Did I say that the Strand was dead to me? I...lied. Sort of. We're still on a break, but I can go when there's a cool event, right? Like a reading by Jhumpa Lahiri, who's been a favorite writer since aught-three.
Having discovered recently that we have the exact same taste in books, Sheryl and I took our book buddy-ness to Union Square after work for the reading. We were way early (it's always so hard to tell when the suffocating literary mob will show up for these things), and after snagging some good seats, we amused ourselves in the children's/YA book sections. Between the old-school books and the fun conversation, good times.
Lahiri's on tour for her new book, Unaccustomed Earth. The reading itself was very professional, if a bit joyless. She read a story that I haven't gotten to yet in the book, but remembered vaguely from The New Yorker a few years ago. Lahiri's public demeanor is interesting. She's not a smiler, and it was hard to tell if she's done this so much that it's boring, or if she's got that jaded Boston-New York thing going on. Anyway, she didn't play up to the crowd, but it worked well with her low-key writing style. And she did thank her editor, which was cute. More people need to thank their editors, and stop squeezing them for money or complaining about deadlines.
Also, she was a good sport about the usual bad Q&A (paraphrased for maximum brutality):
"Clearly, every single one of your Indian-American characters is completely autobiographical. How did you manage to write a character that has a penis? You don't have one."
"Doesn't immigration make you sad?"
"Here's a bad review of your new book that I just read...."
*sigh* People ask the lame questions because they can't ask the ones they really want to know, about the author's personal life. Like, "Do you live closer to Kate or to Sheryl in Brooklyn?"
Anyway, it was a fun night, and I'm looking forward to the next one: David Sedaris!
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby that "reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope." Well, I don't reserve judgments, especially on books, so I channel my criticism here.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
bookstore breakup
Because I'm still in the midst of a reading binge, I've got a different kind of review for now: bookstore. More specifically, the Strand--home to "18 miles of books," except of course the books you want. The Strand is officially on notice!
It takes a lot for me to denounce (and/or reject) an independent bookstore. But the Strand has failed me repeatedly in the following ways:
1. They never have the books I want. Atonement...Last Exit to Brooklyn...The Sportswriter...and several others. It's dicey to go into a used bookstore with specific titles in mind, but those were hardly rare ones. And in each case, they had every other Ian McEwan book, every other Richard Ford book, etc. They didn't even have Gossip Girl (sorry, Sheryl!), which is not only old at this point, but there are a million copies floating around that people don't want to keep on their bookshelves. Also, neither the main Union Square branch nor the Fulton Street branch had any of the books. This is less the fault of the store than the sellers, but still: disappointing. Their retail books are just as hard to find.
2. They hate short people. When they do have a book I want, it's invariably located on the shelf eight feet above my head. Sometimes, like today, that means going to find a tall, friendly clerk to fetch the book for me. And while I'm usually all for having attractive guys do my manual labor, it's an inconvenience.
3. Manhattan-style space management. For a store that tries so hard to be browser friendly (tables with eclectic picks, lots of cool old books in odd corners), there's no room. The aisles are about two feet wide, which means it's impossible to get around the senior citizen professor browsing the philosophy display, or the hipster girl holding What is the What.
Anyway, it makes me miss my beloved Harvard Book Store something fierce. And it also makes me envious of those who get to visit Powell's in the near future. So in conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts...and the Strand is dead to me for a little while.
It takes a lot for me to denounce (and/or reject) an independent bookstore. But the Strand has failed me repeatedly in the following ways:
1. They never have the books I want. Atonement...Last Exit to Brooklyn...The Sportswriter...and several others. It's dicey to go into a used bookstore with specific titles in mind, but those were hardly rare ones. And in each case, they had every other Ian McEwan book, every other Richard Ford book, etc. They didn't even have Gossip Girl (sorry, Sheryl!), which is not only old at this point, but there are a million copies floating around that people don't want to keep on their bookshelves. Also, neither the main Union Square branch nor the Fulton Street branch had any of the books. This is less the fault of the store than the sellers, but still: disappointing. Their retail books are just as hard to find.
2. They hate short people. When they do have a book I want, it's invariably located on the shelf eight feet above my head. Sometimes, like today, that means going to find a tall, friendly clerk to fetch the book for me. And while I'm usually all for having attractive guys do my manual labor, it's an inconvenience.
3. Manhattan-style space management. For a store that tries so hard to be browser friendly (tables with eclectic picks, lots of cool old books in odd corners), there's no room. The aisles are about two feet wide, which means it's impossible to get around the senior citizen professor browsing the philosophy display, or the hipster girl holding What is the What.
Anyway, it makes me miss my beloved Harvard Book Store something fierce. And it also makes me envious of those who get to visit Powell's in the near future. So in conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts...and the Strand is dead to me for a little while.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
The Family That Couldn't Sleep by DT Max
Sleep and I don't have the best relationship. I know we should spend more time together--in fact, we should be hanging out right now. Sometimes it's just so hard to make the schedules work. However, despite our problems, I don't know what I'd do without sleep.
