turns out all along that pi was just a hip shorthand for 'pisces'

So, I have an immediate answer whenever the paparazzi ask what most puzzles me about the gender I am not: "The whole horoscope thing." Of course, I understand that there are many women who reject horoscopes entirely, but still both personal experience, survey data, and perusal of differences in women's and men's magazines all indicate a much greater affinity for horoscopes among women than men.

Last night I was in Barnes and Noble and saw Danica McKellar's Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail. McKellar was Winnie on The Wonder Years. The book is supposed to help girls become interested in math. When the cover promised "horoscope inside!," I thought it was a joke, but, no, there is a section where she consults with an astrologer for a section about how the different astrological signs correspond to different math personalities.

The book cover also promises to answer "do you still have a crush on him?", but I didn't look to see what math it uses to determine that.

BTW, also in Barnes and Noble, a friend and I stood completely engrossed at the graphics novel table for a half hour reading the entirety of Robot Dreams, a book about a dog who wants a friend and so builds a robot, which he then takes to the beach where tragedy ensues. I think I'm going to go back and buy it for my coffee table collection.

they bother you up, your mum and dad. and if they don't get you...

...writing a book regarded as wildly brilliant in one's late twenties or early thirties surely will. Case in point: Douglas Hofstadter, whose I Am A Strange Loop I started reading last night. I remember reading Hofstadter's 1979 Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid when I was a senior in college and thinking this was the most miraculously clever book I had ever read in my life. Hofstadter says readers mostly missed the real point of GEB--regarding consciousness--and that he is going to take a second try at the heart of the matter at IAASL. He also says "I would characterize I Am A Strange Loop as being my own best shot at describing what 'the human condition' is." A hundred pages in, the human condition is apparently wildly disorganized and as much about indulging the self-admiration of Douglas Hofstadter as anything else. I remember there being a current of that in GEB, but now it has gone from current to a scorching thermonucleoelectro wave.

At least I think this is what's happened. I was a lot younger when I read GEB, and so I'm wondering if I would be less enamored of it if I read it now. This is when you know an Established Brilliant Person has really bothered up a book, when you not only want to discard the book at hand, but it makes you question the work that led you to conclude they were brilliant in the first place.

Update: OK, now I just went back and started looking at my copy of GEB and, particularly, my mark-ups in the margins. The new hypothesis is that I am misremembering GEB--specifically, I recalled the good parts of the book and forgot how many problems I had with the character of many of his arguments, even back them. Plus, the cleverness of Godel, Cantor, Turing, etc., rubbed off onto my assessment of him much more then than now, perhaps. It bothers you up, aging does.

his dark materials

My next-door colleague Gary Alan Fine has a restaurant blog, running for more than a couple years now. How did I not know this?

Also, in the annals of "Oops, I Did It Again," I hypothesized that I would have better motivation to perseverate while exercising if I listened to an audiobook rather than music. So I bought The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) on iTunes. I did listen to it while I exercised, then I also spent 9 more hours over the last two days not exercising but listening to it all the way to the end. (Very highly recommended, btw, at least in audiobook form.) Says a friend, "You should just decide you are only going to listen to it while you are exercising." Yeah, right. Those stories about women suddenly having the strength to lift cars off of their children are more plausible than the idea of me suddenly having a burst of will-muscle that would allow me to do that once I am into a story.

Still not as bad as when I sat around listening straight through to the final 12 hours of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix audiobook, my least favorite of the HP series anyway.

overheard plus

This one was actually submitted by JFW premium subscriber from Dwarfamor, ME:

"I really think I want to do something to make a difference this year."
"Me, too. The difference I am committed to making is that I'm going to go to my classes."

Another friend e-mailed me to say that her department has decided that this fall they will have a retreat. The idea being to talk about some larger and weightier issues about structure and collegiality. Northwestern sociology had a retreat this summer, although it was held in a conference room and was not that different from how you'd imagine a seven-hour faculty meeting. In the case of my friend's retreat, they are having a professional moderator--intriguing occupation, that--and they are talking about going to a lodge. As my friend was telling me about all this, I just kept thinking one thing: this is the best premise for an academic murder mystery novel that I have ever heard in my life. Sort of like Straight Man meets And Then There Were None.

am i the only one who cannot see a headline about hurricane humberto without thinking about lolita?

