Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

I picked up this book after I read about it in Dan Savage's July 7, 2010 column.  I've been a big fan of Dan Savage for years now, and when I read what he had to say about Sex at Dawn I dropped everything and started reading.  So in case you feel the same way, here's a quote: 

"Sex At Dawn is the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior In The Human Male on the American public in 1948. Want to understand why men married to supermodels cheat? Why so many marriages are sexless? Why paternity tests often reveal that the 'father' isn’t? Read Sex At Dawn."

It really is pretty awesome.  It's fun to read, and very well-researched.  As a former anthroplogy major, I felt like I was in familiar territory, and I appreciated that when the authors couldn't discuss a subject in-depth they always cited multiple more comprehensive sources.  This is important, and I mention it first because so many of their claims are pretty incendiary.  

Their basic thesis is as follows: most of human evolution took place in pre-historic, non-agrarian societies.  The standard narratives about human sexuality - about men who try to spread their genes by sleeping around, and women who try to secure the protection of a single male - simply don't fit with what we know about pre-historic lifestyles.  By investigating the sexual habits of our closest genetic relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) and also by analyzing human hunter-gatherer societies past and present with a fresh eye, we can come to a better understanding of contemporary sexual behavior.

Basically: Why do we cling to the idea that human beings evolved to engage in a perpetual "war of the sexes," with men and women in a state of mutual exploitation?   Is there a way of understanding our sexual urges as adaptive and useful, rather than unnatural and dysfunctional?  

And the answer to that last question is: well, yeah, there is.  Unfortunately, it's an answer a lot of people won't like very much.  For the vast majority of human history, we lived in small, nomadic groups where multi-partner mating was common.  Women are built to accomodate multiple partners at once (sperm competition); men are built to seek variety (exogamy, avoid incest).  Monogamy is not a natural state. And however we behave now, our bodies are still tuned to the old dance.

The authors support their claims with mountains of evidence.  They compare the size and shape of male genitalia among chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons.  They describe behavioral experiments involving farm animals.  They discuss Jane Goodall's fieldwork with chimps in Gombe.  They turn to fieldwork on modern hunter-gatherer cultures from around the world, in the Amazon basin, China, and Africa.  They mine accounts of early European explorers, from the first English settlers in Australia to Darwin.  They give Hobbes a thorough beat-down.  They talk about declining testosterone levels, Calvin Coolidge, and the smelly t-shirt experiment.  

Personally, I was convinced.  And I really do believe, like the authors do, that understanding and accepting our biological make-up can make us happier, healthier, and more peaceful people.  I very highly recommend this book.  As Dan Savage says: even if you are unwavering in your support of monogamy, at least make the effort to understand why it's such hard work.  

I Am Love

I Am Love is an odd movie.  It's full of things that ought not to work.  I kept thinking things like, "Oh no, not another movie about falling in love through the erotic powers of food," or "Really? A lesbian subplot featuring prurient close-ups of hot girls kissing?" and "That twist at the end, so cheap."

There's more, too.  It's shot oddly - there are outdoor night-scenes that are very poorly lit, so that all the actors are dim and grey; there are lengthy close-ups of rain on statues and multiple flat, disposable-camera style shots of buildings passing by from the window of a car.  The movie is lulling, a slow burn rather than a firecracker.  Especially at first, it's hard to really get a grip on what's going on - all the characters are self-controlled, not particularly emotive, and it's a game of reading into their non-reactions as events unfurl.

But it does work, despite all of the elements that would sink a lesser movie.  Because all of the twists and turns that would have evolved into high drama in another film are dulled or blunted here, I Am Love is a film all about subterranean, core-deep tectonic shifts that slowly build up pressure until finally, as the movie nears its conclusion, the cracks that begin to visibly split the family apart really do feel like earthquakes.

After I walked out of the theater, while I was hashing out my thoughts with my cousin, who'd accompanied me, and then later as I read through a few reviews, I realized exactly how well-balanced the movie is.  My cousin asked if I thought it was a movie that glamorized adultery and leaving one's family to pursue the thrill of true love.  And I answered: no, I didn't get that sense at all.  That was what Tilda's character did, yes, but it didn't seem like a victory or a prescription; and there's another sub-plot, about a son who finds a nice girl and settles down with her, who seems perfectly happy to do the expected thing, that's presented with the same lack of judgment.

And the things that stuck me most, which seem to strike everyone the most, are all self-consciously quiet.  A scene when Tilda asks her housekeeper to have dinner with her while they're both doing chores in the laundry room.  A shot when Tilda's character laughs, a rare occurance, while sitting on the toilet.  A tense, absolutely perfect moment between Tilda and her husband near the conclusion, when a scene ready-made to overflow with sturm and drang instead went the way of a silent but shocking nuclear explosion.  The movie is full of scenes that illustrate the power of understatement.

Final note: I just re-read the New Yorker's review of the film (Second Helpings) - it's utterly glowing, beginning with the strict admonition to see the movie in theaters rather than waiting for it to come out on DVD.  The only thing that the author, Anthony Lane, complains about is the scene where Tilda's lover gives her oral sex.  It cuts between the coupling and shots of insects going about their business, and he's right that this is not exactly a fresh metaphor - but the whole movie is like that, full of cliched imagery that still somehow works.  In the same paragraph, even, Lane gushingly describes the film's metaphorical use of the changing seasons, from winter to spring.  If he's willing to enthuse about the weather, his excuse about the bees doesn't hold water.  When I watched the sex scene, I remember thinking about This Film Not Yet Rated, which argues very strongly that the ratings board penalizes movies that show female pleasure and in particular oral sex on women.  Even at the time, I was surprised and delighted to see a filmmaker so clearly and unapologetically go there.  Shame on you, New Yorker critic, for jumping on the bandwagon and telling us that scenes of cunnilingus are unnecessary.  The truth is precisely the opposite.

In the Company of Writers by Charles Scribner Jr.

In the Company of Writers is, more or less, a publishing memoir.  The author, one in a long line of Charles Scribners, helmed Scribners during a pretty fascinating, transitional period in the industry - and in his own company.  He took over at the tail end of the Max Perkins era, when Scribners was a powerhouse of major voices in literature (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc.), and stayed on through the company's merger with Macmillan, when Scribners became an imprint of a major conglomerate instead of an independent company.

