The five books making up the novel are:
* The Part About the Critics
* The Part About Amalfitano
* The Part About Fate
* The Part About The Crimes
* The Part About Archimboldi

There are connections between all parts: the critics study the works of Archimboldi and end up in Santa Teresa, Mexico, looking for the mythical author. Amalfitano is a professor who goes slightly mad while the critics are there (geometry book hanging on the clothesline taking a beating from the wind). There is a constant drumbeat on the theme of the mysterious killings of girls in Santa Teresa. The part about Fate is Quincy Williams, dealing with his mother's death and being sent as a journalist to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa yet wanting to stay and cover the story of the killings instead but his boss nixes the idea since it wouldn't appeal to their black audience. The part about the crimes is the most disturbing, pages upon pages of strangled, raped young girls, mutilated. Sprinkled into the mass murders are general domestic violence murders where the girl is killed by her boyfriend/husband/jealous lover. Hans Klaus is arrested for the mass murders and yet they continue while he is behind bars. In the part about Archimboldi, we discover that Klaus is Archimboldi's nephew.

A couple of bits I thought to mark whilst reading:

Usually they ended up at a bar frequented by whores in Colonia Guerrero, a huge lounge presided over by a seven-foot-tall plaster statue of Aphrodite, probably, he thought, a place that had enjoyed a certain louche glory back in Tin-Tan's day, and since then had been in perpetual decline, one of those interminable Mexican declines, meaning a decline stitched together here and there with a muted laugh, a muted shot, a muted whimper. A Mexican decline? More like a Latin American decline.

When the Aztecs came out of the pyramids, the sunlight didn't hurt them. They behaved as if there were an eclipse of the sun. And they returned to their daily rounds, which basically consisted of strolling and bathing and then strolling again and spending a long time standing still in contemplation of imperceptible things or studying the patterns insects made in the dirt and eating with friends, but always in silence, which is the same as eating alone, and every so often they made war.

Translated by the inimitable Natasha Wimmer

Best parts were detailing her relationship with Spencer Tracy, where she throws all feminist thought out the window and becomes his slave, he doesn't love her as much as she him, he never speaks terms of endearment to her. Also detailing the filming of the African Queen, on location in Africa with Bogey. And her torrid affair with Howard Hughes, who eventually stopped asking her to marry him.

The secret language of nu shu (merely italicized version of men's written language) was used to send messages from woman to woman. This language was employed to write messages on the secret fan sent back and forth between the laotongs.

An interesting look into 19th century Chinese culture.

In the interim, wanted to placehold this list of books to check out later:

Summer reading

Conjoined twins born to a nun who died during delivery, impregnated by the surgeon attending her birthing, in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia). The twins were separated during the birth process, named Shiva and Marion, and raised by surrogate parents Hema and Ghosh, a couple of talented doctors operating in exile from their native India. The four of them, along with their cook and maid and her daughter, make up the family unit.

The majority of the book takes place at Missing hospital outside Addis Ababa, with the Matron running the show, and Ghosh patiently tutoring his sons on medical matters ("you can't finish if you don't begin!"). Insert periods of unrest due to rebels and coups. Insert female genital mutilation and the horrors that go along with it.

Genet (the daughter of the maid) is raised as a daughter along with the twins, and is the object of Marion's desire. A shadow character, she is ultimately responsible for his fleeing Ethiopia (she is arrested for hijacking an airplane, one of her coconspirators falsely gives Marion's name as an ally under torture). Marion escapes to America, does residency at a poor hospital in Queens, full of trauma victims. He encounters Thomas Stone, his blood-father, during a chance meeting when Thomas swoops in for organ harvesting.

On the day Marion becomes board certified as a surgeon, he has the cabbie take him to Roxbury, where the Queen of Sheba supposedly has real Ethiopian food. There he finds his old neighbor, a woman he helped when her baby died. She offers him her body, he spills his tale of Genet, Shiva, and the resulting chaos, for the first time. Eventually, she sends Genet to his doorstep, fresh from prison and carrying Hep B. Marion succumbs in 6 weeks and is on death's door when Hema and Shiva arrive from Ethiopia. The first ever live-donor liver transplant takes place when Shiva donates a piece of his liver, but eventually dies from brain aneurism. As he dies, he creeps back into Marion's body.

Marion ends up in Ethiopia, helping at Missing hospital.

YES YES YES

The book details the career of Charles Norris (the first Chuck Norris?!) as medical examiner of New York City, a position where the mayor slashed his department's budget and thus Norris personally funded such things as car service for his agents to get to crime scenes, laboratory equipment, etc. Working in tandem with Norris was his chief toxicologist, Alexander Gettler. The two of them set a high standard for forensic science that permeated the country after Gettler taught a new crop of Gettler Boys the methods of ascertaining whether a poison was present in a corpse.

