Light reading

on the road:

Jess Walter's The Zero (good book, interesting mix of satire and noir, I enjoyed it, yet it is in the end not at all my kind of novel--shade of DeLillo looms too large, metaphysical strain unfortunately survives inoculation with satire...)

Simon R. Green's Something from the Nightside (hmmm, had a hasty emergency trip to Borders yesterday morning in Chicago, sudden vision of possible airport delays & memory of true fact about me which is that as long as I have a stack of the right kind of trashy novels, flights can be delayed for hours or even overnight and I hardly notice--I found this guy's books and was, like, how did I never hear of him?!? These sound exactly what I like! I bought three--but after reading this one, am not so sure I will give benefit of doubt, very derivative--however possibly he will find his stride in later books, will wait and see...)

Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man (did not examine this closely enough in the store, of course really I have read it before! But it's a good one, the ones with Death are all on the short list of most appealing ones and the wizards of Unseen University also feature in a big way, as I have often said before I do not think there really is a better depiction of academic life with the possible exception of Diana Wynne Jones's wizard universities...)

Good-quality light rereading trumps average light reading every time...

And on this note, I will sign off for 2007.

(Unless I see something interesting first thing in the morning before I leave for the airport, that is--I'll be offline in South Carolina through the morning of the 2nd--but this is not likely because one annoying thing about holidays is extreme scarcity of interesting literary stuff in the papers, it's all best-of reprises and other padding!)

Hmmm, other random notices, if you have any urge to come and see "This situation" (Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th St.), and feel that it would augment your experience of the piece to catch the Light Reading-inflected iteration, my last two shifts are Thursday, Jan. 3 from 10-2 and Saturday, Jan. 5 also from 10-2. It really is an amazing thing, I will write more about it at some future date...

Best wishes for a happy and healthy year in 2008!

Surrogacy

Science-fictional.

Lagartijas

Adela on interspecies relations. The paragraph that particularly caught my eye and made me smile, since it combines two different things I like (I am fonder of lizards than Adela is--and in fact I have often since wondered if the amazing and quite huge boa constrictor called Mr. B. who lived in the elementary-school science classroom where I helped take care of the animals when I was a little kid might have been named by someone who had read Richardson's Pamela!):

I've never really understood why anyone would want a pet boa mainly because I have yet to develop a relationship with reptiles. I generally do not like them except as momentary curiosities, like lizards when they do push-ups in the sun. As a child I got to see lots of lizards exercising while they caught some rays since my parents' garden was, and still is, a nice haven for them. In Spanish, push-ups are actually called "lizards" (lagartijas) and I was thrilled when I realized this was not a purely arbitrary name but actually referenced what lizards do when they push up and down.

A dormant plastic descant recorder

Barbara Trapido offers a particularly lovely instantiation of the Guardian writers' rooms feature. (No cats, though!) Here's a nice bit:

The way I work is to bed down in here two nights a week and rise at 3 or 4am. Then I write, cross-legged, in bed with an A4 pad on my knee until about nine. The mini-kettle and the Mr Illy tin of biscuits are because I can't leave the room, or I get that Xanadu moment and my fantasy life flies away. Writing novels is like dreaming. My real life returns with breakfast and the room goes back to playing dead. All I use it for after that is email.

I love Barbara Trapido's books, she's on my short list of particularly favorite novelists (the world of her novels is magical, but it's also got exactly the feel of what life is like, i.e. my life--it is a totally counterintuitive connection, and I actually fear that there is probably not a single reader in the world who will share my opinion on this because it is a strictly personal one, but Iain Banks' novels give me this feeling also--their protagonists [partly, I suppose, because they think more than most protagonists in novels?] have inner lives that seem recognizable to me in a way that the protagonists of, say, oh, what are good examples--it must be writers I like or the comparison loses its purpose!--novels by Jonathan Coe or Claire Messud do not...)

My inner fish

Science books to look forward to in 2008. The one I particularly must get, I think, is Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum (hmmm, that might be Amazon UK-worthy, I see it is not published here till August...).

(Updated: also, love and sex with robots!)

Plus robot fights

The year in movies at Jane Dark's Sugarhigh!.

And at the Dizzies, Devin McKinney considers the Blade Runner briefcase set...

(I have not forgotten your request for the usual year-end book roundup, Doctor D., but I am not sure when I am going to have time to do it, in spite of the job being easier than usual because of paucity of books read--this might tide you over?!?)

Rats!

"They had a little picnic set up in there. . ."

Hair-related frivolity

Several different prompts recently reminded me of an anecdote which I now feel licensed to relate, somewhat at my brothers' expense (but they will forgive me, it is an older sister's prerogative, just those couple years' advantage leads to all sorts of unfair benefits like always being the one to win at monopoly, at least until a brother who shall remain nameless would grow so frustrated--all our games ended this way!--that he threw the board up in the air and scattered money and houses and hotels across the floor--not to mention it really is a charming tale)...

The prompts:

1. I was having the ritual fend-off-haggardness winter haircut the other day (hmmm, not very successfully fended off, I fear I might have to soon take the plunge and actually get some of the kind of makeup that you, you know, like, wear on your skin as opposed to lipstick or eye stuff or whatever, this is mildly alarming, I am largely ignorant of the world of what my mother's sisters all scathingly call "lotions and potions"!), and the static electricity was making strands of hair stand up like crazy...

2. And Christopher Smart's lovely lines about the cat (which have provoked some delightful e-mails from readers especially struck by one or another phrase!) include that amazing series of words For by stroking of him I have found out electricity...

