(You’ll notice I’m reading a lot more books that are adjacent to, though not directly in service of, my research. I’m at the coding-and-data stage of my dissertation, so I end up with all my reading energy channeled into my free time!)

1. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Annette Lareau [buy]
Lareau describes two approaches to child-rearing: an ethos of “natural development” among the working and middle classes, and one of “concerted cultivation” among upper-middle-class parents. I can’t stop seeing these two rhetorics in tension with each other in educational research, especially around technology. This book changed my life more than anything else I’ve read this year. Bonus fun: new tools to analyze one’s own childhood experiences!

2. Wifework, Susan Maushart [buy]
Why do husbands benefit so much more from marriage than wives? Maushart argues that wifework – the constellation of practical, emotional, and sexual services women provide to their spouses – is draining to provide and revitalizing to receive. Now that women have control of their reproductive lives and can support themselves financially, men need to learn to be better wives. Often depressing, always persuasive, wonderfully written, and thoroughly recommended.

3. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Judith Martin [buy]
Some of you may be wondering why I’ve suddenly started sending charmingly penned thank-you notes and hosting dinner parties. The secret? I’m hoping to impress Judith Martin with my graciousness and charm. Since that’s unlikely, I’ll settle for  living up to the smart, sane recommendations in her etiquette book. She’s witty enough that I read the whole thing cover to cover – all nine hundred plus pages of it.

4. Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson [buy]
Four essays, linked by the themes of consciousness, reflection, and the aesthetic qualities of lived experience. I admit I skimmed the essay on Freud, but the other three challenged my ideas about how to do research and what research even is. I’ll be mining this book when I eventually write my manifesto about the aesthetics of play.

5. The Invisible Heart, Nancy Folbre [buy]
Folbre identifies a major hidden assumption in economic theory: that all work is alike. She points out how caring work, such as nursing or teaching, functions differently from other kinds of labor, and why it’s problematic to treat them the same way. She also argues that assigning caring work exclusively to women compounds these problems, and injures men and women alike.

6. Why Don’t Students Like School, Daniel Willingham [buy]
When I’m asked for an accessible book about the psychology of learning, this is what I recommend. Willingham covers nine core cognitive principles of learning, ones that have been proven both in the lab and in the field. He even shows how students, teachers, and parents can apply these principles in practice. Useful, readable, and accurate.

7. Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter, Joan C. Williams [buy]
Working-class families face different problems than upper-middle-class families do. Seems obvious, right? But Williams uses data to argue that the vast majority of American families need a different approach to work-life balance than an elite minority do, and that feminism must work for both types of balance in a way that serves men and women alike. Persuasive and very, very important.

8. Honeybee Democracy, Thomas D. Seeley [buy]
This book appears to be about bees. Why do bees swarm when they do? How do they communicate about swarming? How do they choose a new site for their hive? However, the book is also a beautiful look at how researchers ask questions, design experiments, and figure out answers. Any budding scientist should read this.

9. Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine [buy]
The best takedown of “neurosexism” – the notion that men and women have different brains – that I’ve ever seen. Fine demonstrates that the research purporting to “prove” cognitive differences mostly doesn’t show what it claims to, and she’s quite good about pointing out the few places where the evidence really is strong. My favorite section? Her demonstration of why it’s nearly impossible to raise your kids without strong cultural messages about gender, which blows a lot of casual talk about the “naturalness” of gendered behavior out of the water.

10. Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love, William Kolbrener [buy]
Lovely, thoughtful, witty essays on Judaic topics – from specific Torah stories to the landmarks of the Jewish year. Two things tie the book together. First, Kolbrener’s style: he moves smoothly back and forth between traditional Jewish sources, literary analysis, and memoir. Second, his commitment to allowing his Jewish and intellectual lives to reflect on and illuminate each other. Warning: if you aren’t relatively familiar with Jewish concepts, this may be a hard read, but he does a reasonable job of signposting and it’s worth the trouble.

11. Switch, Chip Heath & Dan Heath [buy]
How can you change your behavior? The Heath brothers bring together vivid stories and research on behavior change into a single model: the elephant, the rider, and the path. Learn to engage your subconscious elephant, your rational-minded rider, and design a path that’s easy to walk down! It may sound like self-help pap, but it’s actually rigorous, thoughtful, well-written, and highly accessible. Bonus: these techniques really work.

