Alena (Rachel Pastan)

This haunting novel is a deliberate updating of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and evokes much of the same sense of claustrophobia, uncertainty, and dread. The (again unnamed) narrator is an art historian, new in her profession and working her way up through assistant positions in minor museums. She meets up by chance with Bernard, the wealthy and enigmatic owner of a small but important gallery in Cape Cod, and he sweeps her off her feet by offering her the job of curator. The gallery has been closed for two years since its last curator, the larger-than-life Alena, disappeared, apparently while swimming alone. The museum's business manager adored the departed Alena and is devoted to maintaining her hold on the museum, even though she is gone, whispering to the newcomer at one point to remember that she is temporary. As in the original novel, mysteries gradually unravel and reveal something not entirely surprising about Alena's disappearance. The writing is very good, creating a strong sense of place and character, but for me this story did not work as well as the original, where the young heroine was inexperienced but gradually came into her own, finally taking charge of the household and telling the domineering Mrs. Danvers, "I am Mrs. de Winter now, you know." Alena's heroine never makes the same stand, finishing the book as the same frightened child she was when she started. She also makes some unforgivably foolish choices, for instance sneaking into the museum at night to run off and mail materials without checking on any procedures. In Rebecca, you could understand the innocent bride making some mistakes, though none of them were so egregious, but in Alena this person has been hired in a professional capacity and should live up to some basic standards. I found myself annoyed at both Bernard, who hired someone so woefully unqualified and unprepared, and then abandoned her without direction, and at the narrator herself, who should have realized how far out of her depth she was and insisted on more structure. So although I truly enjoyed the book, I was disappointed for the ways it seemed to be twisted out of its natural shape to align with the original.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Brian Selznick)

This "novel in words and pictures" tells the charming story of a young boy living in the walls of a train station in Paris who gives up everything for his dreams. He tends to all the stations clocks, as his uncle taught him to do before he disappeared, and works to repair an automaton his father left to him. Along the way he meets people who alternately help and thwart him. The book is an adventure and a series of beautifully drawn images, but mostly it is a testament to the thrill and magic of movies.

Just My Type (Simon Garfield)

A whole book just about fonts - their history, their politics, their design, and their psychology. Why does everybody hate Comic Sans? Will Helvetica take over the universe? Why is Steve Jobs almost as important in the history of type as Guttenberg? Which font should I choose for my course materials? I loved it, and learned a vast amount of quirky, fun information. I'm never going to be a font geek, the kind of person who, when watching a movie set in the 1940s, is thrown off by a store sign in a font that was invented in 1972. Still, I loved the whole thing. And yes, after reading this, I was moved to do some research and change my standard font from Century Gothic to Verdana. Read the book if design is something you are interested in.

Shadows Bright as Glass (Amy Ellis Nutt)

This fascinating book describes in detail the experiences of Jon Sarkin, who suffered a massive stroke that tore him loose from his former self and shattered his experience of time and space. He found peace and his way of connecting back to life through art, as he began  doodling compulsively and it expanded  into a national career as an artist. Woven into Sarkin's story is much information about the history of neuroscience and the search for the nature of consciousness and identity. This book is much more accurate and well-researched than the Taylor book I read recently, though not without its own errors. The author repeatedly conflates information seen by the left eye with information in the left visual field, for example, and reports straight-faced that "Some scientists have suggested that there are more synapses in the human brain than there are atomic particles in the universe (p. 24)." Any scientist who suggested this does not deserve to be reported in a serious work of nonfiction. Overall, though, I found the story compelling, and my only real complaint is that there are no pictures of Sarkin's art, aside from the cover.

The Cheese Monkeys (Chip Kidd)

This is an odd little book, but interesting, about a young man who decided to major in art, though he's not sure why. His first semester he falls for a wild, dangerous, challenging young woman who enjoys pushing boundaries and everyone's buttons. His second semester focuses on a graphic design course they both take, taught by a man who is even more wild and challenging. The author has a lot to say about Art, Design, and the differences between them, but the book is mostly about their relationship, which is frustrating and baffling. I can't say I enjoyed it, really, but I was fascinated in an appalled sort of way, and the writing itself was fine.