The Book Post

Dear Readers,
I am recently returned from vacation, during which I did almost nothing but read (hence the lack of posting activity). In case you are feeling similarly lazy and looking for something to read, here are some recommendations (and anti-recommendations).

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett: Actually a YA book, so a fast read, but part of the Discworld series (of which I am a big fan) and one of the funnier ones at that.

Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire: Interesting concept, mediocre execution. He sets the Snow White fable in Italy and makes Lucretia Borgia her evil stepmother. It all fits together nicely, but somehow fails to be exciting.

Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire: Sequel to Wicked. Amazingly boring, especially compared to the first one. It picks up a bit near the end, and leaves plenty of loose plot lines for yet another sequel. Also, I find the title vaguely distasteful and not terribly clever, but maybe that's just me.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant: Definitely a girly read, but I am a sucker for reworkings of Biblical/mythical stories.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: I only read it because I want to read The Eyre Affair and get the references, but I liked the first few hundred pages. Towards the end it had an unpleasant aftertaste of Wuthering Heights

If you have recommendations of your own, send them my way (and if you've already done so, they're on my list and I'm hitting the library tomorrow).

In Defense of the Diary

Not long after I started this blog, I glanced through a book in B&N called No One Cares What You Had For Lunch, a book of prompts and ideas for blog entries that people will presumably care about. I didn't find the book itself particularly interesting, but its message was clear, and I've more or less stuck to it. I enjoy writing entries for this blog because I give them some thought, and I tend to regard this blog as superior to my Livejournal and its confessional mundanity. All this to say that I know, or at least suspect, there's some snobbery in the blogosphere regarding such "day in the life" online journals. However, as summer vacation really sets in and I start my annual campaign of letters and emails, I notice that they all tend to have a paragraph or two in common. There are, in fact, a handful of people who do care what I had for lunch (or who have kindly humored me for years), and there is a better way to let them know than wearing my hand out writing it six or seven times; namely, my online journal, which I can write once for the whole handful to read. It serves its own purpose, quite distinct from this blog (whose purpose I'm not clear on, but that's for another post). So enough of this arrogance among authors of "real" blogs. You're comparing apples and oranges.

The Cloying Scent of Death

Just in case you, like my mother, didn't already have enough things to be paranoid about, the Environmental Working Group has created Skin Deep, a searchable database of health and beauty products. It lists their ingredients and rates them on their potential harmfulness to humans, the premise being that many perfectly legal substances are possible carcinogens, neurotoxins, etc. Many of their ratings are based on just a few studies, but they always list their "data gap" so you can judge for yourself what you think is worth worrying about. I did a couple of searches on the products sitting around my bathroom - both my shampoo and soap scored a 9/10 for potential hazard. The culprit? Fragrance. One major concern is that "fragrance" essentially tells you nothing about the actual ingredients. Another is that the chemicals and preservatives used in many fragrances have been identified as neurotoxins and immunotoxins. Scary, right? I'll be thinking twice before I buy anything just because it smells good.

Do What You Love

Life is full of pithy but overly simplistic bits of advice like the above. How do you know what it is you love? What if you love too many things? I had more than a few crises as I neared the end of my first year of college (I can't believe I've finished a year of college), but I finally made up my mind to double major in French, which was basically a given (and on the practical end of liberal arts), and math, because I really think it's what I love. I realize many people find math unlovable. I loathed it through middle school, was skeptical through pre-calculus, and only really started to appreciate it when I got to calculus. They don't usually teach you the cool stuff, like linear algebra, in high school. Remember chemistry class when your teacher told you the only way to balance chemical reactions was an educated version of guess-and-check? Actually, there's a simple, foolproof method involving matrix reduction that will give you every possible way to balance an equation every time, including some solutions it would be basically impossible to arrive at by the eyeballing method. Nifty. Well, a lot of subjects have cool tricks up their sleeves. How do I know math is what I want to do for the next three years of my life? It was a small clue when my first meeting with my potential adviser turned into an hour-long lecture on the braid group and I didn't get bored. That evolved into my going to office hours on the (legitimate) pretense of getting homework help, but really just so I could sit and listen to the math professors talk. I heard rants ranging from how the sciences are corrupting pure math, to how math in movies is invariably wrong (and how the professors here invariably know the people hired to be math consultants in said movies), interspersed with mini-lectures about arcane principles of mathematics. As terrifically nerdy as it sounds, those were some of the best conversations I had all semester, and those are the people I want to spend the next three years learning from. I will leave you with a joke that, even if you never find mathematics lovable, you have to admit is pretty hilarious:

Q: What do you get if you cross a mosquito with an elephant?
A: (mosquito)(elephant)(sinθ)

Q: What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
A: Trick question. You can't cross a vector with a scaler.

Literary Regression

I'll be doing some work in my high school's library later this summer, a revisitation of my senior project, in which I got to play at being a librarian. One of the best parts of the job was buying and cataloging (and often reading) new books, mainly young adult and children's fiction. You wouldn't know it from glancing at a display in the teen section of Barnes & Noble, but there are some really good books still being written for that age group. I'm long past the time when those books were technically at my reading level, but one of the qualities that makes these books good is that I still enjoy reading them for the first time, unaided by nostalgia. I think many authors make the mistake of dumbing down their prose in all the wrong ways, assuming that teens won't understand complex structures or rhetorical devices; basically, writing with any stylistic depth (by depth I don't mean Faulkner; plain good writing is fine by me). Consequently we get a lot of books full of stilted dialogue and simplistic narration. Really, I think teens are capable of understanding the English language as well as the average adult, though maybe with smaller vocabularies (and what better way to broaden them than by reading?). Content-wise, very few things are off-limits in teen fiction these days, and young people are the best audience for fantasy, myths, and generally imaginative stories. My point is, there isn't really a good reason why young adult literature shouldn't be one of the best genres available. Think of Philip Pullman, for example, whose (amazing) His Dark Materials trilogy is just as likely to appeal to adults as children. My other point is, the number of books out there is absolutely staggering. Even in my comparatively tiny high school library of 3000 books, I haven't read an appreciable fraction of them. I missed a lot of great books during the time I was theoretically supposed to read them, but that's not going to stop me from catching up now.

In conclusion, a short list of books I came to late but enjoyed:

You & You & You by Per Nilsson, tr. Tara Chace
The Realm of Possibility by Devid Levithan
The First Part Last by Angela Johnson
Zigzag by Ellen Wittlinger
Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Any favorites of your own? Please share!