OK I just need to finish this off.

Gentlemen of the Road:

Or “Jews With Swords” as was apparently Chabon’s working title. Swashbuckling adventure set on the silk road during the middle ages. I imagine the effect is similar to Isable Allende’s Zorro book which has been on my stack for about a year now. Simple high quality fun.

The Invention Of Morell:

Brilliant Borges-esq sci-fi mystery. A fugitive hides out on an island pacific, but is he alone? The story’s bizzare sequence of events seem like they must be some kind of allegory or dream or hallucination or something but Casares brings it all imaculately together with a single simple conceit. Like Lost would be if it really, really good instead of glossy nonsense.

World War Z:

The format, a series of interviews with surivors fo a zombie apocalypse is a neat idea from a practical point of view: Brooks gets to tell his grand story without worrying to much about providing a linking narrative arc or developing characters. Unfortunately this framework doesn’t hide the authors deficiencies, the format should offer pace, jumping around from one place to another but instead it just serves up a mix of undifferentated anecdotes. None of the characters are believable individuals, at best they’re crude stereotypes, and the attemps at political commentary are just a bit embarassing. The horror passages are weak too; basically comming accross as descriptions of bits from horror films.

Why do so many people I like think this is a good book?

Bait and Switch:
Barbara Erenreich goes undercover in the shadowy and often desperate world of the unemployed American middle class. This zips along at a fair old pace but never falls into the classic American journalist book trap (Stephen Johnson, Tom Standage etc.) of being just a list of stuff. There’s a story and a point to the interviews and the statistics and Erenreich is not affraid to offer an opinion, though she never comes accross as opinionated. It’s really good, compasionate, funny and occasionally, necessarily ultra-bleak.