I hope all my readers are enjoying a happy and peaceful Christmas Day!

As it’s Christmas, there is – of course – no book review this week; the next will be published in a fortnight’s time, Wednesday 8th January 2014.

Merry Christmas!

See No Evil is the story of how a “nerdy Jewish kid” grows into Elliot Litner, one of New York’s foremost cardiac surgeons in the 1970s and 1980s, who also happens to lead a second life as Il Dottore, a gambling and sex addict embroiled deeply in the world of organised crime, acting as the house physician to La Cosa Nostra.

This is a remarkable book, made all the more astounding by the fact that it is a true biography. Felber is an excellent writer, and infuses the text with just the right quantities of suspense, tension, disbelief, and occasional laugh-out-loud humour. The passage in which Litner performs a rectal examination on godfather Carlo Gambino is a stand-out moment which deftly combines all of the above!

I haven’t read much in the past about the New York mafia, and so was grateful for the background given in the book. Essentially, as well as being a biography of Litner, it is also an insider biography of La Cosa Nostra. My naivety on such subjects led to me being truly astounded by the breadth and depth of the mafia’s reach, and the role that Rudy Giuliani played in curbing organised crime in New York. I don’t think I would ever have been motivated to read about this subject if it hadn’t been for the curious medical angle of this biography, but will certainly read more widely on the topic in future.

I found it somewhat curious that the biographer chose to give the protagonist a pseudonym – Elliot Litner is not his real name – when the description of the various posts he has held and publications he has written would surely make his unmasking very straightforward indeed. That said, I didn’t bother to look it up (perhaps that’s the point).

I love a bit of moral ambiguity in a book, and – as one might expect – this delivers in spades, and with some medical ethical twists to boot. Indeed, the quite brilliant ending of the book arrives when Litner is faced with a clear dichotomous choice between his Hippocratic Oath and his loyalty to La Cosa Nostra. Perhaps I was swept along by the narrative, but I found the ending entirely unpredictable, and the building tension as the denouement approaches was some of the tightest, suspenseful writing I’ve read in a very long time. To say that I couldn’t put the book down is a cliché, but in the case of the final section of this book, it also happens to be true.

Clearly, the veracity of the events described is difficult to ascertain, and I’m certain that a large pinch of creative licence has been used with respect to the well-written dialogue. But for a story as fantastical as this, I can forgive a little bit of fictionalisation and dramatisation around the edges. Parts are so obvious cinematic that it seems unbelievable that no-one has written a movie based on this book.

I’d thoroughly recommend See No Evil. It isn’t the sort of book I’d typically choose to read, but that only made the somewhat unexpected enjoyment all the sweeter.

See No Evil is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle. There will be no book review published on Christmas Day, so the next review will be in four weeks: 8th January 2014.

The Quarry is Iain Banks’s final novel, finished off after he received the news that he was dying of a rare metastatic gall bladder cancer. That background, combined with the fact that I’ve loved many of Banks’s previous novels, makes it hard to write a fair review. But I will try.

The plot is straightforward: Guy, father to teenage Kit, is dying of cancer. Guy invites his old friends to stay with Kit and him, for something resembling a pre-death wake. The relationships between the friends are explored, and their shared past is raked over. The plot, however, is almost irrelevant. It is the detailed characterisation, perfect dialogue and evocative description which do all the work in this novel. The plot is almost beside the point.

The first Banks novel I read was the first he wrote: The Wasp Factory. The Quarry shares much with The Wasp Factory: both are Bildungsromans exploring the nature of the relationship between a strange father and a strange son. This is the sort of thing Banks excels at, as I mentioned in my review of Stonemouth earlier this year. The Quarry is much less extreme than The Wasp Factory: the father is a dying misanthropic bastard rather than a lifelong pathological sadist, and the son appears to have a mild form of autism rather than being a psychopathic murderer. Both The Wasp Factory and The Quarry explore themes of ritual and religion in some depth, as well as the fine line between life and death.

But this is not The Wasp Factory. It isn’t a Gothic powerhouse of a novel featuring graphic murder and torture at every turn. Like Stonemouth, it’s a quiet, subtle novel that explores the absurd horror of everyday life without resorting to comically dark metaphor. The mirror it holds to the absurd swords of Damocles of our pasts and the cruelty of death is plain, rather than comically warped. What this approach loses in shock-factor power, it gains in poignancy.

As always with Banks, the characterisation and dialogue are just outstanding, and the black humour is second-to-none. As always, his prose flows like nobody else’s. His talent as a writer was so obviously superlative that discussing it seems superfluous.