At least it's not Hurricane Humberto Humberto.

BTW: The Wikipedia entry for Lolita includes the following statement by Nabokov: "I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more." Nor, to my knowledge, are hurricanes named Lolita, although who wouldn't rather have their home wrecked by Hurricane Lolita rather than Hurricane Humberto? Anyway, if Nabakov's statement is true, I'm trying to think if there are other candidates for novels that killed off a first name?

concisio!

J.K. Rowling has said she might later write an encyclopedia, as apparently there are all kinds of interesting details and asides about the Harry Potter universe that have never made it into any books (HT: TS). Great, but if she thinks I'm going to stand in line and stay up all night just so I can read The Dean Thomas Backstory, she's got another thing coming. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia entry on Dean Thomas makes this revealing point:

In the UK edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Dean Thomas is not mentioned during the Sorting ceremony. He is, however, correctly sorted in the American edition as a Gryffindor, just after Harry and before Lisa Turpin. According to Rowling, her UK editor felt the chapter was too long and had to trim it down with any extraneous detail he could find.

I would love to see a special "Editor's Cut" of the last four books released. Didn't people do special cuts of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace that improved the pacing and cut out most of the Jar Jar Binks character? I bet Brady will have a nice taut rendition of Deathly Hallows when he translates the German edition into English.

buying harry potter seven

The plan was for a friend and I to get our wristbands around 7:30. Still, I was down by the Coop anyway--plus they promised gift bags to the first 500 people!--and so went around 5 to see what the line was like. The line started at the back entrance, and so I went out the back door. The line went down the entire alley, around the corner, down the street, around that corner, and around to the Coop's front entrance, a distance that Google Satellite suggests is maybe 800 feet.

Most of the queue were females between twelve and thirty. There were very few men over thirty standing by themselves in line, and those in line seemed far more embracing of their dorkitude than, for better or worse, I am. Even so, I stood at the end for a few moments, but then realized that standing in line was not only going to take a long time but that I was going standing behind this girl who was maybe a sophomore in high school and dressed in this costume that was a trollopy take on Nymphadora Tonks. Thus adding "feeling creepy" to the "feeling bored" and "feeling dorky" negative emotionality that standing in line would entail, I abandoned my place and went and got a chocolate-malt-with-extra-malt instead.

When I returned with my friend around 7:45, the line was about as long as it had been at 5. It also moved very slowly, in part because many people were holding places in line for friends, and by the end we did not get our wristbands until 8:45pm. The line had shortened by that point, but the people at the end still had a half hour if the line moved at the same pace. There were 3 people at the front who were looking up names on the list of reservations and handing out nametags, my own transaction was less than 20 seconds, and this went on for more than 4 straight hours.

The math suggested an extremely long wait at midnight. Rather than get in line at 10 and have to wait for 2 hours and then who knows how long, my friend and I decided to go to a bar and come back at 1. When we get there, the line was maybe 2/3 as long as the line we had gotten into for our wristbands. As soon as we got to the end, though, these South Americans came up with copies of the book that they said they had bought for $5 more at the Out Of Town Newstand across the street, which had no line and was even giving out free HP7 tote bags. We had nothing to lose and so went over there and, within five minutes, we were out of there with our books.

So all the reservations and waiting for line for wristbands and whatever was for naught, although I am always pleased when I recognize the sunk cost fallacy--in this case, not wasting more time in line just because I had already spent time to get my wristband--and do not succumb to it. Granted, it would have been far better to realize I didn't need the wristband, as the Harry Potter party that was being thrown in Harvard Yard looked great, with I'm sure the largest and most enthusiastic audience that Harry and the Potters will ever have for a show.

done!