In the introduction to my new academic book, I talk about my childhood love for Franklin Court:

Growing up in Philadelphia, I loved visiting the underground museum below the Ghost Structure, a steel skeleton designed by Robert Venturi to mark the dimensions of Benjamin Franklin’s house, razed in 1812. The museum had a sort of phone bank that allowed one to telephone a huge number of different eighteenth-century figures whose names and numbers were posted across a banner like the menu at a fast-food restaurant. Once the call was put through, I would listen to the recording of what Washington or Mozart or whoever I had chosen to dial up that day had to say about Franklin: history as spiritualism-inflected gossip!

But we also passionately loved the Franklin Institute, a museum that I have not revisited as an adult but that I have designs upon (it's the swim fin project). It had all sorts of amazing things (the giant heart!), but one of them was the sort of device many of us got to play with as scientific-minded children, the magical Van de Graaff generator.

(Oh dear, this is a more roundabout story than I imagined, I am longwinded this evening!)

My brothers were very eager for me to be the demonstratee--this seemed unusual, but whatever, I was excited! I had my hair as always in two very tight long neat braids (or "plaits," as my English mother would call them--I don't think I ever wore my hair down a single day in my life, the elementary-school morning kitchen scene involved her undoing one plait and very stringently and painfully brushing it with a Mason Pearson hairbrush and tightly braiding it back up, and then doing the same for the other!), and I touched the apparatus and the hairs of my head did indeed dance up into the air.

But my brothers were very disappointed--and when our mother asked why, it became clear that they had imagined both braids sort of jumping up into the air like muscular pythons...

(And another good hair story--our mother had very bright red hair as a child and young adult, most distinctive, only many people in her family had it also and so it was annoying to her when strange ladies on the bus told her what unusual and lovely hair she had. And one day one brother finally said, "But mom, how could you have had red hair when you were little? When you were little, everything was in black and white!" Which indeed it was, if you went by the pictures...)

Stegophiles and graffers

At the Telegraph, Sukhdev Sandhu contemplates Whipplesnaith's Night Climbers of Cambridge.

Here's the Night Climbers book blog, and here's the visual evidence (I have borrowed the illustration from that site).

EWTSNBN

A good list of year-end favorite books.

(I'll definitely do some kind of end-of-year round-up, only I'm too busy to do it quite yet and also I hardly read any books this year! I think I can safely say that my own personal most-anticipated read for 2008 is this--with this running a very close second...)

I read an awfully trashy book on the train home last night from Philadelphia. I was eyeing it covetously in the inferior station bookstore and thinking how much I wanted to read it, I had done exactly the same a week or two ago at a Barnes and Noble and then regretfully concluded that I could not justify spending full hardcover price on something so junky. But finding myself in thrall to it again, and with the special circumstances of holiday train travel, I decided it was a justifiable extravagance. It was actually quite enjoyable--it had a talking cat, which I like, and also Mozart transplanted into the body of a gray parrot as punishment for revealing Masonic secrets!--Mercedes Lackey's Reserved for the Cat. This series is a great idea--vaguely alternate Edwardian England, sort of Little Princessish, with magical Elemental Masters fighting villains of various kinds, lots of good animal stuff--but rather poorly executed, so that the books themselves are almost always a disappointment; this one, however, I found quite satisfactory.

(In retrospect it was certainly worth the money as the journey passed by in a flash, and with the added bonus that I ended up terribly fondly reminded of my beloved English grandmother. It was by sheer virtue of a train of verbal associations--I was thinking to myself that the only word for this kind of book was "pap," a word she always used to describe [as it were!] 'modern' bread--"Awful pappy stuff!")

Spraggle upon waggle

Sam Jordison blogs at the Guardian about a radio broadcast of Christopher Smart's lovely Jubilate Agno.

I first encountered this poem in high school while singing Britten's also quite lovely (this is an understatement, I should not be so free with my hyperbolic adjectives!) Rejoice in the Lamb, and it is still one of my absolute favorites. Here are the famous lines about the cat Jeoffry--I am not even going to paste in any lines, because I love them all so much and I want you to go and read them...

Paint color namer, baseball statistician, forensic osteologist

Alice on color and the process of naming things in a set.

Inane jacket copy

Paul Collins contemplates several new releases on one of his favorite subjects, bizarre books. One of the book-jackets he reproduces is so perfect that I must pilfer it (I want to read that novel!)...

Enviably cerulean males

Natalie Angier has a rather lovely piece in this week's Science Times concerning nature's own doping problem:

Like athletes who toy with drugs, animals are constantly, if unconsciously, performing the basic calculus: How much of my long-term health am I willing to sacrifice for the sake of short-term glory? Male cardinals and house finches become obsessed each fall with eating berries and other ruddy fruits, not for their nutritional value but for their carotenoids, the red and orange pigments the birds must acquire if their new crop of feathers are to beam brightly come spring. “Fruit is a poor-quality food in general, just a lot of sugar and water, and it would make more sense for the birds to ingest grain instead,” said Geoffrey Hill, an ornithologist at Auburn University in Alabama. But female birds are drawn to the most brilliant males, he said, so during the molting period, “if you don’t get carotenoids, you’ve got no hope.”

Moreover, colorful male birds may divert so much of their ingested carotenoid into their plumage that they have none left to act in the chemical’s other capacity, as an antioxidant vitamin — a resource allocation decision with possibly lethal consequences. Researchers monitoring bird populations around Chernobyl in Ukraine recently found that in highly radiated areas, brightly colored birds were significantly less abundant than drab birds. The scientists proposed that the drabber species, whose coloring relies on internally generated melanin pigment rather than consumed carotenoids, were freer to use their dietary vitamins to help mop up the cellular damage that radiation can spark.

Glazing over at the sight of a bonnet

At the Scotsman, Andrea Mullaney sensibly rails against the reduction of Jane Austen's novels to Darcy, dating and wet shirts.