Much (though by no means all) of the stuff I talk about in this column comes to me free for review, often well in advance of the street release date. That means there are a lot of unfamiliar CDs and books and DVDs scattered around my workplace; it also means we get a lot of mail.

My kids thought that part was pretty exciting, when I first took the gig — until they got a load of the actual contents of most of those packages. “Hey, guys, who wants to watch this Rob Thomas DVD with Dad?” is kind of a non-starter, when weighing the options for a rainy Thursday afternoon.

Every now and then, though, a hit finds its way into our house. I got my advance copy of the lavish annual photo-book put out by the Ripley’s people (this year’s edition is subtitled Seeing Is Believing) literally months ago, and I’m only writing about it now — because it’s been the exclusive property of my seven-year old since its arrival.

In fact, he wrote his review before I did:

The main idea of this book is basically about gathering up ramdom facts and try to shock you with unbelivable sights. (note: seeing is beliveing) My favorite part is when a bus jumped over 15 motorcycles while on fire in reverseal to Knievel’s stunts!

He’s not wrong, you know. Oddity for oddity’s sake has been the Ripley brand for well on 90 years now. Though it’s been through many incarnations — a radio show, a newsreel feature, a museum franchise, and no fewer than three television series — “Believe It or Not!” began as a newspaper comic. Robert L. Ripley’s little daily panel was (and, in the hands of current artist John Graziano, remains) a masterpiece of concision, depicting strange and unusual people and events in a single striking image and a few well-chosen words.

Ripley himself was an unholy admixture of P.T. Barnum and that guy that does “News of the Weird,” with the draftsmanship of a Hal Foster thrown into the bargain. He remains a curiously underrated artist, even among comics historians — perhaps because of his extensive use of photo reference, perhaps because he increasingly handed off the art chores to assistants and ghosts as he grew more famous, or perhaps because he worked exclusively in his own singular form.

Whatever the reason, even the book series that still bears his name downplays that aspect of his life. You won’t find any of Ripley’s cartoons in Seeing Is Believing’s 240+ pages — which is why Sam and I had to draw our own — but what you will find are hundreds of color photos of crazy athletic feats, human oddities, outsider art, uncanny coincidences, cultural footnotes, and other credulity-straining phenomena, all rendered in that classic, breathless tone:

STRANGE FAMILY! The elephant shrews, or sengi, are a family of tiny, insect-eating African mammals that are more closely related to elephants than to shrews.

CAMEL GIRL! Ella Harper of Hendersonville, Tennessee, appeared in shows as “The Camel Girl” because her knees turned backward. Owing to this deformity, she struggled to walk solely on her feet and preferred to move around on all fours.

OLD SPRUCE! A spruce tree in Sweden has been sprouting new trees for nearly 10,000 years. Scientists think the tree took root in Dalmatia around the year 7542 B.C.

Selected items have a longer feature-style article attached, but for the most part the book reads just like this — like a Twitter feed from some slightly-more-wonderful world just alongside our own.

I’m not surprised that Sam glommed onto this book; the seven-year old version of myself would have devoured it, too. There’s something irresistible about this sort of miscellany. Leafing through such a book gives some of the same thrill of random discovery that you get when you’re surfing Wikipedia, looking for nothing in particular. When I was a kid I would pore over the Guinness Book of World Records, and I still get a little thrill every autumn when the new edition of the Old Farmer’s Almanac hits the shelves. John Hodgman lovingly skewered the format in The Areas of My Expertise, and captured the tone of facts and figures shading into anecdote, conveyed with the same earnestness. He ramps up the absurdity quotient — in Hodgman’s almanac, charts of the moon’s phases cross-reference not only the tides but the stages of werewolfism, and a survey of beard styles sits side-by-side with exposé of America’s secret hobo empire — but the essence of it, the free-floating oddities, shorn of context, adding up to singular worldview, comes straight from the models.

The Ripley books, like their spiritual descendants (and icons of my childhood) the People’s Almanac and the Book of Lists, are of dubious value as references; they’re thinly-sourced, and serve to perpetuate apocrypha and give new life to discredited old stories. The world of these books is full of mystery and wonder — just like the real world, of course, but in the crush of the mundane it’s easy to forget that. Seeing Is Believing’s emphasis on the weird and sensational is, in a way, a comfort; the message is that there is more to life than your workaday existence, that there is beauty and surprise all around you, if you look.

There’s a great repeated line in Warren Ellis’s recently-completed comics series Planetary, a line spoken by a “mystery archeologist,” an old-school globe-trotting adventurer who publishes his discoveries in a set of esoteric guidebooks — a figure not unlike the talented Mr. Ripley himself, now I come to think of it. “It’s a strange world,” he says; “Let’s keep it that way.” Exactly.

Seeing Is Believing is a wonderful stimulant for the mind, a snack tray for the imagination, a perfect vehicle for spending an evening around the kitchen table with paper and crayons in hand. Bottom line: if you have, are, or ever have been a child, this book should be somewhere within easy reach of your toilet.

On last month’s Popdose Podcast, I endorsed The Light in Darkness, an oral history about Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town album and its subsequent tour as told by Springsteen fans. In full disclosure, its editor, Lawrence Kirsch, is a friend and I contributed an essay to the book (as did Popdose’s Farkate Film Flashback columnist, “Outlaw” Pete Chianca). But even though I’ve had my copy for about a month, it took a while for me to finally get through it. The reason isn’t (entirely) due to my laziness, but rather that I wanted to savor every word.

You see, compiling fan stories about a favorite artist, as Lawrence did in 2007 with For You, can be difficult. There’s the potential for repetition, and that possibility increases when you decide to narrow the scope of the book to one year in the artist’s life. So when you read it, you don’t want the stories bleeding into each other. You just take it in about ten pages at a time.

