The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs

After Julie and I watched the John Adams miniseries on HBO, I had two reactions. The first was unsettling: if I'd been alive in Colonial times, I would not have been on the side of the patriots. This is an unpleasant epiphany for someone who's always considered himself moderately patriotic. But I'm convinced of it.

I wouldn't be a king-loving Loyalist, mind you. I'd be somewhere in the middle. John Adams estimated that a third of the country was patriots, a third loyalist, and a third neutral. That'd be me: neutral. 

I don't have a revolutionary nature. I'm not confrontational enough. I'd probably grumble about the tax on tea, but in the end, I'd cough up the money rather than putting on a feathered headdress and storming a ship. I mean, I've shelled out $3.45 for a tall pumpkin latte without declaring war on Starbucks. That's truly intolerable.

-The Guinea Pig Diaries

So I was doing a little research on The Guinea Pig Diaries, for my own personal edification—or perhaps because I was having trouble getting started with this entry—and I stumbled across a couple of interesting pieces of information. 1) In paperback, this book has a new name: it's now called My Life as as Experiment. I've Googled the reason for this change without success. (Frustrating! It's so stupid, yet I must know.) 2) Jack Black's production company has bought the rights to turn The Guinea Pig Diaries/My Life as an Experiment into a TV show. Intriguing.

Anyway, what's this book all about? Anyone who's read A.J. Jacobs' previous books, The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, knows that he is game to completely reorder his life around a certain goal or idea. (Perhaps that's why the title changed. My Life as an Experiment does sum that up pretty nicely). His latest book includes nine essays that cover some of the other projects he has taken on, from living his life according to George Washington's principles to outsourcing everything he does to India. Naturally, there are consequences to all of these decisions: some funny, some aggravating, and some that actually lead to lasting  change.

The Guinea Pig Diaries is a quick, funny read, but it's ultimately less satisfying than either of Jacobs' previous books.  Because each experiment is short, it can never be as absorbing as one of his longer projects—for either him or the reader. I'm not sure that any of these projects could have been sustained for that length—so good for Jacobs for not trying to stretch something that shouldn't have been—but I am eager to see him get back to such a project. Jacobs really excels at taking things on that benefit from in-depth exploration, and making those projects both informative and funny. The Year of Living Biblically even had an unexpected profundity, when Jacobs realized how his challenge to himself had changed his life. (In The Guinea Pig Diaries, he notes that he still is devoted to the concept of thanksgiving, which he first practiced in the previous book.) I did enjoy The Guinea Pig Diaries, but I don't expect to return to it the way I have with The Know-It-All, or the way I feel I could with The Year of Living Biblically.

Up next: Watching Frost/Nixon, I discovered I have some serious gaps in my 70s American history knowledge. Thus, All The President's Men by Woodward and Bernstein.

Faithful Place by Tana French

I had spent my whole life growing around a scar shaped like Rosie Daly's absence. The thought of that lump of scar tissue vanishing had sent me so light-headed and off balance that I ended up doing gobsmackingly moronic things like getting hammered with my siblings, a concept that just two days earlier would have sent me running screaming for the hills. I felt it would be a good idea to get my bearings back before I did something dumb enough to end in amputation.

-Faithful Place

Readers first met Frank Mackey in Tana French's novel The Likeness, where he was introduced as an Undercover detective and former mentor of our heroine, Cassie Maddox. In Faithful Place, the story becomes Frank's when he's called back to his childhood home in inner-city Dublin, a place he long ago fled. The reason he returns? A forlorn blue suitcase, shoved up the chimney in an abandoned house more than twenty years earlier, only recently rediscovered. It once belonged to Frank's first love, Rosie Daly.

After dating secretly for months, they decided to run off together, Frank and Rosie, away from the hardscrabble Faithful Place. Frank waited hours on the night they were supposed to meet, eventually finding an unaddressed note from Rosie in which she said she'd gone to England. Frank assumed it was for him, that she'd decided to leave on her own. He didn't go home, though. He went ahead, not to return to Faithful Place until the suitcase brought him back. He'd never thought that Rosie might have met a bad end. It's a shattering idea.

Frank begins sniffing around the old neighborhood, asking the questions he'd never thought to ask: who might have known he was dating Rosie? Who could have seen her that night? He can't be part of an official investigation, of course. But he's soon drawn back into the rhythm of Faithful Place, where every resident knows exactly what's going on in every other home and is pleased as punch to keep that information from the pigs. His own home is worse: his brothers and sisters never got out, his alcoholic father still has everyone walking on eggshells.

It's a pretty grim situation for Frank, but very well realized by Tana French.  Her characters, from Frank's sharp Ma to his sly brother Shay to a chavvy old friend of Rosie's, are vividly drawn. I think her writing is up to the caliber she's maintained in previous books, certainly. All the same, I found Faithful Place slightly less satisfying than I did In The Woods or The Likeness. Partly, to be fair, because I hoped for an update on Cassie and/or Rob when none was forthcoming; that was a bit disappointing. However, I wasn't entirely happy with the resolution to the mystery. I can't put my finger on it exactly, I just didn't care for it. I'm still quite curious to see what French tackles next, though. This book only came out in July, so I suppose I'm in for a bit of a wait. (Still hoping for a book from Sam's point of view!)

Up next: The Guinea Pig Diaries, a collection of essays by A.J. Jacobs, who has written two excellent non-fiction books, The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically.

Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis

To play competitive Scrabble, one has to get over the conceit of refusing to acknowledge certain words as real and accept that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility. In the living room, Scrabble is about who has a better working vocabulary. It's a sort of crossword puzzle in reverse. But in the tournament room, Scrabble has nothing to do with vocabulary. If it did, I – an Ivy league-educated professional journalist, for crying out loud – would rule. But I can only dream of competing with the champions. No, Scrabble isn't about words. It's about mastering the rules of the game, and the words are the rules.

