Secrets of Eden - Chris Bohjalian

I usually really enjoy Chris Bohjlian.  Midwives, Law of Similars, etc. were all quite good.  The Secrets of Eden however, did not do it for me at all!  I did finish reading it, but only to confirm that I had correctly guessed the ending.  I had.  This is perhaps one of my larger problems with the book--it was very predictable.  Also, though, there was a new-agey character in it, who was really flaky and whom I could not bear reading about.  In a nutshell, the book was about  a murder-suicide and was told from the perspective of four people: the minister who had been involved with the family, the cop investigate the crime, the new-agey woman, and the daughter of the murder-suicide victims.  The author tries to get you to a different truth with each character and this progresses the book.  This was approach was done much better in Stone's Fall by Iain Pairs.  I suggest picking up that book instead.

2/5 Stars.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox - Maggie O'Farrell

The topic of this book is quite compelling.  It explores the case of a woman who was committed to an asylum for almost 60 years--and without the awareness of much of her family.  Using multiple perspectives, O'Farrell leads her readers along a journey to determine whether or not Esme's "sentence" was just.  Her great niece is the character who takes charge of her aunt when the institution is ultimately closing (the only reason Esme really got out) and starts to wonder about why her aunt was committed in the first place.  It's an interesting tale and a quick read.  If you enjoy psychological mysteries, you'll like this one.

4/5 Stars.

Death of Donna Whalen - Michael Winter

I believe that this is one of those books that you can't truly appreciate until you're done.  Or that's how I found it, at any rate.  Winter explores a case in which a woman from St. John's, Newfoundland is brutally murdered.  He used the court transcripts to re-create the events; as a result, there is a fair bit of elaborate detail at points.  This makes it fairly heavy going and I couldn't read too much at once.  That said, it was fascinating to explore the murder from the perspective of all those who were intimately or tangentially involved.  Winter helps you come to a very interesting conclusion in the way he builds it up, but I won't say more than that as I don't want to spoil the book.

While I didn't like this quite as much as Winter's earlier book, The Big Why, it is definitely worth picking up as it's an interesting writing experiment.  And in the end, I think the experiment really worked!

4/5 Stars.

Nonsense on Stilts:How to Tell Science from Bunk

Nonsense on Stilts:How to Tell Science from Bunk

Title: Nonsense on Stilts:How to Tell Science from Bunk
Author: Massimo Pigliucci Page
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN-10: 0226667863
ISBN-13: 978-0226667867

Review: I had first heard about this book quite a while ago while listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, but as I am a very slow reader, it took me quite a while to get to it as I had many other books in the queue.  By the time I started reading it, I had already finished quite a few books in the skeptical genre and as such found that I was experiencing a bit of an echo chamber effect.  Much of the early subject matter in the book were issues covered in other books I had read for instance, the Dover Intelligent Design Trial.

Luckily the recycling of topics (at least for me) had ended about 1/3 of the way into the book.  After that, there was a wealth of new information that I had not yet learned about from other skeptical books.  Information such as the decline of the public intellectual and the rise of think tanks, and one of my favorite topics: the evolution of science itself.  Pigliucci managed to educate me on something that has never even entered into my imagination previously, that is how our current view of science has changed and evolved since ancient times.  The last 1/4 of the book was kind of a philosophy vs science smack down that was interesting, but not earth shattering.

All in all a pretty good book, but not a great book.  I give it 4 out of 5.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - Aimee Bender

Admittedly, I was lured into this book by the title.  However, after I judged the book by its title, I looked into the premise and it sounded really interesting.  Essentially, the main character is able to taste people's emotions through the food that they've prepared.  Sounds interesting, right?  The problem is that the book didn't really pursue this concept.  In fact, it didn't really seem to go anywhere at all.  It vaguely followed the main character as she moved from childhood to early adulthood.  Despite the lack of focus, it was easy enough to read and entertaining enough.  Just don't expect a great plot.

3/5 Stars.