The Quarry is a brilliant novel, and one that I know I’ll turn back to and read again, and – like all of Banks’s work – probably find a whole other level to enjoy on a second reading. Banks was a literary genius. That this is his last novel is a tragedy. I will miss him.

The Quarry is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.

Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking wasn’t a book I expected to like. It’s part self-help, part autobiography, part popular science, and part personality guide, and for a long while I resisted reading it on the basis that it would likely be unscientific nonsense that would make me angry. Yet the positive reviews kept coming, and I eventually felt that I had to read it to see what all the fuss was about.

I opened the book, still expecting to be angered, and started reading about how the world is made up of introverts and extroverts. I started to feel a little twitched: there are few things that irritate me more than self-help books that segment (often dichotomising) the population on their own spurious terms, and then offer “solutions” for existing as or dealing with a member of a particular segment. The commonest example is the entire industry that has grown up around the nonsense that is Myers-Briggs personality typing. Reading Quiet, though, I was quickly disarmed by Cain’s own discussion of how life isn’t that simple: all people have introvert and extrovert traits, and the population cannot be simply segmented. Behaviours, even, cannot be dichotomised. How refreshing!

And yet, Cain’s obvious enthusiasm for her subject sometimes spills over into long passages which appear to negate her statements about the lack of dichotomy. It also fairly quickly settles into a repeated cycle of discussing individuals who exhibit particular traits, assigning the important traits to introversion, and then discussing some of the (sometimes spurious) science about why introverts exhibit this trait. Occasionally – and especially towards the end – a good measure of “self-help” guidance is thrown in too.

Quiet is also very heavily focused on the USA, both in terms of the individuals discussed, and the cultural context in which the book is set. The central thesis of the book is that quiet people make large contributions to society, and are sometimes less recognised in popular culture because they fight less to be heard. I’m not sure that this is quite the surprising revelation that Cain sets it up to be.

I’m certain that many people find reading this book to be validating: as much is clear from the many millions of words written in praise of the book, with headlines like “Finally” and “Vindication at last”. I waver between thinking that this is a fantastic and helpful to many people, and thinking that there’s a danger of over-validation of preconceived ideas (“I’m brilliant, it’s just that the world doesn’t appreciate my brilliance because I’m an introvert”).

Now that I’ve spent four paragraphs picking fault, I feel that I should emphasise that this is a cut above most similar books, and I largely enjoyed the experience of reading it. There were parts where I metaphorically nodded my head in agreement, which is unusual for this type of book – I’m usually too incensed by the roughshod way in which authors ride over science and evidence. Cain is much more light-footed, and makes arguments that were, at the very least, superficially persuasive enough to sweep me along as a reader, even if they didn’t convince me that the society and the world needed to change.

Quiet is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

Dirty Work describes the “Fitness to Practice” investigation into the work of Nancy, a registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology. The investigation is triggered by an operation which goes wrong, and Nancy’s inability to deal with the situation.
The author, Gabriel Weston, is an ENT surgeon, and so is possessed of some insight into how these things work. She also has a remarkable talent for describing aspects of medical life in ways that are both accurate and poetic.

A good doctor needs to know how to spin a yarn. That’s what they teach you at medical school, though no one ever says in in so many words. They prefer to give it a safe sort of name, the powers that be. The call it history-taking, this supposedly natural process in which a patient and doctor collaborate to weave a shape out of what’s gone wrong. They make its sound straightforward. And to the patient it probably feels that way. In reality, though, the competent clinical inquisitor is all the while asserting their own semantic frame, encouraging the patient to dwell on key symptoms, ignoring the white noise of emotion, veering away from anything that has no pathological meaning, doing what is necessary to help a diagnosis emerge. The doctor is rewriting the patient’s story while seeming only to bear witness to it.

If there’s part of that which sounds a little uncaring, perhaps a little too direct, fear not. An epiphany is coming…

I began to see that the words a patient uttered were not always what counted most; that there might be a more important meaning beyond what was being said, a contrary melody, if only I could train my ear to hear it.

This short novel has more characterisation than plot, which feels right for the story it is discussing. It also has a good deal of tension, uncertainty, and occasional confusion.

