The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

I seem to have fallen out of the habit of regularly reviewing books on my blog. I used to be more disciplined about it, and there is a series of reviews on the minouette blog (and here), including the one below for one of my favorite books of the last several years. I've also mentioned The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet on magpie&whiskeyjack, comparing the whimsical maps and scientific illustration of everything incorporated into the work of artist Simon Evans with those of the more strictly empirical modern-day Humboltian cartography protegy Spivet. If you, like me, are inspired by the fertile intersection of art and science, this is a novel for you. You should go read it right away, because as I was very pleased to read this morning, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (director of Amelie, or Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain in French) has adapted the novel for a movie to be released in France (filmed in English, with French subtitles) in October.



The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

Reading this novel I thought, yes, this is what I want to do all the time.  Why can't I just get paid to read books like this? I would be happy  doing this indefinitely. Of course, are there books like this one? That  is a harder question to answer. Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet (best. name.  ever.) is a gifted prodigy in cartography at 12 years old. He lives on a  ranch near Divide, Montana, with his mother, stalled entomologist, Dr.  Clair, his teenage sister, Gracie, who would love to escape their small  town and peculiar family, and strong-silent cowboy father T.E. Spivet.  His brother Layton, has died, and we slowly learn more. T.S. keeps  different coloured notebooks for maps of people doing things:  zoological, geological, and topographical maps; and insect anatomy  (should Dr. Clair ever call on his help), respectively. T.S. learns  he has won the prestigious Baird Award from the Smithsonian, for his  incredible mapping and scientific illustration work, and his adventure  begins, as he decides to accept in person, but being 12, he sees his  best means of transport as to hop on a freight train and hobo east. In  this beautiful, whimsically illustrated book, T.S. maps everything  from the Continental divide, to beetle subspecies, to cowboy moves, to  facial expressions, to geology, to how McDonald's "penetrates my  permeable barrier of aesthetic longing", to concentration of litter in  Chicago, to his family history, to a many-worlds interpretation of  quantum mechanics and what this might have meant for his family. This  book is beautiful, in terms of the sensitivity and originality of the  story (Wormholes of the Midwest! the hobo hotline?), the love of  knowledge expressed, down to the layout of the text and images on the  page. Maybe we will be lucky enough to be recruited into the Megatherium  club. The manner in which this child's mind breaks up the world is a  reminder of why science is wonderful and the joy of unfettered thinking.  The story is also interwoven with that of T.S.' ancestors, including  his great-grandmother the early geologist. We get both 'when science was  young' and 'the young scientist'.

Maybe I'll go reread it myself now.  (cross-posted to magpie & whiskeyjack)

Reading is sexy XL

(image by Iker Ayestaran)

I'm not really feeling very well today. I have this threatening tickle in my throat and cotton wool in my brain, so instead of writing the @%&# report version 3.∞ I thought I'd catch up on some outstanding blogging. I realize I haven't mentioned any books read since July, and though I've been busy, that's just wrong. I started this post, in fact, July 31.

Next, I read the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster.