I successfully procured my copy of HP7 at 1:01AM (story to follow later) and finished it at 10:07 AM. Encoded overall assessment, which does not include any kind of plot spoiler but does include a reader contest, below. To read, go to this site, paste the text in the input box, enter "jeremy freese" in the key box, and hit decode.

r jvpf jnbi m sgcyrpxw jensqim vvepgsx qeqfn sei tssuviv ewh wmrrd fyx gj clv wqtje lyfhaiu ezb kzjxq tjkvw. em, ne xijqb sw qk nfxi-xg-tjkv izhtpqifx, clzw iyx dc pwebx wehmwzxi tsxo fj ffj jivaib. lfaqtji, m hah clzrw rmv irvmwk nee ozzxi kecmjjmayfvc, ks r afyxb wrro ax jlvep mk fvhwv xj glacszb sf xqsji sptlrhk eusei. bylv-xs-hepi vrvmddirl gxych mjxf fi s qrwcimbnek ggqyeimems wsv ei bmegq rmzw mk xqi wmdqy sssc m qemi dcfu ew s rxr-rypgtsssc, euxysgem klel'w qeih rmw di xg fnpzihc lzzif xqiii iyx givzeyw r xtpjv lyfhaiu tmej jxvwxll klmr n wsyfh eiic fcizsyk ewh dimlivvmfk. jpjs, ffj sssc gxrkeulx nlel m aixedb fj xlw wrrxpq bzdfikx vsdizr ne xlw iwxzvq qjimik, ewcfrq umf vishb xyme ysu gef mmiexudd kli hepi eyyzji kilw jr fjrghzep bjf ovabgj uspd.

Update, Sunday 3pm: Gwen gets the contest question exactly right and wins the kewpie doll. The answer is "gwpa ggqnj ppnva bel, ycnj izo najozgt bdkcpj 'uxq pkold' wvz kwtag qpc xathrpael nvbpnijxa, fdc yvb lnmrzkdoza nqksqjx dnngggo pk ja kdn aewvu kb bdian swvxqao qj r zdaz." (Oops, apparently I might have done this backwards, so hit "encode" if "decode" doesn't work.)

not the sort of project i would take on, but it does have a certain recursive charm to it...

Brady is translating the German translation of a English novel back into English. I could see where this would be an interesting way to have a gold standard to compare one's translation skills to, but then again I guess that depends on how much one trusts the original translator.

The Traitor's Gate, btw, is one of 13 novels that Edgar Wallace published in 1927, two less than the 15 he published in 1926. I remember reading somewhere that at the height of his career he had periods of dictating a book a week.

Update: The Wikipedia entry for Wallace is a good yarn in its own right. And, according to it, it's a book a weekend instead of week.

preliminary result

While the sample size is still small and thus conventional standards of statistical significance have not been reached, early indications are that, if one defines "effectiveness" as the indication that one has successfully made one's point, then saying "If you hear any Harry Potter spoilers and tell me, I'm going to be very annoyed" is less effective than "If you hear any Harry Potter spoilers and tell me, I will cut you."

BTW, I'm getting the book at midnight at Harvard Square. I'm thinking about doing an encoded simulblog as I read it.

Comments off for your protection!

spoiler shields up!

I will be a much less well informed citizen for the next several days.

the official jfw deathly hallows prediction

I've decided I am going to break with my six-books-strong tradition of listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks and instead buy the print copy of Deathly Hallows and read it. My preference would be to listen to the audiobook, but I am unconvinced that I will be able to avoid having some source spill an unwanted spoiler on me during the several days it would take me to listen all the way to the end. So I'm going to buy the book at midnight and read it before I look at any news source.

I'm trying to avoid reading any speculation about the book because I'm sure pre-release spoilers are already or soon available and I don't want to read any "speculation" that is directly or indirectly influenced by spoilers. I am nevertheless here posting my own prediction regarding the content of the book, largely so that I can gloat when proven correct. However, so no one who prefers suspense has the truth revealed to them inadvertently, I present my prediction in code. If you want to read it, go to this site, paste the paragraph below in the "Input:" window, type "jeremy freese" in the "Key:" window, and hit "Decode".

Clv tdmuyigq ec xyi qli fj Sjhnv fj Bfjfrmp ajw esf rmrx "rwmclvv xgavw azmui klq myyiv kyazzzqq" (fj xlsx fej gakucixwph prqq csumry xx xyef ztfo efcfep) fgr yyex firxyid *bnvw* azmui klq myyiv kyazzzqq. Xf, tvgfjfcc psj ks Lsvac siull r lsjgayo, lq ffj xs vmn jfv Hmquiqgvc xf huc. Jogihx, clisgem jsqw hnzzgq, ntjwmtph e uigq jo qeulrrr ezb ufwwafuc vbbjfzriv fh lrzull siif wnx zrfm rfxmgr kc Uyyzqvhsji oei mz yimerui jru eorzrxiv fh Weebc, Mrvvq arpc putj rrh Nsuhvqapy nmpd hri. Rpem, fj er arnbgpuafspi vmpvvwegte vixpngkmze Wfaparp'w uiegwv xs vmcgy fqgsx wiwr jw rr msyysv xsa gymxbwvr, lspoarc ffwfykz xqiii igqc fi s wqstoull jizwrcc-wmhc urki larrtier xtirw arxy Jdci rrh Yixvxi.

