Inferno by Dan Brown

This book felt light to me. It opens in medias res, and I spent the first two-thirds thinking the trail was too easy to follow. Of course, there were twists, and it was not quite as simple as it first appeared, but when all was said and done, it all wrapped up in a pat way that seemed more in service of making a point about the world's population and offering a magic bullet to put the world right than in telling a really good story. All of which is not to say that the ride wasn't a lot of fun--I enjoyed reading about the art and the architecture and following the story. This book would be a great beach read.

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.

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 Edge of Doom by Amanda Cross

This book seems to overstate its sense of urgency both in its title and in its jacket copy to me. Kate Fansler suddenly discovers one reason that she may be so disconnected from her brothers is that she had a different father (proven via DNA testing, no less!). But she quickly discovers that her father has plenty to hide in his past. This mystery certainly helped explain Kate's character, but it was less good as a mystery.

Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History by Ian Baucom

This monograph creates an archive out of absence, specifically the absence of a response to Granville Sharp's letter to the Lords Commissioners protesting the court decision to treat the events on the Zong (that is, the captain's decision to throw 133 slaves overboard in order to conserve water supplies) as an insurance case rather than murder. Baucom looks at the way the Zong case has echoed through history (in politics, art, literature, and philosophy), how it reflects the growth of a system of finance capital that not only treats people as objects, but as objects whose loss can always already be theoretically present insofar as they can be insured, and how it shows us the intersections between a trans-Atlantic slave economy and modern systems of capital. The book is theoretical and dense. It draws connections between Benjamin's Arcades project and Arrighi's models of cycles in addition to drawing on theorists as diverse as Adam Smith and Slavoj Zizek. The contents of Granville Sharp's letter (and indeed, a straightforward account of the Zong case) are delayed and secondary to meditations on the ethical implications of how we understand history and of the connections between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and finance capitalism. While there are parts of the book that seemed opaque to me, its overall argument was eloquent and persuasive.

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.

Poster Art of the Disney Parks by Daniel Handke and Vanessa Hunt

I really enjoyed this book, which is mostly various posters designed for Disney theme parks since 1955. The vast majority of the posters are for Magic Kingdom-style parks (a few from Epcot and DHS sneak in)--the chapters are by MK land and then Disney's California Adventure and Tokyo DisneySea. There was a fair amount of information on the parks, the poster design process, and the printing techniques. I learned a lot--but the book made me eager to return to a Disney theme park!

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

This book is a beautiful meditation on art, memory, and forgiveness after great inhumanity. Judge Teoh, the narrator, returns to Yugiri, the Garden of Evening Mists, where she served an apprenticeship many years ago. As she sets down the paths her life has traveled, and attempts to bring the garden--the only Japanese garden in Malaysia--back to order, some of the mysteries of the past are unraveled and she is forced to reassess the choices she's made. I really enjoyed reading this book--it's beautiful and mysterious, and it really makes me appreciate how little of the history of Southeast Asia I know.

New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time by Thomas Bender

This book gives a comprehensive intellectual history of New York City. Bender contends that intellectual life in New York has always been different from Europe--so if we look for European structures, we'll be disappointed. Instead, he traces three types of intellectual involvement: civil, literary, and academic. He contends none of these structures has been completely successful in developing intellectual life, and that a city that could embrace all three would be ideal. In this book, Bender thinks a lot about the relations between intellectual life and democratic society, ultimately contending that intellectual life has to be open to all and a vibrant part of city culture for the optimal situation. I found this book very diligent in providing convincing evidence to support its arguments. The three trends are very clearly defined, but the book could trace their relationships to each other a little more clearly.

A King's Ransom by Jude Watson

This book continues the adventures of Amy and Dan, but with a twist. While Vesper 1 still wants them to continue stealing things that lead to a series of medieval maps, Vesper 6 and her twin brother have decided to beat Amy and Dan to the hunt in order to improve their status in the Vesper organization. The book also reveals that the Cahills' father was a Vesper. The story is fun if you don't think too hard about the premise. I also like that the story explores to a certain extent questions of right and wrong (Amy and Dan are doing some terrible things to save their family--but the family code is that they can only do it themselves).

The Medusa Plot by Gordon Korman

This book pits Amy and Dan Cahill and their remarkable family against another group, the Vespers, who kidnap a number of Cahills in order to motivate Amy and Dan to steal a painting from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I appreciated that Dan's friend, Atticus, pointed out the morally questionable nature of the Cahills' actions. I like all the history that's worked into these stories, although they rely a lot on technology to get them out of tight situations.

Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphor, and Media into the Twenty-First Century by Marina Warner

This book investigates representations of the spirit and the supernatural, starting early but really hitting its stride around the early eighteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. It considers representations of the self and a spiritual presence in material (wax, cloud, photographs, film) and immaterial (ether, air, ectoplasm) forms. The book casts a wide-ranging net to gather its evidence--we see examples drawn from art, literature, material culture, and many other places. Generally it argues that despite our increasing understanding of the processes in the world and our increasing secularization, we still need, perhaps more than ever, representations of spirit. I thought the last chapter, on zombies, was particularly effective. The book had a refreshing tone--it treats moments of spiritualism (like knocking, expulsion of ectoplasm, etc.) as moments to be studied for their interpretative value, not as phenomena to be definitively proven or disproven.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

This book tells the sprawling story of a family with secrets by means of extreme compression. It takes five moments in the history of the related characters and through these five extended scenes shows a lot more about the personal histories and secrets entangled in those moments. At times the book was a bit too glib--even though the characters are faced with ambiguity, the reader knows enough more about what happened and what the characters were like to draw her own conclusions, which works against the book's carefully constructed demonstration that our history remains partially inaccessible and unknowable, even as we're living it. It was definitely interesting to see the characters' assessments of each other and their relationships changing as time passed. Unfortunately Paul Bryant, the biographer trying to figure out the real story (or dig up the dirt and hidden secrets) of the Valance family, whose scion Cecil was an up-and-coming poet until he died in the trenches in World War I, was extremely annoying to me, which colored my enjoyment of the second half of the book. Overall, it does present a world you can get lost in and a plausible and entertaining story.

