Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin

This book was a vampire story with a difference: it does not center on a romantic relationship between a vampire and a human, but on a decidedly non-romantic partnership. If anything, the beautiful lady in this story is the riverboat they build together. I enjoyed the adventure, I enjoyed the friendship between Joshua York and Abner Marsh, and I loved the historical side of things (mostly set on steamboats plying the Mississippi river before the Civil War). Martin's writing feels fresh in the face of the way a lot of vampire stories go.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

This biography provides a comprehensive account of Walt Disney's life from his boyhood in Marceline, Missouri and Kansas City to his death in Los Angeles. I thought it was especially good on his work. At least according to this book, Walt was often the guiding force behind novel ideas, but it really wasn't his skill as an animator that launched the Disney empire--it was his ability to see the cultural potential for animations. I particularly liked the accounts of Disney's collaborations with Leopold Stowkowski and Salvador Dali. The book also portrays Disney as restless: once he achieved something, his interest often turned to doing something new instead of simply repeating his success (which is not, of course, to say that his companies didn't often try to capitalize on and reproduce these successes!). I have read that the Disney family (and particuarly Diane Disney Miller) disagree with the author's characterization of Disney (especially in his relationship with his wife), but I thought the book made sense and gave a persuasive reading of Walt's life and its meaning in the midst of the American Century.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

This book follows Lyman Ward tracing his own family history--in particular that of his grandmother, who was friends with a number of nineteenth-century movers and thinkers--as he's confined to his wheelchair and fighting with his son for his independence. But as Ward traces the events of his grandmother's life, the reader gradually becomes aware that the difficulties and challenges she faced (particularly in her marriage) have more than historical interest for Lyman. While the book never directly answers the question of whether history must repeat itself, it suggests that by delving into the past, we can learn to understand our worst tendencies, even if we can't overcome them.

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

This book is an excellent coming of age story with a good dose of fantasy. Although Sunny was born in the United States, her parents have moved the family back to their native Nigeria. Sunny doesn't fit in because she's albino...and because she's a Leopard Person (she can work magic, or juju). But with a serial killer on the loose, Sunny has to find out who she is and what she can do quickly. This book is full of Nigerian folklore, and a great story about finding your place and your identity. I hope Ms. Okorafor writes more of Sunny's adventures.

City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte

I liked this book more by its end than I thought I might at its beginning. It tells the story of Sarah Weston, a grad student in musicology, who receives a mysterious invitation to work at a Prague museum over the summer, cataloguing scores and papers relating to Beethoven, her musical hero. But even before she arrives at the castle, she realizes that all is not well. Most of the story was really clever and inventive. But there were a number of moments when I found myself rolling my eyes--many of the characters seemed to lack clear motivation, especially at first. I'm intrigued to see where the story goes next.

The New Mind of the South by Tracy Thompson

This book reminds me of both Bill Bryson and Tony Horwitz. There's the personal aspect--as if it's a memoir, but there's also the observer aspect--like many other books about the South, it's author has one foot in and one foot out. I found the writing clear and the thinking on questions Southern (such as: what does history mean? what are the costs of maintaining certain kinds of memory? what things do we falsely assume about the South?) engaging.

The American College and University: A History by Frederick Randolph

This book gives a wide-ranging history of higher education in the United States from its colonial beginnings to the 1960s (when the book was written). It works admirably to show the broad types of changes in higher education--its forms and priorities. Reading this book makes this much clear: while it's easy to look at the challenges facing higher education today and bemoan how much better things were in the past, higher education never faced a clear or easy road. Instead, its history is a long history of compromises and attempts to finance something that many people want but no one wants to pay for. While the book is good on broad strokes, it's less good at looking beyond the history of white men: education for women and education for African-Americans each have only one short chapter.

Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination by Maria del Pilar Blanco

This monograph argues that we should be more attentive to the ways in which modernity haunts American literature; not with outright ghosts, but with two landscapes that uncannily exist simultaneously. Blanco makes a point of noting that her argument is not a generic one: often these hauntings transcend the genres of the gothic (in US literature) and the magically real (in Latin American literature). Blanco starts with a chapter on the hemispheric imaginary of haunting, before moving into three chapters that read specific scenarios: desert hauntings, urban hauntings, and transnational hauntings. She stakes a position as a close reader of texts (and thus, less interested in placing them in their historical contexts). The readings were not bad, but I found the theory of haunting more useful.

