Quick March!

Books read March 2015
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
The Pun Also Rises, by John Pollack
Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
About ten Rumpole anthologies in quick succession, by John Mortimer
Specialty Board Review for Family Practice, by some committee in Iowa somewhere.
The Ode Less Travelled, by Stephen Fry
Shitty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us, by Kilmartin et al
Old Peter's Russian Tales, Arthur Ransome

Gotten from the library on my daughter's brand new library card (!) and much looking forward to: 
Life after life, by Kate Atkinson

Not a book, but deserves a mention since it has given me nightmares about falling off cliff faces every night for the last week since watching it: 
Reel Rock, a documentary about rock climbing in Yosemite

Usual excuses re: not having written anything between September of last year and now: blah blah blah. Have been reading normal amounts but have stepped it up a bit this month (and I am bothering to write a blogpost about it) because I am engaged in the seductive game of productive procrastination. You may or may not have noticed, buried subtly in the 'Books Read' list, that innocuous-looking Specialty Board Review for Family Practice - it is actually a giant telephone directory-sized memento mori of my impending recertification exam that I have been carting around everywhere with me for the last month, in the hopes that it will impart knowledge through my bag into me. Unlike everything else on the list, I haven't actually finished it. Hm. Yes. Well.

Continuing where I left off in September: race relations in this country and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I went on a blind date recently with a very nice (black) West African guy (well-educated, definitely upper middle class, living the fabulous single techie lifestyle in SF, lattes, windsurfing, etc.). (Yes, this will ultimately be about Henrietta Lacks.) During our conversation, I was continually distracted by his 'otherness' - not so much specifically the colour of his skin so much as the whole package - the dreadlocks, the accent, my acute awareness that, despite the high-thread-count dress shirt and ordering of organic low-carb entrees, he comes from a place where people share living quarters with their chickens if they are lucky enough to be able to afford chickens, a place which is poor and corrupt as a direct result of what my great great great grandparents did to his great great great grandparents. While the positive effects of biculturalism on intelligence and personality are well-documented (and as I said, he was a fun guy), I think it would be actually quite difficult to have a relationship with someone who lives with that level of schism in their brain (a dirt-poor country of origin suffering all the effects of postcolonial fallout vs current first-world existence, sitting in a coffee shop in the SF Ferry Building, debating the relative merits of different Tahoe ski resorts) and when there is the larger cultural elephant in the room of centuries of history of white perpetrators/brown victims. Which all circuitously confirms, in a way, my own racism, despite myself: it's difficult to have a relationship with someone with a vastly different life experience, and if most brown people have suffered and white people have not so much, we're going to have some pretty whopping chasms in our life experiences.
To paraphrase Nick Hornby (hello, Nick, if you ever read this :)), there's a bit I like in one of his Believer essays where he takes issue with novelists writing books from the perspective of characters who are already articulate, well-educated, and clear thinking, because "they don't need the help," and that actually it's a more interesting and more worthwhile challenge to help give a voice to a character without those advantages. Which is what Rebecca Skloot does, beautifully, in the Henrietta Lacks book: it's a history of some cells taken from a poor black woman dying of cervical cancer in the 1950's which became HeLa cells, which are the standard line of tissue culture cells used all over the world today (and on which I spent two years in my twenties, running experiments on their interleukin activity, without any knowledge of their provenance), and in addition to a nice concise rundown of the basic science and a clearsighted presentation of the moral quagmire involved in taking unwanted cells from another human being and disseminating them widely for research purposes, she also really loves and provides a voice for the bewildered/angry/poor/sick/uneducated descendants of this woman (who rightfully fail to understand how their mother's cells could have provided the basis of a squillion dollar medical-research industrial complex and yet they don't have health insurance).
Anyway.

Gone Girl is really good and I wish I could write like Gillian Flynn. She's VERY SMART. and funny. Also I wish that I could write like John Mortimer. I spent the weekend recently with a group of women I didn't know particularly well, and everyone was just tremendously nice and earnest and wholesome; all the under-40's said 'like' every other word (also there was unironic discussion of astrology), and by the end of the weekend, I was kind of climbing the walls for a little viciously articulate wit. Gillian Flynn and John Mortimer between them scratched the itch perfectly.

The Ode Less Travelled is only half read at this point - it's a how-to guide for writing poetry, which I'm not 100% convinced I want to do, but I can't resist Stephen Fry, so for now I'm just skimming it rather than actually going through and doing it properly,

But you'll know if in April's post appear
A rhyme or two in beauteous iambs here
That I have read the book on writing verse.
Hmm. Compared to Shakespeare, definitely worse.