The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston by Maurie McInnis

This book looks at material culture in antebellum Charleston to understand the complex political and social system in place there at that time. McInnis reads the architecture, art (ranging from public sculpture to privately-owned paintings), and furniture and decoration of the buildings in the city to show both the elite's reliance on and attempts to control enslaved peoples and the enslaved people's resistance (mostly in the form of carving out space for a private life). This book supplements its readings of material artifacts with both primary written accounts and secondary, scholarly accounts. Overall it is an intriguing book that paints a compelling portrait of antebellum Charleston without romanticizing its history.

Legends II: New Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy edited by Robert Silverberg

I didn't enjoy this collection quite as much as I enjoyed the first one, but it was still enjoyable. It contained the following eleven short novels: "Homecoming" by Robin Hobb, "The Sworn Sword" by George R. R. Martin, "The Yazoo Queen" by Orson Scott Card, "Lord John and the Succubus" by Diana Gabaldon, "The Book of Changes" by Robert Silverberg, "The Happiest Dead Boy in the World" by Tad Williams, "Beyond Between" by Anne McCaffrey, "The Messenger" by Raymond E. Feist, "Threshold" by Elizabeth Haydon, "The Monarch of the Glen" by Neil Gaiman, and "Indomitable" by Terry Brooks. I particularly liked the stories by Hobb (you see a character really find herself and change from an insufferable prig to a strong heroine), Martin (Dunk and Egg at it again), Card (I need to read the full Alvin Maker series), Silverberg (great story about art and poetry), Haydon (nice twist at the end), and Gaiman (again, I need to read American Gods). I thought the others were OK, though I couldn't really get into the Feist story, I had read the Gabaldon before, the McCaffrey story felt a little fluffy, the Brooks story felt way too much like you needed familiarity with the full world, and the Williams story was a little far out there for me. Overall I enjoyed the collection.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Although this book is not my favorite work of Joyce's, I enjoyed reading it this time through. Like his more complicated books, Portrait makes more sense if you pick a few threads to follow through the book like lifelines. I traced naming in particular this read through. Although Stephen Dedalus can be self-centered and downright irritating at times, the book does a lovely job representing his consciousness.

The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough

I enjoyed this book which is written in smooth and lucid prose. It tells the stories of nineteenth century American expatriates in Paris. The book focuses on Americans who traveled abroad to study and practice art, literature, and medicine. There's a fair amount of French (and Parisian) history and of the biography of these men (including Samuel Morse, James Fenimore Cooper, Elihu Washburne, Mary Cassatt, Charles Sumner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Singer Sargeant, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson). I particularly enjoyed reading of Washburne (the American ambassador) and his heroics during the siege of Paris. I couldn't quite decide if I liked the logic that ties everything together: American expatriates in Paris; I'm not sure if I quite think it holds everything together. Still, there's a lot of good history in this book.

Pym: A Novel by Mat Johnson

This book revisits the story of Edgar Allen Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Chris Payne, a college professor who has recently been denied tenure, discovers a narrative written before the Civil War by a free black man--Dirk Peters--and discovers that the story Poe told in Pym was true, if not entirely accurate. Payne convinces his cousin, friend, ex-wife, ex-wife's current husband, and two explorers to join him on a trip to the Antarctic to look for the Tsalals. Obviously, things don't go quite as expected, and the crew finds themselves taken prisoners by the Tekeli-li. While the story is very entertaining in its own right, I found it most valuable for its reflections on race in America in the current day--and the way academics deal with race.

Moon Palace by Paul Auster

There is something both absurd and beautiful about this book, whose protagonist, Marco Stanley Fogg, after the death of his uncle (his only remaining family) drifts through college and life, eventually wasting away to almost nothing, until he is saved by a girl he's met once and his college roommate, and takes a job that leads him (temporarily) to the family he didn't know he was missing. There's a great deal of playful imagination in the book, and the West looms large--the same sort of West that fills the middle chunk of Willa Cather's The Professor's House. The image of the moon, too, fills the pages of the book. The tone of the book was very inviting; I could barely stand to put it down. I am looking forward to reading more of Auster.

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

This book gives a fictionalized account of Alexis de Tocqueville's trip to America. The book opens with an account of it's hero's (Olivier de Garmont) childhood, which reminds me a lot of Marcel's childhood in Swann's Way. Garmont's parents decide to send him to America to investigate the penal system (but really to escape the wave of revolutions and anti-aristocratic feeling in France); a British man working for a friend of Garmont's mother accompanies Garmont as his servant. Despite the vast differences between the two men, they form a friendship, as each learns more about America itself. This book is quite enjoyable.