He's so matter-of-fact about the position of privilege he was born into that it's impossible to resent him for it, and he didn't squander his advantages - he had an excellent education, for example, and so he became a student of Latin and Greek, was passionate about the history of science, and had an active life of the mind well into his twilight years.  He seems - and, really, it's impossible to know the truth through the text - but he seems like a true gentleman, in the best sense of the word.  And he describes his years at Scribners, working with authors like Hemingway, coping with the paperback revolution, and just generally staying afloat, with appealing candor.  There are some great little anecdotes, too.

Either because the author himself was influenced stylistically by his authors, or because much of the book was crafted out of an oral history (Scribner was too old to undertake a memoir on his own, so he told his story and let someone else do the writing), or thanks to the intermediary who translated Scribner's speech into text, the book is gorgeously written and gives a stylistic nod to Hemingway.  Before I read Hemingway, I really resented the overwhelming influence he has exerted on American writers.  Now that I've read Hemingway, I wish more people would write like him.  I guess that's how it goes sometimes.  So the prose here is gorgeous, and it's a pretty quick, easy read.

I really liked this book.  It captures a time and a place, and it seems really wise to me.

Batavia's Graveyard by Mike Dash

I picked up Batavia's Graveyard on a whim.  I was thinking to myself, "I sure would like to read a book that's just like Nathaniel Philbrick's Heart of the Sea, only different," and, luckily enough, the publishing industry is geared to meet exactly such copycat demands.

Batavia's Graveyard is a narrative, non-fiction account of a mutiny/shipwreck/mass murder (in that order) that took place off the coast of Australia in 1629.  That's a pretty wild cocktail of disaster and crime, and the book started out exactly as colorful and bizarre as I had hoped.  The author sets the scene in the Netherlands before taking us out to sea, and follows the early career of the man who would later mastermind the mass murder, Jeronimus Cornelisz.  Cornelisz came from a prosperous family and started out his career as an apothecary, a respectable and lucrative profession, but a series of disasters reduced him to a state of utter desperation - the usual reason to risk a life at sea.  The series of disasters included the gruesome syphalitic death of his newborn child, and during the lead-up to this tragedy Dash explains that while Cornelisz's wife was pregnant, "for a month or more before the birth, as was common at the time...[he] paid an old woman named Maijcke van den Broecke to suckle his wife's breasts in order to stimulate the flow of milk."  That image alone convinced me I'd picked the right book.  How wonderfully bizarre!

So Dash shifts us from a colorful account of life in the Netherlands during the early 17th century to an equally colorful account of life at sea in the early 17th century, especially the workings of the Dutch East India Company (it was a lot like the British East India Company, only Dutch).  He introduces us to all the key players in the upcoming drama, and the friction that ultimately festered into near-mutiny.  The mutiny never quite happened, however, because the ship - the Batavia - wrecked on a coral reef before the ringleaders pulled the trigger.

Most of the 300 people aboard the Batavia ended up on a barren little archipelago off the coast of Australia, with no water and limited supplies.  A single seaworthy longboat embarked on the 900 mile journey to Java, the nearest Dutch port; if all went well, and the little longboat didn't sink on the way, the castaways could expect help in two or three months, give or take.

Those are pretty dim prospects.  While the initial plan was to ration supplies, pray for rain, and wait it out, Jeronimus Cornelisz preferred a different strategy.  He calculated that with the supplies they'd salvaged from the Batavia and the resources available on their little island, they'd be lucky to last a month.  There were too many mouths to feed, and by trying to keep everyone alive they'd only doom themselves to a slow death by starvation.  Far better, he reckoned, to thin the ranks.  Killing some people at the outset would allow the remainder to survive.  Cornelisz wanted to reduce the number of castaways from 200+ to about 40% of that number, and he set about making it happen.

The problem - the tragedy, I guess - is that Cornelisz decided on his plan, and set about executing it, before he thoroughly investigated the available resources.  They'd shipwrecked on a coral reef that surrounded a small archipelago.  None of the islands on the archipelago were resource rich, and none seemed to have water...but careful exploration did ultimately reveal that one of the nearby islands contained both shallow wells and wildlife.  Because Cornelisz's method was a variation on "divide and conquer," the people who scouted that resource-rich island had already been the victim of the "divide" portion of Cornelisz's plan, and couldn't communicate their discovery to the rest of the castaways.

On the one hand, those wells and wallabys might have made the difference for everyone - on the other hand, the thirty or so people caught on that island nearly exhausted both, so there's no knowing if portioning out the water and meat to a group of 200 people would have been sufficient.

Meanwhile, Cornelisz was elbow-deep in blood.  Once he'd committed to his plan, it took on a life of its own - the willing participants developed a taste for murder and tyranny.  At first, they killed out of a perceived necessity; before long, they murdered out of boredom and spite.  All in all, more than 120 people were killed, including women, children, and even babies - especially babies, and the sick, as they were considered a waste of resources.

The problem is that Dash over-dramatizes.  The sub-title for Batavia's Graveyard kind of hints at what I mean; the full title is Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny.  Frankly, I don't think it's entirely mad to opt to save some rather than lose everyone; and I understand fully how once such a plan is set in motion it's hard to stop.  Especially when the buy-in was murder, because once they stop they've admitted that they were wrong and can't justify the horrible things they did.  Who would choose that kind of anguish?  And even more especially when the stakes were so high.  These people had to choose between slow starvation with a slim hope of rescue, or murder and exile - because they understood, correctly, that if they survived to be rescued their rescuers would become the next threat.  There was no middle route.

I guess what I'm really saying here is - Dash has a point of view, and he wants to describe this mass-murder as an example of an evil genius at work, a true psychopath revealing his true colors when given the opportunity.  He's got a pretty limited amount of material to work with - just the records of the episode that survivors later provided to the Dutch East India Company - which means that there are a lot of blank spots, a lot of "perhaps this happened" or "maybe this is why" or "here's my best guess."  Considering those blank spots, I would have liked to see a more nuanced story - Dash claims, for example, that Cornelisz heartlessly abandoned his wife after his baby died.  But he has no evidence that Cornelisz planned to cut her off or stop supporting her; he didn't survive to develop a track record.  But saying he was heartless supports the story that Cornelisz started, and remained, a psychopath.  I think a proper character study requires a bit more evidence, and I think that Dash decided to amp up the drama specifically because the dearth of evidence wasn't exciting enough.

