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As the first step in researching my next book, I decided to study the competition. Or at least the people who sometimes hang out with the competition. I wanted to read a bunch of books that one might tag as “business advice,” or “career self-help,” or “here’s what good business people do, you moron.” Here’s the list I ended up with:

1. So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
2. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg
3. The Alliance by Hoffman, Casnocha, and Yeh
4. Zero to One by Peter Theil
5. Give and Take by Adam Grant
6. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
7. Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things by Brian Burke
8. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris
9. Superbetter by Jane McGonigal
10. Friend and Foe by Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer
11. Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg
12. Choose Yourself by James Altucher
13. The One Minute Manager
14. Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
15. Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried and David Hansson
16. Faster Cheaper Better by Michael Hammer and Lisa Hershman
17. StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
18. #Girlboss by Sophia Amoruso
19. Mindset by Carold Dweck

Plus there were these that I had previously read:

1. Drive by Dan Pink
2. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
3. Getting Things Done by David Allen
4. Quiet by Susan Cain
5. Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
6. The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell
7. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
8. Work Rules! by Laslo Bock

I confess, there were some of these I didn’t read cover to cover, because I didn’t need to in order to get what I needed. But I always read at least a third, sometimes more, and often the whole thing. The idea was to try and understand why the book was popular and what lessons I could take from it. After my time with each, I wrote up a summary in Evernote that at least answered these questions:

• What is the one sentence summary of this book?
• How is it organized?
• What does it do well?
• What does it do poorly?
• What does it do that others don’t?
• What does it do that others also do?

This post will try and summarize what I’ve learned and the lessons I’m going to take with me. There was a lot of variety in these books. They ranged from barely a book at all (The One Minute Manager and Strengths Finder 2.0) to academic (Give and Take) to thinly veiled polemics (Zero to One). There was no one meaningful thing that all the books did. I didn’t like all the books –a few of them I really hated– but they all had something to teach. Here are some lessons I’ve extracted, even from the ones I hated.

Flip Conventional Wisdom

Books like So Good They Can’t Ignore You and The Alliance were attention getting because they took conventional wisdom and told you it was dumb advice. “Following your dreams is a super bad idea” or “People who put others first are more successful” are the kinds of messages that stand out. Find ways to do this wherever I can and maybe make it the hook for the whole book. “Obsession with video games makes you more effective at work” for example.

Tell Stories

I knew this one already, but it bears repeating. Some books, like Smarter Faster Better and Friend & Foe were a pleasure to read and made their points stick because they embedded them in stories about people. Often these were taken from headlines and sources that could be researched. Other books, like Lean In and Superbetter were more autobiographical and relied on personal experiences. Both are effective and I should strive to use stories with every major point and lesson.

Be Prescriptive, Be Specific and Be Practical

Look, I hated The 4-Hour Work Week and wouldn’t trust its author any further than I could throw him, but I have to admit that part of its success is because it offers specific advice that anyone can take. It points you to websites, gives you exercises, feeds you scripts, and tells you exactly what you can do. The advice in the book is actionable, if nothing else. Others, like Never Eat Alone and Superbetter, do this as well if to a lesser degree. They tell you what to do, and not just in a final chapter about “Putting this all to work” or what not. It’s baked into every page.

This give the book a feeling of utility and practicality that probably make it easy to recommend, talk about, share, and reference. Like you’ve gotten something out of your purchase beyond entertainment.

Be Evidence Based

Here’s one thing that most of the books definitely did NOT do. Some, like Zero to On, #Girlboss, and Remote – Office Not Required, and The Alliance get by on their authors’ platforms and credibility. They’re big names and they just tell you what they think and people buy the books because of the author. Others, like Choose Yourself and The 4-Hour Work Week play more off confidence and assertiveness and, frankly, telling you what you want to hear.

But for my goals, I’m better off learning from books like Smarter Faster Better, Give and Take, Friend & Foe, and Mindset. These books reference research, science, and experts in order to support their lessons and theses. And they stay readable while doing it because the research is used to support the story, not the other way around. In reality the research dictates the content of the book (because they aren’t just making things up) but it feels like the stories come first and the research explains them. It’s a good trick and one that I should learn.

