Karen Cushman, Catherine Called Birdy

Karen Cushman, Catherine Called Birdy. Oh, this was delightful. A very stubborn young girl keeps a diary in 1290. God's thumbs! I don't know how I missed this in grade school (oh, it was written in 1994 - I am old!) because the fleas alone would have been fascinating. The home medical remedies were vile, but from what I remember of medieval medical history, Birdy's patients were probably pretty well off. Well, I needed a respite from writing a very horrible term paper for Ethical Theory and this was perfect.

Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson before Dying

Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson before Dying. Moving. Like a blunt instrument to the skull.

Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue

Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue. Coyote, the trickster, comes to life and causes chaos in a respectable insurance broker's life. Slapstick funny, charming, easy to read in a sitting. It was a little like eating a whole box of marshmallow peeps, though. It's fun and sweet, but afterwards you have a headache and you are vaguely disgusted with yourself.

Jane Maienschein, Whose View of Life?

Jane Maienschein, Whose View of Life? If you are looking for a passionately argued viewpoint on when life begins and how research should be conducted, you won't find it here. Jane doesn't present a picture of bad guys and good guys. Instead this book is a careful analysis of the history and research of embryos, cloning, and stem cells. I found the history of embryology fascinating, as well as the earlier (1970's) history of molecular biology - I loved learning about developmental biology.I didn't enjoy the latter sections of the book (on cloning and stem cells) that had a greater focus on policy, but that probably reflects my own preferences. This book is pretty rare, in that it presents carefully researched science, detailed history, as well as a balanced look at how science policy is made while still being readable. I have to make a disclaimer that it's by my favorite teacher, so how could I not enjoy it?

Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter. I had the pleasure of reading this during a weekend spent comfortably on the couch reading companionably alongside an old and dear friend. This rosy scenario probably contributed to my enjoyment of the story. A doctor delivering his own unexpected twins made a snap decision to secretly send away a daughter with Down's syndrome and raise only the healthy son. When he told his sedated wife about their daughter, he inexplicably said she was stillborn. It was one of those deceptions that has unfathomable repercussions and is very hard to back out of. The novel traces both the doctor's family and the life of the daughter who was mercifully kidnapped and raised by the attending nurse. Now that I recall the story, it seems contrived and and the twists of the plot slightly predictable, but nevertheless, it was pleasant.

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma. I don't know what to say other than you absolutely must read this! I had more than the usual urges to look for people to read out loud to, and I was caught several times regaling panicking bystanders with the latest morsel about ruminants or fungi. I have about six people I want to force my copy upon. It is a delicious story. It's too rare that a nonfiction book of with such relevant subject matter is so beautifully written. I have been reading all sorts of horrendously boring and dense material lately, so this was refreshing - I'm so glad that my class assigned this as a text so that I could read it in good conscience.

Ian and Jennifer Glynn, The Life and Death of Smallpox

Ian and Jennifer Glynn, The Life and Death of Smallpox. A fantastic biography of a nasty and still wily disease. It's the only infectious disease we've ever purposely eradicated, and that only happened by the skin of our teeth. We still aren't free and clear because of post-cold war fears of bad actors and weaponization. The history of the disease is particularly rich because the unmistakable symptoms make it easy to track in historical accounts across cultures. The story of vaccination is fascinating, and much less straightforward than I had always thought. It replaced the fairly ancient process of variolation - a home-brew inoculation using regular smallpox (rather than vaccinia or cowpox) that protected the individual but was still contagious and so was epidemiologically problematic. Just the stories about the choices people had to make about vaccinating/variolating their children were incredibly compelling. Do you expose your child to a known (though smaller) risk, or play the roulette wheel that they won't contract the severe disease? It makes our qualms about the side effects of modern vaccines seem almost petty.