But Kirsch does a fantastic job of mixing things up. In between the memories of the concerts are analyses of the main themes found in the album, why the tour was such a pivotal moment in his career, and even an account of the songs that were recorded but didn’t make the final cut. Every Springsteen fan will be able to see themselves in the stories here. I got goosebumps plenty of times while reading because they hit so close to home. The book also serves as a cool document of what being a fan was like in the late ’70s now that virtually everything about the music industry has changed. Yeah, TicketMaster sucks, but does anybody else remember mail-order ticket lotteries?

Many of the dates on the seven-month tour are represented, but special attention is given to the nights that have achieved iconic status among Springsteen fans through bootlegs, including the Roxy, Capitol Theatre, and Winterland shows. But the highlight of the book is the 16 pages devoted to the legendary show at the Agora in Cleveland on August 9, widely considered to be Bruce’s greatest show. I call it The Night Rock Achieved Perfection, a belief that, according to the book, I share with Bob Seger (take that, Homer Simpson!). That bootleg kickstarted my collection back in 2000. I had only had a few cassettes up to that point, and that night’s show, especially the four-song, 55-minute roller coaster ride between “She’s the One” and “Rosalita,” made me want to track down as many as I can find, especially from the Darkness tour. And I finally learned exactly what caused Bruce to say, “I’m working here!” before the last verse of “Spirit in the Night.”

And if you do somehow get tired of reading, there are over 200 photos of the Boss and the E Street Band in action. For those of us who didn’t get to experience the shows firsthand, the shots are revelatory. They portray Springsteen simultaneously out of control and in complete command of his craft. On one page he’s sprawled out across the stage (or the piano…or the crowd) and on the next he’s staring down the audience, wielding his Telecaster like a weapon.

The Light in Darkness is a collector’s edition in a limited run, and is available exclusively through its website for $40 plus shipping and handling. With so many Springsteen-related books available this holiday season, you might not know where to begin to get the perfect gift for the Bruce fan in your life. You cannot do better than The Light in Darkness.

Throughout the book, Nester has a self-deprecating charm that makes his writing seem like he’s just hanging out with you, telling you a good story. Whether it’s recounting the time he moved in next door to an ex-girlfriend while living in New York (“The Puerto Rican Lockhorns Reunion”) or detailing his adventures in self-tanning (“Yes I Tan”) Nester is funny, but never mean. Indeed, even when he could go for the jugular in two of the finest pieces in the book, he instead remains an observer, allowing the laughs to emerge from his subject’s behavior rather than any snarky remark he could have come up with.

The first of those pieces is “Are You Tough Enough to Play With Journey,” which profiles Todd Rogers, a video gamer who set the world record for playing the Atari 2600 “Journey Escape” home video game at 85 hours and 46 minutes. The piece plays like a literary version of the great documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Rogers, like the men in the film, is pretty full of himself and his great achievement. But it isn’t when talking about video games that the article had me cracking up; it’s the tangents Rogers went off on while speaking to Nester and descriptions of those situations that had me spitting my milk out while reading.

“Takin’ Care of Jesus” is a detailed account of attending a concert by the Christian parody band ApologetiX, who take popular rock songs and change the lyrics to more Biblical material. Some examples of their songs are “Bethlehemian Rhapsody,” “Lazy Brain,” and “Welcome to the Judges.” Nester explains that he began following the band after seeing them mentioned on his favorite Queen fan site (which is humorous in itself). When an opportunity arises to see ApologetiX live in concert, he feels that he can’t miss it. Besides the amusing account of the concert, Nester also gives a history of the art form of Christian music parodies. Great stuff.

Nester also has a poignant side, as shown in “Garden Path Paragraphs.” The author and his wife attempt to get pregnant and Nester takes you along for the ride. This is a moving piece that goes into detail what they went through to get pregnant.

While Nester’s writing style is laid back and easy to ready, it’s also smart, making How to Be Inappropriate a book definitely worth seeking out at your local book mart or on Amazon. Like I said, he’s the kind of author you’d find on this site, if he wasn’t writing for mainstream magazines, giving lectures, getting books published and attending ApologetiX gigs.

Since Mercury’s death, “new” Queen releases have been a mixed bag: on the positive side, Queen fans have been presented with the band’s “final” album (Made in Heaven), two relatively strong live albums from the ’80s, a couple of accompanying live DVDs, and the Freddie Mercury Solo Collection. On the negative side, fans (American ones in particular) have been bombarded with seven — seven! — greatest hits compilations (the eighth will be released later this month) and have had to endure the relatively depressing “Queen + Paul Rodgers” incarnation, including mediocre studio and live albums that nobody asked for. Queen fans still wait patiently for archival releases, including a long-anticipated, endlessly-postponed box set of rarities.

The one piece of excellent news for Queen fans arrives in the form of a new coffee table book, Queen: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Crown Kings of Rock. I can say without exaggeration that it’s the most exciting Queen release of the past 15 years.

Lovingly written and compiled by journalist Phil Sutcliffe, Queen: The Ultimate… is 287 pages’ worth of illustrated beauty, featuring multitudes of photos of the band throughout their career — many of them previously unpublished — and scores of memorabilia: concert programs, posters, domestic and foreign 45 singles, LPs, backstage passes, ticket stubs…you name it, it’s here, and there are over 500 photos in all.

It’s not just a pretty picture book, however: Sutcliffe has written quite the comprehensive biography of the band. It’s not as thorough as the Queen bio As It Began, but it’s not meant to be, either. What separates this book from others is Sutcliffe’s generous use of band interviews over the years, including many conducted by Sutcliffe himself. And though only the most hardcore of fans would have purchased the books written by Freddie’s partner, Jim Hutton, or his personal assistant, Peter Freestone (yes, I own both), Sutcliffe compiles the best supporting information from each of these books, and also gives special attention the final years of Queen — an especially touching period where the band rallied around Freddie to help him complete Made in Heaven.

