Sick Person Book Reading

I still have not heard back from the job interview I had on the 16th, but I'm expecting to hear something this week (because they finished up the first round of interviews last week).  Meanwhile, my Christmas tree is still up, and I think I have finally adjusted to my new bifocals -- I certainly gave myself the opportunity because while I was sick last week, I spent a couple of days where all I did was eat, brush my teeth, shower/dress, sleep, and sit in my comfy chair reading books.  I actually sort of astonished myself because I read 6 books in under 3 days.  Thankfully I had both a fresh stash of books that my mom gave me when I visited at Christmas and a pile of books from the library -- this meant that I nice selection to choose from, unlike when sometimes haven't been to the library recently and am down to like 6 books I got from my mom 10 months ago that I still don't really want to read.

Let's see if I can remember what books I read.  I think this is the order...

Shiny Water by Anna Salter:  I'm a huge fan of thrillers featuring (clinical) psychologists, so my standards in this genre are lower than in most others.  This one tackled sexual abusers of children, not exactly a comfortable topic, but a very interesting one.  I sort of liked the characterization of the protagonist (our forensic psychologist) -- it is somewhat rare, in my experience, to read a book with a female lead that is unlikeable (despite having many fine qualities, like being on the obvious side of "good" in the good vs. evil thing going in the story) in quite the way this one is.  She's not a narcissist, or an airhead, or a shrew.  It feels like she's written sort of as a man rather than a woman in many respects, so yeah, I guess she's some variant of the Tough Cookie type.  I was not surprised by whodunit, but it was a pretty enjoyable ride nonetheless, and I'll probably read the next book in the series....in which it's obvious what the main story is going to have to be.  She would not introduce the "manipulative evil mastermind currently serving time behind bars who has a complex relationship to the protagonist" character not to have him unleashed upon the world in the next book.

Specials by Scott Westerfeld:  This is the third book in the (youth) series and...well, I'm getting a bit tired of it all.  Oh, what will this Strong Female Character do next to feel guilty about even though she's basically saving the world? and that kind of shit.  I liked Uglies (setting up the universe, etc.) and Pretties (a meaty story) more than this one.  However, it's easy and undemanding reading, with a fast-moving plot, so it was well-suited to my sick, semi-brain-dead state.  I enjoyed reading it more than I liked it, if that makes sense.

Missing Persons by Stephen White:  I'm a big fan of this clinical psychologist thriller series.  One of the downsides to getting books from my mom is that I don't always get all of the books in a series, in the proper sequential order, etc., because my mom sometimes reads some of them from the library instead of buying them and passing them on to me.  (I mean: the hell?  You'd think she works for the library or something, the way she uses it.)  The main story was interesting and complicated (though I did not personally find the whole Jon Benet parallel thing as compelling as some might have done) but I think my favorite part was the characterization of the protagonist's patient Bob (and the other patients).  I probably would be 90% satisfied just reading about his patients, without a main thriller storyline.  It's funny -- there is no way in hell I would ever want to be a clinical psychologist, but I enjoy getting to peek into this universe (which is, of course, very condensed, with the most boring 95% of content removed).

Friends Lovers Chocolate by Alexander McCall Smith (of No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency fame):  This is the second book in the series, and I liked it more than the first one.  The first one was pretty good, but it felt slow and a bit frustrating as it set up the universe and characters -- and because these books do not have the powerfully driving plot that many mystery novels have, you kind of notice the slowness of this set up period more than you might otherwise.  One of the absolutely most astonishing aspects of this book was finding out that our protagonist is about my age, perhaps a couple years older.  I really thought from the first book that she was meant to be significantly older -- at least 50.  (It is quite possible that her actual age was mentioned in the first book as well and that I simply did not notice it.)  Are other people my age that old seeming in their thoughts?  I don't consider myself in the "still waiting to become a grown up" category, but...damn.

Also, I do not understand the universe in which this woman is the editor of any kind of academic journal.  She is not herself associated with a university, and it's not clear whether she even has a PhD (though I do recall that she studied philosophy at Cambridge as an undergrad so perhaps I overlooked mention of her graduate training).  I sort of hope that we're not to believe that she does because I find her introspection on these ethical issues of a whimsical, armchair variety (you know, the kind that is understandable by most of us, and engaged in by many of us, who are not philosophers), not the rigorous thought of a trained philosopher (though perhaps even trained philosophers are kind of fluffy thinkers much of the time, I don't know).  The author himself is a professor -- of law, though, for what that's worth -- so it's not like the basics of academia are unfamiliar to him, which makes me wonder if I'm just not getting something here.  Although there is an obvious appeal to making "editing a journal of applied philosophy" the part-time job of this independently wealthy person, it's enough of an unlikely scenario that it gets in the way of my ability to just flow with the story.  It's like....well, a lot of these kinds of mysteries have this problem.  For example, the number of female amateur sleuths in novels who, here, in the modern era, support themselves financially and with a reasonable degree of comfort and security running brick-and-mortar knitting shops must well exceed the total number of profit-making knitting shops in the entire nation.  But I am able to say, well, OK, right now I only have to accept that this one woman is making a going concern of this one knitting shop -- I can ignore the implausibility of the numbers generated by the genre en masse.  The free market is the free market -- weirder things have happened than some woman made money selling yarn.  But I struggle to accept this woman's job as part of Academia As I Know It.  Perhaps later books in the series will help backfill some of her story (e.g., her own academic credentials/past research/publications that allow her to stay connected to academia as an independent scholar) and present details that make it easier to accept her career.  I will give them that chance.