The story of the virus itself is fascinating, as we can trace different evolutions of smallpox strains and related animal viruses, even in modern times. Did you know, that actually nobody knows where the strains we use for vaccines come from? The original was supposed to have come from the famous cow, but it doesn't appear to be related to any known cowpox. It may be the cow was infected with horsepox (now extinct, and so we can't check), or along the way the vaccine strain got contaminated with another pox virus.

I also thought this was really interesting because they do work on vaccinia and monkeypox at ASU - I had had no idea of the continuing usefulness of vaccinia to make vaccinations against other diseases! I read this book as part of a project I'm doing with a group in my Biology and Society class on infectious diseases in human history.

Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry

Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry. Doyle is one of my new favorites. Tender and cynical, he gets tone perfectly. Henry Smart, hero, warrior, urchin, and lover, is our immensely entertaining narrator. We get a hyper-Dickensian view of squalid and desperate Dublin, a dark view of the Irish Rebellion, and plenty of words, blood and love. I'm probably the only person, though, who didn't prefer this massive, ambitious, and bloody epic to the comic story The Van. I sometimes like the smaller, more perfect books instead of huge masterpieces.

Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Icy Sparks

Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Icy Sparks. One of those southern novels about a child growing up in Appalachia. Actually wonderful - Icy was a grand heroine, one I really sympathized with. She had Tourette's which made rural school life difficult for her and also made the book screamingly funny. I actually cried in fury for her a few times (I hate schoolyard injustices and can barely tolerate reading about them). Icy as narrator was both convincing and absorbing. The ending was a little too easy, though - the epilogue was the weakest part of the book and the fabric of the story got frayed at the finish.

Terry Jones, Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic

Terry Jones, Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic. Well, Terry Jones is no Douglas Adams, but he IS Terry Jones and so is still pretty uproarious. I actually played that video game with my brother Bredon (which was Adams's and great) and loved it, but I never got too far. I wouldn't mind resurrecting it now. I borrowed the book from my sister to read on the way to the airport and I stole it to read on the plane - it was perfect for that purpose - silly and undemanding.

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient. Gorgeous - a lush and beautiful novel.

Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe

Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe. I enjoy these stories, even if they are maybe overly sweet. This follows The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and is a similar simple and compelling book that is not so much mystery as short interlude in Precious Ramotswe's life. Portuguese Irregular Verbs (a collection of short stories by Smith) was absolutely hilarious and you get touches of the same absurdist humor in this series. I do think there is a little too much philosophizing and moral reflection going on - I read these books because I enjoy the humor - not particularly because I want to be touched by Mma Ramatswe's unique perspective every other page.

Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy.

Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy. Shut up! I've been stressed out, ok? This is my Star Wars. I love the first one (Foundation), but I always hated the Mule, so I don't like the last two as much. Darn psychohistorians, anyway - I always thought it was a way to sneak predestination arguments into science fiction.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. There are so few books that reduce me to my inner 10-year old. I gulped this down (didn't everybody? I heard from several people they thought there might be some spell causing the book to bind to their fingers untill finished), but I kept getting too stressed out and had to walk around the house flapping my hands before I could stand to read anymore. I cried through the last few chapters, just because it was over....(Neal Stephenson is the only other living author who does that to me). I won't say much, but I did see a strong reflection of the Lord of the Rings in the last two books.

Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan. Hilarious. Hopeless. Bilious. Shamefully funny and bitter. Misha Vainburg is so disgustingly self-indulgent, wallowing, and worthless that you can't help but love him even when you want to kick him. This book is almost like a tragic marriage of Candide and Borat - but even more skewed than that sounds. The best book I've read in a long time.

