In March, I took a break from my all-Murakami-all-the-time streak. I thought Paul Auster's Invisible was gripping but left me feeling curiously unfulfilled. Leviathan, which I also read last month, was much better--*really* good, in fact. Fabulous characters. One of the best two Auster books I've read, even.
I also read The Raw Shark Texts, which was gripping in an entirely different way. There are interesting puzzles--both visual and verbal--throughout the book. And some of the concepts in the book are dashingly, wonderfully original. It's not especially well written, but it's not poorly written, either. The characters struck me as a little two-dimensional (and even annoying at times--never a good thing). And a lot remains unresolved, even at the end. But I enjoyed it *all* the way through, and would certainly read anything else Steven Hall writes. Apparently, the book has quite a following online, and there are more puzzles hidden on the web and elsewhere that somehow intersect with the book.
Lastly, I read Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers (or maybe just Chip?) wrote Made to Stick, which I've never read but which got excellent reviews. If you're an aficionado of the pseudointellectual-psychology-pop-culture-behavioral-economics genre (which I am), it will be interesting and might give you one or two new ideas. If Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi had a dime for every time he was cited in this genre, he'd be a very rich man. One of these days, I need to just go straight to the source and read Flow.
I also read The Raw Shark Texts, which was gripping in an entirely different way. There are interesting puzzles--both visual and verbal--throughout the book. And some of the concepts in the book are dashingly, wonderfully original. It's not especially well written, but it's not poorly written, either. The characters struck me as a little two-dimensional (and even annoying at times--never a good thing). And a lot remains unresolved, even at the end. But I enjoyed it *all* the way through, and would certainly read anything else Steven Hall writes. Apparently, the book has quite a following online, and there are more puzzles hidden on the web and elsewhere that somehow intersect with the book.
Lastly, I read Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers (or maybe just Chip?) wrote Made to Stick, which I've never read but which got excellent reviews. If you're an aficionado of the pseudointellectual-psychology-pop-culture-behavioral-economics genre (which I am), it will be interesting and might give you one or two new ideas. If Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi had a dime for every time he was cited in this genre, he'd be a very rich man. One of these days, I need to just go straight to the source and read Flow.
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