Sutcliffe isn’t the only contributor to the book; each album in the Queen canon is reviewed in detail by rock journalists such as Jon Bream, Jim DeRogatis, Gary Graff and Greg Kot, while close friends of the band offer personal recollections. One of the most touching essays comes from Reinhold Mack, producer of The Game, Flash Gordon, Hot Space and The Works: not only does Mack recount the band’s work ethic in the studio, but offers a number of personal photos of Freddie and Mack’s son, “Little Freddie” (I’m not making that nickname up) who was also Freddie’s godson. A Christmas card from Freddie to Little Freddie is one of the most touching inclusions. Finally, the book includes “endorsements” of the band from other artists, such as Geddy Lee, Neil Diamond, Slash, Wayne Coyne, Tom Morello and others. While not entirely necessary (I’m not sure why I care what Adele thinks of Queen), they’re a nice finish to an breathtakingly beautiful book.

Having read numerous Queen books over the years, I thought I knew everything there was to know about this band — but Queen: The Ultimate… has provided me with new anecdotes and stunning visuals at every turn. It’s probably more than any casual fan of the band will need, but anyone with more than three or four Queen albums in their collection will find it to be absolutely indispensable and a welcome addition to their book collection. It is, quite simply, an absolute dream for all Queen fans.

“Maybe I’ll write a book that has all the sex-and-drugs stories from the early years and publish it after all of us are dead,” Clemons writes. “Nah, I can’t do that either, ’cause now all of us have kids and grandkids.”

But beyond the fact that you know a lot got left out of Big Man — a nickname Clemons says came not from Springsteen but from a little old lady in Bloomingdale’s — there’s another complicating factor: A lot of the stuff in it never even happened. Clemons and his writing partner Don Reo label a good number of the chapters “Legends,” and promise that those sections include “some fact and a lot of fiction.” It’s unorthodox, but just think of the trouble James Frey could have saved himself if he’d included the same warning.

Still, you’ve got to read between a lot of lines to get the complete picture of Clarence Clemons from Big Man, since the way it’s written relies less on historical fact and more on the personality of its subject. Fortunately, Clemons has plenty of that to spare.

In fact, the stories (both real and imagined) paint a vivid picture of a gregarious, grateful and complicated man who loves music the way some people love God or women or their own children, although Clarence loves those things plenty as well. He’s spiritual but foul-mouthed, and a womanizer who’s managed to remain close to all his exes, which says something about the confidence and affability of the man behind the horn.

But just because this isn’t a traditional memoir doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain some big reveals. The story about Robert De Niro confiding that he stole his “You talkin’ to me?” bit from something Springsteen said on stage is one classic moment. Clemons also comes clean about a much-publicized incident at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show: That’s right, Springsteen’s “patented knee slide” was apparently no accident.

That’s funny, but the Super Bowl actually provides the narrative climax for Clarence’s literary journey through Big Man — performing for the first time since his double knee replacement and in significant pain, he literally spent the whole time fearing he might tip over in front of a billion people.

The book doesn’t sugarcoat the physical problems that Clarence has had to endure to keep playing. His knees and his back have both betrayed him in recent years, and he reveals that he even suffered a minor heart attack. But he remains (at least in writing) almost unfailingly positive — Clemons knows he’s lucky to have the life he has, even if he does note that if he hadn’t met Springsteen, he’d still be playing music, just in smaller rooms.

But they did meet, and to hear Clemons tell it, his relationship with Bruce was special from the start: “I’ll tell you something, when we started to play that night we looked into each other’s eyes and it was like … total magic,” he writes. “My girlfriend said we were queer for each other. But it was so solid.”

Given that connection, it’s not surprising that the period when Springsteen dismissed the E Street Band to record and tour with different musicians in the early ’90s was so tough on Clemons.

In the book, Clarence describes the phone call he got from Bruce while on tour in Japan with Ringo Starr. He shares only his reaction, not Springsteen’s words, and describes how the scene ended with encouragement and an awkward hug from Ringo — who of course went through his own high-profile band breakup. The chapter doesn’t have “legend” in the title, so we can only assume it’s how it actually happened.

But besides those sometimes frustrating “legends” sections — trying to parse the fact from fiction can be maddening, as funny and well-written as they are — there’s also the contributions of Reo, a TV producer who clearly could pen a fascinating memoir in his own right. His role here, unfortunately, seems mainly to name drop and talk about how cool it is to sit right backstage during a Springsteen concert. (No kidding, Don.) A few of his sections could easily have been sheared.

That said, Reo provides a valuable glimpse of what it must be like to hang with the Big Man. “He shines from within and radiates a kind of … goodness,” Reo writes of Clarence. “He has the ability to distract you from the bitcheries of life.”

That’s also something that Big Man the book is more than capable of doing — along with giving you a good idea, however fleeting, of what it’s like to be, well, the Big Man. And it’s worth the price of admission just for that.

Jeff Martin, author of The Customer is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles (nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and a frequent contributor to National Public Radio, has written his fabricated memoirs, My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize (Soft Skull Press).

As Martin lays out in the author’s note, “Some of the events described almost happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Others were stretched from the smallest inkling of truth. Others were stolen from other memoirs.”  Right off the bat you know this is going to be a silly ride. This whimsical, quick read — it’s only 128 pages, none of which is a full page and including plenty of illustrations — brought me a smile and chuckle as it follows Martin’s “extraordinary” life from his birth in 1980 to the year 2061. Martin’s approach to his so-called life reminded me of Woody Allen’s Zelig and, more obviously, Forrest Gump: Martin is continuously present at some remarkable moments in pop culture history. Some examples:

As a young boy he’s personally hired by Michael Eisner at the Walt Disney Company. Their relationship crumbles when Jeff, then 4 years old, mishandles the release of The Black Cauldron.