Cram In Some Asides, Exercises, and Callouts

Several books made use of little inserts that broke up the chapters and made the books interesting to skim and look at. #Girlboss for example, had “Profiles of a Girlboss” vignette where the author had co-workers write brief bios of themselves. Remote had little cartoons, though the authors WAY overdid it. Superbetter had “quests” and exercises. The 4-Hour Work Week had all manner of exercises and callouts featuring websites and other tools. Faster Cheaper Better desperately needed callouts and bulleted lists to replace its giant paragraphs.

I think this feature helps make the book less tedious and probably helps sell it if someone is flipping through it. It’s also a great place to hit on the “Be prescriptive” advice above.

Be Cheerful, Be Optimistic, Be Fun

Even when I recognized the content of a book to be dreck (e.g., Choose Yourself) I found that I would still respond favorably to some part of it when the tone was happy, upbeat, and conversational. Many of the books like The 4-Hour Work Week and #Girlboss leaned heavily on this and were engaging reads as a result even if they were deeply flawed or lacking upon deeper analysis. They told personal stories, made jokes, spoke directly to the reader, and were generally optimistic about how things were going.

This is one of my strengths as a writer as well (or at least it has worked for me) so I should continue to lean on it when possible.

Focus

The books I responded to the most were ones that had a focus, a topic, a thesis, or some other strong organizing principle. There has to be a lesson or a problem or an insight to build the book around. Some didn’t do this at all. Choose Yourself was meandering. Mindset had a clear topic, but it went nowhere with it. Superbetter meandered without a strong structure. Zero to One seemed like a conclusion in search of an argument. And even Smarter Faster Better had a structure and topic that it failed to deliver on –it instead just gave us isolated vignettes that don’t live up to the topics of even individual chapters.

Other books, however, gave you a strong question or topic and then delivered. How has the employer-employee relationship changed? The Alliance. How do you improve and use your professional network? Never Eat Alone. When should you cooperate and when should you compete? Give and Take. What are your strengths and how can you build on them? Strengthsfinder 2.0.

Every part of the book should clearly relate to its point and its thesis.

So these are some of the major lessons I learned. I think it was a worthwhile exercise for a (relatively) new author and I hope to keep this all in mind. If nothing else it gave me a good sense of the competitive landscape and will help with the book proposal. And I picked up a few really good books along the way.

You all, I think this guy may be a sociopath. And he wants me to join him.

This book is exactly what the title suggests: a (supposed) guide to working just a few hours per week and joining what the author Tim Ferris calls “the new rich.” Ferris sets out to teach you how to “DEAL” –Define your financial goals, Eliminate stuff that will interfere with them, Automate income, and Liberate yourself to travel the world. Yeah, it’s that kind of book.

I was grossed out right off the bat. Ferris starts off with the hard pitch, telling you about all the ridiculously wonderful things he has done in his life, how much money he has coming out of his ears, and how super awesome things are for him –and how he can help you have a super awesome life if you’re pumped up enough to do what’s right for you and seize this amazing new opportunity! Everything about the tone of it made me think I was listening to the Shamwow guy strut around on a stage.

He tones it down after the introduction, but it’s clear that Ferris is recommending a “take care of numero uno at all costs” kind of approach to life. In fact, he comes across as a straight up scumbag in places and he has credibility problems as a result. He often tells you to only look out for yourself and break certain social contracts, especially as they relate to work. Some examples:

• Negotiate a work at home agreement, then travel the world when everyone else thinks you’re working at home.
• Avoid getting assigned work or interacting with people by “training” coworkers to not interact with you
• Hold back your best work performance for your work at home days so it looks like you’re more productive when working remotely
• Start a side business on company time
• Test market a new product by placing Google adword ads, then just take people to a “page under construction”
• Use loopholes in rules to win –-in his case, a kickboxing tournament in China.

And so on. One of the net results of all this is that I don’t trust him at all and would want nothing to do with him if I met him.

