p2/68809.jpg]'s [b:Death Be Not Proud|486298|Death Be Not Proud|John Gunther|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440036906l/486298.SY75.jpg|1321803] was published in 1949. In the 1970s, terminally ill young people became a staple of made-for-TV movies following the great success of [a:Erich Segal|15516|Erich Segal|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1202419115p2/15516.jpg]'s hugely successful [b:Love Story|73968|Love Story (Love Story, #1)|Erich Segal|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388812297l/73968.SY75.jpg|816372] and the movie it was based on. (Both came out in 1970.)
 Fault is a good book and even old sourpusses like me, more prone to think teenagers are no good than to sympathize with them, found the narrator, 16-year-old Hazel, a likeable and sympathetic character. There are a few choices I'd have advised Green against, like using all caps as often as Hazel does and, especially, descriptions of video game playing of any length, which dates a book fast for the young and alienates the old, but those are minor drawbacks overall. I would've avoided bringing Christianity into it as specifically as Green does as a means of broadening its appeal and its message, but Green is a Red Stater. The writing is simple enough that I, a very slow reader, breezed through it in three days, but it's not dumbed down. The characters make literary references any parent would be proud to see their kids get.
 If you find The Fault in Our Stars on you kid's shelf, reading it would be a good way to spend a few hours.
Excerpt:

 I woke up in the ICU. I could tell I was in the ICU because I didn't have my own room, and because there was so much beeping, and because I was alone: They don't let your family stay with you 24/7 in the ICU at Children's because it's an infection risk. There was wailing down the hall. Somebody's kid had died. I was alone. I hit the red call button.
 A nurse came in seconds later. "Hi," I said.
 "Hello, Hazel. I'm Alison, your nurse," she said.
 "Hi, Alison, My Nurse," I said.
 Whereupon, I started to feel pretty tired again. But I woke up a bit when my parents came in, crying and kissing my face repeatedly, and I reached up for them and tried to squeeze, by my everything hurt when I squeezed, and Mom and Dad told me that I did not have a brain tumor, but that my headache was caused by poor oxygenation, which was caused by my lungs swimming in fluid, a liter and a half (!!!!) of which had been successfully drained from my chest, which was why I might feel a slight discomfort in my side, where there was, hey look at that, a tube that went from my chest into a plastic bladder half full of liquid that for all the world resembled my dad's favorite ale.

 [a:Joseph Conrad|3345|Joseph Conrad|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1403814208p2/3345.jpg]'s [b:Heart of Darkness|4900|Heart of Darkness|Joseph Conrad|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392799983l/4900.SX50.jpg|2877220] is a terrible book that was foisted on high school and college students for decades and maybe it still is. I can't think of a more efficient way to crush any joy of reading that teachers would want their students to have than to make them read this. The writing is wordy and the story telling inept; things are introduced out of sequence as though Conrad is deliberately trying to rid it of any narrative elements that would make it at all compelling. The themes are now well known and have been better expressed by others. Except for a few hundred words, it's told as a flashback and every paragraph is preceded by a quote mark, giving it a sort of sub-voice that further distances the reader from the prose. Good luck finding a paragraph less than three-quarters of a page long.
 First published in 1902, Heart of Darkness is the kind of writing that makes you grateful for [a:Ernest Hemingway|1455|Ernest Hemingway|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1574217836p2/1455.jpg], whatever flaws you may attribute to him.

 It makes sense that [a:Herman Wouk|9020|Herman Wouk|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1266847920p2/9020.jpg] lived to be 103 years old; he wrote long books, and the edition of [b:Youngblood Hawke|42990|Youngblood Hawke|Herman Wouk|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440384487l/42990.SY75.jpg|769149] I read was 783 pages long. I'm a slow reader who goes word-by-word, which is why I notice useless things like that an end quote missing on page 193 shows up where one doesn't belong on page 679, and that the word "marshal" is incorrectly spelled with two ls on page 616. I'm mentioning these things to point out that if a long book like this one isn't one I like, I'm going to bail on it or say bad things about it.
 No danger of that happening here. I loved Youngblood Hawke and I was sorry to finish it. Its great length of 215,657 words helped make it seep into my veins in ways that even very good shorter books don't. You know how you often hear critics say good things about how some writers depict a character vividly in just a few words? That's true, but when someone with skills like Wouk goes on at length, his characters seem not only real but like people you've known for a while.
 An interesting thing about Youngblood Hawke is that Wouk exhibits some of the same failings in writing as the fictional writer the novel is about. Wouk's description of these failings somehow becomes a kind of peremptory defense against criticism of them.
 If you have any interest in how books get written and published, how Hollywood works, and what life for some in Manhattan was like around 1950, you'll love this book.
 Excerpt:

 Publication day of Alms for Oblivion was drawing closer. In the offices of Prince House Hawke had seen proofs of the first advertisements, and there was little doubt that Jay Prince was planning what Karl Fry called "the old jazzeroo campaign." The opening gun for Alms for Oblivion was to be a full page in the Sunday book section of the New York Times, with the novelist's name spread across the top in solid black letters two inches high:
           HAWKE
    A major new name in American fiction.
followed by a delirious description of the book and of its coal-truck-driving author.
 Prince was full of hopes for the novel. The failure of the book clubs to pick it up had not dampened him. "They'll hop on the bandwagon, Hawke, when we pass our first hundred thousand. They'll make it a special selection or something. They're always doing that. We've got a big goddamn doorstopper of a book here and it's going to sell like hell. You just get on with that next book as fast as you can."

 I traveled for a few months in Australia in 1989 and I knew something about the history of transporting prisoners from England to Australia, but not nearly as much as I do now thanks to [a:Christina Baker Kline|157146|Christina Baker Kline|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1585081025p2/157146.jpg]'s [b:The Exiles|55276434|The Exiles|Christina Baker Kline|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1618851080l/55276434.SX50.jpg|73236056]. It's a great example of how you can learn from historical fiction especially, in this case, if you read the supplement in the back of the edition I have. Such additional material is often dull, but this is as interesting as the novel as a whole.
 Do I have anything bad to say about it? No, but I do question the timing of the dispatching of a major character. Something about it left things hanging to me in a way I'm not literate enough to describe. I know that the unease that generates may be the point, but if it is I'm not smart enough to get that either.
 It reads fast. The text is generously leaded and the book is only about 82,000 words long. (By comparison, a [a:Herman Wouk|9020|Herman Wouk|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1266847920p2/9020.jpg] novel I'm reading, [b:Youngblood Hawke|42990|Youngblood Hawke|Herman Wouk|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440384487l/42990.SY75.jpg|769149], is over 215,000 words long; [b:The Old Man and the Sea|2165|The Old Man and the Sea|Ernest Hemingway|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1329189714l/2165.SY75.jpg|69741], 35,000 words long.)

 There were some things she would never get used to: the screams that spread like a contagion from one cell to the next. The vicious fistfights that broke out abruptly and ended with an inmate spitting blood or teeth. The lukewarm midday broth that floated with bony pig knuckles, snouts, bits of hooves and hair. Moldy bread laced with maggots. Once the initial shock subsided, though, Evangeline found it surprisingly easy to endure most of the degradations and indignities of her new life: the brutish guards, the cockroaches and other parasites, the unavoidable filth, rats scurrying across the straw. The constant contact with other women, cheek to cheek, their sour breath on her face as she tried to sleep, their snoring in her ears. She learned to dim the noise: the clanging door at the end of the hall, the tapping spoons and wailing babies. The stink of the chamber pot, which had so sickened her when she'd firs arrived, receded; she willed herself to ignore it.