After completing second grade, Jeff takes a public relations job with the Michael Dukakis presidential campaign and advises the Democratic candidate to pose for cameras in a tank.

In 1990, Jeff is hired by Sub Pop Records to “trim the fat.” He quickly terminates the contract of Nirvana because their debut record didn’t sell enough copies. Despite this error in judgment, Jeff has the foresight to purchase stock in a flannel company just as grunge becomes popular.

Other achievements in Martin’s celebrated life include working closely with John Lasseter on the first Toy Story film, traveling into space and accidentally starting a fire on the Russian space station, Mir, and advising Springsteen as he completes The Rising. Martin also falls in love with a photographer, Molly. That fact I believe may be true.

I’m not sure if Martin is trying to make a statement with his book. On one hand, he could be observing how much importance society places on celebrity in our culture, that you only get noticed if you’ve made millions of dollars and hung out with rock stars. But that would almost contradict the manner he’s using to write his book. By taking up the style of a blog entry or Twitter update, a style that any person with a laptop can use, Jeff Martin shouldn’t have to have done so many great things for us to want to read about him. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the book, and it was merely an exercise in being clever. If that’s the case, then Martin succeeds.

My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize is clever, and the quick anecdotes are an enjoyable trip through the last 29 years of popular culture. I believe it would have been a stronger work had the ideas been fleshed out more, even to two pages. But if Martin is poking fun at the Twitter age, in which people expect the writer to get straight to the point without superfluous writing, he succeeds by just giving the bullet points of his fake life and letting us marvel in his fake greatness.

On one level, there seems little point in reviewing a Dan Brown book. He’s big enough now that he’s critic-proof, and my little barbs will penetrate his mighty armor of public adoration not one jot. But you know, sometimes criticism isn’t about influence; sometimes, it’s a matter of conscience. And on the matter of The Lost Symbol being a terrible book — abysmally written, ludicrously plotted, resting on a foundation of knuckleheaded historical speculation and flat-out pseudo-scientific wrongness — I will not be silent.

You don’t have to be a great writer, Lord knows, to achieve popular literary success. But has there ever been a worse writer than Dan Brown to ever become so successful? It’s a trick question, of course, because there’s never been a writer quite as successful as Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code has sold more copies than all four Twilight books put together — more copies than the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fa chrissakes. J.K. Rowling has sold more books overall, but no single volume of the Harry Potter series has racked up Da Vinci Code numbers.

Besides, Rowling is — despite her huge and glaring flaws as a prose stylist and a systematic thinker — pretty good with character and mood. She’s still a terrible writer, but she’s a slightly more lustrous shade of terrible than Dan Brown. True fact, The Da Vinci Code is not a good book, and Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, carries on in the tradition. And if you haven’t read it and intend to, be warned: from this point on, I will be SPOILING like mayonnaise in a hot car.

I have a theory. It’s not a literary theory, but a theory of personality — Dan Brown’s personality, to be precise. See, I figure Dan Brown probably enjoys all the perks of being a writer (who wouldn’t?), but is not much interested in the craft of writing. The Lost Symbol is all plot and ciphers (one using the “pigpen” code from that one issue of Boy’s Life, another apparently created in MS Word with Zapf Dingbats), told with about as much verve or emotional heft as a Will Shortz back-page puzzle from the Times. Or maybe — and this is perhaps a better comparison — as Myst; the structure and lack of emotional affect make the whole enterprise feel like a video game. Stuff happens. Puzzles are solved. Move to a new location — a new level — and start the process again.

But there’s no sense of joy to Brown’s work, no sense that he’s having a good time telling stories and making stuff up. An editor of my acquaintance talks about “the delight factor.” Rudy Rucker calls them “eyeball kicks” — the little jolts that good fiction gives you on nearly every page — and I take him to mean kicks in both senses of the word; both of a violent jarring sensation, and of getting your ya-yas out. They’re both talking about the pleasures of a text — the shape of a well-made sentence turning in your ear like a key, or way a startling simile seems to fall from the sky, or the way a character can with a single action summarize both his charms and his vices. Brown gives you none of that.

The wondrous thing about writing fiction is that it gives you a chance to be someone else for a while, to walk around inside other people’s heads, to see the world as they do, to think as they do. An author of fiction, though a pacifist himself, might write a passionate defense of preemptive military action; an atheist might assume the voice of a believer, or vice-versa. You can stretch out, and try on attitudes and perceptions antithetical to your own. (In fact, if you’re playing fairly with your characters and your audience, you pretty much have to.) But there is one experience, one trait that cannot be successfully imagined from outside — and that’s smarts. You can’t convincingly write a character who is cleverer than you are.

And that’s a problem for Dan Brown. His hero, Robert Langdon, is supposed to be a brilliant scholar (in the fictitious discipline of “symbology,” which entails elements of comparative religion, art history, and cryptography, as the plot demands) as well as an internationally best-selling author, sought-after public speaker, beloved professor, and one-time All-American water polo champion. Now, Brown surely sells a lot of books, and for all I know he swims like a fish, but friends, I’m here to tell you: he’s no towering intellect.

This extract, from early in the book, first sounded my warning bells. Langdon — whose Harvard lectures are so popular that he has to teach his class in the Sanders Theater — is speaking about Masonic symbolism. One of the students opines that the whole thing sounds like “a freaky cult.”

Langdon feigned a sad sigh. “Too bad. If that’s too freaky for you, then I know you’ll never want to join my cult.”Silence settled over the room.