But then again, maybe trust isn’t a necessary ingredient here. Instead, Ferris heaps on more advice, tips, tools, testimonials exercises, and product recommendations than I’ve seen so far in this exercise. The book aims to be a practical workbook for achieving the lifestyle the author (supposedly) has. It throws so much against the wall, everyone is guaranteed to find something useful or at least thought provoking. You will find something to try or change, and you will be told exactly how Ferris thinks you should do it. I, for example, actually took away a few new ideas for time management and prioritizing work. I also found his chapter on oursourcing tasks to virtual personal assistants in India fascinating and practical in a crazy, outside the box kind of way.

So despite sounding like the lovechild of motivational speaker and the ShamWow guy, you can’t say that Ferris is just throwing around empty platitudes. The book is replete with practical, clear, and doable advice and tools. Along with the “get rich easy” promise, I can see why this made the book so successful.

I admit it: as someone who blabs on about the psychology of video games and as someone who is an industrial-organizational psychologist, I should know more about gamification. But I don’t. So I picked up this book.

Burke isn’t a psychologist or a game designer. He’s an analyst with Garnter, a very large marketing research and consulting company. He specializes in gamification, which he defines as the the application of game mechanics and experiences to motivate people. GAMIFY is meant to teach you how to create a gamified experience for employees, students, customers, or anyone else with a common interest or goal. The front half of the book goes through each of these groups and explains how gamification has worked for them, citing examples and case studies. The back half of the book details Burke’s 7-step process of “player experience design” that aims to create an effective gamification …thing. I still don’t know what the propper noun is here.

I think the first section is just full of example after example of gamified systems, and it could have been pared down quite a bit. At just 162 pages the book is already slim –probably intentionally so– but I think much more attention could have been given in the back half to the nuts and bolts of gamification. Burke lists out a lot of sub-steps and topics to keep in mind, but their treatments are always cursory –just a paragraph or two each. The book would have benefitted from exercises, case studies, tools, forms, and other practical aid. As it is, it’s a primer on gamification at best.

Burke also eschews any discussion of how fields like psychology, communications, economics, human-computer interaction, user experience design, or even game design could help the gamification process. Probably because he’s not trained in any of them. Nor does he really engage in any kind of evidence-based or data driven argument, which IS odd for someone with his background. The book would have benefitted from it, and I’m left dubious about what is truly understood about gamification by those with an empirical bent.

Finally, and this probably stands out to me because of who I am, but I’m kind of irked about how little Burke understands video games and how dismissive he is of them. I understand that the goal of gamification is NOT to turn something into a video game. But I think successful video game (and board game) design has a lot to illustrate about effective gamification. Instead, the author just seems to hand wave them away with generalities like “Video games have a constant barrage of lights and sounds that make playing the game an exciting experience.” Which depicts only a surface level familiarity with games and a limited understanding of why they are appealing (hint: it’s not just the pretty graphics). Indeed, perhaps someone should write a book about what video games can teach us about effective gamification…

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself is a blog turned book that aims to explore many of the common biases and errors in decision-making that have made the field of behavioral economics so active in the last few decades. Author David McRaney confesses to not being a psychologist (hey, it happens) but he does a pretty darn good impersonation of throughout the book’s 48 chapters, each of which is dedicated to one reason why you may not be so smart about day-to-day decision-making as you think.

In general, McRaney does a good job of making each one of these 48 topics accessible. He doesn’t talk over a general audience’s head, yet he usually manages to work in descriptions of the research and scientific evidence that each chapter’s topic is predicated on. And it helps that by and large each topic is something that most readers can relate to –remembering childhood events, procrastinating, deciding what brands to buy, affirming your political beliefs, responding to authority figures, arguing with idiots on the Internet, and the like. The book’s schtick is that through its revelation of common errors and biases related to these topics it constantly posits that you aren’t as smart or rational as you might think, because you are no exception to the effects described. Each chapter tries to hook you with declarations of a common misconception and a related truth. It’s the kind of “See, science and psychology matter to YOU and your everyday life” stuff that I love reading about. You should find something interesting in every chapter.