The Novel and the Sea by Margaret Cohen

This monograph contends that fictions of the sea constitute a traveling, adventure genre that begins in the modern era with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. This genre challenges our dominant accounts of the formation of the novel: Cohen insists that we account for the sea adventure narratives of writers such as Defoe and Smollett, even though the adventure genre has been critically neglected. After Smollett, the number of sea fictions wane until the subject is adopted by James Fenimore Cooper. In part this decline may be the result of the incredible, but true, tales that were happening on the world's oceans. Like the previously mentioned authors, though, Cooper is not famous for his sea fictions (The Pilot and Red Rover) but his Leatherstocking Tales. These American sea stories became popular just at the moment that the craft of seafaring became obsolete, replaced by mechanical inventions (such as accurate clocks to measure longitude). Thus Herman Melville, Victor Hugo, and Joseph Conrad had the opportunity to use their sea stories to focus on other kinds of craft at the margins. Jules Verne, on the other hand, took the exploration of frontiers beyond what people were actually experiencing to what they could only imagine. Thus, Cohen contends, sea fictions are the root of today's science fiction. I found this book to be ambitious, but thoroughly researched, and I was ultimately persuaded by Cohen's readings and her contextualizations, that we ought to pay more attention to sea fictions as a genre. I thought her description of the mariner's craft in the first chapter was particularly useful.

The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beaumont

This novel is exactly the sort of novel I love to read: it's witty, self-referential, aware of its own status as a novel, and a lot of fun. Egon Loeser is the painfully self-absorbed anti-hero whose world is crumbling around him (he's an artist in Berlin in the 1920s)--but he doesn't see the political dangers because of his personal problems (an inability to get his show produced or to win over the charming Adele Hitler [no relation to Adolf]). He serendipitously leaves Berlin for Los Angeles (via Paris) chasing Adele, but he doesn't have any better luck in either place either with Adele or with his show. Yet, as the novel progresses, we learn more and more about Loeser's obsession with Adriano Lavinci, an Italian set designer who died in what is known as the Teleportation Accident (one of Lavinci's sets destroyed a theater in Paris). The novel teases readers: was Lavinci a theatrical genius, or a scientist centuries ahead of his time, or a magician? I definitely want to re-read this book; it may have been my favorite entry on the 2012 Booker Long List.

All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

This book provides three more-or-less well-developed biographical sketches of three women who traveled in similar circles during the years of modernism. It contends that in understanding the lives of these three women (Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland) we can uncover a feminine side to high modernism, which seems to consist of a writing side, a fan side, and a fashion side. But I don't think the book makes its case particularly well. Even though all three women knew each other, I had trouble understanding why we needed their stories to be told together. The biographies are certainly entertaining, I just am not sure the premise of the book holds together as well as it might.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

This book tells the story of a woman's life through the viewpoints of her children--starting with the twins who died young, and ending with a granddaughter. I loved the way each viewpoint expanded the story, so we could see Hattie's many different sides and her struggle to determine her identity in the face of the demands of her family. The book was lyrical and well-plotted. I look forward to Ms. Mathis's next book.

The Americans by Robert Frank

This book collects a series of photographs Robert Frank took while traveling across America on a Guggenheim grant in 1955 and 1956 and presents them in the style of Walker Evans's American Photographs: black and white, one photograph per spread. Even though there is an essay by Jack Kerouac introducing the collection, the photographs stand on their own. They are moving and beautiful and cover a wide variety of American life.

Diamonds are Forever by Ian Fleming

This book features Agent 007, James Bond going undercover as a diamond courier to trace a series of diamond thefts to its source. He finds himself in deep with an American gang. Felix Leiter returns as a Pinkerton agent. This book is similar to other Bond novels: a lot of good fun.