The student from the Women’s Center looked uneasy. “You’re in a cult?”

Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.”

The class looked horrified.

Langdon shrugged. “And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.”

OH SNAP! YOU GO, ROBERT! Freshmen beeyotches = PWNED!!!one!

(A note on usage, by the way: In the face of passages like that one, many reviewers resort to writing in a pastiche of Brown’s style. I won’t be going that far — the stuff is beyond parody, frankly — but for best results I recommend that all quoted passages be read to the accompaniment of this soundtrack.)

Anyway. That, right there? That’s a dumb guy’s idea of how smart people talk — a thunderously obvious “insight” served up as a blinding revelation, all with a faux-urbane attitude (after dropping that little bon mot, Langdon literally winks; Constant Reader, I threw up a little). Brown is constantly rigging the game, surrounding Langdon with dimwits easily-impressed by his genius, when in reality it’s hard to imagine a class of high-school freshmen being wowed by Langdon’s little pagan-day-of-Ra stunt, let alone Harvard students. Secondary characters emerge whose only purpose is to ask Langdon leading questions. For instance, there’s Inoue Sato, head of a special CIA investigative unit; here’s her half of the conversation stretching across pages 79 and 80 of the hardcover:

And why would Peter Solomon say that if it weren’t true?

Did he explain why Peter thinks you alone can unlock the portal?

In all of your discussions with Peter, he never once mentioned to you anything about a secret portal in Washington, D.C.?

I’m sorry? The man told you specifically what this portal leads to?

So you’ve heard of the secret he believes is hidden here.

Then how can you say the portal does not exist?

You’re saying the secret he believes is hidden in Washington is a fantasy?

And yet it’s still around?

So what exactly are these… Ancient Mysteries?

Dangerous in what way?

Tell me, Professor, do you believe such powerful information could truly exist?

Well, Terry, I’m glad you asked. You really are the best interviewer in the business, you know.

That sense of being able to out-think the characters (and the author) effectively kills a lot of the suspense of The Lost Symbol; for a thriller, it’s remarkably unthrilling. The villain’s true identity — which is supposed to be this huge, hairpin plot twist — was telegraphed from so far away that when the big reveal came, I was actually confused: Didn’t we find out who he was, like, fifty chapters ago? Then I realized that although, I the reader had worked it out some two hundred pages previous, the characters had not yet figured it out — further undermining the notion that they’re all exceptionally clever and capable individuals.

(That being said, Brown did pull off one very neat third-act reversal that I never saw coming, with a resurrection act as audacious as it is implausible. So, um, yay? I guess.)

In part, my confusion probably stems from Brown’s maddening repetitiousness. He seems to ascribe to Army training standard of communication: “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” If a plot point or event is at all important, it will be mentioned again, and often. It may be inherent — Brown himself admits he has a short attention span — or it may be by design, an acknowledgement that his books are designed to be read in short bursts during airport layovers and subway commutes; but for the reader who’s plowing straight through, it gets annoying quickly. At 500+ pages, The Lost Symbol is a long book in which comparatively little actually happens — the action takes place in a single 12-hour span — and even with the 2-page mini-chapters and micro-climaxes, a rigorous edit could have trimmed a hundred pages or more with no loss in readability. There are a lot of recaps and much that simply feels like padding. (Then again, it wouldn’t do for a beloved author to break a long silence with a slender little book, would it? You’ve got to make people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth, after all, especially if it’s an audience that doesn’t otherwise buy many books — and you’ve got that multi-million dollar advance to justify.)

As for Brown’s much-vaunted research, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. He throws around esoteric terms and factoids, but without any sense that he really understands them or their significance. That was bad enough with the conspiracy-theory and pseudo-history of the previous books. But when he starts in with the mysticism central to The Lost Symbol, Brown demonstrates that you can’t just bluff your way through metaphysics. Here he’s talking about the Solomon siblings, old friends of Langdon’s. Katherine is a research scientist, while Peter is a scholar of religion and philosophy. They’re working together in a discipline called Noetic Science (of which more later):

Katherine and Peter had pooled their favorite texts here, writings on everything from particle physics to ancient mysticism. …. Most of Katherine’s books bore titles like Quantum Consciousness, The New Physics, and Principles of Neural Science. Her brother’s bore older, more esoteric titles like Kybalion¸ the Zohar, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and a translation of the Sumerian tablets from the British Museum.

By the way, if you think for a moment that Dan Brown has read all (or indeed any) of those books beyond the jacket flaps, I’ve got a painting in Paris I’d like to sell you. Peter is trying to convince Katherine that a lot of modern scientific theory is anticipated in the work of ancient sages. There’s a lot of hand-waving about Heisenberg reading the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, then this:

“I want to study cutting-edge theoretical physics. The future of science! I really doubt Krishna or Vyasa had much to say about superstring theory and multidimensional cosmological models.”

“You’re right. They didn’t.” Her brother paused, a smile crossing his lips. “If you’re talking superstring theory…” He wandered over to the bookshelf yet again. “Then you’re talking this book here.” He heaved out a colossal leather-bound book [The Complete Zohar]… “Thirteenth-century translation of the original medieval Aramaic.”

…Katherine studied the page. …[T]o her amazement, the text and drawings clearly outlined the exact same universe heralded by modern superstring theory — a ten-dimensional universe of resonating strings. As she continued reading, she suddenly gasped and recoiled. “My God, it even describes how six of the dimensions are entangled and act as one?!” She took a frightened step backward. …. “You’re saying the early mystics knew their universe had ten dimensions?”

“Absolutely.” He motioned to the page’s illustration of ten intertwined circles called Sephiroth. “Obviously, the nomenclature is esoteric, but the physics is very advanced.”