The other thing that makes the book approachable is that McRaney isn’t afraid to use informal language and specific cultural references. The book is replete with references to Battlestar Galactica, World of Warcraft, and other touchstones. It also contains occasional phrases like “this is bullshit” and “what the hell?” and other casual language that makes it feel like you’re listening to someone go on about this stuff over a beer or a shared commute. It’s a friendly and refreshing tone for which I’d like to thank not only the author for offering, but also his editor for allowing.

The book’s roots as a blog also show through in that most of the chapters are very short –some are in fact as brief as a healthy blog post, it may not surprise you to find out. On the one hand, this can be nice because you can nibble your way through the book, working through one or two of the chapters at a time if you’re not up to taking huge bites. It also makes the book easier to use as a reference later if you want to return to one of the errors or biases.

On the other hand, though, I think the book often misses the opportunity to tell stories that give some more context and meat to the phenomena it describes. Other books in this same vein that I’ve read have walked the reader through narratives about either how the researchers developed their ideas and experiments, or told stories about real-life applications of the biases and mental hiccups they describe. In his book How We Decide, for example, Jonah Lehrer frames a discussion about dopamine predictions by describing how a Lieutenant Commander in the British Navy reacted to odd readings from his radar display and barely saved many lives in the process. There’s none of this gripping storytelling in You Are Not So Smart, nor does McRaney do anything along the lines of tying several related topics into one larger concept, like maybe how our instincts to preserve our self image worm their way into an astonishing array of daily decisions. This book is clearly a collection of blog entries based on a bullet list of topics. And while that has its appeal, if McRaney does a follow-up work I’d probably enjoy it more if he really took his time to research some interesting background material and weave a bigger picture out of all the individual strands.

Okay, let’s say you’re a child of the 1980s, and like a lot of people who were teens during that unprecedented explosion of pop culture you’re thoroughly steeped in the lore of 80s American movies, television shows, video games, music, and toys. NOW, imagine that all that trivia is key –almost literally– to proving not only that you weren’t wasting your youth, but also to defeating evil, getting the girl, and acquiring massive riches. That’s pretty much the nerd fantasy behind Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

The setup for this dystopian future science fiction novel is that James Haliday was a game designer and fan of the 80s who was equal parts Howard Hughes, Richard Garriot, and batcrap crazy. He was also the pro generator of “The OASIS,” a virtual reality game into which most of the world has retreated in the face of global calamity. Right before dying, Haliday announced a massive quest within his creation, challenging players to find a series of secret challenges within the virtual universe. The winner gets control of the OASIS as well as several billion dollars. Enter our hero and narrator Wade Watts, a.k.a., “Parzival,” a destitute youth who educates himself on everything the 1980s had to offer in order to find Haliday’s Egg before an amoral megacorporation can do the same and seize control of the virtual paradise.

The main hook in Ready Player One is how it revels in 80s pop culture. Absurdly enough, Parzival has to quote lines from Mathew Broderick movies and master multiple classic coin-op arcade games in order to find and beat each of Haliday’s challenges. In addition to these central plot points, conversations between fellow egg hunters (or “gunters” for short) are thick with similar references. Having come of age in the 80s I’m in the sweet spot for this kind of thing, and I recognized and appreciated almost every single reference. I smirked, for example, when one character snapped at another with “Tell the truth, Claire!” even when the author provided no other context. And I not only vividly remember the classic Atari 2600 game Adventure, but I had myself found the game’s easter egg after which Haliday’s entire hunt was patterned. So as a literary device, this stuff is fun if you’re the kind of person who will appreciate it. If you’re not, I’m not so sure.

On the downside, while the OASIS makes a vivid and flexible backdrop against which you can tell a story, Cline seems to over rely on it a bit in terms of plotting. Improbable plot devices constantly popped up in the form of overly convenient “artifacts” or super-items within the game, which highlighted cracks in Cline’s otherwise good plotting. Need a way to make the bad guys totally invincible for just long enough to make things dramatic? Artifact. Need a way to save the hero from certain death? Artifact. Want a humongous showdown between protagonist and antagonist? Two artifacts. It gets a little obvious at times, as does Perzival’s uncanny knack for possessing whatever area of obscure expertise needed to beat every challenge.