Bonus, Academic Text Edition: The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills [buy]
When he wrote this book, Mills was not a happy man about the state of sociology as a discipline. The first half of the book eviscerates most people working in the field at the time; the second half proposes a larger vision for what sociology is and can become. The epilogue is an inspiring and highly practical description of how to do effective interdisciplinary research that addresses real problems. I loved it all!

Happy reading!

Every year at about this time, I take a minute to reflect on what I read, and whether writing about it continues to serve my personal goals. I started this project because I read so much, and I have such intimate experiences with the books I enjoy. I wanted to capture some of the intellectual and emotional excitement I feel when I read something wonderful. Plus, writing about the duds is really fun!

In the past year, I’ve found myself reading a lot more non-fiction – and for much of it, the boundary of whether it’s “work reading” or “pleasure reading” isn’t really clear. Part of this is the impact of e-reading; I’m much more willing to read non-fiction in my free time, particularly non-fiction in or near my field, when I know I can easily highlight and retrieve important passages. Another part, though, is realizing just how much of what I’m ostensibly reading for “fun” actually loops back into the bigger picture of what I’m thinking about professionally.

What this means is that I may be writing about some of the non-fiction I read outside the context of these book posts, either as reviews or as I work out specific ideas. I won’t be writing about those books a second time in my reading list posts; I’ll list them, and point to the other post I’ve made.

The other big change of 2011 is that I seem to have a group of readers who come for the reading list posts – not for the talk about games, creativity, feminism, or anything else. So if you’re reading along with me, welcome! I hope you enjoy your reading life in 2012 as much as I plan to!

I am, however, completely freaking obsessed with the Traveller’s Tales LEGO Harry Potter games. My husband bought me the second one for my birthday and it’s the only thing I’ve played in the last week.

“Can you call this research,” he asked me, “or do you just like smashing things?”

“Research!” I answered indignantly. “Narrative research!” Since Hermione was smashing her way through the Room of Requirement at the time, I’m not sure he believed me – but I actually meant it.

Don’t get me wrong – smashing things is awesome. You play as minifig Harry and his minifig friends, in a world in which most items are destructible and produce studs (the game’s currency) when you shoot them with your wand. The smash interaction is very nearly perfect*, from the zap of your wand to the satisfying sound to the effect on the environment. The studs burst out from the destroyed object and roll across the screen. If you don’t pick them up fast enough they fade away, in which case you might not get enough studs on the level to earn the True Wizard designation. It’s a lovely tension between goal-oriented action and the pure pleasure of destruction.

The problem is, of course, that I can’t turn off my researcher brain when I’m playing, even when I’m playing for fun – and that means I notice things. This time, I noticed that my husband kept asking me what was happening in the cut-scenes.  I was surprised at how often he was confused. I’d thought the cut-scenes were incredibly witty, and not hard to follow at all! Then I remembered: he’d read the books just once, back in 2007 when the final volume came out.

Watching the cut-scenes with more scholarly eyes, I realized just how interesting the Traveller’s Tales approach to story is. The minifigs don’t speak, so the designers were restricted to a language of gesture and physical comedy. It means that all the reasons why things happen have to be painted in very broad strokes. For example, the designers had to express the idea of “horcruxes” – and identify which quest objects were horcruxes – without using a single word. Instead of laboriously trying to explain, they created a visual element that makes sense to someone literate in Rowling’s world. A simple picture with six items on it, shown by Dumbledore to Harry in a private conversation, says “horcruxes” to the educated viewer – and leaves the novice completely lost.

Similarly, each cut-scene has to leave the story in a place where exploration, problem-solving, and blowing things up makes sense. This means they’re often compressing large portions of the story into a short cut-scene, and expanding or inventing sections that are more playable. For example, the dramatic confrontation between the Trio and Umbridge is elided, while their subsequent trip into the Forbidden Forest is filled with obstacles and puzzles. The balance in the book is, need I say, the opposite. Once again, the cut-scene briefly references the book’s events (Hermione waggles a picture of Dumbledore in front of Umbridge, temptingly) but can’t actually attempt to tell that story on its own.