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: sex and the evolution of human nature. I love natural history books for the general public. They lack some of the passion of the partisan (think Stephen Jay Gould)- and I do enjoy the enthusiasm of scientists - but outsiders usually add interpretation and synthesis to make a larger picture cohesive. This was a pretty fun discussion of the evolutionary aspects of sex, well written and argued. Ridley gets a little more controversial, interesting, and tenuous when he ventures into the shaping of "human nature" by sexual selection - but that correlates pretty well with the current state of affairs in the field. The arguments he's collected are so diverse that at times they don't support each other: there are so many examples that eventually you feel that any theory can be supported by some animal model. The near-infinite number of reproductive strategies in the world make it difficult to prove any particular system by analogy. But I loved the way he traced through all the competing theories, and all the animal examples were the best part of the book, whether or not they detracted from the argument. Who doesn't love to read about the sex lives of chimps, lions, minnows, woodpeckers, snails, rotifers, and grackles?

Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Mad Mary Lamb

Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Mad Mary Lamb. I loved the Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare when I was a child and was always fascinated by the thumbnail biography of murder and insanity in the introduction. Hitchcock has retold the complete story of Mary and Charles' life together after Mary stabbed their mother in a fit of insanity. They lived together in happy domesticity although both suffered from periodic bouts of mental illness and instability. They began to have an influentail circle of friends who gathered informally in the evenings to drink, smoke, and talk. Charles was an aspiring poet and they were both close friends of the Wordsworth's, Coleridge, and other writers, poets, and publishers. Mary was a quiet and gentle woman by all accounts who stayed in the backround but displayed great kindness and intelligence when she participated in discussions. While Charles was the more published and confidant, eventually the two began to collaborate on projects and jointly wrote several children's books. It's interesting that Charles regarded Mary as caring for him rather than the other way around (since Mary had semiannual confinements in madhouses).
The Lambs had an extensive and fascinating correspondence of letters with friends that Hitchcock draws on to illuminate their story. She quotes Charles Lamb's letter about his sister's reading tastes: "'She must have a story - well, ill, or indifferently told - so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents.'" Which is exactly how I feel when I'm deciding whether to continue a mediocre book. This was a great story indifferently told. Actually, most of the book was engrossing (and the story of the Lambs's lives and literary circle was wonderful material), but some of the author's assertions and extrapolations were illogical, self-contradictory, or vague. At times the writing detracted from the story, mostly when she was imagining the feelings and emotions of Mary herself. The conclusion seemed also hastily tacked on like a bit of a dissertation added so that the book could be said to have a specific argument. The excerpts from letters that form the scaffolding of the book far outshine the author's own voice. Flaws and all, though, a great deal of research was well synthesized to tell the story. I really wanted to go to the brother and sister's smokey evening gatherings to argue and talk about books or at least have someone to write long letters to.

Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle

Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle. Isabelle was an an infuriating but recognizable and pitiable women. Amy was superficially likable but essentially spoiled and vacant. A somehow lackluster novel about a complicated and fraught mother-daughter relationship. I can't define on what didn't inspire me - there were funny moments, true moments- but, while the people seemed real to me, the story didn't. And the sex (and sexual feelings, frustrations, and situations) in the book were really icky, not remotely stirring or even imaginative, and even more yucky than intended. Two scenes, however, were fabulous: 1) Isabelle furiously preparing to have "company" over, and decorating her downstairs bathroom, and 2) the hair-cutting confrontation. Both were absolutely right.

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia. Shallow. Funny. I liked the main character in spite of himself (which was the point, I think). Almost everyone else was worthless. I don't even like fictional actors, I suppose. This book had more fashion in it - or at any rate it was highlighted over by a design major or clothes lover- odd. One of the reasons I like to read random used books is how you can see someone else's personality in their underlining, or even in the dog-eared pages and old receipts stuck in for bookmarks (also, reading more-or-less haphazardly picked up bargain books keeps me from getting imprisoned by my own taste).

Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors. Disgusting. Hilarious. I kept snorting as I read this. One of those memoirs that makes you look fondly back at the most traumatic moments of childhood, (such as the time you stayed up late packing to go live with the squirrels in the tree canopy because you were unjustly punished) and say: "ah, the golden moments of my cherished youth where happiness flowered!"