In an effort to maybe, perhaps, hopefully get caught up on all the books I haven’t reviewed, I’m planning to start doing mini-reviews every couple of weeks for books that I read but didn’t have much to say about. If you have more specific questions about any of this week’s titles, leave them in the comments!

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.  Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them. (Source)

It’s hard for me to tell you how much I just adored the audio book of Ready Player One. I loved it so much that I bought a copy of the paperback after listening because I wanted to add it to my permanent collection. The two worlds that Ernest Cline creates — the dystopian world of the future, and the virtual world inside The Oasis — are vivid and exciting. Wade, our scrappy protagonist, is the kind of character you can’t help but root for (even when he’s being overwhelmingly dumb). There are a few slightly-too-convenient plot points, but I was just so entertained by this book that I didn’t care. Wil Wheaton was a fantastic choice as a narrator — you can tell how much he loves the book and is geeking out about it as he narrates. I’m not a video gamer, and I’m not familiar enough with the 1980s to get many of the geekiest references, but neither of those things detracted from my experience with this book. I highly, highly recommend it.

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway? Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact. The Last Policeman presents a fascinating portrait of a pre-apocalyptic United States. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares. (Source)

Listening to this audio book make me realize what a weakness I have for fiction that sits in a place somewhere between literary fiction and genre fiction. The Last Policeman has a lot of the character-driven, introspective sorts of features that you get in literary fiction because of the overarching problem of a world-ending catastrophe, but adds a whodunit murder mystery on top that keeps our main character and the story from bogging down too much in those philosophical questions. Winter’s writing is quite lovely — very noir, without being over-the-top — and Peter Berkrot’s narration captures the gritty idealism that drives Hank Palace to keep on keeping on in the midst of the end of the world. This is another audio book I highly recommend.

Disclosure: I purchased both of these books through Audible. 

Title: Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years
Author: Geoffrey Nunberg
Genre: Nonfiction
Year: 2012
Publisher: Public Affairs
Acquired: From the publisher for review consideration
Rating:

Review: When someone cuts you off on the freeway, what’s your first thought? When you see Donald Trump on television, what’s the first word you think to call him? When a politician is exposed as a hypocrite, for whatever reason, what’s do you turn to your friends and exclaim?

For me, it’s usually something along the lines of “What an asshole!” And I’m not the only one, at least according to linguist Geoffrey Nunberg. As Nunberg, a scholar in UC Berkeley’s School of Information, explains in the introduction of his new book Ascent of the A-Word:

Every age creates a particular social offender that it makes a collective preoccupation — the cad in Anthony Trollope’s day, the phony that Holden Caulfield was fixated on in the postwar years — and the asshole is ours. … The advent of the asshole is reflective of very sweeping revisions in the personal and social values that we all share, even if we sometimes find ourselves railing about them. The point of this book, more than anything else, is that the ascent of the A-word and the attention it gets says a great deal about who we’ve become.

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I’m feeling a little bit disjointed today, so instead of a single-idea Sunday Salon, I have a few random tidbits to share:

• The boyfriend and I are moving again next weekend… again. I thought when we found the house we’re renting now, we’d be able to stay for most of our time in small town Minnesota, but earlier this summer our landlord decided to sell the house. It hasn’t sold yet, but we decided we couldn’t stay in a place where we’d have no guarantees after our original lease was up. It’s been a stressful time, trying to decide if we should move and then where to go — the rental market in this area is terrible — but I’m glad it’ll be done with in a week.
• I should have been packing yesterday, but instead I spent a good chunk of time getting some of my books cataloged in LibraryThing. I’ve wanted to do it for awhile, but only recently figured out how to use the barcode scanner app on my phone to add multiple books at a time. I’m about a third of the way done, and so far it’s been relatively painless.
• This New York Times article about services that sell huge volumes of book reviews is distressing. This quote, in particular, made me bang my head on my desk: “Reviews are the smallest piece of being successful … but it’s a lot easier to buy them than cultivating an audience.” Luckily, Chrisbookarama has offered up The Fake Review-inator has a funny antidote. You could also visit this website to help you calm down (Spoiler Alert: Manatees!).
• I have a new Audible credit, and I have no idea what to use it for. Any recommendation for fabulous audio books that will make packing our house less tedious?
• This week, I finished reading The End of Men by Hanna Rosin, which I enjoyed and disliked all at the same time. In talking with the boyfriend about it, I realized that maybe my dislike came from me expecting the book to make different or more expansive argument than it was trying to make, so I have to unpack those thoughts before I can write a review.
• Over at Book Riot, I wrote a little bit about the book that has been on my To Be Read pile for the last 12 years. Any guesses which book?

That’s all I’ve got today. Back to the packing… I’m hoping to get up two posts this week before potentially being offline for the weekend while we’re moving and getting settled in the new place. Happy Sunday!

Title: The Gospel According to The Fix: An Insider’s Guide to a Less Than Holy World of Politics
Author: Chris Cillizza
Genre: Nonfiction
Year: 2012
Publisher: Broadway Paperback
Acquired: From the publisher for review consideration
Rating:

Review: What are the top ten issues that candidates should be discussing during this election, but won’t be because of the economy? How is Ron Paul’s run for president like Friday Night Lights? What are five ways we could reform Congress to make it work better?

If those questions or their answers intrigue you, then The Gospel According to The Fix by Chris Cillizza is a book you should get your hands on as soon as you can.

The Gospel According to The Fix is Cillizza’s basic primer to the world of national politics by Chris Cillizza, a contributor to The Washington Post’s political blog, The Fix. Cillizza is a political reporter for The Washington Post and writes their political blog, The Fix. And his credentials don’t stop there – Cillizza is also a contributor to MSNBC as a political analyst and has written for The Atlantic, Washingtonian, and Slate. The guy clearly knows his stuff, and that shows on every page of this book.

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