At the same time, the games go beyond re-telling the story of the books, and develop their own visual and narrative language. Of course, there’s an instrumental aspect to this: if something is metallic and shiny, it can only be blown up by the Reducto spell. However, sometimes it’s just for narrative pleasure. Carrots and pumpkins are always funny. Ditto enormous versions of common household objects, like the shears you build to cut down a hedge blocking your path. The minifig faces and bodies are shockingly expressive, even outside the cut-scenes. It isn’t just a retelling of Harry Potter – it’s a retelling with its own particular style, one that’s been developed across the entire Traveller’s Tale LEGO line.

To “read” the Harry Potter games, therefore, you have to be fluent both with the source material and with the LEGO video game line. For my husband, who regularly watches me play, the LEGO elements were effectively comic, while the narrative elements often left him wondering what had just happened. I expect that my friend Abby, who knows the Potterverse quite well but has never played a LEGO game, would have the reverse experience.

I’m sometimes deeply bothered by the practice of shallow symbolic referencing, but the LEGO games do it with wit, craft, and charm. Unlike, say, Wil Wheaton referencing one meme after another, these games don’t just make references to reinforce group identity – they use Harry Potter in order to do an actual retelling of the story, with its own strengths and weaknesses and point of view. I’d go so far as to call these games a very successful parody series, and I recommend them highly to anyone who likes Harry Potter, smashing things, or both.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to smash my way to the bottom of a frozen lake and retrieve the sword of Godric Gryffindor!

* There are occasional auto-target problems when you’re trying to shoot an object that’s too close to you, but the game provides a manual targeting option for these situations.

Okay, okay, a little bit of ado. I just want to point out that I re-read some really wonderful things this past year, including Vanity Fair and The Three Musketeers, which are among my favorite books of all time. For this list, though, I’m only including books I read this year for the first time.

1. Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra [buy]
Notable gangster Ganesh Gaitonde is cornered by the police – and found dead of a gunshot wound with an unknown woman beside him. Discovering why leads the reader into a huge, ambitious, and totally compelling multi-layered story. If you read just one book off this list, make it this one.

2. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel [buy]
Meet Thomas Cromwell, right-hand-man to cardinals and kings. Even if you don’t like historical novels, Mantel’s masterful balance between the personal and the political will keep you guessing how Cromwell’s story will turn out.

3. Stone’s Fall, Iain Pears [buy]
When arms dealer and financier John Stone falls out a window, the investigator hired to find out what happened uncovers a huge historical mystery. Starts slow, but gets harder and harder to put down.

4. The Leftovers, Tom Perotta [buy]
Three years after Rapture-like mass disappearances, the survivors are walking wounded, and Perotta lets you watch as they succeed (or fail!) at putting their lives back together. This novel takes a fantastic premise and makes it ring emotionally true. By far his best work.

5. The Engineer Trilogy, K. J. Parker [1, 2, 3]
A no-magic fantasy that deals with themes of economic imperialism, consequentialism, and love. Plus, the characters aren’t your usual bunch of fantasy meatheads; they’re smart, skilled, and deeply flawed. The female characters don’t get much agency, but the fact that I loved this series anyhow should tell you just how good it is. Parker, please write me some amazing ladies next time!

6. Big Machine, Victor Lavalle [buy]
A down-on-his-luck former addict is recruited to join a band of paranormal investigators looking for evidence of God’s existence. Murakami meets Denis Johnson, except that you’ll actually be able to follow the (very entertaining) plot.

7. The Silent Land, Graham Joyce [buy]
A young married couple finds themselves isolated at a ski resort after a flash avalanche. As their situation becomes stranger, they turn both to and away from each other. A sad, haunting love story that doesn’t sentimentalize the relationship at its core.

8. The Lecturer’s Tale, James Hynes [buy]
An adjunct professor of English gains the power to force others to do his bidding with a touch of his right index finger. Chaos in the academy ensues! It’s got the inevitable build of a great horror story, but spends plenty of time exploring scholarly ideas through biting satire.