That said, Ready Player One is generally really readable and a lot of fun if you’re in the target audience. Things zip along quickly in the vein of a classic quest tale, which is exactly what the story is. Cline also taps into many themes that are relevant to anyone living nowadays –things like online privacy, escapism, commercialization of art, the value of offline friendships, obsessive fanboyism, and the like. These topics are handled pretty well in the context of the larger story, and Cline makes some insightful and interesting statements.

So I’d recommend Ready Player One if the gist of it sounds interesting to you. The “everything that was nerdy about your youth is actually awesome and totally key to domination of your opponents” plot is a bit eye rolling, as are the transparent plot devices, but it’s still fun and it’s neat to see someone throw references to things I loved as a kid like they were so much party confetti.

Jame’s Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is kind of all over the place, as you might expect given its nebulous subject matter. The author intends to do pretty much what the subtitle suggests: review the history of information as a concept, dive into the scientific field of information theory, and ponder what recent volume of information flow means for us as a society or even as a species. As such, it’s a mix of history, hard science, and even a dash of speculation.

My favorite parts of the book were the history of science bits, which Gleick presents after what seems to be exhaustive and comprehensive research. He traces the evolution of information as a concept, starting around the invention of the written word, then working up through the time line and pointing out landmarks like the printing press, the discovery of logarithms, the telegraph, Morse code, the telephone, the computer, the Internet, and the like. Each of these is discussed in the context of how they shaped the abstract concept of “information” and all led to the inevitable creation of a theory of information. I also loved learning about all the people behind these inventions and discoveries, and Gleick delivers the best bits of biographies on characters like Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace (nee Byron), Claude Shannon, James Maxwell, and more. These parts of the book were replete with fun facts and amusing stories, like the woman who tried to “send” a bowl of sauerkraut by the newly invented telegraph or how the editors of the Oxford Dictionary decide what new words to add each edition. It’s all very educational and made me think of information and the information technology around me in new ways. I always love learning about visionaries and how they made their mark.

The sections on the formal theory of information, though, were also enjoyable, but to my layman mind they were sometimes dense to the point of being impenetrable. Gleick doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff, and his discussion of information theory is flung far enough to cover many fields: mathematics, cybernetics, quantum theory, psychology, electrical engineering, chemistry, astrophysics, computer programming, genetics, history, cryptology, and more. And while Gleick doesn’t revel in jargon and he makes many attempts to keep things at a high level, much of the book is unavoidably scholarly. Still, I was usually able to follow along with the WHAT he was getting at, if not the HOW. And it really is impressive how widely he casts his net.

And I’m glad I did. While some of the finer points may have been lost on me, I enjoyed the history of science treatment and got enough of it to get a feel for the shape of information theory and how the general concept of information has evolved and been revealed through advances in philosophy, science, and technology –what it is, how it’s measured, where it goes, and what its properties are. It’s heady stuff, but fun to think about.

As far as character archetypes go, we’ve seen the likes of Locke Lamora before: clever, dashing, silver-tongued, and full of tricks, he seems to have been put together with the same blocks as Robin Hood, Brer Rabbit, and most Errol Flynn movie roles. To have him as a character in a psudo-fantasy novel, then, is pretty interesting. Lamora and his partners in crime fancy themselves as diciples of the god of thieves, and they live simply to be “richer and cleverer than anyone else” with stealing from the rich being more the point than actually being rich.

The Gentleman Bastards, as his gang calls itself have a penchant for long cons and elaborate schemes that require more acting and subterfuge than swordplay. Their playground is the city of Comorr, which author Scott Lynch presents as a kind of Rennaisance Vennice built on the bones of a mysterious, powerful, and completely abandoned civilization. There’s magic, but outside of a kind of supercharged chemisty called “alchemy” it’s very powerful but extremely rare. This all gives Camorr and the larger world a very refreshing feeling to it, as it’s unlike any other high fantasy I’ve ever read.

