December 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part I

Early this month, the website for National Public Radio published a list of top books for 2020 par excellence. I took it as a very, very long series of reading prompts, and below are some of the results:

***

A few books were interesting but I decided to skip reading the rest of the book after reading the introduction. (Also because this leaves me with a better chance of finishing over a hundred others...)

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World is a memoir of a time when the author, Paul Lisicky, took up a position as a fellow in the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, further away from his family. It was in the early 1990s and AIDS was breaking out, and even before then the author (and his mother, perhaps exaggeratedly so) was conscious of his social vulnerability as a gay man.

It is about family drama as well as the author's individual life. It's also not light reading: molestation, suicide, and marital disagreements already appear in the introduction. [And, to be very clear: I only read the introduction, so the rest of this review should be taken with a grain of salt.] So I'd suggest that perhaps the memoir is best suited for readers who will find the depiction of this kind of dysfunction cathartic or interesting, rather than unsettling or too personal.

For example, he writes how his mother has, to a degree, given up on life. Rather than die by suicide, which would be too dramatic for her, she ekes out her existence in a half-life:

Not making new friends, not allowing herself to be known, eating too much ice cream, no exercise, watching daytime talk shows that don’t even capture her attention. Life as pure endurance instead of the hard, hard work of finding interests that refresh and nourish her.

It's an interesting line of thought, not far from Henry David Thoreau's "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I'm sure the mother was asked for her consent to have her inner life described in the book. Is this a topic that should be published for the entertainment of the masses, however, or is this a topic that you can talk about over dinner to close personal friends? I'd go with the latter.

In any case he's indubitably an excellent writer and I'm surprised I hadn't heard of him before; perhaps he's a writer's writer whom one hears about more in professional circles. He's also published a memoir before, The Narrow Door.

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
Paul Lisicky
Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2020

Cover of Later, via Graywolf Press

*

Travelling from the coast of New England to the southern US, a collection of humoristic short stories about working- and middle-class Americans by George Singleton also looked really good; it was a little bawdy.

You can find three of his stories on the website of the Atlantic Monthly here to get an idea.

You Want More: Selected Short Stories of George Singleton is published by the independent Hub City Press.

***

Cover of Alien Oceans, via Princeton University Press

In the end, I've been reading two books. The first is this, published by Princeton University Press:

Alien Oceans: The Search For Life In The Depths of Space

Written by a Californian professor with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this non-fiction book explores the ideas we have of oceans on other planets or moons.

Kevin Hand begins by telling anecdotes of the time when, as a graduate student, he took a submarine to the ocean floor in the company of Hollywood film director James Cameron. But the rest of the book so far is unsensational, and like a nice undergraduate lecture series.

He takes us from one moon in the orbit of Saturn to the other, and I was thrilled to learn that there are ice volcanoes (cryovolcanoes) on moons like Enceladus, and that such a small moon (500 km in diameter, I think) was already visible to scientists in the 18th century. Besides there are introductions to spectroscopy and a few other staples of astrophysics methodology.

Any person with a Grade 10 level of science, and no great inhibitions or feud against science, can follow it, I think. Even better: despite my analogy to undergraduate lectures, there is no need to do tests, tutorials, or lab work. The analogies — like the metal detector in airport security — are committed to and well spaced apart, so I didn't feel the bored bewilderment that I did when I read an Einstein biography that bombarded me with one analogy for special relativity after the other.

I could imagine a few post-graduates or professors in Chemistry or Physics wanting to thump their heads on their desks if they read Alien Oceans, because sacrifices of accuracy have been made to help general readers understand scientific concepts. But because these professional peers are not the target audience, they'd have to go out of their way to inflict this pain on themselves.

Enceladus, a moon of Saturn (Oct. 28, 2015)
"NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view as it neared icy Enceladus
for its closest-ever dive past the moon's active south polar region."
via Wikimedia Commons

On another note: As a humanities student, I have met examples of the Ivory Tower Ego. When I was at UBC, a professor had released a bestselling book that was turned into a documentary film. It's unfair to say this as I only saw the man once; but when he strode through the streets with his briefcase and took the bus along with hoi polloi, I felt it was with a strikingly self-conscious air. Not to mention a few other professors who also evidently saw themselves as mini-celebrities of the lecture hall, on far slighter grounds.

But in Alien Oceans, Hand portrays a collaborative research world in which long-term effort and sound thinking are as important as flashy brilliance. He honours Cassini and other NASA excursions for providing the data for scientists to work with. He mentions to which researchers (sometimes his friends) we owe which findings. And he forebears from saying anything ostentatiously modest about 'standing on the shoulders of giants.'