9. The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino [buy]
A young single mother accidentally kills her ex-husband – and her next-door neighbor decides to protect her from the consequences. Will his plan succeed, or will the police track her down and find out the truth?

10. Headhunters, Jo Nesbo [buy]
A high-level corporate recruiter uses his position to run elaborate scams. When he encounters a client doing the same, he ends up on the run and trying to survive. Tightly plotted and tricky, it’ll be an entirely different experience the second time around!

11. The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
A huge, sprawling, ambitious, messy fantasy epic, following dozens of characters across a multi-continent war and building on thousands of years of history. While it’s sometimes hard to follow, any book that has dinosaurs fighting zombies – and manages to make it dramatic rather than ridiculous – gets my vote.

Bonus, Graphic Novel Edition: Finder, Carla Speed McNeil [1, 2]
The art is gorgeous, the characters are realistic, the far-future world is compelling and genuinely strange. Buy the collected Library editions linked above for extensive commentary on the creative choices McNeil made. Highly recommended.

Happy reading, and let me know if any of these delight you!

Anya makes an excellent point about the practical implications of marriage for women:

A.S.: Obviously for women getting married also means a hell of a lot more work.

J.S.: Is that right?

A.S.: [Laughs.] Well, of course, we divide things up 50-50.

So, okay, she’s probably used to being “his wife” – I imagine that’s part for the course if you’re married to a Nobel Laureate. But it’s great to hear that, despite his fame, they’ve developed an equal partnership.

Oh, wait.

A.S.: I’d love to comment on that study, but everything I know about it comes from you. One thing that definitely happens in a marriage, speaking of division of labor, is a division of information. When I was a journalist, I had to pay attention to where the dollar was and what the stock market was doing. Now I can always ask you. And there are a million things you don’t have to pay attention to because you can ask me. All domestic matters, for example.

J.S.: I would say more broadly that it’s everything except economics. Movies, plays, culture …

A.S.: Who’s who, and why do we recognize that person. It really is everything but economics. [Laughs.] It’s dynamic comparative advantage.

So, he specializes in being an award-winning economist, and she specializes in household affairs and their social life? All of a sudden it’s looking a lot less like 50-50 to me – particularly since only one of those roles is lucrative and high-status. (And asking “Is that right?” about whether marriage means more work for women? That’s just adding insult to injury.)

What’s going on here? Was Schiffrin making a bitter joke about the division of labor in their marriage? Are they exaggerating the degree to which he abdicates from everything but economic excellence? How can they possibly hold both those points of view?

I’m guessing this is an example of value conflict. Steiglitz and Schiffrin likely value fairness, equality, mutuality, and all those other good things – and no one wants to admit that their life violates the values they hold dear. This is what Maushart calls “pseudomutuality” – a facade of equality covering an unequal and highly gendered division of labor. What’s fascinating is that pseudomutual couples don’t just fool other people; they often genuinely fool themselves into believing their marriage is fair, because they can’t bear the alternative. No one wants to think of themselves as an exploiter, or to admit that they allow themselves to be exploited and abused.

This not-even-very-close reading shows the ugly reality of many marriages, which fall far short of our collective ideals and values. Wondering why marriage rates are at an all-time low? I think that’s a pretty good answer.

• The Head of the House of Coombe, Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Robin, Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women into Wives, Dalma Heyn
• Wifework, Susan Maushart
• A Lady of Quality, Frances Hodgson Burnett
• The Duke of Osborne, Frances Hodgson Burnett
• In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim, Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Vicious Little Darlings, Katherine Easer
• The Information Diet, Clay Johnson
• The Mammoth Book of the Best of the Best New Horror, ed. Stephen Jones
• The Shuttle, Frances Hodgson Burnett

tl;dr – Burnett continues to entertain; Maushart says brilliant things about marriage and Heyn says uneven ones; Jones collects some excellent stories, but errs toward fame; Johnson provides a thoughtful take on media consumption, and connects it directly to action.

