What I Happen to Be Reading At the Moment
"A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.”
While not 13 anymore, the desire to read almost anything and everything in order to read for fun and for experience is still around. I'm currently working on my PhD in a physical science, but I love to read and books are one of my non-science hobbies.
Once again, Nancy Mitford is the gossipy friend who happens to know quite a lot about 17th century France. The Sun King is a biography of both the French monarch and his home, Versailles. From the building of the palace to Louis XIV's many relationships, Mitford takes her informed but light-hearted attitude towards the different aspects of the court of the Sun King. Instead of a comprehensive biography, Mitford focuses on the goings on and relationships within Versailles. There are, of course, more than a few bastard children, mistresses, intrigues, and (my personal favorite) public trials of suspected poisoners. Instead of appearing self serious or respectful merely because of the weighty historical personages, Mitford takes elements that humanize the historical figures as well as characterize their times. Her work is always a combination of academic history and glossy magazines, and she does a splendid job again of walking that line. I do prefer Mitford's historical works (like [b:Voltaire in Love|13330373|Voltaire in Love|Nancy Mitford|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349395395s/13330373.jpg|1040208]) over her novels ([b:The Pursuit of Love|8041279|The Pursuit of Love|Nancy Mitford|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320445188s/8041279.jpg|821072]), and The Sun King is another excellent addition.
Benjamin Franklin combined better than anyone else the qualities of a great scientist and a great rebel. As a scientist, without formal education or inherited wealth, he beat the learned aristocrats of Europe at their own game...Franklin became a rebel only when he judged the time to be right and the costs acceptable...The rebellion that Franklin embodied was a thoughtful rebellion, driven by reason and calculation more than by passion and hatred. While only a handful of essays follow the theme of the title essay, Freeman Dyson's The Scientist as Rebel encompasses Dyson's views on science, popular science fiction, and history. Dyson's often needling wit displays itself when discussing Thomas Gold's theories being rejected by others in the field (but also his other theories that missed the mark) or when breaking down the scientific flaws in Crichton's Prey (the nanobots would be unable to fly because air on that scale becomes extremely viscous). Dyson is not on a power trip of his own making, though, instead analyzing how science progresses and is portrayed. Occasionally taking a diversion into history or other topics, Dyson's examination of the history and history of science in the latter half of the 20th century is engaging and interesting. Also, with an introduction that starts out using Benjamin Franklin as a prototype of the scientist as rebel, it's difficult to go wrong.
Aptly named, Curtain is Poirot's final showing. It was written much before its 1975 publication date (here for more historical perspective on the later Christie works), which gives some perspective considering Christie planned on ending Poirot this way before she finally published it the year before her death. Curtain shows Poirot come full circle. Hastings is back as narrator after an extensive break and after having a whole family life in Argentina while Poirot, his old crime fighting buddy, kept up with catching the murderers. Hastings arrives at Styles, the site of Poirot's and his first case together, with Poirot a physical wreck and a house full of potential murderers. Hastings himself is worried about his daughter, who may or may not be carrying on with a married research scientist who also may or may not be a murderer. Things get complicated fast, in the style of Christie's earlier work. I thought the ending was particularly tricky. While the non-mystery ending was very sad, it was a very fitting to conclude the series. Enough said, go read it now please if you've read the rest of the Poirot series. It really should be read last, just like the recommended reading order from the Christie official site here.On a more personal note: I finished reading Curtain the day I graduated from college, since it was my goal to finish the Poirot mysteries by the time I finished my undergraduate education. Poirot has been a great companion on many planes, trips home, snowed out flights, swine flu outbreaks, and stressful semesters. So, unless another Poirot short story is found somewhere in Christie's notebooks, this is the end. (Except maybe a future re-read)
Watching the English walks the line between popular science and a more academic text, and often falls on the wrong side of that line. The sheer amount of information collected from direct observation is incredibly insightful, but reading it all at once is a bit difficult. I had to take a break about half way through because I was having trouble tracking in this lengthy and comprehensive study. Some high points include the sections on queueing and other English cultural practices, but as I mentioned before the detail sometimes weights the text down. Without the detail though, it would appear to be an English woman making generalizations about her culture, so it is necessary but not very well incorporated into the overall narrative.