One of the things I like about Locke as a character is that Lynch manages to avoid the tempting trap of making him too good at what he does. Cleverness can be a superpower that trumps any danger if the author sets his mind to it, and then it becomes as boring and trite when the hero thinks or talks himself out of any peril as it would be if he just punched everyone super hard. While Locke and his companions clearly think fast on their feet and show a preference for extreme preparation in whatever they attempt, it’s often not enough. Things go badly, they make mistakes, complications arise, and unfortunately runs of bad luck do happen. What’s entertaining, then, is watching the characters react to these challenges and seeing them suffer setbacks and maybe even complete defeat.

The first book, The Lies of Locke Lamora is definitely the better of the two I’ve read so far. The plot is sufficiently complex given the nature of the characters, but it hangs together well and lets us enjoy seeing Locke and his partners wedged into a tight spot before finally wiggling their way out. It also presents a nice mystery or two and lets us learn about the workings of Comorr’s gangs and culture in the process. It’s entertaining all the way through.

In contrast, the second book, Red Seas Under Red Skies, almost stalls out in the beginning. It opens with Locke and his companion Jean attempting a casino heist that seems like something more out of an Oceans 11 movie than a fantasy novel. Sure, this isn’t a typical fantasy setting, but the “Sinspire” casino still seemed a little too incongruous for my tastes. From there the plot gets messy quickly and it seems like Lynch is picking up and abandoning threads all over the place just to have fun with them but not putting enough thought into a coherent narrative. This changes towards the end of the book when all the major parts of the plot mostly come together, but it’s still nowhere as nearly done as in the first book.

So, if you fancy a fantasy page turner with a unique setting and a likeable but flawed trickster hero, give the first book a try. There are more in the series coming, with the third book supposedly due out later this year.

“Robots go bananas and kill everyone” isn’t exactly a novel idea in science fiction, but it stands as a sturdy foundation for Daniel Wilson’s book Robopocalypse. You know the drill: Man creates artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence takes one look at man and says “Yeeeeah, I’m gonna just go ahead and destroy all humans.” Man proves resourceful, spirited, and difficult to eradicate. Time travel may or may not be involved.

What’s interesting about Robopocalypse is that instead of focusing big battles a la Terminator, it lingers on the beginning of the “New War” and shows how the AI serendipitously gains control of all the mechanical and electronic do-dads that near-future humanity has grown reliant on and turns them against their creators. So not only are there service robots choking people to death, there’s killer vacuum cleaners, smart cars that deliberately crash themselves (and their human passengers) into one another at high speeds, buildings that turn off the lights and lure people into elevator shafts, and the like. Much like World War Z, each chapter in Robopocalypse is a vignette following a wide cast of characters who aren’t even connected until the book’s climax. These early to middle parts of the book were the most enjoyable to me because they showed a wide, creative array of ways that things could go south if our machines turned against us.

Unfortunately this also works at cross purposes with the rest of what you want out of a novel. Robopocalypse is epic in nature –it chronicles the near annihilation of humanity– but it feels very cursory. The rapid-fire chapters cover a lot of ground, but Wilson doesn’t take any time to build characters or develop them beyond crude, stunted arcs. I don’t really feel like I know or care about any of these people –or robots, for that matter. The book is full of great gaps in its plot so that it lurches forward months at a time, robbing the reader of getting to know the characters or get a feel for what they’re going through. It’s all punchline and no setup.

The nature of the chapter vignettes also fails in that each one is supposed to be told from the perspective of a given character, but the author often tries to convince us that the action is being reconstructed by an overall narrator who sees gleans events from a variety of sources such as security cameras, eyewitness testimony, and other recordings. This conceit simply doesn’t work in that you’re always conscious of an omniscient author cramming things together in a way to tell the story he wants to tell. There’s no “found footage” feel to the narrative like I think he was going for. Instead you just have to decide to go with it, but roll your eyes a little while you do. Worse, the characters often don’t sound like what you’d think they’re supposed to, like the frozen yogurt employee who throws in just a few too many similes and colorful turns of phrase when supposedly dictating his eyewitness testimony to a cop.

So, it’s unfortunate that Robopocalyse wasn’t better written, because it has some neat ideas that could have stood some fleshing out. It feels like a book that should be three or four times longer than it is, given its desired scale and large cast of characters.