The work which most affects the protagonist, and the operation in which she makes her mistake, is the provision of surgical abortions. I think this is a shame. There is little in the content of the book that is specific to abortion-related work, and I think it would almost have been more interesting to explore the pressure on Nancy if she were the provider of any other kind of surgery. The subject of abortion – for better or worse – carries a lot of baggage. Weston doesn’t moralise, but the occasional graphic descriptions of the work Nancy carries out weigh, I think, unduly heavily on the mind of the reader. This becomes a novel about the psychological impact of abortion provision, and the myriad other pressures on Nancy are comparatively minimised.

This minimisation feels a bit unfortunate because it removes the focus from Weston’s talent for describing the universal fears and pressures weighing on all doctors, which are less frequently discussed and so possibly more interesting than the specifics of the pressures of an individual line of work:

How on earth will I manage if I am erased, removed, struck off the medical register? I will lose my entire frame of reference. And what would I have to replace it? What is a doctor, if not a doctor? That that title away and there may be very little left over.

I would have liked to have seen these ideas explored further, without the baggage of abortion. Weston’s descriptions and language speak to me.

I have seen that other reviewers have felt that the book fails to emotionally involve the reader with the protagonist, but I couldn’t disagree more strongly. I felt deeply involved with Nancy’s story, and worked through this book in no time.
However, given that I’ve praised the book for its true to life descriptions, I should also caveat by saying that this isn’t consistently true. There are strange lines here and there which ring utterly false. There is a scene in which Nancy – reputedly a registrar – described a consultant “decoding” very common terms like ERPC, D&C, and ToP for her. This is patent nonsense. The terms aren’t even explained to the reader, so there isn’t a clear explanation for why the line exists. These aberrations, while frustrating, are mercifully few.

As a whole, I very much enjoyed this novel. It wasn’t perfect, but there were parts that came remarkably close to perfect. There were some distinctly wrong notes, but they were few and far between. I found the novel made me reflect on my own life and medical practice, and made me reconsider issues I haven’t though about for some years. I found it moving, and somewhat thrilling. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.

Dirty Work is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle. Many thanks to Bantam Press for supplying a free copy for the purpose of this review.

My Brief History, Stephen Hawking’s autobiography, is certainly brief. It is a whistle-stop tour of anecdotes about his life, interspersed with some fairly heavy physics. The tone is upbeat throughout, and it gives some genuine insights into Hawking’s life and motivations.

However, it does feel a little like Hawking is uncomfortable writing about his life. He writes with obvious bitterness about the intrusion of the media into his personal life, and I got the sense from reading this autobiography that he found the process of talking about himself somewhat intrusive too. He rarely gives a great detail of insight into the more emotional side of her personal life. To illustrate, here is the level of detail Hawking shares about one of his weddings:

The fellowship meant Jane and I could get married, which we did in July 1965.

I don’t think this detracts from the book at all: I note it only because it differs from the prevailing tone of autobiographies published recently, and I think it gives some insight into Hawking’s personality.

There are some truly remarkable anecdotes in here, including this one:

On my way home, I and my travelling companion, Richard Chiin, were caught in the Bou’in-Zahra earthquake, a magnitude 7.1 quake that killed more than twelve thousand people. I must have been near the epicentre, but I was unaware of it because I was ill and in a bus that was bouncing around on the Iranian roads.

There are also touches of an especially wry humour:

The colleges were therefore all single-sex and the gates locked at midnight, by which time all visitors – especially those of the opposite sex – were supposed to be out. After that, if you wanted to leave, you had to climb a high wall topped with spikes. My college didn’t want its students getting injured, so it left a gap in the spikes, and it was quite easy to climb out.

All-in-all, I got the very strong impression that this book was very personal to Hawking. It feels like he has related the stories he wants to relate in the way that he wants to relate them – pushing himself a little to reveal slightly uncomfortable details, but no pushed by an editor into shaping the book in any particular way, nor driving too far into personal territory.

My highest qualification in physics is the GCSE I earned twelve years ago, and so it’s hardly surprising that I found some of the physics hard to follow. The discussions of concepts like imaginary time (which is simply at right-angles to normal time, apparently) became more dense towards the end of the book. But the fact that the discussion of wormholes left me a little behind didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the book. While I didn’t follow all of the science, I appreciated the beauty of his descriptions.

This is a brief book. But I felt that it contained a good deal of insight, and I found it a thoroughly enjoyable read.

My Brief History is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle. Many thanks to Bantam Press for supplying a free copy for the purpose of this review.

I should start this review by pointing out that I’m not a “cat person”. I have no particular affection for felines. I suspect that sets me at a disadvantage in terms of enjoying a book about a cat.

