Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen

Soooo I pretty much just want to give a copy of this book to every kid I know when they graduate from high school, because damn. For all that I've generally been aware that US history as it gets taught in school is pretty sterilized and white-washed, I didn't realize the extent to which it was patently falsified (including falsification by selective omission). Thankfully I got the AP course in high school, which at the very least meant they had to give us a real text book and not the "Texas Edition" used in the regionally-approved mainstream course (I am not kidding about this), so it seems like my class was maybe marginally more thorough & accurate than what a lot of kids get. Still, I lost track of the times over the course of reading this book where I found myself going, "Wait, what????" & backtracking to be sure that I'd actually read what I thought I'd just read.

All the inaccuracies & omissions Loewen discusses are backed by primary sources & fully documented (it's nice to be able to verify the lies the textbook-industrial complex has raised you on), and he invites you to delve deeper & do your own research if you feel disinclined to take him & his sources at their word. In addition to plain old getting the facts wrong, Loewen discusses the general narratives (sketchy at best, flat-out offensive at worst) to which textbook authors seem to be committed, and how the errors and omissions are carefully selected to prop them up. He also demonstrates how the tone of history textbooks tends to be authoritative and objective, completely understood and agreed-upon and ready for students to memorize, rather than full of controversies and open questions that they might explore and draw conclusions from on their own.

So yes. If you feel like your education in US history was a-okay, I invite you to take a read. It will likely change your outlook not only on the past but on the present & future as well.

Declare, by Tim Powers

Tim Powers weaves a supernatural tale around the real-life facts of the British double agent / defector Kim Philby. (Philby's story was also the inspiration for John le Carré's spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which I can also recommend.) I am always impressed by espionage / political intrigue books because of the sheer level of detail & complexity that the author has to keep track of; Declare is even more impressive because so much of it is historical fact. However, I'm not always great at following it myself & frequently have to go back & re-read in order to be sure I really understand what's going on.

The writing is strong and the characters are convincing (particularly Andrew Hale; nothing sells FUBAR like a super-spy scared shitless); in particular, the supernatural parts are done in a kind of "matte finish" that makes them feel eerily believable. In summary, I'd say it reads like Indiana Jones meets 007 meets Tom Clancy.

Declare, by Tim Powers

Tim Powers weaves a supernatural tale around the real-life facts of the British double agent / defector Kim Philby. (Philby's story was also the inspiration for John le Carré's spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which I can also recommend.) I am always impressed by espionage / political intrigue books because of the sheer level of detail & complexity that the author has to keep track of; Declare is even more impressive because so much of it is historical fact. However, I'm not always great at following it myself & frequently have to go back & re-read in order to be sure I really understand what's going on.

The writing is strong and the characters are convincing (particularly Andrew Hale; nothing sells FUBAR like a super-spy scared shitless); in particular, the supernatural parts are done in a kind of "matte finish" that makes them feel eerily believable. In summary, I'd say it reads like Indiana Jones meets 007 meets Tom Clancy.

MaddAddam (MaddAddam #3), by Margaret Atwood

I always get nervous about the last book in a trilogy, but she did an amazing job with the wrap-up. Without spoiling anything, I can only say that back stories were filled in, characters beautifully fleshed out, loose ends artfully wrapped up, and the main story brought to a satisfying and poetic close. In retrospect, it's clear that the main themes of the series are storytelling, different viewpoints, whether a given action is heroic and noble vs utterly monstrous, and the interplay between all of those things. We do get a little bit of the ambivalent-relationships-between-women motif that is sort of MA's calling card, but it's side story rather than really thematic. Incredibly well-done.

The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam #2), by Margaret Atwood

In a way, "Year of the Flood" begins & ends in the same place as Oryx & Crake, but follows a different set of characters. The storytelling is still poetic, tight, & well-paced, & the characters are still dynamic & three-dimensional & interesting. I like how the difference in the POV characters is reflected in the narration between the two books (and within Year of the Flood as narration alternates between two very different characters). An excellent follow-up to O & C; I'm looking forward to seeing how she wraps it all up in MaddAddam.

Oryx & Crake (MaddAddam #1), by Margaret Atwood

I loved this book, which is not surprising since I have loved just about everything by Margaret Atwood I've ever read. It's slightly off the beaten path for her in that it doesn't deal primarily with complex / ambivalent / dark relationships between women, and I have to say that post-apocalypse sci-fi is definitely at the bottom of the list in terms of genres I'd expect her to try. Still, if someone was going to spin a completely original and unique post-apocalyptic yarn full of dynamic and interesting characters and masterful writing and straight-up nail it first time out of the gate, I'm not surprised it was her. Fantastic. Could not put it down.

Data: A Love Story, by Amy Webb

I enjoyed the hell out of this book. After two weeks of Perdido Street Station, I really needed to read something lighter and more simply entertaining, but still smart and interesting. "Data" totally fit the bill.

Quick summary - After months of truly horrific online dating & feeling pressured by her mother's terminal illness to find a life partner as soon as possible, newly 30 Amy Webb threw herself into "hacking" J-date using an awe-inspiring level of math, science, and color-coded spreadsheets (not to mention countless in-real-life hours spent remaking her physical appearance & presentation). To the shock of her skeptical friends and family, her experiment found her the perfect "1500 point" husband within a few months. (Not a spoiler - she includes the happy ending in the introduction.)

The topic may sound superficial, but if you are at all a mathy-codey-hacky-data-loving type of person, you very well may find a lot of her story fascinating. Absolutely, online daters will probably find it even more interesting (and informative), but I enjoyed it purely based on its existence at the weird intersection of statistics & sociology. No doubt, her methods struck me as creepy, desperate, unbalanced, and back-away-slowly-inducing at first, but then again, she got exactly the result she was after on the first try, and as her now-husband of eight years explains at one point, part of what charmed him about her extreme and highly calculating approach was that she'd figured out how to "out-think the problem" -- to dissect and then re-make a broken system in a way that worked for her, rather than just living with the default set-up when it clearly was not getting her the results she wanted.

Just a few quibbles:

• I am not generally someone who is bothered by cursing, but seriously. Every third word in the book is "fuck" / "fucking" / "fucker" / etc. It's the one thing that makes her writing come across at times as amateurish.
• Some of the side stories feel like unnecessary digressions. For example, I'm not sure how the story of how she went clothes shopping & ended up having a melt down in the Banana Republic dressing room really forwarded the main narrative.
• While the emphasis of her story is on the shrewd collection & analysis of online dating data & makeover of her digital self, there is some discussion of the real-life transformation she overtook as a result of her findings re: what the type of men she was interested in meeting found attractive, which in & of itself is fine. What felt a bit awkward to me was all the detail about how much time & money all that cost her -- a new wardrobe, six days a week at the gym, three days with a personal trainer, a $300 haircut, walking into a high-end cosmetics store & basically saying, "I need all-new make-up; I have lots of money to spend & am free til two," etc. Those details seem potentially alienating to the hopeful online daters out there who have to go to actual jobs for 8-10 hours a day & don't have oodles of disposable income.

Still, it was fabulously entertaining & educational, a quick & easy read, and I would imagine *incredibly* informative to anyone who's gotten disillusioned with the online dating scene.