The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

This… is a good book.

Time Travel is tough, dramatically speaking. There are a few ways to write it, and it’s tough to do any of them well without flubbing up the logistics or the narrative.

Back To The Future, while entertaining, is full of enough plot holes to make it a swiss cheese you could drive several trucks through. It uses the convention that you can change past events, but it is dangerous to do so. (One wrong move, and you destroy the universe or at the very least, yourself.) They slap all sorts of inconsistencies and odd conventions to increase the drama, which just ends up in a holy logistical mess. I get frustrated just thinking about it, so I won’t anymore. (Twenty minutes!? Twenty minutes!? Marty gave himself TWENTY EXTRA MINUTES to try and prevent Doc Brown from being killed?! WHY NOT A DAY?! A WEEK!? A YEAR!!!??? Arg. Ahem.)

12 Monkeys subscribes to the “nothing changes” convention, where everything that has happened, has happened, and you can’t change anything by traveling in time, because you didn’t. I think this movie is good, and intellectually satisfying, but suffers a little bit in the narrative sense.

The Time Traveler’s Wife also subscribes to the “nothing changes” convention, but the narrative does not suffer in the least. On top of that, it is an engaging romance novel.

The story revolves around Henry and Clare. Henry lives a life where every now and again, against his will, he drops out of his present and lands in a different time and place for a while. The author explores just about every nook and cranny of the consequences of such a life, and how a romance could happen in this situation.

It is funny, sad, and captivating. I was concerned that this would be a Romance novel with some bad time travel thrown in, or a Time Travel novel with some corny romance thrown in, but it is neither.

And now I have to give it back to Stacey, who was in the middle of reading it when I swiped it from her nightstand. Sadly, I believe I lost her place, too. Damn.

America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction by the Daily Show Writers

A parody of a textbook that really sticks it to politics in general.

A little bit Onion-y, but with more actual information in it. I’d wait for the paperback, if you haven’t read it. Or borrow it from me.

How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God by Michael Shermer, 2^nd Edition

A wonderfully interesting book. I read and enjoyed his book Why People Believe Weird Things, which deals with Holocaust denial, UFO abduction, and the like. My good friend Joshua gave me a DVD of a presentation Mr. Shermer gave at a skeptics convention.

The book deals with why people believe in God (stated reasons, and evolutionary/biological reasons), and what it all means.

Lots of interesting insights, and some statistics, two of my favorite are:

* Most people in the U.S. who believe in God, state that they do so because they see evidence of God in the world around them (e.g. the world is so wondrous, someone must have made it)
* Most people in the U.S. who believe in God, state that they believe other people who believe in God do so because they need to. (e.g otherwise they would be filled with existential angst and not want to go on living)

Others:

* 96% of people in the United States believe in God (or some supernatural being).

* In 1776, 17% of the population of the U.S. went to church. Mid 19th century: 34%. Today: 60%! How can people say we’re going to hell in a handbasket?

* Genes appear to control 50% of your tendancy to be religious.

* There is a hormone or enzyme or something (can’t remember which) that controls whether you tend to see patterns where none exist. Skeptics have little of it, believers have a sufficient amount.

Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

An enjoyable read. It’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, except in Oz. I’d really like to go back and read the Oz series all the way through (I’ve only read the first two) to see how much of that history is woven into this story.

Also, this book has a lot more sex in it than the other Oz stories I’ve read, so there’s that.

Made In America: My Story by Sam Walton.

This one was on the list of Recommended Books for the Motley Fool’s Hidden Gems subscribers.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that this book has got a lot of “Aw Shucks” propaganda in it. Sam Walton claims he’s just trying to be a successful merchant by giving the customer what they want. He freely admits that he stole most of his best ideas from other retailers. The man brazenly walks into competitor’s stores with a tape recorder and a yellow legal pad and grills the workers on the floor about how they do things and how things are selling, taking notes all the while. He only mentions being caught once.

I’ll never know if he really believes all this stuff about doing right by his “associates” or not.

put a summary of our Salon on Saturday (ssss…) where we discussed Wal-Mart.

Two sides of the Wal-Mart debate are summed up by alternet and the Fool.

I came away from this book thinking that this is just a guy who is obsessed with the game of retail, and he was “good” at it. At the end of the book, I even detected a bit of nagging worry about what the legacy of Wal-Mart was going to be.

A lot of folks have criticized Wal-Mart for not giving back to the communities they are involved in. Sam’s response to this is that it is not the business of business to contribute to communities (“The business of business is business”, as the saying goes). His brand of contribution is to provide cheap pricing so that people can keep their money and use it to better their communities themselves. While one can argue (successfully, I’ll wager) that Wal-Mart hurts more than it helps in this regard (the low wages injected into the community and tax benefits Wal-Mart gets from local government offset the benefits of lower prices), the basic point he makes is worth considering: Why should a business be a force of charity? Should they not just lower prices and let people decide what parts of the community they wish to support with the savings?

At any rate, after reading how this organization works, I have a better idea why the Wal-Mart account reps in our company always have a worried look on their face.

And I also know I’m going to keep going to Kroger.

The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
by A.J. Jacobs

This was a gift from my mother-in-law for Christmas.

A darn fine one at that. It’s not amazing literature, but a nice story intermixed with interesting trivia.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 Edited by Dave Eggers and Michael Cart.

A fine collection of short fiction and essays, and some combinations.

There’s a piece titled My Fake Job about a guy who just goes into startup company and pretends to work there. It’s funny, but I read in the introduction to the collection that it is partially fictionalized. The piece originally ran in the New Yorker, but once the fictional parts were uncovered, they disowned the article.

Both of the collections (2002 and 2003) have a few Onion articles in them, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why the particular articles in question were chosen. Sure they’re good, but in 2001, they had that prizewinning post-9/11 edition with fantastic pieces in it. Perhaps they’d already gone to print by then. Or perhaps they’re trying to dig up unheralded pieces.

Hard to say. I’m out of the targeted demographic for this series (15-25 years old), but I still like it just as much as the Best American Essays series.