In general I like feeling that Alien Oceans mirrors the atmosphere that I sometimes felt when my father was working in physics or biology departments: real contentment in sharing knowledge with each other and asking each other for advice, and patiently putting in (lab) time day after day to figure out the puzzles they have set themselves.

(I am listening to the audiobook, so am not going to say anything about the prose as prose.)

June 2019 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

In June, I haven't found many book appearances that greatly interest me, although it is absurd to say so. So I have been keeping my nose between pages of past works.

***

From Balzer + Bray (Harper Collins imprint)

American Street appeared in 2017. It is a young adult book about a teenage girl whose mother wants the two of them to emigrate to the United States. The mother is held back at the airport and transported to New Jersey to be detained by US border authorities, for a long while without being able to talk with her daughter. Fabiola Toussaint, the heroine, flies on to Detroit, where her aunt Jo and her three girl cousins accept her into their home.

Even her traumatic memories of the earthquake, gangs, and foreign interference, don't prevent Fabiola from recognizing that Haiti was perhaps a better, more homelike environment than America. She holds on fondly to her memories, the cooking, the language, and the voodoo beliefs and practices that her mother taught her. But she becomes familiar with America without antagonism. Fabiola speaks English instead of Creole at the behest of her aunt and tries to make a place for herself in the school that her cousins also attend.

American luxuries like plush carpets and new clothing, she had lived happily without before. They also lose their lustre when domestic violence, debt, and drug dealing are attached. The crime-fuelled American Dream hasn't brought joy to her aunt's family. Her aunt's husband is long dead, the bond between daughters and mother fraught; Fabiola begins to cook communal meals because no one else is doing it, for example, and I seem to remember that Aunt Jo struggles with addictions locked into her own room while her daughters pursue their own interests. Also, the teenager worries about what her relatives do to keep their lifestyle.

I felt that Fabiola's tale is targeted against American immigration policy. That indeed seems like a worthwhile target. But I think that the last few chapters manage to pack a remarkable multitude of plot — also, that the separation of a child from a parent is not very like the way it presented itself in my own life, i.e. extremely disorientating and weird, or as a deep and severe shock. But I guess we each have our own way of experiencing things, so perhaps it does not mean that the book is not as true-to-life in its dramatic moments as it feels very true in its nostalgia for a (second) home country and its ambivalence toward the mythology of the American Dream (I'm projecting here, because I don't recall the phrase 'American Dream' being used or criticized directly).

***

From Virago

The British feminist publisher Virago has tapped into the spirit of turning to classics during the 'silly season' of summer by — in May, not June — re-releasing a set of novels in colourfully patterned paperback editions by Hannah Wood and Yehrin Tong.

So I began reading Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The author grew up in Florida, studied anthropology in the era of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, and became famous as a (periodically rediscovered) novelist who wrote pioneeringly about African-American life. Written in the 1930s about a woman and her fate at the hands of the three men with whom she lives at three different stages of her life, Wikipedia reveals that this novel will not be a cheerful read.

***

I also need to read a brace of books that I found while browsing the shelves at the Kulturkaufhaus:
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

After reading the first paragraph or two of a German translation (I think in the Piper Verlag) that's in the bookshelves of a library near the family apartment, I was really pleased with Halldór Laxness's Iceland's Bell and decided that I must read it too.

There was a time, it says in books, that the Icelandic people had only one national treasure: a bell.

Laxness is good, my mother said when I mentioned this to her, but a bit grim.

"Church in Mosfells valley, Iceland"
July 2005, by M. Morgner
via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 license)

And I came home from an antiquarian bookshop with Helga Schalkhäuser's Riccardo Muti: Begegnungen und Gespräche, which at a glance looks like a distressingly hero-worshipping portrait of the Italian conductor, lord of La Scala opera house.

***

Meanwhile, I've read the rest of Ronald W. Clark's Einstein biography. Then I visited the street, Haberlandstraße, in a Jewish quarter of Berlin, where Einstein lived as a professor until he fled to the US in the mid-1930s, and where he and his wife Elsa invited guests in the 1920s.

Also, the biography led me to the American journalist Lincoln Barnett's 1940s lay-reader book on the Theory of Special Relativity, Theory of General Relativity, and the unified field theory: The Universe and Dr. Einstein. Heinz Haber's Gefangen in Raum und Zeit came next; it reminded me a bit of Voltaire's tale Micromégas. Now I'm reading Teilchen-Detektoren, a survey of different particle detectors (radioactive particles, electromagnetic waves) that were around in 1971. It is written for Physics students, so I expect to have a headache or two.

