Around (and Out of) the World (April Reading)

Thunderstruck (Erik Larson): The invention of radio and the killer caught because of it. The story of Marconi's OCD approach to wireless communication and his extravagant lifestyle might is interesting, and the story of the investigation of Belle Elmore / Cora Crippen's murder by her husband is also interesting, but somehow, Larson uses the two threads of narrative against each other and makes each story less interesting by intercutting. There is a great story about Marconi's thoughtless neglect of his wife to parallel Belle Elmore's domination of her despised husband; there is a splendid story about the American and the Italian struggling in foreign London; there's Marconi's tendency to live a first-class life while his employees roughed it in isolated wireless stations, and Hawley Crippen's struggles to keep his demanding wife in the style to which she became accustomed; but somehow, Larson makes all of this fire and ice lukewarm, even Crippen's affair with his secretary. How one makes an escape to the Continent, under an assumed name, with your very female lover cross-dressing as your "son" kind of "meh" is beyond me. It's interesting material, but it's not delivered as evocatively as it could be.

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Ariel Levy): This is in-your-face Feminism 101, and I am past the 100-level stuff. Levy's premise is spelled out in the title: some women "succeed" by aping the chauvanist pigs who benefit from heteronormative American patriarchy, while others are overtly degraded and objectified by men, and now also women imitating men.

I think you could say Levy isn't a fan of pornography and "let it all hang out" attitudes in much the same way that I am not a fan of milk: it gives me indigestion and gas. Levy is pretty one-note in her condemnation, and - this is my big problem - doesn't offer suggestions toward what she would consider a healthy model of adult female sexuality. Bashing the existing set of options is easy (partly because so many of them are just awful, and if you think I'm wrong I have unkind words to say, drawn from my personal experiences), but if it were easy it would already be done.

Also, I haven't followed a Girls Gone Wild photoshoot around during spring break; if I did, I might want to say a strident and unkind word too.

Intuition (Allegra Goodman): It's like Byatt's Possession, but shorter and with more science! ( The rest is spoilers. )

charlie_ego said the science was too far out of her field for her to comment on the details; cancer and mouse research isn't my sub-speciality, but the general tone rings true to my experiences of biological research.

Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America (Firoozeh Dumas): Short, lightweight autobiography. The experiences of an Iranian girl transplanted to California: American food, Persian festivals far from a Persian community, the shame of a mother who speaks less English than her young daughter, changing American reactions to the foreigners with a funny name during the Lebanon hostage crisis. Reads like essays strung into chapters.

Miles Vorkosigan reread/power skim: A Civil Campaign, Memory, Komarr, Diplomatic Immunity, in about that order. Reading ACC after... whatever the heck else I'd been reading... was jarring; jumping from arguments about queerness and race to Kareen and Ekaterin's dilemma's was bit of a discontinuity. ACC remains very funny, but also too pat: every loose end tied up in a shiny neat bow. Miles and his cohort remain shielded by money and position: as Miles points out, he will never be an advocate for certain womens' rights, such as the right to inherit, on Barrayar. Which is why I love Memory most: it's very much about faults and mistakes, even when it's about Miles refusing to believe the accused (who happen to be his friends) are guilty. God save me from another such victory. And LMB has a knack for lines. Don't you know there are children almost present?

Numbers games: 8 total. 4 reread, 4 new; 5 fiction, 3 nonfiction.

Chicago Day 2, Condensed

Best Bagels In Or Near Chicago, about six hours of the Field Museum - it turns out that tingly strange feelings in the presence of non-DC lack of security evaporate when expensive museums lose at crowd management - Chicago rush hour traffic, dinner at Kuma's Corner, a Chicago landmark. Tomorrow norabombay plays with her new-to-her Asus EEE while I contemplate the great question of life: highway driving, fun or really fun?