This is the story of a drug-addict busker living in sheltered accommodation (James) who takes in a stray cat (Bob) and nurses it back to health. I think a neat parallel is intended between Bob’s recovery and James’s battle with drug addiction – except it doesn’t quite hang properly, as Bob returns to full health within a couple of chapters, whereas James has not completed his drug addiction journey by the end of the book.

There were times at which I found James utterly unsympathetic. His occasionally inexplicably poor choices are related without the insight generated by hindsight that would have made me warm to the character. Because I found the character unsympathetic, I found it difficult to be drawn into the story. And this wasn’t helped by the repetitiveness of the story, and of the emotions described. Really, there are only so many times I can stomach reading about a cat wandering off and it’s owner being worried, or a cat being ill and its owner being worried, or a cat being scared and its owner being worried.

Few things irritate me as much as unthinking anthromorphology, and this is heaped on in spades in this book. We’re constantly told Bob’s thoughts and motivations, and it’s quite possible that over the course of the book he’s ascribed more human attributes than the human protagonist.

In recent book reviews, I’ve been complaining a lot about the standard of proof-reading and editing in recently published books. The standard in this volume is perhaps the poorest I’ve come across. There was a least one point where I found myself unable to follow the plot because a character’s name changed several times. That is pretty inexcusable. Wikipedia is better edited than that.

I accept wholeheartedly that I do not belong to the target audience for this book. It has received excellent reviews elsewhere, and many people find it heart-warming. Many report that it has opened their eyes to the reality of life on the streets, newly reinforced difficulty of overcoming drug addiction, and educated them on aspects of cat care. Those all seem like fairly worthy results, and I don’t intend to suggest through my own negative review that this book hasn’t earned its place on the shelf of the local bookseller. I applaud James’s tenacity and ingenuity in creatively profiting from the story of his relationship with his cat, for tackling his demons, and for building a better life for himself; I wish him all the best for the future.

All of that said, A Street Cat Named Bob did nothing for me. I was unmoved. I found the book tedious in the extreme. I felt that the material on homelessness and drug addiction has been covered far better elsewhere, and cat care tips couldn’t be further from my personal interests. While others clearly see literary merit in the volume to the extent that they have enjoyed very much enjoyed it, I’m afraid I do not. And as such, I cannot recommend it.

Jason Merkoski was on the team at Amazon which developed the Kindle. This book gives insights into how the process of developing the Kindle felt, and gives a personal account of Merkoski’s relationship with books and his ideas of where the medium is going.

These multiple strands make the book a bit of a mishmash of genres, which (no doubt) makes marketing it somewhat tricky. Despite this, I felt that it hung together quite nicely as a whole, though it is undeniable that it reads a little more like a flowing conversation than a planned essay.

Merkoski’s passion for books shines through this volume – not least because of the anecdotes he relates about the difficulties of coping with the number of books he owns. Given his love of books, I was surprised by his level of excitement about a future in which books have changed to the degree that they no longer contain the written word. In the medium-term, he imagines books which are intercut with short movies and games – not so far from what we seen on the iPad today. This fills me with dread, because it seems to me that this limits the reader’s imagination.

Yet, despite my reluctance, I can see that his prediction is probably accurate. Blockbuster books already often have filmed “trailers”. Games with written stories and intercut scenes (e.g. the Professor Layton series) are enormously popular. Convergence between formats can surely only become more common.

And his long-term predictions are still more frightening. With strong overtones of sci-fi, he suggests that authors’ imaginations will be “downloaded” into readers’ minds. Again, despite my personal reluctance, it’s hard to disagree that more efficient communication of ideas is likely to be the direction of travel.

The anecdotes about working on the Kindle project which are intercut into the story gave a little insight into the project, and were described with passion and enthusiasm yet were not overdone. They provided a valuable grounding to offset the flights of futurology, and I think the combination worked rather well.

I should point out that the book includes interactive “bookmarks”, which are conversation-starters linked to Jason’s website. Because I read this book pre-publication, I didn’t use these, so can’t comment on how well they really worked. The questions posed often provided food for thought, regardless of the fact that I didn’t discuss them with others online.

All-in-all, this was one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read for a little while. It may be hard to categorise or capture in a nutshell, but it was nonetheless thought-provoking and engaging. I’d certainly recommend it.

Love Story was published in 1970, and was one of the first mega-blockbuster books. It sold tens of millions of copies, and a large number of people appear to claim it as their favourite book of all time. It is actually a novelisation of a screenplay which, following the success of the book, was produced and performed extraordinarily well. I was born in 1985 – more than a little too late to appreciate the fuss. Yet given readers’ apparent enduring love of the book, though, I wanted to read it.