Elephants Can Remember isn't really a Poirot mystery. He does make several appearances and advises Mrs. Oliver on how to go about her investigation, but for most of the novel we follow Ariadne Oliver discovering a past mystery and going in search of answers. These answers come in the form of "elephants": witnesses who were around when the murder-suicide of a husband and wife occurred. It could have been a double murder, and even if it was a murder-suicide, there is uncertainty which partner was the one who committed the crime. The investigation into the old crime digs up past memories and rumors of a mad sister, violent pasts, and the fate of Ariadne Oliver's goddaughter, the daughter of the deceased couple. The strong point of the novel is that it follows Mrs. Oliver, one of my favorite figures in the Poirot cannon because she acts both as a mouth-piece for Poirot as well as a character who thinks about murder mostly in a theoretical way. Her investigations by going and talking to a wide variety of people recalls Miss Marple without some of the more refined old lady mannerisms. However, I figured out the solution to the mystery even having disengaged that part of my brain (detective fiction is more fun discovering things along with the main detective). The puzzle that Christie presents is vaguely derivative and all in all too simple. As a generally Christie mystery, Elephants Can Remember is a mid-quality addition to her canon. As the second to last Poirot novel, it comes up wanting in the area of developing a challenging case for both Poirot and Mrs. Oliver.
I got bogged down in Within a Budding Grove, maybe because I was trying to finish it at the same time as my last semester of undergrad, or maybe because our beloved narrator is kind of an ass in this volume of In Search of Lost Time. You know those students who always have something to say in class, usually to hear themselves talk? One of my courses had two of them, who gave opinions based on their own artistic sensibilities ("I don't like pictures with my words" said one once, it was really exciting hearing someone in their very early twenties decry graphic novels) and were very into being intellectual without some of the experience to back it up. The narrator, especially when dealing with intellectualism and meeting his literary hero, Bergotte, had the same quality of naive intellectualism. The whole process of intellectual discovery would have been more interesting if the narrator had been a little more humble, but his lack of humility is clearly a defining characteristic in this portion of his life. The narrator also discovers his ability to have obsessions with girls in this part of In Search of Lost Time. First it is Gilberte, the daughter of Swann, and then to some extent it is also Mme. Swann as well. Maybe if Proust wasn't quite as good as he was, these relationships wouldn't have come off as early as creepy as they did. While Swann's Way does not have an abundance of healthy relationships, the narrator isn't doing a very good job either in Within a Budding Grove. Between Gilberte and like with all young obsessions he has only a fond memory of it two years later and the three girls at the seaside, the narrator is already running through his paces as a little bit of a, as the kids say, creeper. This pattern is a toned down, literary version of so many young adult novels so is quite interesting despite the slightly uncomfortable quality of these relationships. The narrator in Within a Budding Grove is on the verge of a greater adulthood, since he is beginning to see the cracks in adult life though he is not quite able to process them in a way that allows him to operate outside of his childhood perceptions of reality. It's a complex exploration but probably will be my least favorite of In Search of Lost Time because of my general frustration with the precociousness (to be polite, he is a child to some extent after all) of the narrator.
A plastic bag with a notebook, watch, and lunchbox arrives washed up on the shore of the Pacific Northwest Island and Ruth, a struggling novelist, discovers and begins to read the contents. Ruth becomes deeply involved in the world of the diarist, Nao, a Japanese girl who moved back to Japan from California after her father's business failed. Nao tries to be upbeat and many times shows her age, but as Ruth soon finds out, her world is much darker than it first appears. Ruth becomes obsessed with Nao, trying to find more evidence of this girl and whether or not she may have died in the 2011 earthquake. Ruth's world is full of interesting island Pacific Northwest characters, including her ecologist husband. Nao's great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun, helps Nao deal with bully at school as well as beginning to tell her enough to make sense of her great-uncle's death as a kamikaze pilot during World War II. At times both worlds tends towards the darker side of things, between Ruth's past as well as Nao's bullying at school. This darkness is not the shock and awe kind but much quieter and realistic, the understatement creating an even greater sense of urgency. As a fellow Proust-2013er might want to know, the diary Nao writes is covered in the boards of an old edition of À la recherche du temps perdu and there is much discussion of time, memory, and Western philosophy. Nao's uncle, the kamikaze pilot, is revealed to have been a student of philosophy and Nao's father spends his days folding paper insects out of pages of the multivolume set of Western philosophers. The more philosophical side occasionally verges on the more mystical interpretations of quantum mechanics as well as delving into Buddhist thought (as Nao's indomitable great-grandmother is a Buddhist nun after all), offering an interesting thread throughout the story told by Ruth and Nao. As Nao's father attempts suicide and Nao herself considers it, Ruth's mission to find the owner of the diary becomes more desperate. The tone of both characters is captured well in the alternating narration and not only is there thoughtful reflection, there is also a fair dose of suspense that keeps the reader intrigued with Ruth and Nao and wanting to know how it all turns out.
Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, shapes up to show Bond as an emotional, amateur, and often overconfident spy. While fans of the later novels and film adaptations might take issue with this, Fleming is able to show Bond as a rookie without himself coming off as amateurish. The Royale, Felix Leiter, and the Bond girl are all present and take action in one of the better plotted Bond adventures. Of course Bond's interactions with women are problematic and he's not the best man, let alone the best spy (yet). However, Casino Royale captures a sense of the rawer, darker Bond when he was more of a reaction to a stylized version of the espionage game instead of a stylized version of himself. While From Russia with Love is a less brash plot and premise than Casino Royale, Casino Royale manages to hold up even without considering its place in James Bond history. (On a more personal note, this novel had the distinction of being the last novel I was required to read in my undergraduate career.)
Basically, who doesn't want to have the same super powers as Sherlock Holmes? Being able to look at someone and tell everything about them is pretty neat, and Sherlock Holmes can use this for his extra special career of consulting detective. Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes is an effort to understand, given modern research into memory and cognition, how the Great Detective achieves his mental clarity. I had just finished a course focusing on Sherlock Holmes, so most of the quotations used by Konnikova to support her overall ideas were already familiar to me. A few times this verged on over-reliance, though I also got the impression that her audience was slightly wider than the Sherlockian detective fiction enthusiast. The details regarding her interaction with Holmes, from her first encounters being read to until her current brain science analysis, were a highlight for the fan part of my reading brain. While most of the science is treated in a cursory way and there isn't a final self-help style checklist on how exactly to turn oneself into Holmes, the overall examination of Holmes' techniques and their applications was a nice analysis of the Holmes stories in a new context. If we could actually read Holmes' Science of Deduction, Mastermind would be the abstract.
You know that feeling when you think you've done something really terrible? It's not like you are sure you are guilty, and it's probably not your fault, but there is a sneaking suspicion that maybe you could have done something differently or that if one thing had just gone differently, you would be relieved of this potential guilt? This feeling is perfectly captured in An Accident in August by the same author as [b:A Novel Bookstore|7998632|A Novel Bookstore|Laurence Cossé|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1346131063s/7998632.jpg|12511438] and [b:Bitter Almonds|15812228|Bitter Almonds|Laurence Cossé|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355057945s/15812228.jpg|21537510]. The eponymous accident is the car wreck that killed Princess Diana, and Lou just happens to have her white Fiat hit by a speeding car when entering the fateful tunnel. Lou wasn't the one who caused the accident (or did she?) and she continues to drive. Not until the next morning does she realize that her hit and run was the accident that caused the speeding car, containing Princess Diana, to flip and kill the former-Windsor passenger (or did it?). Through the speculation in the press about the cause of the accident and a visit by a private investigator who is on the lookout for a white Fiat (but there are thousands in Paris) and tries to get Lou to confess, Lou goes through hell mostly from within her own mind. She's constantly looking over her shoulder and before long it's too late to come forward. Lou feels much more guilty than an outsider would thing she would be if it was just a simple side-swipe. The psychological suspense as well as feeling of latent guilt is perfectly captured by Cossé in a novel of modern history. A few events are a little far fetched for this otherwise highly realistic novel, but these are minor when compared to the other strong elements of this novel.
Another gem recommended to me by Powell's Indiespensable, and while at times I was frustrated with the memoirist, With or Without You fits in to the perfect medium between historical figure memoir and tell-all. Domenica Ruta chooses to open her memoir with a scene where she is riding in a car with her mother. Her mother, Kathi, has a baseball bat and proceeds to stop to bash in the windshield of a rival's car. Kathi and her dubious choices form the major events within this memoir, from the taxi driver future husband to drug dealer roommates and her harassment of Ruta once Ruta decides to leave her mother's home. At the same time as the readers learn of Kathi's outrageous behavior, they are also shown a complex mother-daughter relationship where Ruta obviously still cares for her mother despite her out of control behavior. Kathi does not become a wholly unsympathetic figure until the end of the memoir, which was about when I'd begun to grown tired of anecdotes of her behavior beginning to harm or embarrass Ruta. While all children known the feeling of being embarrassed by their parents, the end the complex relationship that had been previously portrayed turned into Ruta's story of trying to break away from her parents and strike out on her own. Ruta's mother is certainly cringe-worthy, and how Ruta makes this relationship work for as along as it can makes this memoir worth reading.
The short semi-autobrographical essays in Legs Get Led Astray vary from minimalistic to complex, from stories of past relationships to stories of her apartment building collapsing. These essays are at times not for the faint of heart, but the raw emotions portrayed in Caldwell's work are authentic. In other words, this is what Lena Dunham wants to be but what Caldwell manages to pull off without pretension. (One issue I have with this collection is that the narrator states that these are autobiographical, but I'm not 100% sure that there is not a distinction between Chloe the author and Chloe the narrator. For now I will assume that they one essentially the same.)Chloe Caldwell lives in a highly literary world, with her brother and his friends working at the Strand and the keeping of a typewriter in the bathroom for use thoughts. Caldwell's essays reflect her tumultuous teenage years as well as her relationships and interactions with others as she gets older. She writes about snooping in her mothers diaries, her time in Berlin, and her early twenties bouncing between New York City and the Pacific Northwest. While airing frequently on the grittier side, Caldwell's prose is complete with the emotions of someone who is finding (and quite spectacularly found) her voice in her early twenties.
