Hot zone update

Sitting at my desk in New York and trying to gear up to write a letter of recommendation that's due today - fortunately I don't need to be on campus until three, as I still have quite a bit of reading to finish before class as well.

Dublin was excellent but phenomenally tiring - any time I was not actually seeing people and doing conference things, I was essentially huddled in bed in my hotel room (fortunately it was quite a nice room - I put up the Do Not Disturb sign and just left it up!).

Interesting interview with Richard Preston at the New York Times about current plans to update his thriller-like account of Ebola as of the early 1990s, The Hot Zone. I vividly remember reading this during my first year of grad school - my roommate LeeAnn had the hardcover and I devoured it! I have been following Ebola developments closely and with interest: my two main fantasy alternate careers are neurologist and epidemiologist, and I am a little sorry that I am not involved in planning and organizing ways to contain the epidemic.

I am relieved to see that Preston admits that one bit of the book is especially in need of correction (I always wondered!):

In the original “Hot Zone,” I have a description of a nurse weeping tears of blood. That almost certainly didn’t happen. When a person has Ebola, the eyes can turn brilliant red from blood vessels leaking and blood oozing out of the eyelid. That’s horrifying, but it’s not someone with tears of blood running down their face. I want to fix that.

Here's his piece in this week's New Yorker.

Closing tabs

Ayn Rand, cat fancier.

Vanilla is the old black.

Rebecca Traister on the violence of adolescent girls. (Joyce Carol Oates and Megan Abbott are two great novelists on this theme - I am much looking forward to Megan's new novel The Fever.)

This is interesting. (Via GeekPress.)

Have been doing some very interesting reading this week, about which more anon, and am more strongly resolved than ever to stop rotting my brain with so much junk! I am not contemplating denying myself light reading altogether, that would be simply penitential, but I would guess only about a third of the novels I read are things I am really avid for, the others are just to fill up the time. More nonfiction for the rest of the year, and I have some research topics I'm excited to begin reading in more deeply, so that's perfect.

(I think this disgust was particularly prompted by two poor books I read last week. Usually I link to bad books without naming them - I have a protective feeling that minor authors of minor books should not have to read me saying cruel things about their novels in the first page of Google results! But these two were ones by high-profile authors that inevitably have a lot of buzz, so my scruples in that case do not apply - instead I think I am doing a bit of public service in warning others about their demerits....)

I have let it go too long without logging light reading - it becomes a pain when I have to paste in a ton of links!

First of all, and very good (though I find the spin put on things at the end quite bizarre), Jo Walton's My Real Children, which among other things confirms my suspicion that the novel as a genre is built upon a scaffolding of counterfactuals!

A reread of Dorothy Dunnett's first Lymond book, but I am not sure I am really in the mood for this (I like having a long series on the go in a month when I am spending time in airports - started the second one but have left it idle for now).

Deborah Coates's Strange Country, which is frustratingly slow in opening (as if you set Alice Munro to rewrite the first half of a Lee Child thriller!) but picks up speed to become one of my very favorite kinds of novel. The writing is really exceptionally good, and the characters are very appealing, though I wish she were getting more crime-series-type editing (I don't know that you would enjoy this without having read the first couple in the series, whereas I think some editing ought to have made it into a more satisfying book in its own right).

Now the two really poor ones.

First of all, Mo Hayder's preposterous Wolf. The violence in her books has always been polarizing, and they are also uneven in quality, but the best couple are in my view superb. This one is terrible! The writing is still quite good, and I can't fault it for readability, but the central drama (with ridiculous twist at the end) hinges on a family who are being kept hostage and the detective trying to figure out who they are (and as a consequence where they can be found and rescued), with chapters alternating between the hostage scenes and the detective's quest to identify them. But in fact the information he has plus five minutes with Google would have answered this question immediately!

Then Greg Iles' Natchez Burning, which is particularly cartoonishly written in its sequences set in the past and which more generally just reminded me of the dreadful John Grisham at his most portentous on the topic of race relations in the South (A Time to Kill is possibly one of the most banal and silly books I have ever read). It's marketed as the first in a trilogy, but really we are supposed to know the characters from a prior series of books that I hadn't read - hadn't read and don't intend to! I really, really didn't like this one, though it is competent enough that I read it to the end rather than putting it aside. In fact I dimly recall that I have read one or two others by this author and didn't like them either - this one is a mass of good intentions but didn't work for me.

Finally, Mary Rickert's The Memory Garden, which I wasn't keen on at first but which grew on me as I read further. The first half is dreadfully whimsical, but it becomes much more satisfying as the engagements with the past grow more substantive.

Halfway through Knausgaard volume 3 and very happy to have temporarily arrested the brain rot!

Bad habits

Clarissa to Anna Howe, letter dated "Sat. night, Mar. 18" (the Penguin edition edited by Angus Ross seems to be no longer in print, which is dismaying to me!):

 You see, my dear, he scruples not to speak of himself, as his enemies speak of him.  I can’t say, but his openness in these particulars gives a credit to his other professions.  I should easily, I think, detect a hypocrite: and this man particularly, who is said to have allowed himself in great liberties, were he to pretend to instantaneous lights and convictions—at his time of life too: habits, I am sensible, are not so easily changed.  You have always joined with me in remarking that he will speak his mind with freedom, even to a degree of unpoliteness sometimes; and that his very treatment of my family is a proof that he cannot make a mean court to anybody for interest-sake.  What pity, where there are such laudable traces, that they should have been so mired, and choked up, as I may say!—We have heard that the man’s head is better than his heart: but do you really think Mr Lovelace can have a very bad heart?  Why should not there by something in blood in the human creature, as well as in the ignobler animals?

The flea's progress

Fantastic piece by Will Self at the Guardian about the trouble with his blood. Warning: don't click through if you have trouble reading about needles and blood-related grotesquerie!...

The world bedbug collection

At the NYT, Donald McNeil, Jr. on bedbugs:

The classic bedbug strain that all newly caught bugs are compared against is a colony originally from Fort Dix, N.J., that a researcher kept alive for 30 years by letting it feed on him.

But Stephen A. Kells, a University of Minnesota entomologist, said he “prefers not to play with that risk.”

He feeds his bugs expired blood-bank blood through parafilm, which he describes as “waxy Saran Wrap.”

Coby Schal of North Carolina State said he formerly used condoms filled with rabbit blood, but switched to parafilm because his condom budget raised eyebrows with university auditors.

Also (unrelated): download a free PDF of Lewis Shiner's excellent novel Glimpses....

Blood-sucking

Dracula-themed blood drives. (Via the Guardian.)

Hematophagy

A delightful piece by Natalie Angier in the Science Times on some of the creatures hymned in Bill Schutt's Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures, which I am Amazoning at once:

Among his rubied rabble are vampire bats tuned to extract blood from large slumbering mammals and bats that aim instead for the warm breast plates of birds; New World leeches that track their hosts through the water and Old World leeches that relentlessly stalk down blood bearers on land; the notorious vampire finches of the Galápagos that daintily peck open dribbling wounds on the hindquarters of blue-footed boobies; and the candiru, tiny, eel-like catfish that are reputed to have the power to swim up a person’s urethra and suck blood from the bladder and thus are often more feared than their fellow river dwellers, the piranhas.