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OK, I surprised myself with this book, and I have to contradict my prior statement. This is the best book I have read in the last ten years or so. My previous champ, Eager by Ben Goldfarb, has slid to second place (you still owe it to yourself to read Eager!).

Paved Paradise is about how the mundane and seemingly boring subject of parking our cars has warped North American cities and suburbs beyond livability. A strong statement, but true.

If you look at the cores of many European cities or of American cities that developed before the dominance of the automobile, you will find the "natural" format of a city. This is the format that people determined was the most efficient and livable urban design. These urban cores consist of buildings of four or five stories. The ground floor is shops with front doors flush with the sidewalk. The floors above are apartments or offices. If you travel outward a short distance into the strictly residential area, you will find not only apartment buildings but also duplexes, triplexes, brownstones, and other sorts of individual family homes that are built up against each other.

These downtown cores are now what is referred to as "15-minute" cities. Everything you need for daily life is within a 15-minute walk of your home. You can walk to the grocery store and buy what you need for tonight's dinner and tomorrow's lunch. There's a drug store and a general merchandise shop and multiple cafes and bars all within a short walk of where you live. Need to go somewhere just a bit farther? Ride a bike on the separated bike path or walk to the subway or streetcar stop. You can have a car if you want one, but you will find that you don't need one most of the time.

Instead, though, we have the mid-20th Century American landscape, which is mostly covered in parking lots.

The advent of the automobile distorted our cities. People drove into downtowns from the suburbs and searched for parking. This caused gridlock as those cars circled the block looking for a parking space. Many people stopped driving into the city, instead opting to drive to the suburban shopping malls, which had loads of "free" parking. Cities responded by opening large multi-story parking garages, often tearing down older (still usable) office buildings or multi-tenant housing to make space.

Since the country was in love with the car, drivers expected to always be able to get a parking space, preferably free, wherever they went. Cities and suburbs added parking minimums to their zoning laws, requiring ample parking for every business.

As new buildings were constructed, they were surrounded by large swathes of surface parking lots. This pushed buildings farther and farther apart. It turned our suburbs into hellscapes of urban sprawl. One big parking lot after one big parking lot, with a big-box store or strip mall in the middle of each. It became impractical and undesirable to walk anywhere. Businesses were too far apart, and the sidewalks along the high-speed stroads between them were too unpleasant and dangerous to use.

Parking minimums have contributed to the housing crisis. The U.S. is several million housing units short of what we need. This shortage has skyrocketed both rents and house prices. This makes affording the monthly rent difficult for many families, and it has pushed the dream of home ownership out of the reach of millions.

Because of parking minimums, every apartment complex or multi-family dwelling must have many parking spaces (often two spaces per apartment). This takes away the number of units that can be built on the property. It also means that each of the apartments that are built has to carry more of the cost of development. The cost of that parking adds anywhere between 10% and 20% to the cost of rent.

It's not just housing. The Empire State Building would be illegal to build by itself today. It would have to be surrounded by 12 blocks of surface parking (or multiple blocks of multi-story garages). Repeat that for every skyscraper in Manhattan, and Manhattan would be mostly parking.

I've just brushed over some of the highlights of this book. It is an immensely fascinating story of how we got into this mess and how many cities are beginning to unwind the damage.

This book is the red pill of urban design. You will never look at our cities and suburbs the same way again. Highly recommended.

This book is the first of three novels starring Vietnamese-American sleuth-by-happenstance Anh Santos. Her husband has recently died of Covid-19. She was going to shut down his one-man detective agency, but a case falls into her lap. Desperate to pay off overdue bills, she decides to try to solve the case herself.

The first part of the book tells two stories in parallel. One is the story of a deputy U.S. Marshal in 1898, who is sent from the Arizona Territory to deliver an important court decision to the Federal Courthouse in Carson City, Nevada. The corrupt rich bastards of the era ensure that he never makes it.

The other story follows Anh and how she discovers the mummified corpse of the deputy marshal in the Nevada desert. As the book progresses, this becomes the only storyline. She tries to find out who the mummy is and if he has any living relatives. In the process, she discovers that the crime of 1898 has ramifications today.

I liked the ethnic diversity of the characters and its consequences. It's a realistic portrayal of the America both today and in the 19th Century.

I didn't like all of the Covid-19 stuff. The author is trying to make the book timely. Twenty years from now, telling a story set in the Covid era would make sense. As society forgets what life was like, it's good to get a glimpse of that era. Writing that story now, just two years out, it's just a reminder of how unpleasant those times were. It detracts from the story instead of adding to it. Wait 20 years before setting a story during Covid times. Real life will probably be pretty horrible then, and we'll all have nostalgia for the "simpler times" of working from home and yelling at each other about vaccines and face masks.

The writer is a mediocre wordsmith, but that's the best I can say about his writing ability. He competently conveys the details and actions of the story, but there's minor clumsiness throughout the book.

For example, characters frequently speak in texting acronyms. When something strange happens, one of the characters will often say "WTF?". Nobody talks like that! The acronym is more syllables than the words it's replacing!

Another example is that the writer spends too much time telling us what his character has for breakfast (or lunch, or dinner) and how many showers she takes.

Despite the writing, the plot is engaging and kept me reading. Well, for 3/4 of the book anyway. The book jumps the shark somewhere around the 75% mark. The U.S. government confiscates the mummy (citing "national security"), the main character then starts acting like no normal person does, and the FBI is unusually incompetent. The author awkwardly manipulates events to set up the exciting chases and fights that make up the remainder of the book (and they are kind of exciting).

Finally, the epilog is WAY too happy. Everything wraps up in the best and most fortuitous way possible for all of the characters.

This is a ghost story written in 1898. The scariest thing about it is the prose. It's terrifying! Seriously. Stay away!

The thing is hard to untangle. It's written in an archaic writing style, with an excessively wordy backward sentence structure. If I hadn't been working so hard to understand the sentences, I probably would have been able to pay attention to the story.

It's about a governess who is hired by an absentee uncle to watch over his niece and nephew in a gothic house. No gothic house is complete without a ghost. This guy got a bargain when he bought this place. It has two ghosts!

This story commits one of the major sins that I occasionally see in books and (especially) movies. The governess can see the ghosts. The two kids can see the ghosts. They refuse to speak about it! They spend the whole book dancing around the elephant in the room. Who does this? No one! If Adolf Hitler moves into your spare room, do you think no one in the house would mention it? No! Especially if he leaves the bathroom a mess!

This is an unreadable, nonsensical vomitorium. Stay away.