Also, check it out: how many Commandments are there? That’s right. Now, d’you want to seriously get your lid flipped? Okay. Go ahead and count your fingers. Both hands. Go on. I’ll wait. See what I mean? I know, right? How could they have known?

Now, admittedly, I’m no expert on the Kabbala, and my knowledge of the tenfold Sephiroth has been mostly picked up from comic books — but I know glib, opportunistic bullshit when I smell it, and this is a shitknife that cuts both ways; Brown is trying to use cutting-edge science to make ancient philosophy seem relevant, while simultaneously using ancient philosophy to make cutting-edge science seem spiritually important. But in order to find the lowest common denominator between the two disciplines, he’s got to dumb both sides of the equation down so far that the passage has the opposite effect, cheapening both physics and mysticism. (And again, note the weakness of the writing — the strained, clumsy imagining of how smart people talk to each other, and the attempt to make the material convincing by sheer force of emphasis, including repeated use of the “?!” typographical construction, which I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen in print outside of, well, a comic book.)

So what are the metaphysical underpinnings of the Lost Symbol, exactly? What shattering truth about human nature and forbidden knowledge sets this plot grinding into motion? For that, let’s take a look at a clip from 1978’s Circle Of Iron, a.k.a. The Silent Flute. The irritable poodle-haired muscleman is our hero, and he’s spent the whole movie questing for a mystical book that contains within it all the secrets of the Universe. This sequence is the big payoff. Sit back and tighten your hat, friends, because your mind, she is about to be BLOWN:

Dan Brown, God bless him, aims for that level of profundity. Indeed, there’s something almost touchingly credulous in his worldview — not just his childlike faith in the mass media’s ability to rouse the masses to action (In the book’s other main plot thread, the huge crisis that everyone is trying to avert is the uploading of hidden-camera footage of the Washington Freemasons lodge to YouTube, lest the sight of high-ranking U.S. officials play-acting with skulls and daggers spark a firestorm of anti-Masonic fury that could bring down the government. No, really, that’s the threat.), but the book’s apparent wholesale endorsement of Noetics — a “discipline” that strives to justify metaphysics by cloaking it in science, to the detriment of both.

A man’s free to believe what he wants, of course, but one likes to think that a writer of thrillers is necessarily a bit hard-headed, a bit bloody-minded. Not so Dan Brown. For an ostensible thriller, The Lost Symbol isn’t terribly suspenseful. The autrhor seems less interested in making us sweat than in educating us — even, God help us, in uplifting us. And thus the feel-good piffle of Noetics, which lies roughly on a level with Intelligent Design on the despicability scale. All that guff about weighing the body immediately after death to establish that the human soul has a physical weight, or that dying plants revive in the presence of prayerful thoughts? That’s Noetic science, in its crudest form — tailor-made for gullible chumps who believe everything they read in forwarded e-mails.

Or that they see in stealth-marketed propaganda films for daffy New Age cults. The notions behind Noetic Science have gone mainstream with the movies The Secret and What the [Bleep] Do We Know?, which is how I suspect they came onto Dan Brown’s radar in the first place. Those movies, and the pseudoscience they espouse, deserve a takedown of their own — which is exactly what they’ll get in the next column. Yes, friends, it’s a two-part exclusive How Bad Can It Be? hatestravaganza; my knives are out and sharp and I do hope you’ll stay with me. Trust me: Your mind = GUARANTEED BLOWN.

Since then, Hornby has broadened his thematic horizons to encompass religious fervor (How To Be Good), suicide and therapy (A Long Way Down), and teen pregnancy (the “young adult” novel Slam) – all, unfortunately, with returns considerably diminished from his earlier work. In fact, his most essential work of the last decade was a nonfiction immersion into his music fandom: the essay collection Songbook (titled 31 Songs outside the U.S.), which explores his emotional attachments to tunes by artists ranging from O.V. Wright to Royksopp. Any Popdose loyalist who has not already picked up a copy of Songbook should do so immediately.

With all that in mind, it was welcome news indeed when Penguin’s Riverhead Books subsidiary announced that Hornby’s new novel would return him to the world of those who create and devour popular music. Indeed, the setup of Juliet, Naked is almost impossibly juicy … at least from the perspective of a 21st-century music writer like me (and many of you). If you read the excerpt we posted here last week, you already know that Duncan is an obsessive fan of singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe, who walked away from his middling career under mysterious circumstances 20 years ago and has since become the subject of endless conjecture about his past and present lives. As leader of the “Crowologists,” and administrator of a website devoted to picking apart every detail of the singer’s career, Duncan receives a preview copy of a new CD featuring “naked” demos from Crowe’s most acclaimed (and final) album, Juliet.

The divergent emotional responses those demos elicit from Duncan and his longtime girlfriend, Annie, lead to dueling reviews of the disc on Duncan’s website, then to their breakup – and then, soon enough, to Annie receiving an e-mail from the reclusive Tucker himself. That unexpected contact sets the three protagonists on a crash course toward a pseudo-romantic triangle of hilarious proportions…

Well, that’s what should have happened, at least. Sadly, though, after that exquisite buildup, Hornby — despite clearly having reveled in the “factual” details of Tucker’s career and the barely benign enthusiasm that keeps Duncan’s website (and psyche) afloat — seems to decide that what he really wants to be writing isn’t a music-obsessive’s comic fantasy after all. Instead, the second act of Juliet, Naked involves two lost souls attempting to figure out what they’ve been missing over a period of time they now consider wasted – Tucker ruminating over failed marriages and piss-poor parenting, Annie trying to make up for the years she spent in a dead-end relationship with a guy who never seemed to care about her as much as he did about some vanished rock star. Speaking of which, Duncan vanishes almost completely from this middle section – which is a shame, because while his shallow emotional life, compulsive rumor-mongering and atrocious analytical skills don’t reflect particularly well on those of us who pontificate about music in our bathrobes, his character is easily the most interesting of the three.