IF ANYONE WANTS TO READ THIS BOOK AS A SIMPLE MYSTERY NOVEL, THAT'S HIS BUSINESS. - Rudolfo Walsh

27. City of Glass by Paul Auster "It was a wrong number that started it," the mystery in which our protagonist Daniel Quinn finds himself. Quinn lives a life of relative leisure, easily publishing one detective novel under the pseudonym William Wilson, about gumshoe Max Work, every year. The rest of the time he is free to read, or roam the streets of New York city. His wife and son have died, and he lives a quiet, solitary existence. A series of telephone calls from a strange, somewhat mechanical voice, asking to speak with the detective 'Paul Auster' changes everything for him. Years of writing detective novels have made him intrigued about his own abilities to be a detective, and he eventually agrees to meet Peter Stillman, the man who is convinced he is 'Paul Auster' the best detective in town. It turns out that Peter Stillman has been the victim of a very strange experiment. His father was a theologist who wrote about the myth of Paradise and the myth of Babel. His thesis was about Milton's (apparent) secretary, Henry Dark, who allegedly conceived the idea that an infant, without the influence of people to teach it the languages humanity uses since the fall of the Tower of Babel, would naturally speak God's own tongue and be a link back to Paradise. So Stillman locked up his son Peter in isolation, in the dark, for 9 long years. There was a fire, which lead to Peter's release. Eventually the police, confronted with the barely-verbal young Peter deduce what his mad father has done, and the father is imprisoned. Peter spends years in a hospital, being rehabilitated, and eventually marries his nurse. Peter has called Quinn ('Paul Auster') because his father is being released from prison and he is terrified. 'Paul Auster' should tail Stillman senior and warn, Peter and his wife, if he intends Peter any harm. The wife, Virginia, has stepped straight out of a noir film. She is more care-giver than wife, and makes a pass at Quinn. Soon Quinn finds himself at Grand Central Station, awaiting Stillman senior, and then following his bizzare tramp-like life. Stillman lives in a rooming house-style hotel, and roams a certain set range of New York, on particular paths (which may have meaning) gathering innocuous things - urban debris. There is a wonderful interplay between levels of identity: Quinn as the author William Wilson, Quinn playing the role of Max Work, Quinn playing the role of 'Paul Auster' - and then one day, it occurs him to look in the phone book and call Paul Auster, whom he meets and learns is an author. Auster is writing an essay about Don Quixote (another D.Q.) and levels of meaning and identity, questions of who is the author and how this can be, and how can a person become the character in the sort of literature which obsesses them. This is an incredible book. On one level it is a detective story (though I felt compelled to look through my Paco Ignacio Taibo II novels to find the Walsh quotation above). It's also about the romance of New York, and literature, identity, meaning, loss, homelessness - and baseball, specifically the Mets. There's a real humanity here, as well as a love of history, literature and myth. It felt like Auster's New York has something in common with Haruki Murakami's Tokyo. The streets also have echos of the literary giants past who have made it their home. It's quite amazing to read something magic, and moving, with such a spectacular structure and so rich in allusions to literature.

28. Ghosts by Paul Auster It's the late 40's. Blue has learned the ropes of how to be a good detective from Brown, now retired. White hires Blue, over the phone, to trail a man named Black. He's rented the apartment across the street from Black, and supplied it with all Blue needs to surveil Black indefinitely - without explaining why. Blue accepts the easy, paying job. Blue calls his sweetheart and warns her he's going undercover, and moves into the apartment and begins the process of watching Black. The less Black does - and he does very little - the deeper Blue slips into obsession.

The entire novel is a sort of metaphor, as clarified by the third in the trilogy.

29. The Locked Room by Paul Auster A "locked room" mystery is usually a classic sort of murder mystery in which a body is found in a locked room (think Poe, Christie or Conan Doyle, why yes, I did take a course in Detective Fiction, why do you ask?), but in this case, and in this context, it is, of course, about a book, or several. Our unnamed protagonist, a writer and critic, receives a letter from a childhood friend named Fanshawe with whom he has lost touch. He soon learns that Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving a trove of unpublished novels, letters, and stories, and a young, beautiful wife and child. He is enlisted to help get the undiscovered literary genius Fanshawe published, but soon he falls into his role - husband and father in his small family. Despite some unresolved jealously of Fanshawe, and the reality of being suspected of being Fanshawe and merely pretending to be his childhood friend, life is good in a loving relationship and with a steady source of income from editing and publishing Fanshawe, until Fanshawe writes our protagonist a letter. Fanshawe is distinctly not dead, nor ignorant of our protagonist's new role, and in fact, appears to have orchestrated it all. Our protagonist is left fearful of confessing this to his wife, and feeling like a puppet. Our protagonist needs to hunt down Fanshawe.

Of the three, the first in the Trilogy is the most compelling, and the most able to stand on its own, but by the end of the third, the view of the over-arching structure of the entire trilogy is breath-taking.

{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII, XXXIX}

Reading is sexy XXXVIII

Time for some non-fiction (having read Seeing I was hoping for something less gut-wrenching).