I continue to enjoy Burnett’s adult novels, and she does some very clever things. The Duke of Osborne, for example, is the counter-text to A Lady of Quality, telling the romance from the man’s perspective instead of the woman’s. A Lady of Quality was also my favorite of this batch of Burnett. Her heroine is brilliant and iron-willed and wild; while she tames herself in order to marry, she does it to become a happier person, not because her husband asks her to be anything less than she is. It’s a shameless romance but I found myself captivated, and I really liked how unconventional some of Burnett’s choices are. I also liked The Head of the House of Coombe, which is theoretically about the life of a neglected child. I read it as the story of the titular character, though, whose pride, coldness, taste, and honor shape the lives of those around him for good and ill. Robin, the sequel, is a bit more sentimental, though I appreciated the WWI setting and was glad to see more of my favorite characters.

Wifework is the most important book you may ever read about marriage. It looks at why marriage is so much better for men than for women on almost every measurable outcome. Her conclusion? Men have wives, while women are wives. Women perform immense amounts of unseen, unpaid, unrewarded labor for the direct benefit of men, from nurturing their social lives to managing their doctor’s appointments to having sex on demand. This labor is toxic to women – and to marriages, now that women can control their reproduction and support themselves. Maushart argues that men need to do more wifework if they expect to sustain successful marriages, because the old bargains don’t make sense anymore. Read the book for more details of her argument, but be warned: it’s carefully researched, powerful, devastating, and very hard to read if you’re married or ever plan to be. Highly recommended.

Heyn makes a similar argument, but less coherently and less effectively, focusing on the self-censoring of women and their attempts to fit the role of perfect wife. Her chapter on the history of “the angel in the house” is terrific, but if you’re going to read just one book on this topic, make it Maushart.

Jones picks the best story from each of his twenty “Best Of” horror anthologies. I liked many of the stories I read, but unfortunately there were a number of rather famous ones that I’d already encountered elsewhere – some of them three or four times. Still, I discovered a few new joys. Samuels’ “White Hands” is a gothic gem that could have been written by M. R. James; “My Death,” by Tuttle, impressed me with its wit and subtlety; “The Man Who Drew Cats” made me decide I finally need to read some Smith. The only real dud in the volume was Newman’s vampire story, which I guess is part of an ongoing series? But its attempts at humor were clownish (stupid Buffy parody is stupid) and its protagonist ridiculous (an ancient vampire working as a PI). No horror here, except the horror of having to read this tripe. If you aren’t a completist like I am, just skip the damn thing. It’s terrible.

Finally, Johnson makes the case for “information veganism” – consuming information that’s relatively unprocessed, and limiting one’s information consumption more generally. He points out the psychological impacts of too much information, as well as the cognitive biases that means we don’t deal well with much of the information we get. For example, we’re all fond of hearing our existing ideas affirmed, which doesn’t do much to make us more educated or wise. Johnson makes the case for being conscious about your information consumption (always a good thing!) and proposes a balance of affirmation, “vegan” data, and social news for a healthy information diet.

The book made me wonder if I read too much fiction, though I think he may be less concerned with fiction and more with news and social media. Still, I’m not sure that I spend enough time seeking out information that actively represents other points of view, except on academic topics. Perhaps in 2012 I’ll get some book recommendations from people I can disagree with productively. If that’s you, feel free to post them here!

• The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
• Twenty Years After, Alexandre Dumas
• The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Alexandre Dumas
• Ten Years Later, Alexandre Dumas
• Louise de la Valliere, Alexandre Dumas
• The Man in the Iron Mask, Alexandre Dumas
• Ark, Charles McCarry
• The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James, M. R. James
• The Tree of Hands, Ruth Rendell
• A Kiss Before Dying, Ira Levin

tl;dr – Dumas remains a phenomenal storyteller; James, Levin and Rendell are masters of careful, inevitable construction; McCarry goes way out of his comfort zone with reasonable success.

As a storyteller, I aspire to be Dumas. He does wonderful adventure, combined with clever politics and social satire. I also really enjoy his take on history, where he uses historical elements as the motivation for his characters’ adventures, but also uses his characters invented actions to explain historical events. Don’t judge the series by the first book, though. In The Three Musketeers, the musketeers succeed, gloriously and heroically! Later books get more and more tragic, and it’s usually Aramis’s fault. Oops.