Continuing to try and work my way through John Steinbeck’s novels. This short work bears a lot of resemblance to Tortilla Flat in that it’s largely devoid of plot and focuses on a group of loafers and bums, and it’s kind of funny in places. Cannery Row has a bit wider scope, focusing as it does on the community near a fishing cannery in Monteray, California. I’m not sure of the timeframe, but I’d guess that like other Steinback books it’s set in the early 20th century. The bums in question here are the residents of “The Palace Flophouse and Grill,” a former fish meal storage hut. Like the paisanos in Tortilla Flat, the Palace’s inhabitants are possessed of skills and philosophy but are lacking in ambition. Instead they just choose to take things as they come and enjoy life. Their outlook largely mirrors the first half of the novel.

This changes a bit when they decide that they should throw a party for one of Cannery Row’s other residents, Doc, a kind of dour but helpful natural philosopher who collects and works with wildlife specimens. The book loosely follows the Flophouse crew and Doc as they screw up one party and try to make it right with another. Chapters are interspersed with little scenes and tales from around the community, giving us sometimes funny and sometimes grim views of everyone else in town. And for such a short book it has a wide cast. In addition to Doc and the Flophouse inhabitants there’s Lee Chong, the owner of the local grocery store, Dora Flood, the madam of the local restaurant/brothel, and assorted other neighbors. Through them the book hits on its themes of happiness, community, charity, and ambition.

And, like Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck’s appreciation for simple pleasures and the authentic, straight-forward people who love them shines straight through. You get the feeling that Mac and the others in he Palace Flophouse and Grill may not amount to much in life, but they’re doing a better job of living it than any politician, businessman, or person of would-be significance ever could. To me, though, the bums in Cannery Row were much more likeable than those in Tortilla Flat –they’re lazy and they may steal on occasion, but they’re more honest about it and don’t go through the (admittedly amusing) mental and philosophical acrobatics needed to justify their actions. They just do what they do, and they care about the other people in their community enough to put up some effort. They seem like nice fellas.

You know Tina Fey, right? Writer and host of Weekend update for Saturday Night Live, actress and producer on 30 Rock, and reluctant Sara Palin impersonator. Bossypants is the result of the “hey, I should write a book!” urge that people like her get, and lucky for us it’s as funny and well written as we could want. The book is autobiographical in nature, and follows the typical template of starting with her childhood, moving through adolescence, then young adulthood, early career, then current day. For some reason I thought the book was going to deal more with motherhood, but while that particular topic is present, it’s no more so than others.

As you might expect, those other, accompanying topics are slapshot and almost random, and the book reads more like an extended blog than any kind of memoir. You get stuff on her dad, the time she spent surrounded by gay teens in a summer theater camp, her early days at SNL, her time with an improv troop, her wry description of a magazine cover photo shoot (probably my favorite chapter), her honeymoon, and others. But that’s cool; I certainly wasn’t looking for or expecting any kind of coherent narrative or theme to tie everything together. I just wanted to be amused. And for those of us who are fans of 30 Rock, there’s a delightfully meaty serving of inside baseball (is that a weird mixing of metaphors?) that describes getting that show off the air and the creators’ pleased amazement over its eventual success.

And, as I said, it’s all pretty amusing. Fey has a great, wry, and piercing sense of humor that couples well with the familiar staple of self deprecation. She makes fun of herself constantly, seizing on her shortcomings and using them to bludgeon the reader into amusement. It also works in that once she does turn her sights on other targets, like answering particularly insipid reader e-mails and messageboard posts, she doesn’t come off as arrogant or superior. It’s more like she and the reader are sharing a sidelong “Oh my god, can you believe this?” kind of understanding. It’s also notable that this version of Fey is a lot more raunchy and lewd than you might be used to if you’ve only experienced her through the filters of network television. Not that it’s all potty jokes, but there’s a few pointed jokes about things like sex, religion, menstruation, and homosexuality. Oh, and there’s also an extended bit about jars full of urine, so I guess there is some bathroom humor too. But it’s all pretty funny.