BTW, word on the street here in Cambridge is that Harvard square will be transformed into "Hogwarts Square" on Friday night, including a battle of the bands between a band that calls itself "Harry and the Potters" and completely separate band that has independently named itself "Draco and the Malfoys."

(No unencoded predictions of your own in the comments allowed!)

time has come today (time!)

I know a guy who spent some years working intermittently on a novel about time travel. He might still be. Once, he was talking about it, and he said a big problem working on it has been that new novels about time travel keep coming out. He kept having to go back and revise what he had already written to take into account ways that other original ideas that were coming out in these new novels made what he was doing not original anymore. When I was doing short short fiction, I thought about writing a story about a guy trying to write a novel about time travel who keeps getting thwarted by an evil time traveler from the future who gives other, struggling-but-speedier novelists the guy's good ideas.

I kept thinking of this guy yesterday, because I read The Time Traveler's Wife on the plane back from Chicago. I thought it was quite original: it's a love story, the man has a disease akin to epilepsy only he time travels instead of having seizures--digressive link to everybody's favorite epileptic here--and the book basically permutes through all sorts of different clever ways this allows the lives of him and his true love to be tangled up with one another.

I really enjoyed reading it, although the prose itself is middling sometimes to the point of distraction. Even then, there was this sad part that had my eyes well up and me willing myself urgently not to have tears start down my face while in the middle seat on an airplane. I succeeded. I do worry I am going to become one of those people who is strange to sit next to on planes. My last plane trip, I read The McSweeney's Book of Lists, and thought the person next to me must think I was insane because of how I kept giggling uncontrollably.

left behind

I just took a break here in the office by reading the whole of Anthropology: 101 True Love Stories by Dan Rhodes. The stories are all around 100-150 words, and while some of them turn a too much on a cutely warped last sentence, the book on the whole is a fun bag of prose popcorn that is well worth the forty-five minutes it takes to devour it. Anyway, as I don't have any great ideas for posts and the continued rain in Cambridge brings out a melancholic turn, I'll instead here promote the book by reproducing three of the stories about being dumped:

Xanthe left me. I found out her new address and returned the kettle she had left behind. The next day I took her a book she had lent me. I found a box of hairgrips, and delivered one each day. If she wasn't home I would post it with a long letter explaining how I had found it on the floor. When I had returned them all, I took her, on the tip of my finger, a tiny ball of dust. "I remember seeing it fall from your dress one afternoon," I said, "The pretty one, with the flowers on it."

After Firefly left me I presented her with a video recording I had made of myself, so if she ever felt down she could be reminded that there was somebody out there who loved her more than anything in the world. I met her in the street, and asked her if she ever watched it. She said she did, and that it always cheered her up. She told me she particularly liked the part where I kissed and caressed the tiny black skirt she had left behind, and cried like a new-born baby. She said that always made her smile.

Treasure left me. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I understand how awful you must feel." Choking, I told her she couldn't begin to understand. She insisted that she could. "You know you'll never find anyone as pretty as me," she explained, "or as nice, and your every moment will be clouded by nagging recollections of times we spent together; times when you wrongly believed we had some kind of future. Believe me, I understand." she said, gently." A part of you has died, the part capable of loving and trusting, and you know you'll never get it back. Stuff like that."

BTW, for the trip to Madison, I was going to bring my jacket, but then because the forecast called for several inches of snow I decided to bring my big winter coat instead. While the snowstorm did strand me in Detroit for several hours, I never wore the coat during my visit. Several times I wished I had my jacket, but chose being cold to cavorting around in the cumbersome coat. Last night, as my flight from Detroit to Boston was taking off, I realized I had left my coat in the in the overhead bin of the plane going from Madison to Detroit. Story of my life.

a dream deferred is not a dream denied

Okay, so maybe the sociology world isn't ready for the idea of a group twittercast of ASA. It's only April, though. If Twitter continues to grow at its current rate, then by the ASA meetings in August, the world will actually be needing to grow babies in vats and signing them up for Twitter as soon as they ripen just to keep the trend going.

