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Hey, Look What I Found! (April Reading)
May. 5th, 2005 06:21 pmOne book a week. I think that's a happy medium. I would like to note the unprecedented and shocking fact that nonfiction outnumbers fiction.
The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi (William Scott Wilson): Nonfiction. Life of famous shugyosha (swordsman) and artist Miyamoto Musashi. Musashi lived in the late 1500's to about 1645, so the scholarship relies on some fairly limited and unreliable documentation. The careful notes of significant contradictions were nice, but confusing, because I missed the frontispiece note listing the sources referenced in the bio. In fact, the attempt to balance prose flow with flow-killing reliability analysis - "well, text A says this happened in 1605, and text B describes a similar event, but in 1607..." - sort of didn't work at all for me. Also, diagrams of family trees would have been helpful. The material is interesting, and I don't regret being exposed to it, but I might suggest people look for other books on Musashi if they want a more engaging read. N.B.: this was my primary reading on the plane to and from the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jkling/mareklamo wedding, so external factors may have caused my attention to suffer. So it might not be the book, it might have been O'Hare.
The Child That Books Built (Francis Spufford): Bibliomaniac talks about his childhood of compulsive reading, a topic close to my heart. I suspect I'd really enjoy talking to this guy, but the book felt unbalanced - not really a biography, not exactly a book about books, not at all about child psychology and development. Not what I was expecting, but still useful for random Narnia and Little House tidbits. (Apparently I am the only child in the world who totally missed the allegorical aspects of the Narnia series. In my defense, the most active Religious Ed teachers at the Unitarian church my parents chose to attend were the burned-out Christians and the practicing Wiccans. I think this explains a lot about my knowledge - and ignorance - of the contemporary religious scene.)
The Language of Power (Rosemary Kirstein): Fourth in a series. Steerswoman Rowan continues to pursue information that might lead to the wizard Slado and his sinister plans. This is one of those extremely linear series where it's a really good idea to start at the beginning with The Steerswoman's Road and avoid spoilers. But this is great stuff. Not exactly literary popcorn, but maybe literary grapes: very sweet, tends to go fast. ( Huge spoilers for the entire series. )
Genes, Girls and Gamow: After the Double Helix (James D. Watson): Nonfiction. After the great "aha!" of DNA, people get very excited about RNA. And Watson tries to get hitched. Really tries. For fifteen years. ( Nattering. )
As reviews go, that's a fairly terrible one. Second try. It's easy to compare this to The Double Helix and have GGG come up short. (GGG! That's a - let me check - glycine codon! [/geek] [geek]And Richard Feynman was gly in the RNA tie club! [/geek]) tDH focused on a relatively small number of people tracking down one structure. GGG is a lot more amorphous: many more people wander in and out, and there is no satisfying "and then we discovered the One True RNA Structure, submitted to Nature, and were feted by our collegues" wrapup. (Because, of course, there is no One True RNA anything. There are at least six true RNA things, and Heaven help you if you mix up snRNA and snoRNA on a test.) If this were fiction, I would say the plot is really loose, and poorly wrapped up: the two major threads are RNA research and Watson looking for a wife, and both reach their logical climaxes in the epilogue. Further, the Geo Gamow of the title sort of wanders back toward physics about two-thirds of the way through. So I got huge kicks out of the scientific stuff, and the gossip about who was or wasn't doing what with whom. It's a light read, and fairly fun for the science crew, but if you're not into following the names you're not going to like this so much.
The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi (William Scott Wilson): Nonfiction. Life of famous shugyosha (swordsman) and artist Miyamoto Musashi. Musashi lived in the late 1500's to about 1645, so the scholarship relies on some fairly limited and unreliable documentation. The careful notes of significant contradictions were nice, but confusing, because I missed the frontispiece note listing the sources referenced in the bio. In fact, the attempt to balance prose flow with flow-killing reliability analysis - "well, text A says this happened in 1605, and text B describes a similar event, but in 1607..." - sort of didn't work at all for me. Also, diagrams of family trees would have been helpful. The material is interesting, and I don't regret being exposed to it, but I might suggest people look for other books on Musashi if they want a more engaging read. N.B.: this was my primary reading on the plane to and from the
jkling/mareklamo wedding, so external factors may have caused my attention to suffer. So it might not be the book, it might have been O'Hare. The Child That Books Built (Francis Spufford): Bibliomaniac talks about his childhood of compulsive reading, a topic close to my heart. I suspect I'd really enjoy talking to this guy, but the book felt unbalanced - not really a biography, not exactly a book about books, not at all about child psychology and development. Not what I was expecting, but still useful for random Narnia and Little House tidbits. (Apparently I am the only child in the world who totally missed the allegorical aspects of the Narnia series. In my defense, the most active Religious Ed teachers at the Unitarian church my parents chose to attend were the burned-out Christians and the practicing Wiccans. I think this explains a lot about my knowledge - and ignorance - of the contemporary religious scene.)
The Language of Power (Rosemary Kirstein): Fourth in a series. Steerswoman Rowan continues to pursue information that might lead to the wizard Slado and his sinister plans. This is one of those extremely linear series where it's a really good idea to start at the beginning with The Steerswoman's Road and avoid spoilers. But this is great stuff. Not exactly literary popcorn, but maybe literary grapes: very sweet, tends to go fast. ( Huge spoilers for the entire series. )
Genes, Girls and Gamow: After the Double Helix (James D. Watson): Nonfiction. After the great "aha!" of DNA, people get very excited about RNA. And Watson tries to get hitched. Really tries. For fifteen years. ( Nattering. )
As reviews go, that's a fairly terrible one. Second try. It's easy to compare this to The Double Helix and have GGG come up short. (GGG! That's a - let me check - glycine codon! [/geek] [geek]And Richard Feynman was gly in the RNA tie club! [/geek]) tDH focused on a relatively small number of people tracking down one structure. GGG is a lot more amorphous: many more people wander in and out, and there is no satisfying "and then we discovered the One True RNA Structure, submitted to Nature, and were feted by our collegues" wrapup. (Because, of course, there is no One True RNA anything. There are at least six true RNA things, and Heaven help you if you mix up snRNA and snoRNA on a test.) If this were fiction, I would say the plot is really loose, and poorly wrapped up: the two major threads are RNA research and Watson looking for a wife, and both reach their logical climaxes in the epilogue. Further, the Geo Gamow of the title sort of wanders back toward physics about two-thirds of the way through. So I got huge kicks out of the scientific stuff, and the gossip about who was or wasn't doing what with whom. It's a light read, and fairly fun for the science crew, but if you're not into following the names you're not going to like this so much.
