This classic, while it is by far the poorest book by Dickens I have read, nevertheless somehow endures as one of the author’s most visible and popular works. Perhaps if it were not the first Dickens people were often tasked with reading, they would not develop a dislike towards the man. All its qualities are inferior, and all its flaws deeper, than every other work of his I’ve encountered.

Oliver, to begin with, is a cypher. His only qualities seem to be politeness and naiveté, neither of which seems likely to have emerged naturally in a child raised in the orphanage described. He fails to make any meaningful decision the entire book, acting only as a plot device and nullifying him as something anyone reading should care about — since as a plot device he is more or less immune to harm or influence. The idea of inherent honesty and goodness, always strained in Dickens (and allied to class), reaches the level of nonsensical here.

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It’s easy enough to recommend the light, literate Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore without diving too far into the story (the book is still new and people will be wanting to avoid spoilers for some time, unlike, say, Les Miserables), though it will be read with more interest by savvy folks for whom the references need not be explained in footnotes (or marginalia).

The premise is simple but rich in potential: A young out-of-work tech guy in San Francisco takes a job working at a strange old bookstore and tumbles into a mystery of sorts. It’s a breezy trip with a few nods to history and more than a few nods to present tech culture. While that makes it a fun read for the tech-savvy of 2012, I think it might end up causing the book to age poorly, achieving anachronism status for the tech-savvy of 2022. At any rate, the trade-off works for now.

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“To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic,” writes Hugo. And, although he perhaps did not aim to eclipse all previous literature with Les Misérables, the book is nevertheless a novel of the human conscience (if not the poem). But between the reader and this final epic is Hugo himself, and the book is equally an odyssey within the author as within humanity.

Hugo was called in his time L’Homme Ocean, and it is easy to see why. His depths are unsounded, and his volume immense. Les Misérables is, roughly speaking, equally divided between narrative proper, internal narrative, history, and digressive essay. Every action, every topic, every piece of dialogue in the book is potentially a platform off of which Hugo may launch into rarefied airs, extemporizing on the nature of chastity, or the implications of criminal jargon, or the failings of society as regards orphans, women, civic duty, fashion, honor, or whatever strikes him.

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Midway through Dracula, Stoker makes the following references in regards to extraordinary vigor and longevity:

There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and ‘Old Parr’ one hundred and sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men’s blood in her poor veins, could not live even one day? For, had she lived one more day, we could save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps?“

The biblical story doesn’t really warrant investigation, and Thomas Parr is established cryptoanthropology, but I was curious about the spider anecdote. A little research turned up the following in the "Literary and Scientific Intelligence” section of an 1821 number of the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany:

Spiders.—The sexton of the church of St Eustace, at Paris, amazed to find frequently a particular lamp extinct early, and yet the oil consumed only, sat up several nights to perceive the cause. At length he discovered that a spider of surprising size came down the cord to drink the oil. A still more extraordinary instance of the same kind occurred during the year 1751, in the Cathedral of Milan. A vast spider was observed there, which fed on the oil of the lamps. M. Morland, of the Academy of Sciences, has described this spider, and furnished a drawing of it. It weighed four pounds, and was sent to the Emperor of Austria, and is now in the Imperial Museum at Vienna.“

It appears Dr. Van Helsing was exaggerating the length of the spider’s life somewhat, but the anecdote is at least based on what appear to be real events.

The drawing appears to be lost, unfortunately, though here is an image (Prout, 1839) of the cathedral in question, which appears capable of housing such an animal:

Like most Neal Stephenson books, Reamde is unsatisfying. But unlike Anathem, which was unsatisfying because it just barely missed following through on a powerful and fascinating premise, Reamde is unsatisfying because it aims so low. It is a surprisingly unambitious and overstuffed series of procedurals that has you waiting for a payoff that never comes. Page by page it is enjoyable, but around 900 of the 1040 pages are enjoyable in more or less the same way, and you reach saturation long before they run out; the remaining 140 pages are essentially irrelevant navel-gazing.
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One of Wells’ lesser-read (not to say obscure) works, The Food of the Gods is an enjoyable but perplexing book. The premise is simple enough: a pair of scientists invent a substance that causes life to grow much larger than normal, the explanation being that growth is naturally punctuated because of the sporadic presence of this substance, which if supplied artificially causes continual expansion. A neat and adaptable concept, and he explores its implications in several directions, yet the theme and overarching idea of the book is elusive. Is it a parable? Is it a lark? Is it a warning? And if so, to whom?

The most off-putting aspect of the book is its varying tone. It’s like a Hollywood blockbuster that tries to be both tragic and comic. This doesn’t always work out. At least with The Food of the Gods the tone changes more or less continually from jaunty and light to serious and subversive. And in the end you get the feeling that the story had become something it was never meant to be – but which Wells probably found unavoidable given its trajectory.

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This interesting book was put in my hands by a good friend whose literary suggestions are sound without exception. It is not, as the title may suggest, a tell-all like Pepys’ diaries, or even, really, a private memoir at all. It’s a striking early example of nontraditional narrative structure, predating many other adventurous novels and reportedly inspiring Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde.

It’s remarkable for the transparency of its misdirection, which leaves the reader constantly unsure exactly what is true, and rarely pins anything down with certainty. So the reader, like the protagonist in fact ends up at one point in the novel, is suspended between several points of view and unable to make any definite conclusions. It begins with an “Editor’s narrative,” which describes a series of events at the turn of the 17th century involving two sons of a Scottish Laird, one of whom is disowned and becomes a religious zealot who torments and eventually kills the other for, apparently, no reason. Then follow the actual confessions, which are written by the religious brother, Robert, and seem to describe a descent into depravity and madness, accompanied and prompted by someone who may or may not be the devil. Last, there is a continuation of the editor’s narrative, which describes how the text was found.

As others have pointed out, this means the story is in a way told backwards; it would be far more logical to describe how the text was come across and its context, then present the text itself, then produce some criticism or notes to aid in its interpretation. Yet the point of the novel isn’t just to tell a story, though the story of how absolute certainty in an idea can, and in a way must, lead to the worst atrocities, is certainly interesting enough.

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This book has been recommended by many a shelf tag in book stores, and won a number of prizes last year, or maybe the year before. At any rate, like The Wind-Up Girl, it was showered with praise and I looked forward to being pleasantly surprised by one of the more critically-acclaimed sci-fi books out there. Alas, I have been deceived again, and while the book is certainly not bad, it’s rather disappointing and any reader must immediately acknowledge that the setting’s potential was squandered on a ho-hum story and an abrupt, unsatisfying ending.

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The full-immersion historical novel isn’t an easy one to get right. It’s easy to get bogged down in irrelevant contemporary details, info-dumps in the form of history lessons, or archaic speech. Or it can be a failure of overarching style, as novels written in the 18th and 19th centuries in particular (popular periods for period books) are for the most part extremely well-structured, a feat not every novelist can achieve. An Instance of the Fingerpost manages to avoid most of these pitfalls, presenting a vibrant and highly compelling 17th century England, but outside the traditional bustle and filth of London. The structure of the book is also compelling, and as soon as you detect it, the depth and your own interest increases.

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The War Of The Worlds is, most importantly, a book about the dangers of complacency. While Wells’ imagination and knack for a rolling narrative are worth applauding any day, the book is not at its heart a heroic adventure. Like The Time Machine, it is a warning. In that book he caricatured the erosion of humanity’s most important qualities; in this one, his message is more direct: the road of complacency leads to destruction – destruction of the literal and immediate variety.

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