Mockingjay is the third book in the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, in which our heroine Katniss Everdene finally comes into her own. Here’s the super condensed version of the setup: dystopia, dictatorship, reality TV, gladiatorial games, love triangle, rebellion. That will get you most of the way there, but you can read my review of The Hunger Games or Catching Fire for more detail.

After the filler that was book 2, I was glad to see Collins finally start running full speed with a theme she’s been hinting at since the first book: Katniss as an unwilling and even unknowing role model and inspiration to the growing rebellion in Panum. She, along with several of the other characters from previous books, find themselves in the middle of a full-out war against Capitol, fighting for their freedom by cutting off the city’s access to the goods and services it had traditionally plundered from its various surrounding districts. Only Katniss finds that life as a the face of a rebellion isn’t much better than the alternative, since she’s still being pushed around, still having to throw herself into danger to protect those she loves, and still finding herself literally on camera and fumbling to play a part for the sake of appealing to home viewers. It is, in short, very much like being in the Hunger Games. I thought this was pretty clever of Collins, and I really like how she plays with this intersection of celebrity, politics, and warfare, which you can see pretty clearly in the real world if you squint your eyes and cock your head just a little.

The author also continues to touch on other themes like responsibility, government control, sacrifice, the role of media in war and politics, class warfare, poverty, and the rest. And, of course, while things resemble the Hunger Games thematically, we are finally not watching Katniss and Peeta stomp around an actual arena. Instead we see Katniss and her crew engaging in real warfare, making hard decisions (or failing to), and living with the consequences (or trying to). The book does, in fact, get pretty dark at times. Like really dark. Like, dead babies dark. This is kind of surprising for a book found in the “Young Adult” section of the bookstore, but at the same time it gives it a sense of gravity that entirely fits with the themes being laid out.

I cannot, unfortunately, say the same thing about the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gail, but at least in Mockingjay I can sigh and remind myself of three things: 1) this is indeed a book written for young adults, 2) Katniss is supposed to be like 16 or something and most every one of us was also emotionally retarded at that age, and 3) it’s not nearly as bad as it was in the first two books. And, in the end, Collins decided to give us a payoff (or at least a resolution) that actually felt natural and deserved.

So, while Mockingjay wasn’t the novel page-turner that I found the first book to be, it was definitely better than the second and made for a nice cap to the series.

Catching Fire is the second in the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. I liked the first book pretty well, so I went right into this one. Unfortunately it’s really not anywhere as good, despite having a lot of potential. I get the feeling that Collins only had two books’ worth of story to tell with these characters in this world, but because she needed a trilogy she set out to fluff up this completely unnecessary middle book.

As you may know, The Hunger Games books are set in the post-apocalyptic world of Panum. The empire’s capital, Capitol, is nestled in the bones of North America and maintains a firm boot on the necks of 12 surrounding districts. Part of this bullying involves sending 24 youths to fight to the death until one is crowned victor of the annual Hunger Games, which are televised to both entertain the citizens of Capitol and rub it in the rest of Panum’s collective face. In the first book, our heroine Katniss Everdene survived the Games, along with her love interest Peeta. But the manner in which they did it required thumbing their noses at the Capitol, which had two unintended consequences that form the plot of Catching Fire. First, the other districts take inspiration from their defiance and start rebellions. Second, the Capitol exacts revenge against Katniss and Peeta by forcing them to fight in another Hunger Games.

So, yes. We get essentially the same plot as last time: Katniss and Peeta fighting in the Games and fumbling around with their emotions. Collins shows she still knows how to write a page turner, but it’s THE SAME PAGES WE’VE ALREADY TURNED IN THE LAST BOOK. I was really expecting Collins to run with the idea of the unintentional heroine who has to figure out how to lead a rebellion, as she had set up in the end of the last book and in the opening of this one. Instead we get that all delayed until the third book while we’re left to putter around in the arena again in an adventure made more dull by its lack of novelty.

I really do think that Catching Fire could have been excised entirely, with the few important bits (like Katniss’s victory tour and the instigations of rebellion) put into the beginning of the next book. It would have been much better than what we got.