Along with all the standard poisons (arsenic, carbon monoxide, chloroform), we are enthralled by tales of radium poisoning of the girls who painted glow-in-the-dark clockfaces (and who wet the brushes with their lips before each stroke, ingesting radium which weakened their bones and slowly destroyed them). Also thallium, which rendered its victims hairless before killing them.

During this time, Prohibition went into effect, and the amount of poisonings by wood alcohol skyrocketed. Norris was an outspoken critic of the government's deliberate poisoning of wood alcohol, and in his own way helped to generate momentum to overturn the amendment.

Enjoyable book that may make you think twice about eating or drinking anything that wasn't prepared by your own hand.

Definitely:
1. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
2. Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
3. The Tanners by Robert Walser
4. Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson
5. Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland
6. I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley
7. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes
8. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

Runners-Up:
1. What to Eat by Marion Nestle
2. Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
3. The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald
4. Awesome by Jack Pendarvis
5. The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
6. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Basic plot is a poor LA boy named "Not Sidney Poitier" by his mother, and who ends up looking exactly like Sidney Poitier, swept away to Atlanta by Ted Turner when Poitier's mother dies since she was one of Turner's biggest shareholders and sitting on a minor fortune. An avid reader, he finds little of value in high school, drops out, buys his way into Morehouse. He collects a light skinned girlfriend along the way, is taken home to her parents as a black wedge during Thanksgiving, eavesdrops on the parents finding out about his wealth and takes Everett's advice to have fun with that knowledge and mess with the parents. Booted out of T-day dinner, he flies home, loads up his car for attempt #2 to return to LA, and gets lost in Alabama. In Smuteye, Alabama his car breaks down, he is asked by three hungry ladies to help them build a church, he gets $50k from Podgy (his accountant), resulting in an innocent lookalike being murdered.

A whirlwind of entertainment and good writing.

Game Change is a book shat out quickly after the 2008 election, and the authors claim hours and hours of research with most sources. I was disappointed in the book, comparing it to the gold standard in this arena, What it Takes, the epic tome about the 1988 election. I'm not overly fond of the "happily ever after" ending, where Obama sincerely extends the offer of Secretary of State to Clinton.

It was as much information as I'd care to ingest about Palin, oddly cool and collected and yet so out of her league. The McCain bits were slightly interesting-- his theory of gut instincts and not caring about the details of the campaign. Most of the book was consumed by the Obama/Hillary story, Obama's backroom Senate meetings where the old guard pushed him to run but they could not formally endorse him due to the Clinton dynasty that had raised so much money for the cause. Hillary's disastrously run campaign, with power struggles from within and the omnipresent question of "What to do about Bill".

It's a tolerable book, but you probably picked up most of the information during the election unless you were braindead at the time. If you're looking for in-depth exposure of how a political campaign is run, check out What it Takes.

The story picks up where Girl with a Dragon Tattoo left off; Lisbeth Salander the badass 4'11" waif comfortable in her billions of stolen kroner, doing good in her own way in Grenada by watching a man try to kill his wife in a hurricane. She drifts back to Sweden, buys an apartment, buys all the accoutrements of home life. (This might be my only gripe-- holy crap there are pages and pages devoted to the details of her furnishing her new life.)

Mikael Blomkvist's magazine is working on a story about the sex trade, girls from Estonia ending up in Sweden and systematically raped for small profits. The expose starts to sniff around a character named Zala, and things get dangerous. Meanwhile, Lisbeth's guardian, Nels Bjurman (famously tattooed by Lisbeth in the 1st book of the series) begins to hatch a plot to be rid of her.

Suddenly, Lisbeth is accused by the police and the media of a triple homicide, and is on the run. Enter the blonde giant who feels no pain. Enter Lisbeth's famous boxer pal, Paolo, who rescues her girlfriend Mimmi from the giant. Enter Zala, Lisbeth's dad who was disfigured when Lisbeth, age 12, doused him in gasoline and set him ablaze for nearly killing her mother.

Good stuff, albeit a bit wordy in parts.

Lisbeth lives to see another book-- part 3 coming soon!

This was a quick read that dove deep into the 2007-2010(?) financial crisis and its causes. My biggest takeaway is a general sadness that the US economy got so inflated during this period without actually creating anything of value. Phantom wealth that made a handful of folks wealthy, but nothing was created. The constant consumption and arrogance of our financial system make me want to step back, withdraw, and create. Draw, paint, write, sing, smile, whatever. To create something in order to fill the void left by financial vultures. But I digress.

Lewis breaks down the cause of the meltdown: mortgage backed securities based on subprime mortgage loans, rated as AAA bonds by Moodys and S&P. This, plus people who had no idea what they were doing were running the show on Wall Street, allowing traders (Morgan Stanley's Howie Hubler) to amass $16 billion in risk without asking a single question. Mindless drones. No analysis of risk or potential for blowing up. What exactly did Wall Street analysts do all day?