But progress is also being made in Alexander von Humboldt's Russian journeys.

Marie Curie Through Her Daughter's Eyes

Madame Curie
by Ève Curie, transl. Vincent Sheean

Radium Girls
by Kate Moore
Simon & Schuster UK
2016
(E-Book: 480 pp.)

***

In the poor household of a teacher, a mother who had died of tuberculosis as her children were still young, and five children, in Varsovian houses in a Poland considered as a property of the Tsar's Russia, Marie Curie grew up in conditions that were unlikely for a Nobel Laureate. Women could not study at the official universities in Poland in the 1880s, and the academic culture was stifled by Russian political control.

Warsaw: Orthodox Church (1890-1900)
"Postcard showing a 19th century view of the Orthodox Church of
the Holy Trinity in Warsaw. Today the church serves as
the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army."
Marie Curie lost her faith after her mother
and one of her sisters died, early in her life.
via Wikimedia Commons

Even as Marie grew older, poverty vexed her as well as the lack of academic opportunity. Her family had made ends meet by renting out rooms to boarders, and through the teaching salary of the father. But the four remaining children (the eldest child died from a childhood illness) soon had to earn wages to educate, feed and shelter themselves.

Marie became a governess. Her job in the Polish countryside ended badly as she and the older brother of her charges fell in love; they were forbidden to marry by the young man's parents, and although she kept earning money there until there was another job for her, she felt her own intellectual development and self-education becoming sluggish. She fell into what I suspect was a depression. Marie had decided with her elder sister Bronisława (Bronya for short) that Bronya would study in Paris, that Marie would send her money that she could spare from her own expenses and her father's, and that as soon as enough money had gathered, the younger sister would study at the Sorbonne. At present she was just at the stage of earning and sending money.

But at last it happened. Paris brought Marie Skłodowska the ability to study as much as she wanted. She earned the best grades of anyone in her classes at the Sorbonne, I think. She also met Pierre Curie, when she was looking for more resources for her research. It was, it seems, the happiest period of her life in unpromising circumstances. Her apartment was dreadful and so unheated that one winter she piled all her clothing and even a chair over herself so that she could sleep; she barely ate anything and became ill; and she wore the same clothing for ages. Apparently Pierre Curie was her soulmate in this aspect too — appalling self-neglect, but also their idealistic and disinterested love of science, seemed to draw them together — and it seems charming, even if this reader at least spent many pages of Madame Curie (the biography first published in 1938 by her daughter Ève) trying to mentally reach through time to tell them to 'Eat something nourishing, for the love of God!'

It's difficult not to become misty-eyed at the portrait of the Curies' romance. It was at first complicated to keep the relationship going as Marie Sklodovska, loyal to Poland and very worried about her father, doubted whether to really marry a French citizen and bind herself to building a life that would keep her away from Warsaw and her family. But Pierre Curie's determination pulled them through, and Marie Curie never seems to have regretted it, although later in life she was — her daughter tells us — a cynic about love.

Pierre Curie liked going on endless walks without any predetermined goal, and Marie Curie enjoyed rambling and loved gardening until she died. So they shared a fondness of nature, too. Their honeymoon sounds beautiful and characteristic: they went on a bicycle tour (I wonder if bicycles were still enormous pennyfarthings in the 1890s?) through the French countryside. It turned out that their families got along well, too. There had been a de facto reunion around the time of the wedding, and Marie had finally been able to see relatives whom she had left behind in Poland, and with whom she'd only been able to talk by letter.

When the married pair returned from their honeymoon, they hoped in vain for a large, weatherproof laboratory space, as well as equipment and any paid staff. Their lab environment was so dusty, etc. that it had been contaminating their materials. It was worse for the Curies because they hated self-advertising and they were bad at actively snaffling paid positions and honours that would finance a better laboratory. Also, intrigues and academic politics ran against them. Prejudices existed against women and foreigners like Marie Curie. The French Academy of Sciences voted against admitting the Curies, and the Sorbonne dragged its heels for years before it finally offered Pierre Curie a professorship and refused even a little longer to pay for a laboratory or laboratory assistants. So, although the École Normale Supérieure was friendlier, offering Pierre a cheap laboratory and offering Marie employment, often the Curies had to finance their own research as they could.

"Rue Lhomond, Paris, 1913"
The street on which the Curies' 'cheap laboratory' stood.
From the Bibliothèque nationale de France
via Wikimedia Commons

Marie Curie chose to write her doctoral thesis about uranium, specifically an effect that Henri Becquerel had observed, i.e. that it can create black prints on photographic paper even though it isn't phosphorescent.