This has been one of my notoriously unfocused Saturdays. I'm in the middle of reading five separate books right now. The best may be Allen Brandt's The Cigarette Century, which is a great (but long) history of the cigarette industry. The book, perhaps oddly, reminds me about what I found so interesting about pharma that made me go on a ten-book-bender about the pharmaceutical industry last year. With cigarettes, you just get these corporations that engage in all sorts of ugliness in the service of getting the public to buy a product that is horribly bad for them. With pharma, you get these corporations that engage in all sorts of ugliness in the service of getting the public to buy products that are often good, sometimes bad, and regularly hard to tell exactly which.

current bedtime reading

I'm reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Or, to be completely honest, re-reading, as I have also listened to it before as an audiobook. I'm currently on Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

I wouldn't be re-reading T7HoHEP if I didn't think there was much wisdom in it, but it's sort of a starchy wisdom smothered in hokey gravy. Namely, for a book that trumpets the virtues of principle-centered living, the book has all these fake-o seeming anecdotes. They follow this basic dramatic structure:

1. Actor [person/organization/member-of-Covey's-family] has problem.
2. Actor tries standard expedient solution to problem, fails.
3. Actor decides to try way that uses T7HoHEP wisdom, even though it seems unlikely to work.
4. Success follows, often greater and more immediate than Actor could have anticipated.

The book is stories with that structure AgainAndAgainAndAgainAndAgain. So it was weird when I ran across a story that had this footnote (the only one in the entire book):

Some of the details of this story have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.

And I thought, "Why would there be this footnote now? When various other stories seem clearly like they must involve embellishments of one sort or another, if they aren't entirely made-up..." Then I read on and the story begins:

I once had a friend who was dean of a very prestigious school. He planned and saved for years to provide his son the opportunity to attend that institution, but when the time came, the boy refused to go.

And, I thought, I wonder if he has that footnote because he was using this story and someone somewhere pointed out to him that a dean at a very prestigious school would be able to swing some kind of tuition arrangement for his child as part of the deal.

sorry, i know it's nearby, but i can't really reckon with the singularity right now

I made progress on the grant I'm working on tonight--although, O, much more needs to be done--but tonight's major procrastination distraction was: improving a piece of anti-procrastination software! I'll post it when I get around to it.

So now I'm in bed having my usual trouble sleeping, and I'm contemplating one of the books on my nightstand, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near. I bought the book because it had been recommended to a colleague by an important figure in the national science funding establishment. The basic argument of the book is that innovation is occuring at an accelerating pace and, this will continue to change everything faster and faster, then big chunks at a time, then all at once. Or something like that. I can't get past page 14, where I read the same two sentences and stop.

"I conceptualize the history of evolution--both biological and technological--as occurring in six epochs. As we will discuss, the Singularity will begin with Epoch Five and will spread from Earth to the rest of the universe in Epoch Six."

Each time, I hit this point and think, "You know, it's an accomplishment for me if I manage to leave the house cleanly shaven five days a week. I can open my head enough to wonder and worry about the world. Proliferation to the rest of the universe, I can't be troubled with that. The whole universe, when I don't even have my elliptical trainer yet. No, not for me."

the boy detective flails

Sitting in his office late into the night, doing some combination of working and floundering, the boy detective opens up Firefox and Googles up a passage he remembers from The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman:

Inconsistent soul that man is!--languishing under wounds, which he has the power to heal!--his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge!--his reason, that precious gift of God to him--(instead of pouring in oil) serving but to sharpen his sensibilities--to multiply his pains, and render him more melancholy and uneasy under them!--Poor unhappy creature, that he should do so!--Are not the necessary causes of misery in this life enow, but he must add voluntary ones to his stock of sorrow;--struggle against evils which cannot be avoided, and submit to others, which a tenth part of the trouble they create him would remove from his heart for ever?