That's what makes the subject of the nonfiction book The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery so horrifying. The titular family is an Italian clan, dating back a single ancestor in the 1700s, whose members have a tendency to develop Fatal Familial Insomnia in middle age. FFI victims have a sudden onset of symptoms: since their brains can't rest, the body deteriorates as well. Organs begin to shut down. The person sweats and hallucinates uncontrollably. Even the ultimate coma is a nightmare of thrashing and agony. Finally, maybe months later, the person dies of total exhaustion. Five years later, his sister develops the signs. Twenty years later, it's his niece and one of his sons. It's the family plague.
While tracing the history of the family from that eighteenth-century Venetian doctor through a Mussolini-era local politician to the present day, science journalist D.T. Max takes a harder look at the science behind the disease. It turns out that FFI isn't caused by run-of-the-mill genetic defects, or an unlucky susceptibility to viruses. It's caused by "prions," or infectious particles derived from protein and almost impossible to eradicate. Nobody's really sure what to do about prion diseases. Since the 1950s, doctors and scientists have known that prions exist, and that they cause devastating (and almost always fatal) diseases like FFI and the similar Crutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (one strain of which is mad cow). But there's virtually no treatment available, and definitely no cure. Accurate diagnoses are rare as well; the Italian family had to fight against doctors who assumed nervous exhaustion and/or alcoholism were to blame for the strange tremors and rapid degeneration. Modern British and American people who have CJD aren't having much more luck--especially older ones, whose symptoms are generally assumed to be Alzheimer's.
The sections talking about the mad cow epizootic/epidemic are the most terrifying parts of the book. The fact that the disease is on an invisible timer ("Happy 45th birthday! Remember those burgers you ate all those years ago?"), and doctors can't predict which people will develop symptoms, is bad enough. But then add that countries like England, Canada, and the U.S. know that this disease is generally transmitted by feeding infected cow proteins to other cows, which are then fed to humans--yet they still can't get up the regulatory wherewithal to pull all the infected cows out of the beef population and ensure that farmers are using the proper precautions. Basically, we're all screwed.
(In completely related news, I don't think my birthday dinner will include the usual steak this year.)
if the subject matter is depressing, at least the storytelling is very good. The most disheartening part of the book (after you're done calculating all the beef you've eaten in your lifetime, and figuring out how much quality sleep you really got last night) may be that there's no real resolution. If the book has a drawback, that's it. A "happy" ending isn't feasible, but there's no ending at all. Just the politics of science, with slow drabbles of genuine scientific advance.
Now: who's up for some veggie burgers, followed by a long, luxuriant nap?
That's what makes the subject of the nonfiction book The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery so horrifying. The titular family is an Italian clan, dating back a single ancestor in the 1700s, whose members have a tendency to develop Fatal Familial Insomnia in middle age. FFI victims have a sudden onset of symptoms: since their brains can't rest, the body deteriorates as well. Organs begin to shut down. The person sweats and hallucinates uncontrollably. Even the ultimate coma is a nightmare of thrashing and agony. Finally, maybe months later, the person dies of total exhaustion. Five years later, his sister develops the signs. Twenty years later, it's his niece and one of his sons. It's the family plague.
While tracing the history of the family from that eighteenth-century Venetian doctor through a Mussolini-era local politician to the present day, science journalist D.T. Max takes a harder look at the science behind the disease. It turns out that FFI isn't caused by run-of-the-mill genetic defects, or an unlucky susceptibility to viruses. It's caused by "prions," or infectious particles derived from protein and almost impossible to eradicate. Nobody's really sure what to do about prion diseases. Since the 1950s, doctors and scientists have known that prions exist, and that they cause devastating (and almost always fatal) diseases like FFI and the similar Crutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (one strain of which is mad cow). But there's virtually no treatment available, and definitely no cure. Accurate diagnoses are rare as well; the Italian family had to fight against doctors who assumed nervous exhaustion and/or alcoholism were to blame for the strange tremors and rapid degeneration. Modern British and American people who have CJD aren't having much more luck--especially older ones, whose symptoms are generally assumed to be Alzheimer's.
The sections talking about the mad cow epizootic/epidemic are the most terrifying parts of the book. The fact that the disease is on an invisible timer ("Happy 45th birthday! Remember those burgers you ate all those years ago?"), and doctors can't predict which people will develop symptoms, is bad enough. But then add that countries like England, Canada, and the U.S. know that this disease is generally transmitted by feeding infected cow proteins to other cows, which are then fed to humans--yet they still can't get up the regulatory wherewithal to pull all the infected cows out of the beef population and ensure that farmers are using the proper precautions. Basically, we're all screwed.
(In completely related news, I don't think my birthday dinner will include the usual steak this year.)
if the subject matter is depressing, at least the storytelling is very good. The most disheartening part of the book (after you're done calculating all the beef you've eaten in your lifetime, and figuring out how much quality sleep you really got last night) may be that there's no real resolution. If the book has a drawback, that's it. A "happy" ending isn't feasible, but there's no ending at all. Just the politics of science, with slow drabbles of genuine scientific advance.
Now: who's up for some veggie burgers, followed by a long, luxuriant nap?
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