-Word Freak

I love Scrabble. I've played it since I was kid and I consider myself to be a decent living room player. But I'll never play at the same level at Stefan Fatsis and, honestly, I wouldn't want to—I get hung up on the whole "real word" thing he discusses in the passage above. Nevertheless I love love love Word Freak.

Word Freak chronicles journalist Stefan Fatsis's journey into the world of competitive Scrabble. It's a weird place, populated by all varieties of social miscreants.  Stefan begins at the bottom of the heap, playing the blue hairs—and not always winning, either. He begins studying words, which means memorization, and lots of it. Can you imagine memorizing a list of two-letter words that are valid in Scrabble? And then, when you've finished that, three-letter words? And four, five, etc. There are more words on each list, naturally. It's a Sisyphean struggle for Stefan, although he does make slow progress.

Word Freak is not all about words, though there are certainly plenty of them. Let's get back to those social miscreants, the real heart of the story. It takes a special kind of person to be an expert Scrabble player. Dedicated would be one word for it. Experts could doubtless think of many more, a fair amount of which might be less flattering. But while Stefan's new Scrabble friends may be single-minded in their devotion to the game, they're also pretty fascinating. There's the friendly but ever-ailing "G.I" Joel Sherman (the G.I stands for "gastrointestinal"). There's the funny, hot-headed Matt Graham, who takes smart pills by the handful in order to boost his performance. Matt's friend, Marlon Hill, a smart, temperamental player out of inner-city Baltimore who is working on a book about race in America. And there's Joe Edley, who has mystical approach to Scrabble and coaches Stefan on the psychological aspect of the game.*

There's many more, besides. Some of them, to be fair, seem perfectly well adjusted — but they also get less face time in Word Freak. Stefan is not condescending, although he is honest about the weirdness level, as are many of players. As time wears on, though, and his obsessiveness about the game grows, he finds he has more and more in common with his Scrabble comrades. It might have been a frightening realization to have, but Stefan often finds himself happy with this crowd, playing Anagrams and rehashing games past. They love the game, they truly do.

And I love this book. I enjoy spending time with people who are happy and successful in a way that might not make sense to the rest of the world.  Good for them. And I especially love that this revolves around language, even if many tournament players might not know (or care about) the definitions of the words they play. There is something exciting about finding the perfect word — be it in writing or, when the universe smiles upon upon you, in the mishmash of tiles on your Scrabble rack. I enjoyed celebrating that in Word Freak. It also really, really made me want to play a game of Scrabble.

Up next: For whatever reason, this entry took me forever to write, so I've already finished Tana French's Faithful Place; I imagine I'll be back to write about it soon. I'm planning on starting The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs later this evening.

*If you're curious to see these players in action, the documentary Word Wars covers at least part of the same time period and features many of the same people.

Moonshine by Alaya Johnson

So I'd been on my bicycle all day and my tailbone felt like someone had been smashing it with a mallet and I had a dead boy—the kind you're never supposed to let turn, if you're an ignorant Other-phobe like Troy—who could double as a vampire pincushion draped across my neck, and damn if I wasn't getting some odd looks as I huffed my way through the busy Canal Street intersection. Why did things like this always happen to me?

I had to laugh, and saw my breath float away in the glare of the electric lamps. Because I'm certifiable.

-Moonshine

Meet Zephyr Hollis, resident of Prohibition-era New York City. She's an all-around do-gooder: night school teacher, blood bank volunteer, champion of women's and Others' rights. Others, of course, being vampires and other such fantastic beasties. They call her the Vampire Suffragette.

Zephyr hails from Montana, the daughter of a renowned vampire hunter (known as a Defender). She was a promising Defender herself, until she decided that Others deserved tolerance, not death. She's a progressive girl, our Zephyr; she's also a vegetarian.

As a night school teacher, Zephyr meets a lot of interesting characters. One of them, the smoldering, mysterious Amir, offers her a proposition: 200 dollars to locate the notorious vampire Rinaldo, overseer of much of New York's fang-friendly underworld. Zephyr's intrigued by Amir, and, generous as she is, she's always hard up for cash. She accepts.

Life, unsurprisingly, gets a lot more dangerous quite quickly for Zephyr. With some trepidation, she works on infiltrating the Turn Boys gang, a group of young vampires who, under Rinaldo's supervision, is responsible for turning children (such as the boy mentioned in the passage above). It's her best bet at getting to Rinaldo, but it's a risky move, particularly once a new vampire intoxicant known as Faust floods the market. Young, volatile vampires? Bad. Young, volatile, drunk vampires? Well, it's certainly not better. And time is running short, as it tends to do in these situations.

Alaya Johnson has created a wonderful world for her characters to inhabit. There's the period itself, which allows for flapper dresses, speakeasies, and some delightful slang. The fact that it's New York makes it doubly fun to me, and I enjoyed envisioning where Zephyr went. (Johnson helpfully includes a map of lower Manhattan if you're less familiar with the area.) What I really liked, though, was the conceit that vampires are just there: no secrecy, no mention of coming out. They're a persecuted, feared minority to be sure, but no one doubts their existence. Considering how commonplace vampire/human stories have been in recent fantasy, this is a nice way of shaking things up.

I thoroughly enjoyed this and would have undoubtedly finished it a lot sooner had I not been in the midst of moving. (I also stretched it out knowing I had no other new books at my disposal). I love Zephyr and I feel that the ending is open-ended enough that a sequel would be welcome. Here's hoping!

Up next: Almost finished with my reread of Word Freak, one of my favorite pieces of non-fiction. And I just received the new Tana French from Amazon today, hooray!