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Friends, I have a problem. Admittedly, it’s a good problem.

I’ve just read a new book by one of my favorite authors, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. But the problem is now I have to review it. Ordinarily, when writing a review of a book, I start out by telling you something about the plot, the characters, etc.

But this book is the second installment in a series, and so to introduce you to it much at all, I would have to tell you a little about the first book, including what series protagonist Liza Larkin did in it. And this is the tricky bit, partially because to do so would not only risk spoiling the first book in the series, but also because Liza herself is always a bit of a Rorschach test. (Come to think of it, she’s also a bit like the character Rorschach, the anti-social vigilante from Alan Moore’s Watchmen.)

So what I say about Liza’s action in book one will carry over and affect how she’s viewed in book two. It’s a bit like how, at the beginning of Knights of the Old Republic II, you have to explain what happened in KotOR I, which can vary depending on your choices. And my interpretation of the first book may not be everyone’s interpretation. I alluded to this when I reviewed it, and it’s even more true now. All I can really say is the Liza discovers a friend’s aunt is dead. While the death is ruled an accident, Liza is not convinced, and this sends her analytical, logical—and sometimes paranoid—mind to work.

What happens from there, though, is very much a matter of who and what you choose to believe. There are all sorts of dark twists and turns: fentanyl overdoses, an ongoing attempt by an ex-con to blackmail Liza, and multiple visits to a BDSM club. And none of this is even the really strange aspect of the book.

Which, as I said with the first book, is exactly what makes it good. Your view of what happens here may not be the same as mine. The truth is that we, as readers, are being asked to solve a mystery as much as (or more than?) we are following Liza as she solves it. We get clues. But what do we make of them?

If you’re disappointed by the lack of specifics in this review, I hope I can at least convey this much: Malignant Assumptions is a terrific book, even better than the excellent Fatal Rounds. It is fairly typical for a thriller to keep a reader guessing what will happen next. What is more unusual is when it makes the reader second-guess what has already happened. But that’s what these books do, and so create a mental tension that, if nothing else, makes it easy to empathize with Liza’s own peculiarly (over?)active mind.

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As a critic of sorts, it is my business to traffic in opinions. As a result, I sometimes encounter people who disagree with my opinions. To steal a line from P.G. Wodehouse, probably most of them have been eaten by bears, but just in case, I regret to inform you that there are those who will take issue with my admiration for Adam Bertocci’s books. The chief complaint I hear from these people is that his books have “too much irony.”

Paraphrasing The Lion in Winter: “We all have too much irony! It’s 2024 and we’re millennials!”

Srsly, people! These books are by and for millennials. Having a book for millennials with no irony would require a trigger warning, at least.

Another thing I’ve heard people say is that the characters are “too self-absorbed.” Well, this is because they are usually young people on journeys of self-discovery.  I feel that most Bertocci characters are less self-absorbed by the end than they were at the beginning. And even if they’re not, the class of books which are called “literary fiction” frequently feature self-absorbed characters, and people fawn over them and heap accolades upon them and force innocent students to read them. Do I even need to say it?

But okay, let’s say you are one who doesn’t like the black cat’s lines at the end of Samantha, 25, on October 31, and are not charmed by the extremely meta dialogue in The Hundred Other Rileys. Well, perhaps this is the Bertocci book for you.

Ex Marks The Spot follows a typical Bertocci protagonist, high school sophomore Darian, who decides to dress up as a pirate for a Halloween party, which she is looking forward to as a way of forgetting about her ex-boyfriend Shane.

Unfortunately, she ends up being forced to take her little brother out for trick-or-treat night instead. And guess who they happen to bump into?

Like all Bertocci’s stories, the prose is witty and the theme is of a young woman finding her way in the world. All of us dedicated Bertoccioids, (whose numbers are swelling by the day) will find all the delights we expect.

But there is a little something different here, too: it captures the warm nostalgia of Halloween in an unapologetically fond way, and more to the point, Darian has to do a little growing up, and is certainly not self-absorbed. She comes into her own as a big sister, and that makes her all the more likable.

It’s got humor, it’s got romance, it’s got magic, it’s got spookiness, and–like Linus’s pumpkin patch–it’s got sincerity. Perhaps it can be the book that will make even the most ardent Bertocci non-enjoyer say cast aside their saber, fight no more, and say, “let there be commerce between us.“

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I heard about this book via Audrey Driscoll’s review, and she recommended it to anyone interested in information management. Well, I’m interested in information management! So, naturally I had to read it.

The book includes a brief history of libraries across the world, before zeroing in on the United States’ Library of Congress, and how it evolved from essentially Thomas Jefferson’s personal collection to housing an unparalleled assortment of books, documents, and so on. It wasn’t always an easy road, as shown by the struggles at cataloging and the efforts made by people like Melville Dewey (a man so obsessed with efficient labeling that he for a time spelled his name “Melvil Dui”) to create a system for managing all of it.

Yes, indeed; this book is paean to library science that should make any archivist proudly proclaim, like Evie Carnahan in The Mummy, “I am a librarian!”

The most interesting fact of all that I learned from this book comes from a little note towards the back, referencing the Mundaneum. The Mundaneum was, in effect, a non-electronic internet, created by Belgian lawyers in the 1900s. It was, essentially, a database. In the 1930s, there were even early plans to make it accessible remotely.

The name “Mundaneum” is just so perfect, don’t you think? We ought to start calling the internet “Mundaneum 2.0” as far as I’m concerned. It captures the spirit much better.

Now, as I said, I am interested in information management. What may surprise you is that I am interested in information management in much the same way that Robert Muldoon was interested in velociraptor management. Information, you see, is a dangerous thing.

Of course, unlike velociraptors, information is critical to human life. We need information, and a way to store and retrieve it.