I love McCarry’s spy novels, which are smart and heartbreaking and mean. I had no idea what he’d do with a disaster novel, though. It turns out he focuses on the preparations people make for a disaster, which in turn involve lots of quasi-spy activities and government posturing – exactly his specialty. McCarry makes the interesting choice to have the point of view character be a writer, who collaborates with the billionaire genius trying to save the world from disaster. I liked that she isn’t a scientist herself, but she has creative insight that helps solve scientific problems. It’s a nice way of keeping the reader’s point of view limited and creating suspense. Unfortunately I rather hate what McCarry does with her in the last chapter, but you’ll have to read it yourself to find out what that is.

James’ ghost stories are little gems, each of them carefully constructed out of common ghost-story material to create something far beyond the common. “O Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad” is the most famous, and it contains many of the characteristic James elements: an artifact from an ancient time, a growing sense of dread, a ghostly figure that can neither be pinned down nor explained. I might not read them all at once, like I did, unless you’re interested in exploring variations on the classic ghost-story themes. I feel like I learned a lot about how to construct an effective story of this type, and I’m considering whether I want to try my hand at one of my own.

Levin does some equally tight construction, but in the service of suspense rather than eeriness. The book is structured around a young sociopath’s attempt to inherit the Kingship fortune by marrying one of the Kingship girls – one section for each of the daughters. The daughters are likable and distinct, and each section has its own compelling mini-story that links into the larger narrative. I can’t tell you more because the pleasure of reading the book for the first time is delightful, and you should be surprised at how the story plays out. This was my second read, and it’s even more satisfying if you know what’s coming. Highly recommended.

Rendell also builds tight little interlocking stories, in which one mistake sets off a chain of reactions that change many people’s lives. In this case, a young boy is left unattended and disappears – and changes the lives of those he’s lost, and of those who’ve found him. I find Rendell hard to read sometimes, because her characters are universally flawed, and half the time they do stupid things that cause their own problems to get much worse. If you like self-destructive, horrible people, you’ll love Rendell. If you don’t, you may enjoy her anyhow, but you’ll sometimes have to grit your teeth and watch people shoot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly. For chapters on end. I guess that’s its own kind of fun?

Happy reading!

• What We Eat When We Eat Alone, Deborah Madison
• She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror, ed. Gerri Leen
• Mildred Pierce, James M. Cain
• Mr. Chartwell, Rebecca Hunt
• The White People, Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Dawn of a To-Morrow, Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Emily Fox-Seton, Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Esmeralda, Frances Hodgson Burnett
• A Fair Barbarian, Frances Hodgson Burnett

tl;dr – Mildred Pierce is my favorite Cain, and it should be yours too; Hunt’s novel will haunt you; Burnett grows up; Leen collects some great stories and a few duds; Madison does second-rate things with a first-rate topic.

Why is Mildred Pierce such a perfect novel? The titular character kicks out her no-good husband, starts a successful restaurant, marries a decaying upper-class Angelino, and ends up losing everything she cares about. It’s a beautiful portrait of a woman who loves work, and a gripping look at how twisted love can be, and a perfectly crafted tragic tale with a villain you can’t believe is real. It’s a short read, too, so you’ve got no excuse not to try it.

Mr. Chartwell personifies Churchill’s “black dog” of depression – and follows what happens when he takes a room to let in the household of a recent widow. His relationships with Churchill and Esther, the widow, are priceless. Churchill, accustomed to depression, resists; Esther, unused to it, finds herself slowly ceding ground to the monster in her house. Ignore the not-that-interesting romantic subplot; the glory of this book is its black humor, and the snickering horror you’ll feel at the things Mr. Chartwell does to those he pursues. The conceit is a simple one, but Hunt carries it through effectively, and Mr. Chartwell is a giggling, groaning, slurping, dribbling figure who will stay with you.

Burnett continues to surprise me with her adult novels. Of this batch, Emily Fox-Seton was by far my favorite. It’s a (mostly) light-hearted parody of the aristocratic romance novel, that nonetheless has its own emotional center and charm. Emily Fox-Seton works as a companion to a rather selfish, elderly, aristocratic woman; like many of Burnett’s  heroines, she’s kind and gentle, but she’s also dull and plain and her most characteristic trait is that she’s remarkably well-organized. At a weekend house party, she meets the most eligible noble bachelor of the decade, and, well, I’m sure you can figure out where it goes from there. The second half of the novel goes a bit gothic, with a murder attempt and a contested inheritance, but Burnett still puts forward the radical notion that plain good sense is worth quite a lot. I also loved her portrayal of two unromantic people in love.