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

This monograph argues that American college students are not learning very much in college. Given the rising costs of higher education, and the increasing sense that a college education will open up possibilities to students, it's important to address this lack--although the authors hesitate to call it a crisis, because the US higher education system is not in danger of collapsing. The authors' conclusions are mostly based on a test called the College Learning Assessment, which was administered to students at twenty-four universities at the beginning of their freshman year (2005) and the end of their sophomore year of study (2007). The authors then used the data to assess how much the students learned. The book accounts for a wide variety of variables. It seems that the variable over which individuals have control (as opposed to, say, whether their parents went to college) is the types of courses they select: students tended to learn more in courses that required at least 40 pages of reading a week and at least 20 pages of writing over the course of the semester. I think this book brings up a lot of problems in higher education, and it motivated me to look more closely at course structure. I think a larger sample size (more universities) and studying a larger range of classes (not just the one cohort) would help reinforce the study's claims. I am also not entirely convinced that this test alone is a good measure of how much students have learned (though I admit that it is a step towards a solution of a tough problem).

Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

In this book James Bond seems more familiar, as he teams up with Felix Leiter of the CIA again to take on SMERSH agent Mr. Big, who has apparently discovered a pirate's hoard of gold and is smuggling it into the United States and using the profits to fund communist activities. This book is clearly of its time: the way that it uses dialect and talks about race sound off-putting. But, it's more the words than the content that's offensive, and the spy story is good. The pacing is improved since Casino Royale.

New American Gothic by Irving Malin

This book takes a psychoanalytic or Freudian approach to six American writers of the mid-twentieth century who produced gothic fictions: Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, James Purdy, and John Hawkes. Malin argues that these gothic fictions start with a narcissistic protagonist, disruptive to community. There are often family problems: self-absorbed parents and isolated children. Three typical gothic figures (the haunted castle, the voyage into the forest, and the reflection), which were "mere props" in British gothic, become more psychologically important--and show how these American gothic fictions reflect a community disrupted. This book could have been much more persuasive; it was organized thematically (chapters on the narcissistic self, the family, and the three images), rather than by author, and the argument felt rushed (although part of it may have been my lack of familiarity with many of the authors and titles discussed). I also felt the psychological approach was limiting--many times the analysis seemed forced or overdone.

Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader edited by Brian Carpenter and Tom Franklin

This anthology collects short stories, excerpts of novels, and excerpts of autobiographical writing from what the editors describe as the rough south or grit lit genre. Indeed, the anthology shines in its generic formulation: the introduction and headnotes to each story help clarify what rough south means. In this case, it's contemporary (so Faulkner and O'Connor aren't here), it tends to be white and poor and created by outrageous autobiographical stories instead of academic training (although some of the later writers have participated in various MFA programs and other forms of higher education--and this experience raises ambivalent feelings in them), and it often features a kind of toughness or grit. I enjoyed the stories; some were better than others, but it was a fairly engaging collection all in all. Harry Crews's and Dorothy Allison's writings stand out as gems.

The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons by Colin Dayan

This book examines the ways that the law has been used to manipulate the boundaries of the human--especially in the case of enslaved persons and prisoners. Dayan posits that forms such as zombies, ghosts, and dogs appear in literature and culture in response to the ways that the law can be deployed to take away someone's humanity. The book covers a broad time period (dealing with cases in US law from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first) and it combines sources and techniques from a variety of fields, including the law, history, and literature, to end in a stunning indictment of legal systems that take away people's humanity and an exposé of how the cruelest forms of punishment may be written off as administrative conveniences. All in all, a persuasive and useful monograph, and a model for a radical, engaged form of criticism.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

I found this book a little hard to pick up--but I suspect it would be much easier had I read the previous book, The Passage, more recently. There's a lot of shifting in time in this book: one set of stories shows the actions of a devastated few immediately after the virals escaped--a pregnant doctor so traumatized by the attack she sees that she loses her mind, a lone wolf's escape from the penthouse apartment he'd holed up in, a group's response to the camps the US government set up to control the flood of refugees from infected areas--and the other set of stories is set about one hundred years later, as Amy and a variety of characters from the first book, attempt to destroy the 11 remaining, original virals. Once I figured out what was going on, I enjoyed this book, which was well plotted and well written.