The witty pas de trois among Tucker, Annie and Duncan does arrive eventually toward the end of the novel, though it is entirely too brief. Still, Hornby redeems himself nicely in the third act, with answers to the novel’s central questions (Why did Tucker shelve his career? Will he ever attempt a comeback? Was his music any good, anyway?) that are both amusing and profound. Hornby also offers some worthy insights into the nature of artistic expression – not the least of which is a matter, given voice by Annie, that Matthew Bolin has occasionally explored here in our own little corner of cyberspace: “You know that bad people can make great art, don’t you?”

Without the tangents and occasional tedium of its middle section, Juliet, Naked could have been a classic novella about our current, internet-fueled pop-culture moment. As it is, the novel is still Hornby’s most inspired in more than a decade; now, if only he could find a way to apply that same inspiration to a greater variety of situations that aren’t so obviously near to his own heart.

I imagine I’ll return to the opening and closing chapters of Juliet, Naked frequently, the same way I return to the first section of Don DeLillo’s Underworld for its riveting portrait of the Giants-Dodgers playoff of 1951 and the “shot heard ’round the world.” Clearly, I have my own obsessions – and if they’re only pursued in certain parts of a work of fiction, I suppose I’m willing to take what I can get.

The debut novel (or novella, as somewhat grumpily conceded in the Author’s Note) from AlertNerd’s Matt Springer, Unconventional is, according to the front cover’s helpful summary, “a tale of sex, booze, and geeks”…pretty much in that order. And as unappealing as a book filled with drunk, naked nerds might seem, Springer makes it work, thanks to his effortlessly conversational writing and a plot that actually has less to do with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings than it lets on.

The story follows a sci-fi-loving trio of longtime friends (Marty, Ron, and Ham — a nickname, short for Hammerhead, as in the minor Star Wars character) on their adventures through one weekend at the UnConvention, “Chicagoland’s number one sci-fi con,” working in plenty of basement-dwelling misfits in Jedi costumes while building toward a few life-changing decisions for the main characters. It’s a framework you’re probably overly familiar with — as you’ll be with Unconventional’s habit of flashing back and forth between past and present in order to give the reader additional context — and pop metaculture has been drowning in geek heroes for years. At a fundamental level, the book is utterly ordinary, and it shouldn’t work as well as it does — but unlike most writers who dabble in geekdom, Springer actually has something to say, and instead of just presenting his characters as empty vessels for Klingon jokes, he uses them to deliver some trenchant, poignant messages about making the awkward transition into adulthood, and the nature of fandom in general.

Admittedly, Unconventional can be a little uneven, especially for a 133-page book. For one thing, although I’ve never personally been to a fan convention, I suspect the women who attend these things are generally not as hot and horny as the ones Springer describes — and along those same lines, I doubt many male congoers look like a young Harrison Ford, as Ron is described. After opening with one of the greatest first sentences in the history of fiction (”Luke Skywalker was just about to take a tumble into Jabba the Hutt’s Rancor pit when Theo got kicked in the balls”), the story stumbles a few times out of the gate, occasionally feeling like a fantasy about fantasy lovers — but like the Star Wars trilogy, Unconventional really comes into its own during the second act, laying the groundwork for a series of surprisingly sharp, well-written passages that manage to feel utterly believable in spite of their eloquence. Given that most of the book’s dialogue comes from the mouths of characters who wouldn’t think twice about spending premium prices for a mint condition action figure, that’s a pretty nimble feat. For instance, here’s a bit of back-and-forth between Ham and a girl who pipes up after hearing him rant about The Phantom Menace:

“I just think it’s a little bit sad for people to argue about what should happen with something they have no real control over,” she said. Ham’s face turned burning red at lightning speed and he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising slightly. “I mean, if you don’t like it, why do you keep doing it? How many times have you seen The Phantom Menace, anyway?”

“That has nothing to do with it…” Ham’s voice was squeaking its way into astonishing new registers. This was bad.

“Come on,” she said, her eyes rolling behind her glasses. “How many times?”

“I saw it ten times at the theater,” Ham said. Ron glared up at him, mouthing the word “Stop…” over and over.

“Then I would say what you think doesn’t matter,” she said, standing up to leave. “George Lucas won.”

But it isn’t just the fanboy stuff Springer does so well. A number of pages later, as Ham is trying to work up the nerve to talk to a girl, he describes his nerves as “the tangle, the fire,” saying he “couldn’t machete his way through,” and plummets into dread as “the bored sitcom audience in his mind applauded dutifully as they made their big entrances.”

Matt Springer is an author who deserves to be read. But don’t take my word for it. Go pick up your own copy — either the free PDF version or the $9.97 paperback — and see for yourself. I don’t know what he’s got planned for his next book, but I’m eager to find out.

“I haven’t got much time,” Yancey tells me.

My head jerks so hard that the pencil falls out from behind my ear. “Jesus Fuck,” I splutter. “You’re fucking dying? Fuck, Yancey — ”

“Naaah,” she says. “I just haven’t got time. You know, for the book. Good thing it’s a quick read.”

She smirks. Last thing I need is Yancey giving me a hard time. But she’s a fictional character I created to act as an interlocutor for my review of Joe Pernice’s debut novel It Feels So Good When I Stop, so there’s not much I can do about it.

I start thinking about the day I finished It Feels So Good. It was a Saturday, muggy. The ceiling fan barely stirred the air. I was sprawled on the couch, and Elliott Smith was on the stereo. A bootleg. Something really obscure. Cassandra was in the kitchen, barefoot, cooking a pot of chili. She was wearing panties and a wifebeater with nothing underneath. There was a damp spot on the small of her back. She was chopping up two chipotle chilies; she liked it hot. If you know what I mean.

