Alif the Unseen

G. Willow Wilson--graphic novelist and author of Seattle Times "Best Book of the Year" The Butterfly Mosque--has here turned her hand to an intriguing combination of dualing computer programmers and supernatural beings (jinn, demons, marid and others). Set in an unnamed City of an unnamed country in the Middle East, this is a world strictly structured and controlled by a royal family with powerful censors who monitor every communication. Alif, the cover name for a person who helps anyone trying to hide from the government censors--collectively known as "The Hand"--has generally been successful in keeping his clients a step ahead of trouble and out of jail. Then one day his life begins to unravel. The woman he has secretly loved, slept with and married--Intisar--has told him she is promised to another by her father, and wishes no further contact. As revenge, he develops a program so that she cannot find him online. But "The Hand" intercepts and turns the unique identifying algorithm against Alif's clients. Suddenly, Alif is on the run and everyone who knows him is in danger from the secret police as well. The wild ride that Alif and his long-time childhood friend, Dina, begin will involve seeking help from not-quite humans, imprisonment and torture, and finally full-blown revolution. This book is very timely given events in the Middle East. This book has been compared to works by Neal Stephenson (see Cryptonomicon or Snow Crash) or Philip Pullman (e.g., Golden Compass) and certainly the creation of detailed alternate worlds merits that. But it is unique in its focus on the world shaped by this particular culture and set of beliefs.

Isaac's Storm

This is one of Erik Larson's first books and when he said at his author's talk here in Bend on June 20 (2013) that it was his wife's favorites (she is is initial editor for all his work), I was even more intrigued to read it--having already bought it in preparation for his appearance here. Personally, I did not think it superseded the other two of his which I really liked, Devil in the White City or In the Garden of Beasts (see also my post on Thunderstruck ).  He does a good job of describing the hubris of men who were the initial movers and shakers of the national weather bureau and who believed, falsely as it turns out, that they already knew a lot about how hurricanes behaved. They also had political agendas which kept them from paying attention to those who did know how hurricanes behaved, the Cubans, and therefore ignored available warnings that this was a storm to be reckoned with. A lot of people died needlessly as a result. Although Isaac Cline was the chief of the Galveston station at the time the 1900 hurricane wiped out much of the city, and Larson does rely on Cline's memoirs and scientific papers, I think the reader gets a less compelling picture of Isaac than might be expected from the title of the book. As with his other books, Larson has done his research on the meteorology,  the history of the weather bureau and relevant events and personalities-- providing extensive documentation which is all relegated to notes at the end of the book;  he writes his story with the heart of a novelist so the reader is swept along with the tide of the oncoming storm.