The book follows the story of a couple of traders who smelled disaster coming and who cashed in on it: Michael Burry (discovered he had Aspergers during the ordeal), Steve Eisman (in your face, lacking tact, NY based hedge fund manager who vocally challenged inane fund managers), Greg Lippmann (Deutsche Bank salesman notorious for saying "Fuck you, I'm short your house" when challenged about his negative outlook on the US housing market), the Cornwall Capital folks (Charlie, Jamie, Ben).

This is a peek back into the idyllic 1950s, where fun was something you saved up for, where television shows were crap, and movies contained zero nudity or suggestion of sex. Due to his chronic absenteeism, Bryson missed out on numerous days of atomic bomb drills at school, and thus during the first one he experienced where his non-participation went unnoticed, he determined that he could simply read comic books whilst everyone else quivered uncomfortably with butts up, heads down under their desks.

Bryson interweaves other facts into the story, bemoaning the loss of family farms, wishing for a return to halcyon days where quality mattered, not cost (the gorgeously built elementary school a testament to craftmanship), a look into conspicuous consumption and the need to buy beyond our means.

The perspective of a German soldier through the long years of trench warfare during the First World War. Truly excellent book; billed as the "Greatest War Novel of all Time" and I'm inclined to let the hyperbole stand. Paul and his classmates volunteer for the army at the urging of their schoolmaster, get thrown into the muck and mire of seeing people get bits blown off, fighting rats for bread, watching their numbers dwindle to nothing. Taking leave once a year to travel home is even harder than the front line, having to hear the civilians tell him he doesn't know anything about the big picture, persistent questions about how it was, it's bad right?

Philosophical questions about what will happen to them after the war... they are damaged goods, no one will understand it who didn't go through it. The older generation will slide back into their pre-war life, the younger generation will shove them aside and not understand.

Excellent classic. Reminded me of Sartre's The Reprieve, written about the time between WWI and WWII.

Great concept, but awful writing. Apparently taken from letters that he penned at the time to a correspondent who would become his wife, he makes no effort to write well. Or he's already an "established writer" therefore he doesn't try. I also might have a small bias against people with 3 names. And forgive me, but I happen to need French & Latin translated into English. An example of the writing that made my head hurt (notice the constant interruption before he makes a single point):

For, in the seclusion of a cell - an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual and long solitary walks in the woods - the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.

Best part of this book was the intro by Karen Armstrong. ("... you cannot read a sonnet by Shakespeare in the chatter and tumult of a party.")

Overall impression- contains bursts of brilliance, but nothing like the sustained majesty of Hedgehog. You can tell the maturation of the writer from one book to the next. And don't read this book if you're hungry. Mouth-watering descriptions, reminiscent of MFK Fisher.

Examples of delicious prose below.

The linden tree:

Above all there was the linden tree. Immense and decorative, from one year to the next it threatened to submerge the house with its tentacular foliage, which my aunt obstinately refused to prune; any discussion was out of the question. During the hottest days of summer, the tree's troublesome shade offered the most sweet-smelling of bowers. I would sit against the trunk on the little bench of worm-eaten wood and avidly inhale the scent of pure, velvety honey which came from the tree's pale yellow flowers. A linden tree releasing its perfume at the end of the day is a rapture which leaves an indelible mark, and in the depths of our joy to be alive it traces a groove of happiness that the sweetness of a July evening alone cannot suffice to explain.

His introduction to whisky, or "DTH" (Down the Hatch)

To start with, the unfamiliar aroma unsettled me beyond anything I thought possible. Such formidable aggressiveness, such a muscular, abrupt explosion, dry and fruity at the same time, like a charge of adrenaline that has deserted the tissues where it ordinarily resides in order to evaporate upon the surface of the nose, a gaseous concentration of sensorial precipices... Stunned, I discovered that I liked this blunt whiff of incisive fermentation.

Like some ethereal marchioness, I cautiously ventured my lips into the peaty magma and... what a violent effect! An explosion of piquancy and seething elements suddenly detonates in my mouth; my organs no longer exist, no more palate or cheeks or saliva, only the ravaging sensation that some telluric warfare is raging inside me. In raptures, I allowed the first mouthful to linger for a moment on my tongue, while concentric undulations continued to engage it for a long while. That is the first way to drink whisky: absorb it ferociously, inhaling its pungent, unforgiving taste. The second swallow, on the other hand, was undertaken precipitously; as soon as it had gone down, it took a moment to warm my solar plexus - but what warmth it was!

* Nike knows it's been wrecking our feet for the last 30 years with additional cushioning. Now it's introduced shoes that have less support, which should technically be better for your feet.

* Your feet are highly sensitive instruments, adjusting how they hit the ground based on the firmness of the initial touch.

* Homo sapiens beat out Neanderthals because we evolved to run. We engaged in persistence hunting, running our meat down. Not fast, but endurance counts. Our ability to sweat away our heat keeps our engines cooled, while our prey has to release heat through breathing.

McDougall does a nice job interweaving his personal story of running with the Tarahumara Indians in Copper Canyon (Mexico), along with science, evolution, ultramarathoning.