The castaways were ultimately rescued, three or four months after they were stranded.  The rescuers made it to Java after about a month, crammed together in their longboat, and returned on a more seaworthy vessel to search for survivors of the wreck.  They were back in the general vicinity of the Batavia about three months after the wreck, but it took another month of zigzagging around to find the precise location.  When they arrived, they found the splinter group first - 30 or so soldiers that Cornelisz separated from the herd first thing, who were on the island with the water and resources.  Those were the lucky ones.  Of the remainder, 120-some were dead.  Only six people who hadn't joined Cornelisz survived to see the rescue ship.  A half dozen of the ringleaders were hung on the spot, and several more suffered a similar fate either in transit or upon their return to Java.  The horror of the Batavia story, I think, is the damned if you do, damned if you don't aspect of it.

In short - Batavia's Graveyard was pretty good, but because it opted for easy condemnation over nuance, it didn't quite soar for me.

In Youth Is Pleasure, by Denton Welch

In Youth Is Pleasure may or may not be a misleading title.  It's one of the most atmospheric books I've ever read - in fact, it is nearly 100% atmosphere - and In Youth Is Pleasure is one of the most atmospheric book titles I've ever run across, tender and bittersweet as the book itself.  On the other hand, the title might suggest hedonism, an indulgent tour through the pleasures of youth.  In Youth Is Pleasure is anxious, fraught, above all teeming - it contains not a hint of that luxe, calme et volupté which, now that I think of it, might be the hallmark of a somewhat riper age.

In any case, it is the brief tale of a fifteen year old boy - Orvil - on vacation from boarding school.  He's young, weedy, dreamy, a little feminine - the sort of boy who suffers a lot in an all-male boarding school, and doesn't feel much more comfortable in the bosom of his family.  His mother is dead, his father is a gruff, successful businessman who doesn't have much patience for Orvil's odd fancies, and his two brothers are hale and hearty near-adults who find Orvil mystifying. 

You might guess that In Youth Is Pleasure is a sexual awakening - after all, Orvil is the right age for it and that seems to be what young people do on vacation in literary novels (Bonjour Tristesse is an obvious parallel - and, on the film side, so is Fat Girl) - and in a way, that's an accurate statement.  But it's a sexual awakening without any sex. There's no flirting, no fumbling, no one object of his desires.  What we get is Orvil's state of mind - so highly sensitized that the whole world seems to throb and ache around him.  He's alone in a luxurious, bucolic setting and every gravel path, river canoe, and empty ballroom is a blank space he can populate with his odd imaginings.  Like I said before, this is a book that is all atmosphere - there is no story to speak of, no real character development, I don't even think there's a message.  It's pure slice of life - and, as such, it's absolutely brilliant.  I don't think I've read another book that captures so pitch-perfectly the awful, exquisite feeling of being a teenager.

It's a lovely book, easy to read, and the period detail is remarkable as well - early 20th century upper-class England on holiday (as Orvil is driving away from his hated boarding school in his father's big black Daimler: "'I did not need so large a car for my Escape,' he thought, 'but Magic would never niggle, never send a Baby Austin.'")  It's fairly quotable, and Orvil has an occasionally cruel, acid sense of humor which is the only thing that saves him from being a complete sissy (while dining at the hotel, he sits next to an old woman and observes to himself, "On one of her fingers she wore a half-hoop of very large diamonds; the sort of ring that harmonizes with white suites of bedroom furniture, wreaths of composition roses, inset panels of cane-work, silver shoe-horns and button-hooks, and Reynolds's angel faces on the oxidized lids of powder-pots.")  On the other hand, without the forward momentum of a plot or a point, it takes a bit of patience to push through.  I'd put it down, then have to remind myself to pick it back up.  With that caveat, I recommend it highly.

Debt to Pleasure, by John Lanchester

This book was suggested to me by a friend, and something that she said when she described it has stuck in my mind: she said it's a great book to recommend.  Everybody she gives it to likes it.  It's very smart, very fun, very easy to read - people who read Debt to Pleasure will think, "Ah, my friend is good at recommending books."

The critics do not stint with their praise: they call it dazzling, a tour de force, seductive, diverting, gorgeous, elegant, fun, flawless.  If you read between the lines of all this praise, the book's central problem becomes apparent: for all its many, many virtues it's not transformative.  It won't change literature, and it won't change your outlook on life.  And the thing is, Debt to Pleasure is such a good book that it's really a shame it isn't a great book.  Or maybe I should say: it's great, but it's not Great.

The blurb from The New Yorker on the back cover of the book reads: "Lanchester has written a novel masquerading as an essay masquerading as a cookbook, and it somehow manages to combine the virtues of all three."  The best thing about this summary is that it hints at how marvelous Debt to Pleasure is without giving away any spoilers.  Debt to Pleasure has a doozy of a twist at the end - the kind of twist that, once you've read it, makes it kind of hard to talk about the plot without giving something away.

It really is ridiculously clever.  I know when I first picked it up, I double checked two or three times to make sure I was reading a novel, not a memoir, and when I gave it to my mom (she loved it, of course) she asked me, about halfway through, if she was reading an autobiography.  The narrator's voice is that convincing.

I would happily buy a few dozen copies of Debt to Pleasure and hand them out to all my friends, but it's not a book that means something to me.  I heartily recommend it.  You will love it.  You will probably find yourself recommending it to others.  In that sense, Debt to Pleasure is kind of like a communicable disease.

But I wonder what I'll think about it five years from now, or if I'll think of it at all.  And I say that honestly: I wonder.  Apparently when Tristram Shandy was first published a lot of people thought it was too silly to stand the test of time.  It's true that Tristram Shandy is silly, but it's still being read, what, 250 years after its initial date of publication?  And for good reason.  So who knows.

Kindle

I got a new Kindle for my birthday.  I loved my first generation Kindle, but not for its appearance.  This one, however, is pretty enough to bling out.  What you see above: custom designed Gelaskin and a padded case from Lollington on Etsy.

So far, I love my new Kindle although the user interface is different and I miss the Gen1 content manager.  I bought it when the hype about the then-unnamed iPad was at a fever pitch, and a part of me wondered if I'd regret buying a new Kindle when (according to rumor, at least) Apple was so heavily pregnant with the Messiah of ereaders.