Anyway, I think this series would be especially appealing to those who like their cozy mysteries light on serious crime but with an extra helping of philosophical musing. 

Divergent by Veronica Roth:  Of the books I read during this period, this one clearly wins the "Book Easiest to Write A Huge Amount About" award.  Now that I've read, fairly recently, the Hunger Games series, the Uglies series, and the first one of this series, I'm starting to see a lot of commonalities in the young adult science fiction genre, so many aspects of this book just did not feel as fresh to me as they probably would have without all of this exposure.  That being said, even though I did not enjoy it as much as Hunger Games, it's definitely the most obviously thought-provoking of the lot.  One of my first thoughts being, Oh good!  Somebody is finally taking that whole Harry Potter Sorting Hat thing and putting real stakes on it.  I mean, was I the only person who felt that was an idea that somebody absolutely had to exploit?  (I have no idea whether Roth was consciously aware of this similarity or not when writing the book, but as a reader, I'd been hungry for something of this nature.)

And of course, I was hugely interested in seeing a little bit into the mechanism that was used for this sorting...and I was actually rather disappointed in it.  From reading the author's commentary, I got the sense that she has a background in social psychology, etc., (and that does shine through many aspects of the story), but man, the methodology used to determine which faction someone belongs in was just.....Not Good.  By which I mean, it is vaguely possible that you would be able to classify someone's personality using this methodology more accurately than throwing a 5-sided die, but I'm not sure.  (Indeed, you'd be much better off just assigning everyone to the faction that they grew up in.)

The way the sorting happens is that people are placed in a simulation and have to make a small number of choices/take a few actions, then based on this behavior, they are placed in one of the 5 factions.  So I put myself into this scenario:  I enter the simulator and am immediately given the choice to take either a knife or a hunk of cheese.  There is no context to this; there is no clear sense of what your choice means or what you'll be facing next.  How do I decide?  You know, maybe I've just read too many Choose Your Own Adventure books and played too many role-playing/adventure games, but I would probably choose the item that I felt would make me the most ready for anything -- it's really a defensive kind of choice, and that's not how I live or want to live my life.  I actually expected, given those particular choices, that I would be facing a Mean Rat in the next phase and that they were going to see if I tried to kill it with the knife or tried to placate/distract it with the cheese.

The protagonist has difficulty deciding between the knife and the cheese...and this is apparently a surprising and uncommon reaction within the universe of the book.  Really?  Of course, my dad would find it nearly impossible not to make a joke by cutting the cheese with the knife and probably then eating the cheese.  (And there is No Way my dad would be alone in this.  We're talking about teenagers here, peeps.)

This is a really bad way to go about categorizing people.  The simulator doesn't measure someone's preferences for a knife versus cheese, let alone an affinity for what those items are supposed to represent -- it's looking at a very, very short series of choices.  And looking at a person's choices without any context this way is pretty useless.  It's also pretty damn stimulus-specific.  I would choose a knife over cheese (I don't really like most cheese, and I wouldn't eat it without a lactaid enzyme except under dire straits, and I'm probably too fucking nervous about this test to be hungry, and I sure hope I'm not going to be here so long that I get hungry enough to eat this cheese), but would I choose a knife over chocolate?  Would I choose a knife over a fuzzy bunny rabbit?!  And what do the choices mean?  Maybe I should take the knife so I can kill anything dangerous the bunny and I might encounter, or at least keep it busy so the bunny can get away.  Or maybe I should take the knife so I can kill the bunny.  WTF??

I also found it insanely laughable that it was somehow the rare person who had matches to multiple categories (Oooh, you're a dangerous divergent!) -- perhaps in addition to her study of social psych, she should have looked into the personality literature as well because I don't think personality typologies (for all their intuitive appeal) have fared well in recent years.  I think most of us would look at the 5 options and feel that we have strong associations with more than one of them.  It's not just Harry Potter and Whatever-Her-Name-Is that have complex personalities.  (I'm a lover and a fighter, watch out!)

This makes it sound like I disliked the book, but I didn't -- it's just that clearly this whole ridiculous personality measurement/social classification system hits me where I live.

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber:  I'm really running out of steam now, so it's good that this book does not involve psychology, academia, or anything else that is likely to push my buttons.  It's a literary thriller of the "Somebody has discovered a lost play by Shakespeare!" variety, but it's much more about characterization than it is about plot.  (That's a good thing because I think the mysteries must have been pretty un-mysterious given how easily I figured out what was going on behind the scenes.  The protagonist does at least acknowledge that he was a major doofus not to figure these things out for himself.)  The main character is kind of a dick, but that's okay -- I'm cool with the anti-hero thing.  I enjoyed the relationship between two of the characters but was somewhere between disappointed and astonished that they ended up staying together at the end, after the truth had been revealed.  Whaaaaa?  The guy is a fucking tool, and I don't have much time for that.