Love Story is a short book, running to fewer than 100 pages. It tells the story of the blossoming love between rich Harvard law student Oliver Barrett IV and poor Radcliffe music student Jenny Cavilleri, who dies at an awfully young age. That isn’t a spoiler: it is revealed in the first line of the book.

But I’m not sure that the headline “love story” is the most interesting: another felt more moving to me. The subplot follows Oliver’s changing relationship with his father. Segal’s own father died shortly before he wrote this novel, and perhaps this is the reason for this subplot being infused with such emotion.

Yet, despite this, the book felt a bit flat. The characters felt a little cardboard, with the shallow characterisation bluntly hammered home time and again, with little room for subtlety. The plot is stretches realism beyond breaking point in parts: the refusal of the doctor to tell Jennifer her own diagnosis, for example. And I found the dialogue throughout to be awkwardly stilted.

Despite all of its flaws, the book was still moving. But it felt like it was moving me in a sort of emotionally manipulative way, as though the mechanics were on show and I was being prodded in a direction, rather than moving me by engaging me on a deeper level. I’ve not seen the movie, but I believe it relies heavily on strings to generate emotion, and that’s sort of how the book feels too. It was moving, but not in an especially memorable or deeply affecting way.

So, I guess I enjoyed Love Story while I read it, but it was a little clunky. I’m not going to rush to read Segal’s sequel.

Amazon recently boasted of the success of it’s Kindle Singles, novella-length ebooks by notable authors sold at low prices. I understand that Amazon has sold over five million ‘singles’ since it launched the programme a little over two years ago, and they have reasonably recently been gifted their own reserved location in the Kindle store.

Having never read a ‘single’, I felt a little like I was missing out, so I logged on and bought Gutenberg the Geek by one of my favourite media writers (and one-time reader of this blog) Jeff Jarvis.

Given that this is my first ‘single’, I feel I have to spent some time writing about the format. I understand that Gutenberg the Geek is about average in terms of ‘single’ length. Essentially, it seems short enough to read in one sitting, yet long enough to explore topics and ideas in some depth. It seemed much the same length as the longform feature articles in news magazines. Of course, this is a much-lamented length that has become something of a cause du jour, with all sorts of outlets from Matter to NSFWCorp to Longform doing their best to “protect this style of journalism” which they believe is dying, while all the while The New Yorker, Wired and Time continue to publish longform articles. I wonder, really, what Kindle Singles can offer than all of these other “solutions” cannot.

I should, perhaps, backtrack a little here and point out that I really like and admire Matter (which I helped to fund), NSFWCorp (to which I subscribe) and Longform (which I read daily). I don’t mean to sound critical of them. But, while I like longform journalism, it’s a rare morning where I awake from my slumber and think “I must read something long today”. Obsessing about longform journalism makes little more sense than obsessing over making articles shorter and punchier. The important thing is that the right content is in the right form.

I guess the upshot of this is that I feel a bit short-changed by the Kindle Singles format. It feels like a length that should be in a magazine, and that doesn’t quite stand comfortably in isolation. But perhaps that’s down to the novelty more than the form itself.

And so to Gutenberg the Geek. This is a fine, brief biography of Gutenberg which presents him as “the original technology entrepreneur”. As I’d expect from Jeff Jarvis, he gives a convincing account and argument for shining Gutenberg’s achievement through this prism, and uses the light it casts to illuminate modern-day questions around everything from internet freedom to start-up investment. Handled with Jarvis’s typically deft touch, the comparison feels neither strained nor awkward, and never as though the life of Gutenberg is being manipulated to fit.

This sort of thing, I suspect, answers the question about what Kindle Singles can offer. This ‘single’ wouldn’t fit comfortably as a passage in a bigger book, as it’s a self-contained idea. The idea wouldn’t survive stretching to fill an entire standard-length book, without detrimental deviation from the central thrust. And as much as the length may be appropriate for magazine publication, I think it would be difficult to convince an editor to carry what amounts to a mildly esoteric thought-experiment with little new content. Publishing it as a standalone actually works rather well.

So I guess I’ve reached the somewhat circular conclusion that I like the writing of a writer whose writing I like. Gutenberg the Geek presents the life of Gutenberg in a fairly novel way, and left me with much food for thought. What more could I ask for 99p?

Gutenberg the Geek is available now from amazon.co.uk, exclusively on Kindle.