The answer?  Nope, no regrets.  I read books, and the matte, electronic ink screens of ereaders from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony et al is much better for sustained, long-form reading than a full-color, backlit LED.   If my media of choice were magazines, newspapers, and blogs I'd probably prefer the iPad.  For a lot of people, that's what they consume and that's what they should buy.  

I say this a lot but maybe I haven't said it here: when I first bought my Kindle, I thought I'd only use it for trashy novels.  Books that I didn't want to keep and cherish, books I didn't want to display on my shelves, books whose covers I didn't feel like exposing on the subway to judgy, judgy strangers.

I have been seriously surprised to discover how much I prefer it to a paper copy.  It always fits in my purse.  The screen always flickers on to just the right page.  It's always the same weight, whether I'm reading a novella or a doorstop.  I can hold it, and turn pages, with one hand.  I can buy books while waiting to board my flight at an airport.  I can buy a new release without making a sidetrip to the bookstore.  I love getting book samples, and being able to read them at my leisure - instead of hunting for an empty chair at a bookstore (they are always all occupied), or sitting on the floor (I think this bothers other people more than it bothers me, but a lot of other people getting a little bothered does add up).  I don't have to worry about cracking the spine or bending the cover while reading those first few pages, and the samples usually include a full chapter or more - I'd feel guilty reading that far into an unpurchased book at a bookstore.  I love having 10 or 15 samples in my menu, so when I finish a book I can instantly dip into another - exactly the book I'm in the mood for at that exact moment in time  (you know how sometimes you put a movie on your Netflix queue because you can't wait to watch it, but when it arrives the next day you are inexplicably in the mood for a different kind of film?  You ordered a comedy and want a drama; you ordered a thriller and feel like a rom-com, etc., and then it's just not as fun to watch the movie you couldn't wait to see the night before.  Like that, but with books, and instant gratification).  I love being able to juggle multiple books at once - something I never used to do (this may not be a positive side-effect, but I like it).

I've dabbled in bookbinding.  I take pleasure in a well-designed cover, a well-chosen font, a layout that gives the text just enough room to breathe.  I enjoy books as objects.  But I don't fetishize them.  I don't read for the experience of holding a pretty paper product.  I read for the content, and when I weigh up all the pros and cons there's no doubt about it: reading on the Kindle is just plain better.  

So that's that.  Now I read everything I can on the Kindle.  I read Middlemarch on my Kindle.  I read The Great Deluge on my Kindle.  I read Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy on my Kindle.  Given the choice, I will pick the Kindle every time.  

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games is a young adult book, the first in a trilogy (books one and two have been published, book three is expected in 2010).  I recommend it to anyone who has even the slightest, tiniest, vaguest interest in YA literature.  If normally you avoid YA books like the plague but you loved Harry Potter, give The Hunger Games a try.  Not because they are at all similar.  They aren't.  Just because if you can approach one children's book with an open mind, there's reason to believe you could do it again.  If you thought Harry Potter was silly...well, that's one thing The Hunger Games isn't.  It's a grim sandwich, with a side of more grim, and an icy glass of grim to wash it all down with.  And that's only a slight exaggeration.

So far I've convinced two people to read it, and they both loved it.  One of them told me - and I quote - that it's the best thing she's read since East of Eden (she read East of Eden about a year ago, not, like, three weeks ago).

The book is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, in a country called Panem.  Panem is in North America, what used to be the United States, but history doesn't reach that far back anymore.  Power and plenty are concentrated in the Capitol, the seat of government, while citizens in the twelve outlying districts are worked to the bone, denied the most basic freedoms, and forced to participate in the yearly Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games seamlessly marry punishment and entertainment.  Every year, two young people between the ages of 12 and 18 are selected from each of the twelve outlying districts by lottery and forced to compete in a battle to the death.  Twenty-four contestants - called Tributes - enter the arena, but only one will leave it alive.  The event is tarted up with a lot of pageantry, taped and broadcast in an edited form over the state-controlled TV station.  The arena where they compete changes every year - sometimes it's a desert, sometimes a jungle, sometimes a waterworld.  The Tributes don't find out what the arena will look like until they enter it, and those who refuse to participate in the bloodbath don't get very far - the Gamemakers can engineer environmental disasters, like a blistering volcano, to get rid of people who won't play along.

Like I said, pretty grim. And yet - this is part of the book's insidious charm - it's a lot of fun to read.  The pacing of the book is amazing, and the protagonist grabbed my heart and ran away with it from the first page.  Collins tricks the reader into participating in exactly the behavior the book is engineered to condemn...no, it's not original, but the technique is put to good use here.

Collins eases us into the story.  We start reading about Katniss, a girl-child who keeps her family from starving by illegally hunting game and trading it on the black market for bare necessities.  It's a hard-scrabble life, but it's not all bleak: she spends her days wandering the woods with her handsome friend Gale, and evenings with her sweet, 12 year old sister Prim.

But as a reader, you know things are going to change, so even these early passages have an edge of menace.  The yearly lottery arrives, and Katniss ends up in the games.  She's sent to the Capitol to prepare, but her visit there is full of fun and luxury. She eats fine food, she marvels at advanced technology she's never seen before, she meets her stylist. The sharp, menacing atmosphere thickens - but so does the crazy, unreal showmanship of it all.

And then the Hunger Games start.  I got to like Katniss so much that the idea of seeing her hurt, or being right there with her on the page as she hurt someone else, became almost unbearable. Of course, both of my fears came true. But Collins kept pulling me along, interspersing scenes of real horror with calmer, sweeter interludes. I had time to catch my breath and brace myself before the next onslaught, much like Katniss does. The tension ratchets up steadily, page by page, while the progress of the Games sends the reader veering about wildly on an emotional roller coaster, full of highs and lows.

The book is great because it's got so much more to offer than a heart-in-your-throat adrenaline rush.  There's the political aspect, especially the government's media savvy.  It's like Soviet propaganda if it were re-tooled by a bunch of Hollywood marketing execs.  And the experience of the Tributes is an obvious commentary on reality TV.  Not only does Katniss doubt everyone around her, she can't trust her own feelings: is she brave, or is she faking it for the camera?  Does she care about her allies in the arena, or does she just want them to think she cares?  She doesn't know, and the confusion does real damage to her sense of who she is.