I really wanted Leen’s anthology to be awesome. I spent thirteen years studying the Bible intensively, and finally, here it is – my payoff! I was a bit disappointed, but I think the problem here was my high expectations, not any fault in the book. Of the nine stories in the book, two were genuinely excellent – a retelling of the Ruth story, in which her determination to stay with her mother-in-law is a curse, and a sci-fi tale in which prophecy has been co-opted by corporations and bears a terrible price. Both stories stood well on their own, but my expert knowledge enhanced my appreciation of them. Of the rest, most were solid, but there were a couple of duds (an incoherent David story, an only-interesting-for-the-squick Lovecraftian Jonah). Still, worth reading overall.

Finally, What We Eat When We Eat Alone had some great recipes, but I wanted the essays on various aspects of eating alone to be, well, better. For example, Madison falls back on gender stereotypes (men like meat! women like cottage cheese!) for much of the book, which could have been redeemed if she’d said something interesting about gendered expectations around food preparation or, well, something other than repeating stereotypes. Buy this as a recipe book with some entertaining commentary, not as a book of essays with some recipes attached.

Happy reading!

But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You’ve got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you’d better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.

And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

Perhaps I’m slightly less cynical than Taibbi, but I don’t think it’s just that the very rich can opt out of our shared social goods. Don’t get me wrong – all of them can some of the time, and some of them can all of the time. But I don’t think that’s the core problem.

I think, rather, that it’s easy to take these shared social goods for granted, to assume they’ll always be there no matter how many pension funds get plundered or how much budgets get cut. The human mind is weirdly conservative. We tend to assume that the way things are is the way they must always be, particularly when they are deeply embedded into our institutions, our social rhetoric, and our values. They become nearly invisible, unless you’re one of the people encountering them day to day.

I don’t think Schwartzman wants to destroy, say, the police. I think he assumes the police will magically continue to exist, because that’s how America works. Because he doesn’t have to engage with the police, because he’s got enough money to buy himself out, he never sees the reality of the police – only the stories we tell about them.

I think it’s analogous to how a lot of men see housework; clean clothes magically appear, and if they ever bother to think about the process, they assume that’s just how life works. They keep throwing dirty clothes on the floor*, knowing that the clean clothes will just keep coming – until the day their wife walks out on them, because actually they have no idea of the work they are creating or the person who is doing it.

In my analysis, Schwartzman and his ilk are in a similar situation. They think the way things are is the way they’ll always be. They can keep acting just as they like, because a functioning society is just how things work. And because their social bubble keeps them away from people who have to engage with those social goods more directly, they’ll keep thinking it, right up until the day things stop working for them.

* I do feel the need to say that if anyone throws clothes on the floor in my relationship, it’s me – but laundry remains a job primarily done by women, so I’m using it as the example here.

• Darwin’s Radio, Greg Bear
• Devices and Desires, K. J. Parker
• Evil for Evil, K. J. Parker
• The Escapement, K. J. Parker
• House Lust, Daniel McGinn
• For Better: How the Surprising Science of Happy Couples Can Help Your Marriage, Tara Parker-Pope
• 11/22/63, Stephen King
• Hothouse Kids: How the Pressure to Succeed Threatens Childhood, Alissa Quart
• Evelina, Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, Fanny Burney

tl;dr – Parker does no-magic, very smart fantasy; King and time travel are a great fit; Hothouse Kids delivers good insights; the title character of Evelina may strike you as sickly-sweet, but the story stands the test of time.

