The Reading Railroad Keeps A-Rolling

I ran out of time on Wednesday, so here is the continuation of my earlier post on the books I have been reading.

Lucky You
Carl Hiaasen
February 2008
Fiction

Whenever I go to Miami Beach (which, thankfully, is not very often) I read crime novelist Carl Hiaasen, whom I started reading on my last trip in 2003. Discovering there were two of his novels I have missed, I picked them up in preparation for my southward trek in February. The first one I read was Lucky You, the premise of which is that two people have won the Florida Lottery--one is an African-American woman who wants to use the windfall to save a local wetlands from becoming a strip mall, while the other is neo-fascist moron who wants to use the money to start a neo-Nazi militia. The latter discovers there was another winner and plots to beat her up and steal her ticket. It being Hiaasen, the satire is painted with very broad strokes and the bad guys get their rather grisly comeuppance at the end. There is also an intrepid reporter, whose editor throws a nutty and joins up with a local tourist trap that features a weeping Virgin Mary and some turtles with the Apostles painted on them. It goes a bit off the rails toward the end, and it’s not one of my top Hiaasen books, but it's not bad.

The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket
Trevor Corson
March 2008
Non-Fiction

Everything you ever wanted to know about sushi, one of my favorite foods. By turns, a document of a semester the author spent at a Southern California sushi "academy" detailing the students’ struggles to master the art of sushi preparation, and a history of sushi and how it has changed over the centuries, not just as it emigrated to the U.S. but also in Japan itself. There is a sprinkling of natural history about the fish, and a lot of interesting stuff I never knew--including the "proper" way of ordering and eating sushi (i.e., you are not supposed to use chopsticks, and dipping the sushi in wasabi-infused soy sauce is technically a no-no). I had quite the yen for sushi after reading this one...

Native Tongue
Carl Hiaasen
Mar. 2008
Fiction

As Native Tongue opens, a pair of local yokels (of which there seems to be no short supply in South Florida) have stolen a pair of blue-tongued mango voles from a (fictional) Key Largo theme park (not unlike Disneyworld). Thinking the voles are just rats, the yutzes are not all that concerned about tossing them at passing cars and are only moderately worried when it turns out the voles have ended up dead. It is only after they discover that they were the last remaining members of their species that they panic a bit--and incur the wrath of the elderly yet feisty environmentalist who hired them to vole-nap the critters. Meanwhile, the PR director for the theme park has a crisis of conscience and begins to wage a crusade against big Florida real estate developers (in particular, the owner of the theme park), especially after having a run-in in the woods with Skink, a former Florida governor who "went native" some years earlier. Skink is a recurring Hiaasen character and one of my favorites of his (even if he is a bit hard to believe). This is one of Hiaasen's better books, if only because the bad guys are a shade more well-drawn than is usually the case with Hiaasen (well, except for Pedro Luz, the theme park's head of security, who is a steroid-addicted nut job who ultimately gets a Hiaasen-esque comeupppance with a "playful" dolphin). Again, the satire is painted with broad strokes (Francis X. Kingsbury, the theme park's owner, is a complete scuzzball with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever) but one doesn’t read Hiaasen for subtlety or nuanced characters. Hiaasen is also a bit too priapically obsessed at times, it seems, but ultimately, though, Native Tongue is a fun, brisk read and his points--concerning the preservation of Florida's rich biological diversity--are very well taken.

The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus
Joshua Kendall
March 2008
Non-Fiction

One would hardly think that a biography of Peter Mark Roget, who compiled the first thesaurus, would be utterly compelling, and yet, in the tradition of Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman (about the Oxford English Dictionary), it is a fairly gripping story of how one man's obsessive-compulsive behavior resulted in one of the landmark and long-enduring reference works of all time. Madness--in particular, depression and psychosis--ran in Roget's family, and many of his relatives, including his mother, his sister, and later his daughter, were completely destroyed by mental illness. Roget avoided the same fate by making lists--that is, when the world got too much for him, he organized it, compiling lists--most often of synonyms--over the course of his lifetime, culminating in the publication and immediate success of the Thesaurus when he was in his 80s. Thanks to his compulsive list-making, he was able to stave off the demons that ran in his family, and led a long, prosperous career as a doctor, scientist, and lecturer. The book's publicity perhaps plays up the madness aspect a bit more than is warranted, but there does seem to be a cottage industry of "loony scholar" books emerging. Still, Kendall's book is well-researched, and is written in a brisk narrative style that makes this far-removed from a dry scholarly text, which it could very easily have been. Very enjoyable and fascinating, to boot. I always liked books that put a face and a personality to famous names and works about whom very little is known. Interesting fact: the Thesaurus was wildly unpopular in the U.S. when it was first published. What made it popular over here? The crossword puzzle craze of the 1920s.