The Hunger Games is a thought-provoking book wrapped up in a gripping adventure story.  I couldn't put it down once I'd started, and I've had some great discussions about it since.  In short, read it.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

I had a relationship with Tristram Shandy.  First I fell in love.  We had a lengthy honeymoon period, during which I gushed about it to anybody who would listen.  After the honeymoon ended, we settled into a comfortable companionship.  Then...I have to admit it...things started to go sour.  The same qualities that once dazzled me began to seem tired, I stopped laughing at all its jokes, I no longer looked forward to a future together.  And then I turned the final page and our relationship was over - not a moment too soon.

I'm not sure I have ever started out so enthusiastic about a book, and finished so tepid.  I was ready to clear out a spot on my top ten list - I don't actually have a top ten list, but there are books that would probably be on it if I ever did make one - because it seemed like such a tour de force.  Endlessly imaginative, brilliant, Rabelaisian, absolutely hilarious.  Like a magician pulling rabbits from his hat, or a star quarterback nimbly dodging past all the competition, it's a show of pure virtuosity.

If you don't quite know what Tristram Shandy is - it's an 18th century novel written by Laurence Sterne pretending to be a memoir written by the eponymous Tristram Shandy.  Tristram starts at the beginning - the day of his birth - and it's well past the halfway point in the novel before he's finished being born.  Every time he tries to progress through the story of his life, he's drawn farther into the past.  His uncle Toby was present on his birthday, and in the process of introducing him Tristram gives us his whole life story.  But he can't stick to his digressions either.  Tristram tries to write about Toby and ends up discussing the minutiae of siege warfare (shades of Sebald's Austerlitz there - I'm sure the connection is intentional, and it kind of made me want to reread Austerlitz).

It's great.  It's great, it's done perfectly, and it's fun to read.  It carried me through the first two-thirds of the book in a state of sheer euphoria, and then I crashed.  Partly because a couple of the digressions left me honestly confused (The whole trip to France?  Can someone explain this to me?), but mostly because I started to wonder if the sheer fecundity of the book was a mirage, if Sterne had whipped up a one-trick pony and ridden it a little too long.  I have to admit that once you've figured out his schtick it's kind of predictable.

And the conclusion was pretty unsatisfying.  It just sort of...ends.  The final section seemed like a meandering, tepid fade-out.  And it leaves us with so many unanswered questions.  We never really learn anything about Tristram, beyond a few tantalizing hints.  I could believe that Sterne intentionally leaves the reader unsatisfied...but, well, I was still unsatisfied.

Anyhow, a few of my favorite quotations:

"Have not the wisest men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself, -- have they not had their Hobby-Horses;--their running horses,--their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets, --their maggots and their butterflies?

"brisk trotting and slow argumentation, like wit and judgment, were two incompatible movements"

"When to gratify a private appetite, it is once resolved upon, that an innocent and an helpless creature shall be sacrificed, 'tis an easy matter to pick up sticks enough from any thicket where it has strayed, to make a fire to offer it up with"

"the thin juice of a man's understanding"

"Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relicks of learning, as monks do the relicks of their saints--without working one--one single miracle with them?"

"The ancient Goths of Germany, who (the learned Cluverius is positive) were first seated in teh country between the Vistula and the Oder, and who afterwards incorporated the Herculi, the Bugians, and some other Vandallick clans to 'em-- had all of them a wise custom of debating every thing of importance to their state, twice, that is,--once drunk, and once sober:-- Drunk---that their councils might not want vigour;-- and sober--that they might not want discretion"

This is a sort of quintessential Shandyism, where the author addresses the reader directly: "To conceive this right,-- call for pen and ink--here's paper ready to your hand.--Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind--as like your mistress as you can--as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you--'tis all one to me"

"That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best--I'm sure it is the most religious--for I begin with writing the first sentence--and trusting to Almighty God for the second"

"I have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune; and though I will not wrong her by saying, She has ever made me feel the weight of any great or signal evil;--yet with all the good temper in the world I affirm it of her, that in every stage of my life, and at every turn and corner where she could get fairly at me, the ungracious duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small Hero sustained."

The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch

I'm a bit conflicted.  It was a good book.  Really and thoroughly good.  It did many wonderful things; working simple discussions of ideas into the plot; fleshing out these ideas through the actions taking place in the plot; mixing a hint of fantasy and unreality in with a cool, clear view of the world.

However, at some level it didn't pass muster.  The language was adroit, apt, everywhere clear and enjoyable, but lacked a certain sparkle.  It wasn't phenomenal.  Most of all, somehow despite the fact that the book did such a good job of wedding the extraordinary with the banal, the realm of absolute morality with a very familiar day-to-day, I felt that it never quite took flight.  There was something heavily earthbound about it.

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

Sebald is like a pillow.  Or a breath.

Somehow, despite the fact that his language is so specialized, so apt, like a finger touching the exact spot you've been looking for on a map, the book is like a laying-over or a net, something that surrounds but doesn't quite touch the solid center of meaning or feeling.

There's a tremendous amount of delicacy about his writing for this reason, so that his use of language, in its precision, never seems blunt or hard like a weapon or machine, but rather fragile and almost anxious.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The book is set in an unprepossessing village town named Stockyard, its protagonists cling by the skin of their teeth to their nobility, most of the characters in the book are totally insufferable, and aside from the murder and the fatal trial, nothing particularly extaordinary happens.  And yet, after I finished the book, I found myself thinking, "Oh!  That's the way to live!  What passion!"

A second later, I was horrified at myself.  No, that is most decidedly not the way to live.

I loved when Katya comes to visit Mitya in prison (after Katya has, during a hysterical fit at Mitya's trial, offered up the evidence that condemns him) and Mitya says, "do you know, five days ago, that same evening, I loved you...when you fell down and were carried out."  And why?  When Katya is condemning Mitya, once her fiancée, Dostoevsky writes,

"Oh, of course, such an avowal is only possible once in a lifetime - at the hour of death, for instance, on the way to the scaffold!  But it was in Katya's character, and it was such a moment in her life.  It was the same impetuous Katya who had thrown herself on the mercy of a young profligate to save her father, the same Katya who had just before, in her pride and chastity, sacrificed herself and her maidenly modesty before all these people, telling of Mitya's generous conduct, in the hope of softening his fate a little.  And now, again, she sacrificed herself, but this time it was for another, and perhaps only now - perhaps only at this moment - she felt and knew how dear that other was to her!"

There are a lot of books that show the epic of the everyday; the great upheavals that explode all around us while we walk down the street.  Maybe the virtue of Dostoevsky is that he is pitiless, but writes with great love.

