Murakami, Dunnett, Chua, Eco

oh the irony, that lactation gives you all this time to read, and yet your intelligence is (literally??) getting sucked out of you...

this week i read:

Haruku Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

so. lessee. I think I actually _hated_ the Murakami, which is weird because a) he's all famous and shit, so you think I would find something to like and b) he does two things that I also like to do (run and write), so ditto you would think i'd find something to like in his book which is about running and writing. but no, alas. I found it affected, pointless, and humorless. eek. I said it. Sample annoying quote:

"But is it ever possible for a professional writer to be liked by people? [Clearly you want the answer to be no, even though there are reams of famous writers who have friends, and in fact you yourself mention friends in your book]. I have no idea. [OK, so why pose the question in the first place?] Maybe somewhere in the world it is. [Huh? Likeability is geographically determined?]... But that's another story. Let's get back to running. I've gotten back into a running lifestyle again. [Duh. You're writing a book about how you like to run.] I started seriously running and now rigorously running. [Again, huh?] What this might mean for me, now that I'm in my late fifties, I don't know yet. [So... you don't know the meaning of the previous pointless statement... funny, neither do I.] But I think it's got to mean something. Maybe not anything profound, but there must be significance to it. Anyway, right now I'm running hard. I'll wait till later to think about what it all means. [So basically what you're saying is that you are trying to make your editor's word count with an ENTIRELY MEANINGLESS PARAGRAPH IN WHICH YOU DON'T ACTUALLY IMPART ANY ACTUAL IDEAS.] Grrr. Anyway. He continues in this vein for the entire book. 'nuf said. can't recommend it. Perversely, it did make me want to read one of his novels to see if I can figure out why he is Mr. Famous Literary Best-Seller.

I'm going to lump the Dorothy Dunnett and the Umberto Eco together, mostly because really I'm only a few chapters into The Name of the Rose (which is a re-read - I read it when I was seventeen, and remembered it being very dense and difficult and brainy, but sort of sexy at the same time, so wanted to confirm my impression). The thing that I luuuuurve about both authors is that, while they are essentially writing beach books (mystery/thriller historical fiction) they are completely unapologetic about throwing in snippets of old French/German/Spanish/Latin without any translation or footnotes or even sly context-entwined explanation as if duh, any reader worth his salt should be able to sail right through it no problem (I will admit to resorting to the Internet a couple of times, but appreciate the challenge). They both have big fat juicy vocabularies, too: I don't have the Dunnett on me to be able to look at, but a random description of a carved stone column from the Eco contains the following list: sirens, hippocentaurs, gorgons, harpies, incubi, dragopods, minotaurs, lynxes, pards, chimeras, cynophales who darted fire from their nostrils, crocodiles, polycaudate, hairy serpents... leucrota, manticores, paranders, weasels, dragons, hoopoes, owls, basilisks, hypnales, presters, spectafici, scorpions, saurians, whales, scitales, amphisbenae, iaculi, dispsases, green lizards, pilot fish, octopi, morays, and sea turtles. Got that? I got maybe half of them.

The Amy Chua book I feel like I don't really need to discuss because EVERYBODY is discussing it right now, to the point where you don't need to have read the book to have an opinion about it. Briefly: I agree with her general philosophy that children's (indeed, anyone's) self-esteem comes from acquiring actual skills, which requires spending actual time and effort, and that it's up to the parents to get that to happen, but I think the extremes to which she carries that philosophy in practice are kind of psycho.

Anyway. Time to go implement some parenting philosophy of my own: sleep when you can, eat when you can, and try to have a shower every day. So far, two out of three...

Simon Singh, The Big Bang

WOW, that was weird - I must at some point have accidentally selected "Enable transliteration to Hindi" (not an button on one's computer that you'd think would be easy to hit accidentally, but stranger things have happened...) and as I started to type "Simon Singh, The Big Bang" it came out in Hindi, and for a brief moment I thought that my laptop was somehow asserting cultural/linguistic superiority over me, and showing off that it could not only recognize Singh as an Indian name, but also knew how to spell it in Hindi, and it was a tiny glimpse into a dystopic future controlled by machines. and then I realized that that was dumb/I was dumb and that I just needed to dink around in the settings tab until I fixed it. Anyway.
I promise I have read other things in the intervening months, but I will plead pregnancy brain and post-partum brain as my excuse (some of the reading has been things like "The Contended Little Baby Book" and "The Nursing Mother's Companion" which if anything tend to increase the postpartum stupor, so I refuse to discuss those on principle). However. Simon Singh! Simon Singh is fantastic. I love him. I will admit to reading his acknowledgement section at the end to find out whether he has a girlfriend or wife (ha! don't think so!) because if he ever moves to San Francisco, he is so mine.
The Big Bang is a concise-ish review of astronomy from the very beginning of the science (Aristotle, Ptolemy, etc.) through to the development and consolidation of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. I read it several years ago, but a) I had forgotten enough of it (i.e. most of it) and b) it's a really good read so I decided it was worth reading again, and this time I read it reeeeaaalallllllyyy sloooooowwwwly in an effort to actually retain as much of the information as I could, especially of the more basic early astronomy (e.g. how the size of the earth/sun/moon were figured out, the development of the heliocentric model of the galaxy, etc., all of which to my chagrin I have learned multiple times over, starting in sixth grade science lessons, but of which I had retained hold of only a few unconnected snippets (Tycho Brahe and his metal nose! Galileo muttering "And yet it moves" under his breath after his recanting at the Vatican! Ernest Rutherford and the thing about firing a cannon at a piece of tissue paper!) No guarantees that I will retain any of it this time around, but at least I have a few more random snippets which are colourful enough they they will stick in the cannon (Tycho Brahe also had a pet moose which died in a drunken revel at Christmastime! the Syrene well, the bottom of which was mysteriously illuminated every solstice!). I get lost (predictably) right around Einstein and relative space/time and space itself bending in funny directions, but since he also includes plenty of comforting quotes from people like Niels Bohr and Richard Feynman saying "If you can understand relativity and quantum physics, than you haven't understood it," I feel OK about it. I just went on Wikipedia to find out if SS has written anything else that I need to read, and he has! so exciting! an expose of the alternative/chiropractic medicine for which he was unsuccessfully sued for libel. yippee. stay tuned once I have read that.
The other thing I read recently which I just have to at least mention is Elizabeth Crane's book of short stories, You Must Be This Happy to Enter which is seriously goofy and very smart. My favourite was the story about Betty the zombie who goes on a reality TV show in which she competes with an anorexic, a shopaholic, a chronically shy person, etc. to see who can most successfully confront their various problems.