Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susannah Clarke

It took me a few tries to get through this. I don't ordinarily give a piece of contemporary fiction so many chances, even on audio, and I think I only did so with this one because the blogosphere has been resonant with vague enthrallment over it for the last several years, I'd heard the ending was to die for, and the story was in fact interesting enough. It was still far longer than it needed to be - forgivable once you plow through it, but likely to lose a lot of readers along the way.

How to describe it? Magic, mystery, mysticism, manipulation, madness, secrecy, suspense, surprise, jealousy, power, love, war - all in a tasty candy coating. And I mean that in the best possible way.

The ending was well done. Thought the actual events of the story become increasingly mystical and frenetic, the narrative becomes more and more measured, deliberate, disciplined. The final pages leave you wanting more - which is interesting, when most of the book's significant bulk leaves you wishing for a bit less.

The footnotes are a delight - but moving Brussels to Nebraska was sheer brilliance.

The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson

The first time I visited Chicago, I indulged my inner engineer by ending my trip with a visit to the Museum of Science and Industry. It's a science museum with a technology, rather than a natural history, focus, housed in a massive building on the south side. It has a German U-boat in a corner of the basement, a Boeing-727 attached to the balcony, and exhibits including a simulated tour of an entire Carrier Battle Group, a three-story sculptural interpretation of the periodic table, a technically sophisticated presentation of environmental science and technology, and, rather incongruously, a doll house.

The building itself is the last standing remnant of one of the most spectacular events of Chicago's past, the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition - the World's Fair - an event designed to assert America's place in the world, and Chicago's place in America.

Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City builds his story of "the fair that changed America," on the thesis that only Gilded-Age Chicago had the combination of gumption, civic pride and business acumen to create the glittering, six-month-long festival which would attract Americans from east to west and European royalty alike, introduce the world to everything from the Ferris wheel to the incandescent light bulb to shredded wheat, and inspire lands of fantasy from Baum's Oz to Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom.

Larson's story centers on Daniel Burnham, the fair's director. Burnham's influence as an architect is evident in Chicago's distinctive aesthetic to the present day, but in 1893 and preceding years, his life consisted of the near-impossible task of imagining, designing, and constructing, and overseeing the fair. The stakes were high - unless the fair easily outshone the 1878 Paris Expo, it would be considered a failure, and an embarrassment to the city and the country. Among Burnham's challenges: the bureaucracies of Chicago's business and political communities; a years-too-short construction schedule; budget constraints, exacerbated by a national recession; brutal Chicago winters; the burgeoning labor movement; and the egos of more than a dozen of America's greatest architects and designers, each with a hand in the fair's execution.

Burnham's fair covered 600 acres on the shore of Lake Michigan with an idealized city - the White City of Larson's title - of promenades, lagoons, gardens, fountains, and 200 Beaux arts buildings housing exhibits of culture and technology from around the world. Larson's talents of description are considerable, as the reader's most lasting impressions by far are of the opulence and immensity of the display. It's sometimes surprising how evocative prose of such precision can be. This passage imagines one visitor's first steps inside the massive Manufacturers and Liberal Arts building, the fair's main exhibit space:

A blue haze of human breath and dust blurred the intricate bracing of the ceiling 246 feet above. Halfway to the ceiling, seemingly in midair, were five gigantic electric chandeliers, the largest ever built, each seventy-five feet in diameter and generating 828,000 candlepower. Below the chandeliers spread an indoor city of "gilded domes and glittering minarets, mosques, palaces, kiosks, and brilliant pavilions," according to the popular Rand, McNally & Co. Handbook to the World's Columbian Exposition. At the center stood a clock tower, the tallest of the interior structures, rising to a height of 120 feet. Its self-winding clock told the time in days, hours, minutes, and seconds, from a face seven feet in diameter. As tall as the tower was, the ceiling was yet another 126 feet above. (p. 266)

Yet, Larson is sensible to the fact that the glories of the White City stood in contrast to the desperation of the "black city," the oppressive, industrial gloom that was the factories, stockyards, and tenements of surrounding Chicago. Interlaced with the story of Burnham's quest and triumph is the story of H. H. Holmes (the "Devil"), a psychopathic serial killer for whom industrial-era Chicago, with its constant influx of friendless farm girls seeking work, provided an endless supply of victims who would never be missed.

The pleasure of this book lies in its intricate detail and deliberate pacing, both direct testimonies to Larson's impressive and extensive research, and his talent for reconstructing a story. I was truly fascinated.

Much more information about the book, the Fair, Burnham, Holmes and Larson is available on the publisher's website. Additional information and images are available from the Illinois Institute of Technology Digital History Collection. Definitely check out the photos of the Fair - there's nothing like it.

The Know-It-All - A.J. Jacobs

This was a piece of fun I'd been putting off for a long time. In case you missed it, A.J. Jacobs, worried that the frivolity and pop culture-focus of his New York life (and of his job at Esquire) had placed him on a path of ever-increasing stupidity, spent 2002 reading cover-to-cover through the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Half-almanac, half-confessional memoir, this book records Jacobs's education and epiphanies, interlaced with his year's worth of office antics, family gatherings, and seemingly fruitless attempts to conceive a child with his wife, Julie. Along the way, he also mingles at a Mensa conference, interviews Alex Trebek, takes a speed-reading seminar, and wonders whether any of this was a good idea in the first place. Predictably, his daily hours of reading begin to color the rest of his life:

Dundatree
This the Britannica defines as "the mythical country where large-footed dictators come from." Huh. That's a strange concept, I think to myself. I've never even heard of it.

The reason I've never heard of Dundatree is that...I dreamed it. I read so much that it's invaded my sleep. I can't escape those endless descriptions and dates, that little ten-point Times font text, the fancy gold embossing, not even when I close my eyes. And now I'm making up my own facts, which I'm worried I'll confuse with actual facts. (p. 66)

Although it took me a few years to get around to reading this, the concept appealed to me the first time I heard about it. Reading the encyclopedia is the sort of thing I would do. I haven't done it, naturally, but as a child I could spend a few hours at a time perusing a volume or two of the (1987?) World Book. Another thing I had in common with Jacobs - I'm sure I spent a good portion of my childhood with an over-inflated concept of my own intelligence. (Actually, it didn't start out that way. For the longest time, I thought that breezing through school with perfect marks without cracking a book was supposed to be the norm, and that I just had the unusual luck of being surrounded by imbeciles. Then I figured it out. And relished it. A lot.) Still, a good part of me would like nothing better than actually to be smarter than I ever imagined myself to be.

A few more telling (and bookish) excerpts:

• "The United Nations defines a book as a text that is at least forty-nine pages long." (p. 26)
  
  
• "Rene Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes." (p. 55)
  
  
• "I like this image of Ezekiel and the scroll as a snack." (p. 89)
  
  
• "I like the story of how Marie de Gournay - a French intellectual at the time - fainted from excitement when she read Montaigne's work for the first time. She fainted from reading. What a great image. We've become far too jaded. I've been intrigued, bored, titillated, annoyed, amazed, but I've never even come close to fainting while reading any book." (p. 210)
  
  
• "I tell them they can write anywhere. If you have a job at the Gap, steal a few minutes and write some lines in the sweater section. No excuses. Hugh Lofting wrote Dr. Doolittle while in the trenches of World War I. Amid exploding grenades and gas masks and rats, he created a lovely little story about talking animals that he sent home to amuse his children. Be like Hugh. Write everywhere." (p. 334)