You can't help but admire Katya, even as you hate her.  Just like you can't help but admire Mitya, even though you'd normally hate him.

Dostoevsky abolishes the whole notion of justice, by making human justice impossible and leaving only the possibility of divine justice.  And this is why, in The Brothers Karamazov, nobody is wrong, but nobody is right, either.  Or - and this is also possible - everybody is wrong.

There are certainly despicable characters to contend with.  Rakitin and Fyodor Pavolovich.  But they are comparatively minor.  Aloysha is the only character who is wholly admirable - but he's also something of a shadow compared to the more forceful characters - from Ivan and Dimitri to Grushenka and Katya.  He is almost a blank space; the empty box of a confessional, or the envelope that secures a message as it passes from hand to hand.  And then there's the fact that Aloysha is so childlike.  Aloysha is pure because he has not lived.  I don't think that anyone who has done much living in Dostoevsky can remain pure.  On the other hand, there are many who don't do much living and still aren't pure.

The reader is even roped into sympathizing with the prosecuting attorney, who is so meticulous and sincere.  Even amidst such a miscarriage of justice, you can't hate anyone, or blame anyone.  You can only grieve.

I was really glad when Aloysha gave a speech at the end.  I'd been waiting for him to really say something since the book began.  The sweetness of it warmed my heart.

"And even if we are occupied with most important things, if we attain to honor or fall to great misfortune - still let us always remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are....

"You must know that there is nothing higher or stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home....

"...the cruelest and most mocking of us - if we do indeed become so - will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been skind and good at this moment!  What's more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, 'Yes, I was good and brave and honest then!'  Let him laugh to himself, that's no matter, a man often laughs at what's good and kind.  That's only from thoughtlessness.  but I assure you, oys, that as he laughs he will say at once in his heart, 'No, I do wrong to laugh, for that's not a thing to laugh at.'"

The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller

An excellent biography and cultural history that sets Foucault's philosophy into the context of his life, and his life into the context of his times.  The result is a particularly illuminating description of the second half of the twentieth century.  Miller considers Foucault in relation to his influences (Sade, Artaud, Bataille, and especially Nietzsche), his love/hate relationship with Sartre, his relationship with his philosophical peers (Derrida, Barthes, Chomsky, Habermas, Deleuze, etc.), and his history of political engagement, especially during May '68 and the Iranian Revolution.

But the main focus of the book is the integration of biography and philosophy, with particular emphasis on Foucault's sexuality - his interest in S&M and his homosexuality - in relations to his interest in marginalized groups and violence.  Foucault's death from AIDS and his frequent presence in the gay bathhouses of San Francisco is one of the key points of the text, particularly the possibility that he engaged in unprotected sex while aware that he was dying, and probably aware that he was dying from AIDS.  His experimentation with drugs - marijuana, LSD and opium - also receives a fair bit of attention.

The book gives the impression that Foucault was prone to histrionics in his writing, always a bit overwrought and dire.

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

The strange thing about Sebald is the double voice I hear when I read it; there is the voice of the text - so clean and precise - and then a second, which is warm and fuzzy - the voice of an older man.  I've never read a book that I imagined so strongly as sound.

I love the way that Sebald writes.  Somehow his concrete descriptions swallow the metaphors and imagery, so that no matter how extraordinary they are I read them as muted, the tone smooth, sort of damp.  Like here: "He said that he could see things then with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within him, doubtless because he himself was small, but also because the shelves reached all the four meters up to the ceiling.  The light in the emporium, coming through the small transom windows let into the tops of the display window backboards, was dim even on the brightest of days..."

Here's another: "ever since I had once visited Munich I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to the word city as the presence of heaps of rubble fire-scorched walls, and the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air."

The blurb on the back of the book says that Sebald had a "quarrel" with Proust (I can only assume that the word quarrel is meant to signify respectful disagreement - although, actually, it occurs to me that Proust would have had different feelings about memory if he'd had the kind of memories that Sebald writes about) and I have a note scrawled on page 141 of my book: "the quarrel is this: for Proust, memory brings completion, wholeness.  Sebald seems to see memory as destructive - almost an active force.  His precision may be an attempt to subdue memory, to tame it, order it, make it unnatural and foreign."

The book is really haunting.  Of course, not unlike Proust, it's an excavation - a search for lost time - an attempt to attach images, places, names to stories told by dead and dying friends.  To fill out details and gaps.  But everywhere, the people Sebald meets are passionately dedicated to the destruction of the past.  Destroying themselves (it's a book full of suicides), destroying the houses that sheltered the horrors.  But it doesn't do them any good, they can't escape.  They surround themselves with debris, like Ferber haunting the periphery of the rotting asylum, or the doctor eating the fruits of the abandoned garden.

The conclusion, at the end, is that the only thing worse than remembering is willing forgetfulness ("I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves").

If you do not remember, you are contemptible...but if you do, you are doomed.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Foucault's Pendulum combines the worst qualities of chi-chi French films with the worst qualities of low-budget slasher flicks.  On the one hand, it takes a long time to go nowhere.  On the other hand, it's like putting that clichéd scene where the girl goes down alone into the dark basement wearing high heels on endless repeat.  You want to smack her upside the head and say, "If you don't want to die, down't go down there, stupid!"...Advice that the protagonists of Foucault's Pendulum could use.

The book explores the possibility that one or another of the secret societies generally believed to be mythical (or extinct) are, in fact, real and very powerful indeed.   Is it the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Jews?  Did they control all of history?  A handful of bookish nerds at a publishing house dedicate much, much too much of their time rifling through crackpot occultist books looking for answers.

The narrator, Casaubon, is dull and hard to like.  His posse of cowardly friends ditto.  His girlfriends are interchangeable, their characters undeveloped.  All the women in the novel, for that matter, are one dimensional stereotypes.  The enemy, the Templars or the Illuminati or whoever, are ridiculous.

The reader is reminded periodically throughout the novel that the protagonists' attempts to get to the heart of the secret society are foolish, that their discoveries are tripe, and that they, the bookish nerds, are insane.  Call me crazy, but giving away the surprise ending before the tension has started to build is not the best move.

Eco's obsession with list-making makes sense in the medieval-set thriller In the Name of the Rose.  Here, it's just annoying.  Adding the diary entries of Belbo, the editor who can't write well and knows it, into the text of the novel is tedious.  Most of all, the book is boring and has no real payoff.  It's more than half over before the plot kicks in, long after I stopped caring.