Sometimes the boy detective has crises of spirit or confidence over exactly what he understands himself to be doing and why he is doing it. These episodes can be counted upon to pass. Knowledge of this does little to lessen the unpleasantness of their experience while underway.

the boy detective fails, again

Lucy, as much as she's nice as 3.14159265, and I are now locked in public dispute over the penultimate page of The Boy Detective Fails (see update to her post and footnote and update to mine). TBDF is one of the few books to earn a full five kiwi rating in Lucy's antipodal book-rating system. So as not to leave interested bystanders out in the literary cold, I have scanned the relevant page for your perusal here (don't worry, it's not a spoiler):



If you do like this page, then you will definitely love The Boy Detective Fails, given that this is the worst part. Indeed, you can feel free to follow its instructions by printing the scanned page, finding someone's hand to hold, reading the passage again, and making the requested drawing on your printout. Even better: instead of writing the name of that chump whose hand you're holding, write mine! C'mon!

Meanwhile, here are a couple of pages from The Boy Detective Fails in better times, selected nonrandomly but not especially deliberately from somewhere in the middle:



BTW, I may dislike the second-to-last page, but the ending itself is pretty good.

(annual tradition!) my official recommended novel from 2006

I figure that if somebody regularly reads novels and seems like someone of compatible taste, they ought to be able to recommend one novel a year just on their say-so. "Seriously, read this." More than one and they need to sell you with actual reasons and/or a convergence of positive reviews from other people. Or else, they are being pushy, one of those people who wants to colonize your reading queue.

If somebody gets me to listen to a song and I don't like it, so what? 3 minutes. With a novel, we are talking about putting several hours of someone else's time on the line. And so, while it isn't to be approached as gingerly as "Seriously, take this job," a substantial pinch of ginger is in order.

Anyway, I'm thinking of what would be the one novel I would recommend to the world (i.e, you) from my reading this year. Although I am militant about keeping novel reading in my life [see p. 8 6 here], I don't read that many, so maybe I don't even deserve an annual recommendation. I've decided my three finalists are: Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl; The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster; and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is basically written for women under 30, at heart if not chronologically, and I felt both age and gender wrong for the book even as I enjoyed it. So, I'm going to offer it here as my recommended book for women, but, regardless of your gender, you can only read it on my recommendation if you promise first that you will not hold me responsible for the sucky "goldfish" speech near the end.*

New York Trilogy are three novellas that add up to few pages than either of my other finalists. It plays heavily on Boy Themes related to accomplishment, obsession, and losing one's way, and has all these recursive turns of paragraph and plot that seem to appeal more to the geek-male reader than anyone else. So it wins as my recommendation to male readers: especially because it's a more risky recommendation, and studies show men are less risk-averse than women, and yet also shorter, and studies show men begrudge a disappointing book recommendation more than women. Seriously, dude, read this.

I suspect some people won't like the idea of separate recommendations for female and male readers, or will at least think of themselves as not someone for whom gender-specific recommendations are pertinent. For such people, I recommend Cloud Atlas. In terms of the most moments of my reading and thinking, "Dear God, this book is a freaking miracle," Cloud Atlas is the clear winner for this year and likely in my all-time top ten. If there is someone out there who is putting together more interesting English-language sentences one-after-another than David Mitchell, I want to know who it is (I mean it, let me know). Cloud Atlas is a big clever puzzle-box of textual wonders, but it's main shortcoming is that it's a book that uses a really smart conceit to show off Mitchell's virtuosity at the expense of any overarching plot. The book is instead a confederacy of six different plots that are not intended to "come together," and while they do add up to more than the sum of their parts, the sum is maybe still not enough or else it would be the year's hands-down winner.

Importantly, none of these novels is as good as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, which remains my favorite contemporary novel. If you haven't read it, seriously, read that. If you've read it and didn't really like it, I don't know why you'd pay any attention to any of my recommendations above.

I'd love to know any recommendation from your own reading that you have for me. Note the singular noun, though: one year -> one novel that's worth a try just because you say so. Beyond that I have to be persuaded.

* The only more dramatic lapse of form I've read in the past few years is the second-to-last page of the The Boy Detective Fails (Joe Meno), which literally made me feel a little stupid for having enjoyed so much of the rest of the book. If you read The Boy Detective Fails, have someone black-out the second-to-last page for you before beginning.

Update: Lucy, who read 120 novels last year, has come out with her top 10 11 list, which includes The Boy Detective Fails and spurns Spec Top Calam Phys, even though her recommendation was why I read it in the first place.