I closed the book and tried to imagine what Joe Pernice looked like. I’d heard of his musical projects, the Scud Mountain Boys and the Pernice Brothers, but I really only knew him from his novella Meat Is Murder. I’d liked that one, because of the way that it was about the record without actually being about the record. I wondered what his own music was like. His credentials as a listener were pretty impeccable. I set the book aside, then picked up my acoustic guitar and played a non-ironic cover of “Crazy Horses,” which reveals something fundamental about my character.

Cassandra brought me a bowl of chili and set it on the coffee table. She didn’t say anything, just smiled. Two hours previous, I’d had my tongue up her ass. The chili was chunky with beef and beans, and the white drifts of sour cream and cheddar were like the crests of waves breaking on a blood-red sea. This fucking chili was gorgeous. Pretty, even.

“Pretty fucking chilly” is also a fair description of It Feels So Good’s atmosphere. It’s set on Cape Cod, as autumn turns to winter, and it captures the bleakness of a tourist trap in the off-season, when there are no visitors to impress and the true emptiness of the place becomes oppressive. The time is the early 1990s. The unnamed narrator, after impulsively marrying his girlfriend, freaking out on his wedding night, and fleeing New York, ends up in an empty house owned by his erstwhile brother-in-law. He spends the rest of the book nominally trying to “get [his] shit in a pile” but effectively having a slow-motion breakdown, revisiting places he remembers from his childhood, reflecting on the missteps and fuck-ups that have brought him to his predicament; underemployment in a shitty college town, a half-assed musical career, periodic stabs at academia and responsibility. Mostly, though, he drifts, just letting things happen to him and hoping vainly for the best, maddeningly passive. He hasn’t even got the balls to be properly passive-aggressive; he’s Bartleby, minus the tragedy.

“You ever read this?” I call to Yancey. She’s getting dressed before we head out to the Smog show, and I’m passing the time by looking over her bookshelves. Lots of leftover college textbooks and anthologies that no human being ever read for fun. There’s a volume of Melville in my hand, one I’ve never heard of, called The Piazza Tales.

She pokes her head around the corner and squints at the book title. She shakes her head. “I liked the one with the big fish,” she says. Her hair is still wet. “It’s the queerest book ever.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“Come on. Big white Dick bobbing out of the ocean, sperm everywhere, guys sharing beds. It’s a gay wet dream. And that’s a lot of seamen.” She shrugged. “What’s that one about?”

“Dunno,” I say. “It sounds like a cookbook for dyslexics.”

“And that,” says Yancey, “is how you do a fucking allusion.”

She turns away. I never know why she does shit like that. It’s because she’s a girl, I guess; and who the fuck can figure them out?

I start thinking about this time I was having sex with somebody. Yancey, maybe. Or Cassandra. It’s hard to tell. I was drinking heavily at the time, and also I seem to have become unstuck in time.

One time my band opened for Pigeonhed in this shitty little dive somewhere and afterwards Steve Fisk bought us beers and we talked about the music business. In my memory, Sweet Billy Pilgrim was on the jukebox, but that can’t be right. Wait, here’s a 2,000-word extract from my diary covering the event:

“Do you think it’s disingenuous for an author to have his characters pretend ignorance of something even as he flaunts his own knowledge of it?” Cassandra asked.

We were in the bathroom. She was shaving her legs in the tub and I was on the shitter reading the Phoenix. “Holy crap,” I said. “Foghat is touring again.”

“It bugs the shit out of me,” she said. “Like, if you’ve got a character who thinks she’s an avant-garde filmmaker, and she’s shooting with a Fisher-Price PixelVision camera. And you’re waiting for the Sadie Benning namedrop, and it never comes.”

“I have got to get tickets for this,” I said. Cassandra was still talking. About something, I don’t know.

“And this is in a book that has some kind of name-dropping on every fucking page,” she said. “That’s bullshit. That’s like, you’re lead character does giant paintings of Marilyn Monroe, and somehow Andy Warhol’s name never comes up once.”

I reached for the toilet paper. What the fuck does disingenuous mean, anyway? “You know,” I said, “I think I’m gonna blow off your birthday party that we planned, with your boss and your rich parents — the one where you were going to announce your promotion and your pregnancy. I’m just gonna go to the Foghat show with Eddie, instead.”

She leaned out of the tub and reached over between my legs. “Marry me,” she said. Girls. Who can figure them?

Yancey and I are sitting in her pickup truck, which she drives because she is a salt-of-the-earth working-class person. Prince is on the radio, singing “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” The truck is rolling down a dead-end street. Yancey lights two cigarettes at once and smokes them both down to a nub in a single drag.

“Why the fuck are we listening to Prince, anyway?” I say.

Yancey shrugs. “Guy’s a fucking recluse, right? Never leaves his studio except to tour? So the odds are good he’s not gonna come traipsing down here and give us a five-page cameo.”

Her voice is throaty and her accent is strong. She talks like a plumber. A hot, messed-up, drunk plumber.

The truck is rolling faster. The road is uneven. “Would it explain anything if he did?” I say.

She shrugs again. She’s not holding onto the wheel. “I mean, 1999 came and went, and the world didn’t end. It was kinda disappointing.”

“All that apocalyptic dread, and nothing to show for it,” I say. The truck is lurching now, and I feel sick.

“And no more excuses, either,” she laughs. “You fuck up, you fail at being a grow-up, you try being a kid again and fail at that — after a while you’re counting on the world to end. And then it doesn’t, and where are you?”

The trees are a blur. My head is pounding. “Are we still talking about the same thing?” I ask.

And then the truck stops. Doesn’t end. Stops.