What a waste of some great one-liners.

NB: I wish I could go back and explain some of my damning comments a little better, backing them up with an example or two, or a bit of plot summary.  Unfortunately, I have no memory of reading Foucault's Pendulum, and this is all I wrote at the time.

I now know that Casaubon is the name of a particularly repulsive character in George Eliot's Middlemarch.  Yet I don't like Foucault's Pendulum any more than I did before.  Curious.

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

One sentence review of Anna Karenina: Tolstoy is sending God a job application, in case he's looking for a replacement.  Thanks, Tolstoy.

Full review: When Anna jumped in front of the train, I was relieved.  I'd been waiting for her to die ever since the race when Vronsky killed his horse.  When I turned the last page, I felt more like I'd faithfully accomplished a painful duty than like I was saying farewell to a beloved friend.

I find Tolstoy to be smug and self-satisfied to the extreme.  Tolstoy and Anna Karenina were recommended to me left and right; I was told that Tolstoy really understood women, and sympathized with their tragedy - I was told that there is a special term for his kind treatment of these tragic characters, "Toylstoyan pity."  And I think the term couldn't be more apt - because this is the ugly kind of pity.  The sort that slyly places the pity-er in a position of superiority.  The pity-er gets to enjoy being better off than the pitied person and self-consciously meritorious about his/her bleeding heart.  Such a bargain.

I was constantly aware of Tolstoy's craft, of the author pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes.  Their behavior frequently struck me as unnatural and artificial, and I could only make sense of it as the the author showing off.  He says: see, this horse that Vronsky kills, - this horse is Anna!  He says: see, this ill-fated love affair of Anna's has a foil in the lawful union of Levin and Kitty, such good and loving souls!  He says: see, Anna and Stiva are brother and sister, and they make parallel choices throughout the novel!  He says, over and over again: look at how brilliant I am, with my parallel plotlines and foreshadowing!

I think that Tolstoy is convinced his characters deserve what they get - Stiva deserves financial ruin and disrespect, Anna deserves death, Vronsky deserves pity and death, and Levin and Kitty deserve a happy life in the country.  Tolstoy is happy with himself for having grasped and described human nature, content in his ability to properly penalize or reward the actions and motivations of mankind, summarized so neatly in his characters.

I kept that that every time Levin appeared in the book it was Tolstoy chortling, "Here's the way to go!  If only you others would follow suit!"  Indeed, Tolstoy, if only we could all be more like you.  Thanks for letting us know.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

I have never read a book so long that I hated so much.  The more I read, the more I hated it, and then I hated it because it would not end.

A lot of the ideas in it ought to appeal to me - the enmeshing of disease and love, the fleshly-spiritual cross currents, the discursive style - but I was totally unmoved.

I hated every last character in the book, and that didn't help; but many of Proust's characters are unlikable, and I love Proust.  I think the difference is that in the end, though Marcel can't respect people like the Verdurins, they nonetheless become heroic...they become larger than life.  I felt like all the people, all the events in the Magic Mountain, shrunk into dust bunnies, filth on the floor, something meaningless and a little repulsive.

I hated the endless descriptions of the natural environment.  I hated the endless philosophical debates between Settembrini and anyone.  I hated Hans Castorp.  I hated the endless repetition.  I do not know how many hundreds of times I read about the "excellent lounge chairs" or the "hearty meals" at the Sanatorium. I was reminded countless times how and when the patients wrapped themselves in blankets.  Eventually, every time I saw those details, I would be infuriated.

The only thing I liked about the whole book was Clavdia Chauchat.  She was magnificent.  I loved the way that Mann described her body, her movements, her hands, her eyes.  I loved her dialogue, her sly and suggestive slink.  I loved her name, and I love that she cruelly rejected Hans Castorp, because I would have, too.

NB: It's a few years now since I wrote this, and I have to say that there is at least one thing about The Magic Mountain that I recall with great pleasure.  Hans Castorp - a worthless sniveler if ever there was one - gets his clumsy mitts on an X-Ray of Clavdia Chauchat.  Of her chest I think?  He finds it profoundly erotic.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

I really loved Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is structured very similarly, splicing together a contemporary narrative with another story set in the past, making the reader privy to both and to the richness of the connections between the two while the present-day characters in the book are deprived that knowledge.

In both cases, there's a search: in Everything is Illuminated, Safran Foer is looking for the place where his family is from.  In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a boy is looking for a lock to fit a mysterious key.  In both cases, the reader finds the journey (and even the eventual conclusion) to be satisfying while the seeker himself is frustrated.  In both cases, the style of writing is very similar - the narratives set in the past have the same frantic rhythm, the same delicate shades of magical realism, the same explosions of vivid prose.

Basically, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a very different book, but pressed in the same mould as its predecessor.  That's a little disappointing.  I had hoped Safran Foer had more potential to grow as an author.

I imagine I was seeing a very strong influence from two other writers.  Martin Amis, and in particular his book Time's Arrow, and W.G. Sebald.  Amis' book Time's Arrow is set during WWII and its trick is that time progresses backwards through the novel - it's not the telling of the narrative that's scrambled, it's the events themselves, reversing cause and effect.  One of Sebald's quirks as an author is his use of photographs.  Foer doesn't copy any phrase or image, but he uses their tricks without modification, and they still have the tone and function of their sources.  They fit, but feel borrowed, like they still belong to someone else.

Now, both Amis and Sebald have a very similar interest in urban, contemporary Jewish identity and WWII/Holocaust narratives.  Foer falls into the same category.  It makes sense that there's a connection, that Foer would find those other authors intruding on his own creation, but he is putting himself in danger of being overwhelmed by their inventions.

But I'm circling the book itself.  It's a really beautiful novel.  I didn't snap it up originally because I had heard that it was written from the perspective of a 10 year old boy, and I heard that it was about September 11, and I imagined a trainwreck.  I had heard true, on both counts, but it's no trainwreck.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is full of details that are delightful, charming, funny; the boy is precocious and sweet, and his running commentary is never simple or dull.  His dad died in the World Trade Center, and 9-11 is not a political event in the book.  It returns 9/11 to what it was before it was co-opted by Bush et al, and I have to admit that it's been hard to remember the tragedy itself with all the baggage it's been carrying for so long now.  So Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a good reminder.