I learned an important lesson from this batch of books: turns out you can get pretty good book recommendations if you complain. I was griping to a friend that I can’t read most fantasy anymore; it’s just too dull, the characters are always morons, and most worlds are just another boring medieval-Europe retread. Plus, my tolerance for fantasy tropes as an excuse for rampant racism and sexism has gone way down over the past few years. Fortunately for me, he pointed me at Parker’s Engineer trilogy. It’s not perfect (women exist mostly as plot devices, for one thing), but I was willing to overlook its flaws for the great characterization, sneaky-bastard plotting, and unusual world-building. The series is more a tragedy than a traditional fantasy, but screw categorization – just read it.

My favorite bit was the world – an early-industrial one, in which a single society has developed factories, manufactured goods, etcetera. They’ve pushed out local manufacturers in every society they have contact with, because they have better technology and can produce goods more cheaply. They use their immense profits to hire a mercenary army and maintain their power. However, all this relies on their ability to maintain a monopoly on their technological secrets – especially their weapons. When an engineer flees a sentence of death, and sets up shop in another country, they must respond with force. And so a tragedy is set in motion, one that is driven by the flaws and desires of the people Parker follows as much as it is driven by the inevitable instability of the situation. There’s no happy ending here, but there’s a measure of peace for many of the characters, and a glimpse at a new world coming to life.

King’s book is also a tragedy. Jake Epping is sent back in time to try to stop the Kennedy assassination – and as you might guess, it doesn’t go smoothly. Not much time is spent on the mechanics of time travel, which is nice. Jake simply accepts the limits of what’s possible and acts within them. That means spending several years living in the past, building a life in small-town Texas while monitoring Oswald and trying to figure out how to stop the assassination without committing murder. King does a lovely job of integrating the historical elements into Jake’s emotional and moral journey. Does it matter what Oswald was up to in, say, 1961? To Jake, and therefore to us, it does – and it shapes the choices he has to make. The book hinges on three such choices, all truly difficult moral decisions. By the time Jake has to make them, you’re sufficiently invested in him that they’re genuinely painful for you as a reader. King can get sentimental, particularly about small-town life, but overall this was a great read, even if you don’t love time travel the way that I do.

Evelina is sentimental in an entirely different way. It’s an early epistolary novel, part of whose social function was to teach women how to behave. The title character is impossibly sweet, dutiful, and well-behaved. Even when she gets herself into trouble (and she does!) it’s through an excess of accommodation and delicacy of manners. I’m not saying it’s bad – just that you should be prepared for it, so you can enjoy what it does well. I appreciated it as a glimpse into the ideals and values, not to mention the social dangers, of another world. Plus it’s got a surprising number of soap-operatic elements – disowned children! mistaken identities! crimes of passion! As long as you don’t expect to identify much with Evelina, I think you’ll enjoy this the way I did.

I thought Hothouse Kids was a good deal better than Quart’s first book (Branded, on kids and marketing). Quart looks at the social construction of “giftedness” – both in individual families and in larger social institutions. She gets some pieces very, very right, such as the pressure on gifted children to produce and perform. I also really enjoyed getting a glimpse into the child-preacher and Scrabble-circuit subcultures. Understand, though, that the book is a bit of a polemic. While it draws on great research and interesting anecdotes, it’s all pulled into an argument about the damage the “gifted complex” does to our children, our schools, and our society. I found it interesting and useful, but read it with a grain of salt.

For Better was a perfectly adequate review of relationship research I’ve read elsewhere, but for people less immersed in the field than I am, it’s a pretty good read. I’d especially recommend it if you’ve been in a relationship for less than two years, or if you’re thinking about getting married. Every chapter’s got actionable insights; speaking as someone who practices many of them, they work!

Darwin’s Radio uses miscarriage and pregnancy as a major plot device, which only confirms my suspicion that Bear should not write about women. I didn’t buy the social changes he depicts, and the “holy mommy brings forth a new race” ending left me cold. If you’re looking for a good sci-fi thriller by Bear, try the far more original Blood Music.

Finally, House Lust could be read as a series of loosely related house-themed essays. McGinn covers building, fixing, financing, and selling houses, with additional essays on big houses, second homes, and house-themed media. Individual pieces of this book are extremely interesting, like the history of House Hunters and how floor plans have changed over time. It didn’t quite add up to the trenchant cultural analysis I was hoping for, though. Then again, I’m a big house luster myself, so maybe I just didn’t want to see myself in it!

Happy reading, everyone!