Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All

I signed up for a couple of reading challenges this year. I needed to read more, and this seemed like a good way to keep me focused.

Once upon a time, I was about 6.8% well-read according to the book on the right. The 1% Well-Read Challenge wanted me to read 10 more of these 1001 listed books so I can go up a whole percentage point. So now, I’m 7.8% well-read.

Of the ten I read, I enjoyed them in this order:

1. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
2. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
3. No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
5. Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard
6. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
7. Junky by William S Burroughs
8. Watchmen by Alan Moore
9. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
10. Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker

Thanks to the random number generator, I already have ten more books lined up for next year. I’m going to see if there are any other reading challenges that catch my fancy though. It always helps to make the same book count as many times as possible.

The What’s In a Name Challenge asked for books with words in their titles that fit into six broader category headings. Here are the books that I assigned to that challenge in my order of enjoyment:

1. Time of Day: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Profession: No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. Relative: Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard
4. Body Part: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
5. Medical Condition: Junky by William S Burroughs
6. Building: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

Finally, I have the Audiobook Challenge. Again, in order of enjoyment:

1. E=mc2 by David Bodanis
2. Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
3. On Writing by Stephen King
4. Reason for Hope by Jane Goodall
5. Through a Window by Jane Goodall
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (part 1 of 2)
   To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (part 2 of 2)
7. Once Upon A Town by Bob Greene
8. The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke
9. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
10. The Virgin and the Mousetrap by Chet Raymo
11. Longitude by Dava Sobel
12. What If…? Volume 2 Watersheds, Revolutions, and Rebellions edited by Robert Cowley

Tags: Books by Ms. SP
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The Counterfeiters is a many-layered work. While it does stumble in places, overall it is very successful. I especially enjoyed the second half of the book.

We’ve all heard of the idea that we (and everyone else) play roles during our lives. In The Counterfeiters, there are plenty of adults who are acting out a part and trying to convince themselves that the acting is really who they are.

And then there is the younger generation, who are stumbling around—trying on all these different roles to figure out who they truly are, or rather what their final role(s) should be.

So these people are like counterfeited coins—perhaps gold on the outside but glass underneath. And who can really tell the difference?

Does a fake coin know it is a fake? Or since it fulfills the function of a real coin, why can’t it be counted and categorized as real currency?—at least until the forgery is discovered?

These counterfeit characters combine to have counterfeit relationships. There are marriage infidelities, a mistaken parentage, fake friends, and real friends who deny their friendships.

Then into all of this we add the broken fourth wall. I never did figure out who the narrator is, but there is another character in the novel who is writing a novel called The Counterfeiters. Is he a character in his own story? or are the two elements completely separate ones? As Edouard, the novelist, comments on his own work, the narrator comments on Edouard.

It’s quite trippy.

Storywise, the plot is strong. This novel could have stood on its own as a straight forward tale. The first half starts off like (and feels a bit like) a Hugo or Tolstoy work. We start meeting characters chapter by chapter and wait for them to come together.

Readers should be warned that there are pedophilia elements (consensual relationships between men and teenaged boys) here. The effect is so subtle though that beyond one pairing, I can’t confidently be sure of any others.

This is not a terribly hard read but a challenging and fulfilling one. Andre Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947 and from just this inventive work, I can understand why.

1% Well-Read Challenge status: ten completed, zero! to go.

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This is the second (audio)book that’s suggested to me that science is not truth but is instead the imagination and thoughts of our time.

The first, by James Burke, focuses mainly on science and uses the history of scientific thought to demonstrate how scientific ideas do not stand on their own but change according to the understandings of each era. Chet Raymo’s work has a different goal. He wants scientists to acknowledge the benefits that the arts and humanities can bring to scientific work.

For him, the disconnect between modern scientific endeavors and the public at large is problematic. He believes poets, artists, and philosophers can help scientists humanize their sterile approaches and often hard-to-understand conclusions.

And since science is so much of the imagination, the arts will also help scientists be better at science.

The Virgin and the Mousetrap is a collection of essays on different topics. In each, Raymo links a scientific idea with an artist and his work. For example, one of the more successful essays talks about the stars and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. (And here’s the second Starry Night.)

Raymo wonders how our scientific history may be different if we were on a planet with full cloud cover and no visible stars. I find this thought fascinating. He says that humans had astronomy before they developed medicine. The stars fired the imaginations of early man and caused them to ask questions about what things are, how things work, and how humanity fits into it all.

Artists like Van Gogh bring their powers of observation and imagination into this tradition. Astronomers who have studied Van Gogh’s paintings find accurate portrayals of the skies in them. The scenes are not fictional ones.

We all know the connective power of The Starry Night. We also know that kids seem to automatically love these images when other artworks leave them unmoved. Raymo thinks if scientists could touch people with the actual magnificence, beauty, and wonder of the real stars, our attitudes towards science and scientific knowledge would improve.

Overall, his essays are a mixed bag. Some make better links between science and art than others. Still, as a liberal arts person interested in science, I appreciate his attempts to bridge the academic gap.

Audiobook Challenge status: eleven completed, one to go.

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