Nana, by Emile Zola

I ended up feeling pretty disgusted by Zola after finishing Nana.  The only other book of Zola's that I've read was La Curée - I read it during my semester abroad in Paris.  I don't remember the narrative arc exactly, but it's about an aristocratic woman who marries into the nouveau riche of real estate speculators during Haussmanization.  The woman - so went hte professor - stands in for the old Paris and so while developers mutilate the old city, the same thing happens to her.

Nana is a sort of opposite plot.  She is born a petite bourgeoise, becomes a prostitute, and slowly rises up through the theater to become a wealthy, coveted courtesan.  The book is amazing, fabulously written and rich and brutal..but nearly every character is corrupt, perverted, sick, and Zola describes Nana as the fly that passes the disease around.  She becomes a kind of Dorian Gray - a beautiful, desirable creature who absorbs all the filth around her and is ultimately destroyed by it.

At the beginning, I really liked Nana.  She was stupid but kind, unaffected, charming.  But she plays all of her cards wrong and burns her bridges - falling in love with a man who beats her, spending extravagantly and always beyond her means, embarrassing her patrons.  In the process she becomes crass, unkind, repulsive.  Of course she finally catches a horrible disease and dies, disfigured, her life of vice written all over her beautiful body.  An by that time there was some satisfaction in her death, some release.

But I hated Zola for writing these books where women, as symbols, suffer and die to pay for - or just embody - the sins of all.

True statement: I am a top 1000 reviewer on Amazon.com.

I mostly review the pulp novels that I'm addicted to, so no linky link - names changed to protect the guilty and all that.

For anyone curious about how to achieve this august title, or interested in improving their own rank, I am going to share my tips and tricks.

Everything I'm about to say can be summed up in one simple sentence: The more people who see your review, the more positive votes you will get. Let's take a closer look at how to make that happen.

#1 - Be the first to review something. New products get the most traffic, which translates to more readers, which translates to more votes. But that's not all. If you get your review in first, your review will start out on the main product page. The more positive votes you get, the more likely your review is to stay on the front page - later reviews, even if they are much better than yours, will be posted straight to the "see all ## customer reviews" page. Fewer people click through, so fewer people vote. If a product is popular, that great review will be buried under newer reviews. The early lead turns into a nearly insurmountable advantage.

#2 - Leave positive reviews. This is sad but true: the bar is set much lower for positive reviews. 4 or 5 stars and a couple of sentences declaring that a book is "Wonderful! The best book I ever read! You will love it!" will probably do better than a thoughtful critical review. A really well-written positive review is ranking gold.

By contrast, negative reviews collect "unhelpful" votes no matter how great they are. Positive reviews that contain a whiff of criticism are more likely to get negative votes too. I think this is because the people most likely to visit a product page are fans, and a lot of fans don't take kindly to opposing opinions.

It's important to write negative reviews, but hard to rank with them. A negative review generally won't collect "helpful" votes unless it is well-written. The more entertaining a negative review is, the better. And the more balanced it is - acknowledging the book's positive points, or exhibiting a solid understanding of the genre in which it belongs - the better.

Beware. Amazon will knock negative reviews off of the main product page. There are rumors that Amazon will delete 1 and 2 star reviews, and whether or not this is true a 1 or 2 star review is much, much more likely to be delayed while the censors vet it or just plain rejected.

#3 - Game the system. I recently reviewed a book that had been out for only a couple of days, but long enough to collect 3-4 glowing, 5-star reviews. I knew my review would bypass the main product page completely, and since I had a few problems with the book I knew my review wouldn't get bumped up for propaganda purposes. So I tried something different.

After the main product page, the next place where a review can be featured is the "most helpful..." section at the top of the product's review page. There's a box at the top, split in half. On the left side is the "most helpful positive review" and on the right side is the "most helpful negative review." The "most helpful negative review" will generally also be the most laudatory negative review. It's usually a 3 star review, the highest rating that is categorized as negative.

The review I had written was pretty critical for a 4 star review, but pretty positive for a 3 star review. I selected 3 stars, and voila: my review was almost instantly selected as the "most helpful critical review," and was stickied on the main review page - where it wouldn't just get buried by more recent reviews.

#3 - Review popular titles. The more popular an author is, the more widely publicized the book, the more people will visit the product site, the more votes you will get. Being the first to review a best-seller is the reviewer equivalent of winning the jackpot. But it's hard, since people who have ARCs (advanced reading copies) will be posting reviews - often before the release date - and even if reviews are closed until the date of release, you can bet that several reviews will go up within the first hour. The more popular the title, the more you have to concern yourself with timing.

The opposing strategy is:

#4 - Be the only/obviously best reviewer for less popular titles. It's not as effective as #3, but it's easier and more reliable.

What to write?

A few points about what makes a good review:

To summarize or not to summarize? This might be superstition on my part, but I find books are more likely to be featured on the main page if they include at least a little plot summary.

Include detail, but don't spoil. It's bad manners to put spoilers in a review, but a good review must be specific. If I'm criticizing something, especially, I want to include an example - but I'll try to pick one from the first 50 pages of the book. I want to let the reader know that I'm choosing my example carefully, too, so they don't leave angry comments. Like so: "Silly Pulp Novel is full of plotholes you could drive a truck through, starting in Chapter 1 when..."

It helps to be authoritative... If you know a lot about the subject of the book, if you are very familiar with the author, the period, the genre, etc., and you can speak authoritatively about a book, that's a good thing.

...and friendly. Part of the reason why Amazon reviews are popular is that they're not written by professionals - it's fine to be opinionated, informal, even emotional. A good review makes you feel pallsy with the author, like you just had a nice chat.

It's important to note that while you can strategize to get your review onto the main page, its placement there is not set in stone. Reviews that get lots of positive votes will move up to the main product page, displacing what's already there, and I've seen my own reviews get preference over unranked reviewer submissions when there were no votes involved.

My personal suspicion is that there is some real human involvement in review placement - I've seen reviews move on or off the main page for reasons database technology alone can't explain. My further suspicion, for which I have no evidence at all, is that Amazon is fairly responsive to author/agent/publisher requests - "Please feature this review, please don't feature that one." With 10%+ of all books being sold via Amazon.com, it would be very frustrating for the publishers not to have any control over what appears on the product page - and that would be a fair compromise.