trinityofone | Booklog 2007: Week 3

Work is especially miserable today, and I think I'm fighting off a cold, so let's avoid all that stuff and talk about books instead! (Denial is my friend.)

Week 3: 15-21 January 2007

13. Watching the English, Kate Fox — A really amusing anthropological look at the English by an Englishwoman. Fox’s sense of humor is what really makes this book; it’s a bit long and repetitive at parts—skewing too much toward being an academic text when what I want (need) it to be is a work of popular science—but Fox’s own innate “Oh, come off it!” reaction always pulls through in the end. Somewhat frightening: how much of Fox’s “grammar of Englishness” I find applicable to myself—social awkwardness, humor, cynicism, belief in fair play… Bloody hell! Sodding, blimey, shagging, knickers, bollocks… Oh, God! I’m English!

14. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard — Shockingly, I hadn’t read this before. And actually, what really surprised me about it was how creepy it was. I read it right before bed and ohhh, that was a mistake. Other than that, I’m afraid that I don’t have anything terribly interesting to say, at least not without sounding like a bad high school English essay. Shall I talk about fate? Wordplay? Metatextuality? Um. I don’t want to. I’m tired and my analyzers are broken. This tends to be the kind of time when unfortunately I utterly fail to be deep. But at least I liked this rather a lot more than Waiting For Godot.

15. Mathematicians in Love, Rudy Rucker — I have mixed feelings about this one. I loved the first few chapters, setting up Bela’s alternate universe—our world but not (and specifically, Berkeley but not, which was particularly fun for me). I loved some of the insights into the different ways Bela and Paul approached math; the idea of Bela hearing equations as music was wonderful, because I’m always fascinated by the way people think. Some of the alternate universe theory was cool, too—I dug the council of alien mathematicians—but other parts of it didn’t work for me. So Bela and Co. save Earth 2 from a corrupt political machine that’s clearly based on the Bush administration (and do so through the power of rock ‘n’ roll, which was awesome), but then Bela escapes to “the best of all possible worlds”—and it’s our world? Huh? I also couldn’t get behind the ending, and couldn’t really enjoy the love-triangle-y bits, because I hated Alma; I thought she was a selfish bitch and couldn’t understand why Bela and Paul were fighting over her or why “boy gets girl” should be seen as a happy and satisfactory conclusion. (Though I did enjoy the few excuses it gave for Bela and Paul to be a bit gay for each other—check out the dream sequence where Bela reaches over to stroke Alma’s pussy and instead wakes up gasping at the imagined touch of Paul’s cock.) So really, what I liked the best were the bits about Bela’s band; I guess what I really wanted was a story about alternate universe rock ‘n’ roll. With no Alma.

16. The Double Helix, James D. Watson — Watson’s retelling of his and Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA. Really a story about academic infighting, which Watson recounts with enough humor to make it quite amusing. The science stuff is really mostly beyond me, but the book is enjoyable if, like I said above, you’re interested in how human thought processes work, and in the social foibles of very smart people. I couldn’t help going to the “this would make great SGA fic” place; for example, here’s Watson’s opening description of Crick: I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood…It has nothing to do with his present fame. Already he is much talked about…but that was not true [in] the fall of 1951…At that time he was thirty-five, yet almost totally unknown. Although some of his closest colleagues realized the value of his quick, penetrating mind and frequently sought his advice, he was often not appreciated, and most people thought he talked too much. Heh.

One curious thing about this book is the treatment of Rosalind Franklin, one of the rival scientists at King’s. In telling the story as it happened, Watson depicts Franklin in an often not-so-favorable light, as for a long time he did not like her, but at the end he goes out of the way to credit her and say how much he came to like her later. This seems reasonable within the context of the narrative, yet some of the reading I did afterward suggests that there is further controversy about Watson and Crick’s use of Franklin’s results, etc. I’d be curious to read a book about Franklin and see what perspectives it has to offer.

But, controversy aside, this is a great example of science as an adventure story, and I quite enjoyed it.

17. The Man in the Queue, Josephine Tey — Appropriately after reading Watching the English, here’s a murder mystery that revolves around queuing. I adore Tey’s The Daughter of Time, but I’d never read any other books by her. This is her first novel (originally published under a male pseudonym; ‘Tey’ is actually a pseudonym, too) and it introduces Alan Grant, who’s the detective in Daughter of Time, too. He’s an enjoyable, if not especially vivid character to me—Time is fantastic because of its plot, which involves an investigation of whether Richard III was framed—but here, where the plot is less solid, the fact that Grant is (to make the obvious comparison) no Peter Wimsey is especially and unfortunately apparent. The ending was additionally disappointing—an unprompted confession? Lame! All in all, while this was a light, quick read, it was not an especially memorable one.

18. The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly — An immensely engaging story about stories. David’s mother dies and he moves with his father and his not-so-evil stepmother to a new house in the country, where, after hearing books start to whisper to him (I loved the descriptions of what the different types of books sounded like) and sensing the Crooked Man watching him, he finds a way through to another, dark fairytale world. Connolly twists a lot of familiar stories, playing with gender and often switching good guys and bad, and it’s really cool. (There are gay knights. GAY KNIGHTS!) The atmosphere is also fantastic, and dark as hell—this could almost be a children’s story, except it’s really violent and at times quite scary. (The whole huntress sequence freaked me the fuck out.) The attitude is also refreshingly adult; I really liked how David’s growth was presented. In fact, all of this world-building and character development was so good that I kind of wished that it resulted in more; the end was actually kind of quiet and understated and sad—an ending that I respect, I guess, if not the one I wanted. Still, I love books about books and stories about stories, and this was an incredibly imaginative and scary and exciting and moving example of that. Plus, gay knights.

Total Books: 18

Current Mood: sick
Current Music: Sarah McLachlan, "Vox"