Week of March 18, 2007: Interesting New Releases

The New York Times Book Review

“You Don’t Love Me Yet,” by Jonathan Lethem - I haven’t read any Lethem in a long while and this one seems like a fast-paced one with fun subject matter. It may be better to go after “Motherless Brooklyn,” though, as most reviews consider that the magnum opus.

So it’s a surprise that Lethem’s latest, “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” which is about a rock band, is such a quiet little book. It’s slender, it’s quick, and it sidesteps the messy rock-novel challenge by focusing on an unassuming Los Angeles indie group that’s only on the cusp of success.

[...]

The plot is a preposterous but fun contrivance. Lucinda, the bassist in the nameless band, has just broken up with the singer, Matthew. At the same time that she’s navigating the awkward business of being in a group with her ex, she takes a new job, if it can be called that, answering phones for a conceptual-artist friend. The friend’s latest art stunt involves pasting stickers all over the city that are emblazoned with the word “Complaints?” and a telephone number.

Then We Came to the End, by Josh Ferris - I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover but you must admit this is an absolutely brilliant cover. The New York Times calls this first novel from Josh Ferris “acidly funny.” A fictional account of a turn of the last century advertising firm and its many corporate layoff victims that somehow maintains a real human element in the face of inhuman indignities and mind-numbing knowledge work.

Ferris, who once worked at a Chicago ad agency, is fluent in the language of white-collar wordsmiths under siege. [...] Above all, Ferris has a sixth sense for paranoia.

The Week (Reviews of reviews)

Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenburg - All of the reviews point the fact that this book is written well enough to appeal to non-technical audiences. I suspect if you can appreciate anything you’re not good at, you’ll find a way to appreciate those who actually do dream in code and spend their days in complex attempts to build something new.

Beyond 9 to 5, by Sarah Norgate - How are our conceptions of time changing our experiences of it? I may not work for a clock-punching firm but I certainly feel the political implications of time management pervasively around me.

The Economist

The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America, by Allan M. Brandt - I’ve always been intrigued that something which kills so many can be consumed by the willing.

Allan Brandt, a Harvard professor, has written a history of the cigarette in America. It runs from the automatic rolling machine, patented by James Bonsack in 1881, to last year’s retreat by the Bush administration in a case that was intended to make the industry meet the full cost to the federal government of treating tobacco-related illness. It is a remarkable story, clearly told, astonishingly well documented (“We know more about the tobacco industry than any other business in the history of business”) and with a transparent moral motif.