Closing the Book

Books

(a Guest Post)
I just listened to a CBC Ideas podcast regarding the future of books called Closing the Book.  In the program, they talked about the meteoric rise of eBooks and the slow decline of the dead tree version.  They talked about how eBooks are changing (and will continue to change) publishing, they interviewed people that believed that the printed book would be dead in 15 years, and they had people stating that print would never truly die.  The latter group of people are starting to sound like old cranks to me.  "I don't want to be a part of this new fangled eReading!  You'll have to pry these books from my cold dead hand!"

OK, nobody actually said that, but to me, that is how they are coming across.

I don't believe that the world will convert fully to eBooks in the very near future as I think there will always be a niche market for the physical book.  I do believe that over the next few years however, the eBook will far out pace sales of physical books, just as some of the people interviewed on the Idea's program.  Many of them also think that this will be the end of your local book shop as there will be no need for a bookshop in an ebook world.  This is where my opinions diverge with those who were interviewed in Ideas.

I think that it will be the big chains that will feel the squeeze from the eBook revolution.  Stores like Chapters/Indigo, Borders, or Whitcoulls will lose out because their one advantage over the traditional local bookshop, low prices, will no longer be a factor.  With the high overhead that these book superstores have, they simply will not be able to compete against the likes of Amazon.  This is where I think the local bookshops will gain the upper hand.

Local bookshops have virtually always been owned and operated by book lovers; voracious readers who have, over many years, developed a wealth of tacit knowledge over everything about the written word.  These type of people not only know about the literature itself, but they also delve into various tangential  aspects of literature: author biographies, digging into source materials, learning the ins and outs of the publishing business, etc.  These people are the curators that we will need in the new eBook world; people who can use their knowledge to direct me to new types of literature I may be interested in.   That is one area where I see a need for the local book shop.

Another area that the local bookshop can excel at is in the procurement of real books.  As I said earlier, the written word will never totally go away, so it will be the the responsibility of the local bookshop to acquire the physical books no longer available through the large chain stores: the signed first editions, the ancient leather bound copies, or simply a normal hard cover instead of the virtual book.  Looking into the future, I can also foresee local bookshops providing print-on-demand books for patrons that simply want a physical keepsake.  There is also a benefit that current bookshops do that will never be available in a virtual format, that is having authors give personal readings during their book tours.  Barnes & Nobel is really good at this!

Finally, I can envision a local bookstore partnering with the ebook distributers themselves.  Have you ever tried to get a feel for a book you've never read through an online bookstore?  Some sites will let you read a the first page or two, or sometimes even a random page or two from the book.  I don't know about you, but for me, I often can't get a read (pardon the pun) on the author's style from a couple of pages.  This is where the local bookshops can help out.  Picture a bookshop that has a bunch of eReading devices with virtually every book you can possibly think of.  These devices would be available to all of the bookshop's patrons and would be licensed for in store use only; this would help avoid piracy.  All of the books available on the device would be either free to the bookstore, or at a ridiculously reduced price.  Now, if the consumer wishes to purchase the eBook, based on what he has read while in the bookstore, they can wirelessly purchase the book through the bookstore's network.  The purchase itself would be through a partnership program similar to Amazon's partnership program currently in place.

I've got a Kindle.  I love my Kindle.  I still like books too, and I don't think they're going anywhere...for a while.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot

I wanted to love this book and parts of it I really did.  Perhaps because Rebecca Skloot is a science journalist, it was really the description of the science behind the HeLa (Henrietta Lacks) cells that grabbed me.  It was interesting to learn how HeLa has been used in AIDS and cancer research, as well as how they have helped to advance the field of genetics.  The story of Henrietta herself was actually also well done.  It was when Skloot started to write about Henrietta's children that I struggled a bit more.  There was little to no science here and it read almost like an average fiction book in these parts.  That said, I think this book tells an important story and is worth picking up.  It's a very accessible book that teaches readers a great deal about bioethics.

4 out of 5 Stars.