The science of cataloging and accessing information now takes up vastly more of our lives than it used to in historic times. The reason we don’t notice this is that it has evolved more or less concurrently with advances in electronic systems designed to expedite this process. “Anything can be quantified nowadays.”

All of which is to say that there is something about the entire process of information management that feels slightly inhuman to me.

“Big Data,” cloud computing, advanced analytics, and of course our new friend Artificial Intelligence are all refinements on methods of organizing and cataloging information. As this books shows, from the ancient Sumerians on, information management is a practice that has been steadily progressing over time.

But when I say “progressing”… is it progressing the way a garden gradually grows and becomes filled with nourishing food and beautiful flowers? Or is it progressing the way a malignant tumor does? Marc Andreessen said software is eating the world; perhaps it’s more accurate to say information is eating the world.

Is this good or bad? Like Zhou Enlai didn’t, but should have, said of the impact of the French Revolution, it may be too early to say. On the other hand, it might be too late. Or maybe both at once…?

You see what kind of weird and dangerous tricks you can play with information? You came here probably expecting a simple review of a book about libraries. “That seems like a dry enough topic; he can’t make too much of a mountain out of this molehill,” you may have thought. Sorry! Perhaps the wisest course would be to go outside and touch the damn grass already.

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First things first: no, the author isn’t the Guardians of the Galaxy director. This is James E. Gunn, born nearly a half-century earlier. This book is what they used to call a philosophical novel, before such things fell out of favor. It’s sci-fi, but the sci-fi is really an excuse to examine complex issues concerning the human condition.

The first section deals with a company called Hedonics, Inc., a business which promises to make people happy, or give them their money back. A hardboiled businessman thinks he sees through this obvious scam. But after awhile, he starts to find that maybe it isn’t just a scam after all.

In part two, Hedonics has basically taken over the world, to the point where there are professional “hedonists,” who are essentially doctors assigned to make sure that their charges are in a state of happiness. This section follows one such hedonist, whose name we learn very late in the section, is Morgan. Morgan gradually uncovers… let’s say… issues within the structure of the government-sponsored philosophy of absolute happiness.

The third section deals with a Venus-born man returning to Earth to warn of what appears to be an impending alien attack. What he finds on returning to Earth is that it has been nearly entirely taken over by machines, whose prime directive is ensuring that humans are happy at all times. And being machines, they followed this logic to its inevitable conclusion.

This all probably sounds pretty straightforward as a plot. And in some ways it is, but the real meat of this book isn’t the plot, except maybe in the first section. The Joy Makers isn’t plot-driven or character-driven. It’s question-driven, and the question is, “What does it mean to be happy?”

It seems simple on the face of it. I’m sitting here in my comfy office chair, in my air-conditioned house, sipping a nice flavored water. I am happy.

Ah, but am I really? Am I maximizing my joy? Do I have absolutely no anxieties or possible wants? Could I, somehow, increase my Benthamite utility?

Of course, I could be happier! My desires could be satisfied more completely, my wants and fears removed. But then… what would it mean to do that? What would the complete absence of anything remotely displeasurable even look like?

Such are the questions The Joy Makers grapples with over and over; each section exploring different aspects of what it is to be happy, each chapter with a quote from some famous philosopher on the concept of happiness.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the modern world provides a great deal of luxury and convenience. We enjoy amenities undreamt for nearly all of recorded history. Is it possible to imagine a future in which people remain forever in a gauzy, comfortable state of pleasurable suspended animation while robots mine the planet for resources? Gunn was imagining it in the 1960s, and it sure looks even more plausible now.

And would this really be happiness? Or merely a flawed simulacrum thereof?  And how would we know?

The Joy Makers addresses all these questions. While a few aspects here and there serve to date it, the core theme of the book is strikingly relevant to the present day; probably much more so than when it was written.

Of course, the issue with many philosophical novels is that the actual plot may get short shrift, and that kind of happens here. For example, both section two and three feature this pattern of events:

  1. Male protagonist meets attractive female
  2. After some confusion, male and female realize they are allies
  3. Male and female seek shelter together, fall asleep
  4. When male wakes up, female is gone.
  5. Male thinks female has probably abandoned him, doesn’t wait for her return
  6. This creates problems for both down the line.

Maybe this was some sort of artistic choice, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like the same story beats were just being recycled. And maybe it annoyed me more than it should, but I hate when characters in a story don’t wait for someone they supposedly like to explain their motivations. (Actually, I hate when people do that in real life, too.)

So, sure, there are a few times when the story gets bogged down a little. But it’s so interesting I could mostly look past it. The themes in this book are so relevant that I could forgive any flaws. Everyone should read it, simply for the questions it raises.

RJ Llewellyn recommended this book to me years ago, and I picked up a copy at the time, but didn’t get around to reading it until this past month. I wish I hadn’t waited so long. This book raises ideas that stick with you long after you finish reading.

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I found out about this book from Lydia Schoch’s review, and anything Lydia likes is something I’ll give a try. And I’m glad I did. This is a shorty story–5,501 words to be exact–but it’s effective, and it uses all those words to good effect.

The only problem with a story so short is that it’s hard to go into much detail about spoiling the story, so I’ll deliberately keep the plot synopsis vague. It’s about a fishing trip that goes wrong. More generally, it’s in the grand tradition of the ghost story, where people get warned not to do something, do it anyway, and suffer the consequences.

This is the kind of tale you tell around a campfire on a dark night, maybe changing the details here and there to make it better suited to your present location. You don’t need thousands of pages to tell a good scary story; you just need to evoke the feeling of being in a fog and then, when then tension is at its highest, spring something out of it.

The Killer Catfish of Cape Cod is an effective horror short story.