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
With fantastical features like girls who have been turned into silk worms and magical war tattoos, Karen Russell's Vampires in the Lemon Grove covers a lot of ground. What comes in common with all of the short stories is a sense of being very dedicated to an idea, like a vampire's sobriety of go keeping hold of a glass window long enough to stake an official claim, and then somehow realizing that that idea will fail. The slow disintegration of psyches and unveiling of events can be a bit too slow at times, but overall plays well with the fantastical elements. There are certainly spooky aspects, like the life-sized doll of a runaway child, and these play well into the overall stories without devolving into a gimmick. The talent in writing is evident though I didn't care for quite all of the stories mostly because the plots at times could be painfully slow to develop.
I was provided a copy of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell through the GoodReads First Reads program from Graywolf Press. I'm on the fence about this novel. It's written in a very meta way, about a father and son who may or may not exist making up stories about people who are probably made up but the reader is not 100% sure. There are so many plots and subplots in the first part, with the next two portions becoming even more convoluted, but not convoluted in a bad way. The ending parts were especially interesting, and the inclusion of photographs at the end was an interesting move. I frequently got a little confused about who was speaking (another author who eschews quotation marks), but it was not enough to completely detract from the thematic content. The discourse between father and son, and also the father's meditations of life and death within the nursing home that a portion of the novel, was fascinating and made sense in the context of the convoluted style. The reflections on being concerned about aging and feeling trapped made the novel meaningful in more than a flashy "look at me" innovative style.
Nancy Mitford is as delightfully snarky as her sister Jessica, and this makes reading her novels like getting gossip from an old friend. That being said, I enjoy Mitford's biographies more than her novels. Mitford's novels are lightly fictionalized versions of her own family's biography, and it makes sense that she alienated some of her family along the way. Her biographies are less than academic but there is less second guessing as to whether a similar incident happened in her life or not. The plot of The Pursuit of Love focuses on the Radlett family and is told through the eyes of their cousin, Fanny. Fanny's mother has a reputation as a "bolter" from all her relationships, and Fanny grows up alongside her eccentric cousins. Linda, Fanny's cousin that becomes the focus of the novel, grows up to be the Bolter of her generation. Linda first marries a Tory politician, then a communist, and then has an affair with a French duke. Her serial relationships form the gossipy plot that Fanny recounts, though towards the end Fanny becomes less of the main narrator and the novel instead falls into a recounting of Linda's time in France. The novel was published in 1945 and the tone of impending war is woven into the plot.Overall I found the beginning a bit like something I had already seen before, having read [b:Hons and Rebels|43401|Hons and Rebels |Jessica Mitford|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320464420s/43401.jpg|1023825] but the portion where Fanny's narration takes a back seat to Linda's growing sense of self and decisions about how she actually wants to live her life is excellent and compelling.
I have been meaning to read Zulu by Caryl Férey for a while. I got to another one of his novels, [b:Utu|11523445|Utu|Caryl Férey|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328046716s/11523445.jpg|7159859], first and knew that Férey's style is intensely violent. The violence is gratuitous because it could be an equally effective story without the violent descriptions, but at the same time supports the overall feel of social breakdown and amorality that Férey's main characters must confront through the course of their investigation. So, it works but it also takes some getting used to.Originally writing in French, Férey's work takes place in radically different places. [b:Utu|11523445|Utu|Caryl Férey|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328046716s/11523445.jpg|7159859] is set in New Zealand, and Zulu in South Africa. Setting gritty noir novels in these exotic locations makes for an even more out of place feeling with the narrator. Violence between racial groups, especially the colonizers and newly enfranchised colonized, is the main mode.In Zulu, the main character, Ali Neuman, witnessed the murder of his father and brother during ethnic violence predating the ending of apartheid. The violence continues much later, both in the townships and in the murders of two well off white girls. Neuman is of course trying to find the murderer, this is a mystery novel after all, but at the same time stumbles upon crimes that are much worse (if that's even imaginable). The connections between the surprise and conspiracy elements of the plot are strained at times, unless the reader is perfectly willing to go along with the plot and try not to guess at plot points ahead. At times the narration takes a step away from the actions of the broad cast of main characters to explain some aspects of the distinctly South African concerns. AIDS plays a major role in the plot as well as the committees set up after Mandela's election to address the wrongs of apartheid. These long explanatory passages are breaks from the intensity of the plot. Ordinarily this would be very useful background, but the movement away from the otherwise tightly plotted and thrilling crime novel can be frustrating.