22. The Eternal Frontier - An Ecological History of North America And Its Peoples by Tim Flannery The Eternal Frontier tells the story of successive waves of invaders of the North American continent. Starting 65 million years ago, (the K-T boundary to an earth scientist) when "a great fiery ball appeared in the sky and came crashing to Earth" with an "unfortunate chip-shot" ending the age of dinosaurs and devastating North America in particular, the book explains the evolution of the continent, the interplay of climate and ecology, in an engaging and fascinating way. It's filled with relevant colourful details*, such as the role of fossil-hoarding ants in paleontology, or how the nut-stashing squirrels changed the landscape on a large scale and allowed a source of protein far from water bodies for early indigenous peoples, or the story of George McJunkin, self-taught, African-American cowboy-scientist, who in 1908 excavated a bone pit containing entire (extinct) giant bison remains and hunting tools, which completely changed the understanding how long native people had been living on the continent. The book is divided by era (Act 1: 66-59 Million Years Ago - In Which America Is Created And Undone; Act 2: 57-33 Million Years Ago - In Which America Becomes a Tropical Paradise; Act 3: 32 Million to 13,000 Years Ago - In Which America Becomes A Land of Immigrants; Act 4: 11,000 Years Ago - AD 1491 - In Which America is Discovered; Act 5: 1492-2000 - In Which America Conquers The World) which allows him to trace how the changing climate controls the ecology, even on a continental scale. He purposely draws parallels between invasive animal (and even plant) species and later human invaders (First Peoples and later Europeans). He convincingly explains how the shape of North America creates a climatic trumpet, with essentially arctic winters and tropical summers through the bulk of the continent, and how this makes the plant and animal species unique. He's able to make simple arguments about the connection between size of land-mass, diversity, competition and likelihood of success of any invading species. His writing is very engaging: I feel like I now know the drama of the discovery of the Uinta beast, or the character and behaviour of the oreodonts. It left me devastated about the fate of the buffalo, and later wholesale ecological destruction. I was glad to learn that in Canada the Hudson's Bay Company was actively supplying smallpox vaccine to its traders in the 1830s for their native trading partners. At least there was some hint of humanity in the chapter on disease, otherwise filled with tales of evil. The book is well annotated and he is clear about his own biases and explains competing theories. Flannery is an Australian, which gives him a unique view as an outsider on the ecology (and the romance of the frontier) and the effects of invasive species. I can highly recommend this book.

The one disappointment was that he chose to focus on the U.S. - or so he claims. It might seem reasonable, as one must limit a book somewhere, and the scope was ambitious. However, he can't discuss many issues without describing the continent as a whole. No one interested in dinosaurs could avoid mentioning Alberta. He also describes the ancient civilizations of Mexico, and the Inuit of Canada's north. So really, when he says he is limiting the study to the U.S., he means the fifth act only, which then seems quite arbitrary. And it is in Act 5 that his status as an outsider fails him. I don't find his description of North American history, and in particular, unity, since the American Revolution, all that convincing. Though he spends chapters describing settlers, the revolution, and setting-up the North-South cultural differences, he skims through the Civil War in a few paragraphs - where I would have thought the ecological destruction, let alone the death toll, would have demanded much more - claiming it "definitively resolved the tensions that had been evident in British-settled America since its inception". Oh, really? He contrasts the United States of America with Simón Bolívar's unfulfilled South American dreams of unity and even Canada, which he seems to think is falling apart.** Now, in 2001 when the book was first published in Australia, he could be forgiven for writing that Québec's separation seemed imminent. It was, I believe, far from a given (note, it did not happen) - but, it was certainly a possibility. However, when he goes on to lump the threat of Separation with "the statehood and autonomy" achieved by the Inuit in 1999, as examples of "federation in reverse" he simply does not know what he's talking about. He also erroneously uses the word province. The creation of the territory (the difference between a province and territory is immense, but I'll spare you the gory detail***) of Nunavut was a great triumph for Canada and the Inuit of Nunavut. It is by no stretch of the imagination a sign of the dissolution of this country. Nunavut is very much part of Canada. This was wrong in 2001, and really should be remedied for this new North American release. It's probably flippant to suggest that the American Civil War simply became a cold war, and simmers to this day, but the fact that such a suggestion would be unoriginal gives the lie to the claim of "definitively resolved" tensions. Let me contrast two numbers which I think are revealing when considering the nature of confederation on this continent.

Since 1861, the number of deaths which have ensued from the issue of succession versus unity
In Canada: 1
In the U.S.A.: 625,000
I really do no see the U.S. as more united than Canada, and I haven't even broached the issue of voting patterns.

While I agree that "pluralism seems to lie at the heart of the Canadian ideal" I believe he is very mistaken that this indicates disunion. In fact, I think he missed an opportunity to compare and contrast the role of regionalism versus federalism north and south of the border. There are some interesting parallels. In both countries power is balanced between an unruly group of either states or provinces and territories and the federal government who often disagree with each other and amongst themselves. Further, since he takes the idea of a boundless frontier and traces this to mass production and consumerist culture in the U.S., comparing and contrasting this with Canada and Mexico, whose frontiers were likewise vast, would also have been interesting.

23. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt This novel is excellent. Read it. It's the story of Victorians, largely Fabian socialists, and their children, the Edwardians who grow up to go to war. In the interim there is much magic. It starts with beautiful Olive Wellwood, lady novelist, who writes successful children's stories, fairytales with just enough darkness, whose research visit to Major Cain and the South Kensington Museum changes lives, when their respective sons Tom and Julian discover Philip, a young, working-class runaway who has been living secretly in the museum. He needs to create things and has come to learn. The novel interweaves the Wellwoods - charming Quaker, black-sheep and Fabian, Humphrey, writer of satires of the socioeconomic situation, Olive, her sister Violet who keeps everything together and their growing family, Tom, the golden boy like Peter Pan, Dorothy, who discovers she has an ambition to be a doctor, pretty Phyllis, headstrong Hedda, and little ones, with the London Wellwoods: banker Basil and German wife Katerina, with daughter Griselda who is interested in stories and son Charles who is moved by his uncle's socialist tirade, with the military-curator Major Cain, whose son Julian is interested in Tom, and beautiful daughter Florence is calm and collected, with local artists, potters and puppermasters and their children. Olive keeps a notebook for each of her children, documenting a never-ending fairytale just for them. Tom's story, a quest to find a stolen shadow underground, draws on Olive's childhood fearing for her father and brother who went down into the coal mines. Dorothy's story is of shape-shifters and a hedgehog skin. These stories, Olive's own published stories and the lives of the parents and children are seamlessly worked together. Byatt often includes fairytales in her novels and in this novel in particular, I find, that it's magic. It is integral to the tapestry in which the novel itself progresses. The story is told against a backdrop of changing social mores, increases fluidity of the class structure, socialism, anarchism, Marxism, a growing awareness of women's rights and the battle for the vote, acknowledgment that children are children and not miniature adults, but children, who have a need to play and develop, growing acknowledgment of human sexuality (without proper birth control, and with hypocritical consequences and responsibilities for mothers, of course), irresponsible speculative financial markets, fading imperialistic ambitions and the build up to world war. Further, the literature and writers of the times are part of the fabric of the book, from the tragedy of Oscar Wilde, exiled in Paris, H.G. Wells' fiction and his role in the Fabian society, through Lewis Caroll's Alice, and J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, or both the furniture, art and writing of William Morris and the arts and crafts movement and art deco. It's telling that Aunt Violet likes to tell the children about the cuckoo, and how hard it is to know who one's parents really are. Eventually the children, of course, loose their innocence, and learn some things they might not have wanted to know. They create their own lives, as artists, scholars, suffragettes, lovers, anarchists, potters, puppeteers, doctors, martyrs, heroes, soldiers, husbands, wives and parents, or not, in a world forever changed by a larger loss of innocence. It's quite beautiful, dark and real.

24. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi I thought it was high time I read this book. The cover is filled with surprised reviews by people who wouldn't have thought that the elements would make such apt muses, but I guess they must know little chemistry. To chemist, and memoirist, Primo Levi, the elements themselves are filled with connotations, metaphoric, historic and inspiration for pure storytelling. He begins with Argon, a Noble gas, as a means to discuss his heritage, ancestors and their unique blend of Pietmontese and Hebrew languages. He proceeds to work through other elements (but not the periodic table itself in any systematic way), and tells sorties about his experiences as a boy interested in science, as a chemistry student, as a rock-climber, as a chemist, mainly before and after, but sometimes during (in a concentration camp) WWII. A few of his early stories are blended in to this mix. He is a great observer, both as a creative, experimental chemist of course, but also of people and the series of sketches of the people in in life are very evocative. Mysteries about seeking the elements themselves and revelations about people appear in equal measure. I enjoyed both the romance of the chemistry itself, and the memoir of his life.

*I'm looking at you Simon I never saw an irrelevant tangent I didn't like especially if it allows me to show off my research or compliment my alma mater, Oxford, of course Winchester.
**This is a good way to irk federalist Canadians.
***Canadians consider any discussion of Constitutional Law as cruel and unusual punishment to be avoided at all costs.

{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII}