In addition to sucking at blogging, I'm also pretty terrible at following my own rules about book selection. So to get back to the good old days, random.org says the magic number is 45.
Next up: Tears of the Cheetah. More science. Huzzah!
Friday, March 1, 2013
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Apparently this book wasn't on my list of things to read. But it was on my bookshelf. And it was very thin. And I thought it was on the list. So I read it. And now I am going to congratulate myself for completing this little bitty book by posting about it anyway. So ha! *I guess I should have made my list more thoroughly*
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a fairly quick read, comprising the story of a year or so in the lives of two Chinese students during the Cultural Revolution. Luo and the narrator (if his name is ever mentioned, I missed it) are sent into the hinterlands to be "reeducated" because their parents are "class enemies." The book presupposes that you have an understanding of the Cultural Revolution, which I do, but I'd imagine it might be confusing if you had no knowledge of modern Chinese history. Luo and his buddy spend their time being harangued by the local party boss, carrying shit up a mountain (no, really, shit), and getting friendly with the daughter of the local tailor. The titular Balzac doesn't appear until halfway into the book, when the boys discover a hidden trove of translated Western classics which they then steal and read. Luo, now in a relationship with the Little Seamstress (also the only name given for her), decides to read Balzac to her to convert her from a backwards hick into an educated lady. Ultimately, the Little Seamstress learns a little too well and leaves the mountain, and her stranded companions, to go to the city and make use of her beauty.
The book was beautiful and conveyed character development in a very compact format. I found the decision to make Luo the only named character very interesting. Other characters were only called by their professions or nicknames based on appearance. It reminded me to Julie Otsuka's books, where characters are only ever called Mother, Father, Son, etc. Having never read Balzac, I'm sure I missed some of the finer points of the novel. Knowing the literature being discussed isn't essential, but I'd imagine that it heightens the experience of the reader (and lets you feel a little smug for being well read).
I found myself wondering what happened to all the characters. The narrator is speaking in the past tense and occasionally diverges to talk about how he can still remember something so many years later or how they never thought they would get out... but you never find out how he got out, or what happened to Luo. I suppose the book was meant to be a small snapshot of a particular time and place, and it succeeded well at that.
I'm not sure if I should take all my college lit classes to heart and start analyzing the meaning of the work. What does it say about the role of literature in society, etc? I'm sure there are a lot of reviews out there that do that to much better effect than I could. I guess I would just say that I thought the interplay of these Western classics in an isolated society was thought provoking. It's not just that the mountain was isolated and "backwards," but that the Chinese government at the time restricted all supposedly elitist knowledge. Mao wanted everyone to become like the lowest peasant, which meant that everyone was denied access to education and culture... even the peasants themselves who might have previously had access to it or wanted it. The boys spent some time recounting movies and, later, literature to the villagers and their reactions to the stories were very interesting. Were people at the time really so primed for storytelling that a lousy recounting of a North Korean propaganda film could make them cry? Could a multi-day retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo really keep a man awake at night waiting for the next part of the story? The fact that that seems foreign to me could be a reflection of my being jaded by modern life... or was the author making the villagers out to be simpletons? Was the author suggesting that literature is better appreciated by people starved for other sources of "culture"? I'm not sure.
I really enjoyed this book and give it a 9 out of 10. It's so lovely and such a quick read, I'd argue there's no reason not to read it.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a fairly quick read, comprising the story of a year or so in the lives of two Chinese students during the Cultural Revolution. Luo and the narrator (if his name is ever mentioned, I missed it) are sent into the hinterlands to be "reeducated" because their parents are "class enemies." The book presupposes that you have an understanding of the Cultural Revolution, which I do, but I'd imagine it might be confusing if you had no knowledge of modern Chinese history. Luo and his buddy spend their time being harangued by the local party boss, carrying shit up a mountain (no, really, shit), and getting friendly with the daughter of the local tailor. The titular Balzac doesn't appear until halfway into the book, when the boys discover a hidden trove of translated Western classics which they then steal and read. Luo, now in a relationship with the Little Seamstress (also the only name given for her), decides to read Balzac to her to convert her from a backwards hick into an educated lady. Ultimately, the Little Seamstress learns a little too well and leaves the mountain, and her stranded companions, to go to the city and make use of her beauty.
The book was beautiful and conveyed character development in a very compact format. I found the decision to make Luo the only named character very interesting. Other characters were only called by their professions or nicknames based on appearance. It reminded me to Julie Otsuka's books, where characters are only ever called Mother, Father, Son, etc. Having never read Balzac, I'm sure I missed some of the finer points of the novel. Knowing the literature being discussed isn't essential, but I'd imagine that it heightens the experience of the reader (and lets you feel a little smug for being well read).
I found myself wondering what happened to all the characters. The narrator is speaking in the past tense and occasionally diverges to talk about how he can still remember something so many years later or how they never thought they would get out... but you never find out how he got out, or what happened to Luo. I suppose the book was meant to be a small snapshot of a particular time and place, and it succeeded well at that.
I'm not sure if I should take all my college lit classes to heart and start analyzing the meaning of the work. What does it say about the role of literature in society, etc? I'm sure there are a lot of reviews out there that do that to much better effect than I could. I guess I would just say that I thought the interplay of these Western classics in an isolated society was thought provoking. It's not just that the mountain was isolated and "backwards," but that the Chinese government at the time restricted all supposedly elitist knowledge. Mao wanted everyone to become like the lowest peasant, which meant that everyone was denied access to education and culture... even the peasants themselves who might have previously had access to it or wanted it. The boys spent some time recounting movies and, later, literature to the villagers and their reactions to the stories were very interesting. Were people at the time really so primed for storytelling that a lousy recounting of a North Korean propaganda film could make them cry? Could a multi-day retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo really keep a man awake at night waiting for the next part of the story? The fact that that seems foreign to me could be a reflection of my being jaded by modern life... or was the author making the villagers out to be simpletons? Was the author suggesting that literature is better appreciated by people starved for other sources of "culture"? I'm not sure.
I really enjoyed this book and give it a 9 out of 10. It's so lovely and such a quick read, I'd argue there's no reason not to read it.
Another book off the list...
I marked out Certain Girls from my "to read" list. This is not because I have read it. I like spoilers and often read reviews and wikipedia articles on books and movies as I am reading/watching them. I read spoilers from this book and decided not to read it. If you want to read it without prior knowledge, stop here, spoilers ahead...
The husband of the main adult female character and step-father to the teenage girl in the story dies. Given my personal history I cannot handle fathers dying in books or movies. I mean, I can live through it, but I don't enjoy it at all and it's often enough to completely ruin an entertainment experience for me. So, I decided to skip this book. I love Jennifer Weiner's writing and imagine I would probably have enjoyed the book overall, but everyone has their triggers and this is mine.
Anybody want a free, never read book?
The husband of the main adult female character and step-father to the teenage girl in the story dies. Given my personal history I cannot handle fathers dying in books or movies. I mean, I can live through it, but I don't enjoy it at all and it's often enough to completely ruin an entertainment experience for me. So, I decided to skip this book. I love Jennifer Weiner's writing and imagine I would probably have enjoyed the book overall, but everyone has their triggers and this is mine.
Anybody want a free, never read book?
The Common Thread
So I gave up on Wicked for a while. As the folks at Pop Culture Happy Hour would say, I am not a "bitter ender." If I lose interest in something, I just put it down. Half the books on this list have been picked up by me and read partially at some point. Then I just lose interest or something new and shiny comes along and I forget about the book I was reading. So... Wicked got lost in the shuffle of things. I got half way through, and it wasn't my favorite thing, but it was interesting. So I do intend to finish it. Sometime.
Anyway, what I picked up in the mean time was The Common Thread, a book about the sequencing of the human genome way back in the day when that shit took forever and cost a lot of money. For perspective, when John Sulston et al were working on sequencing the first human genome, it cost millions and millions of dollars and took multiple sequencing centers with hundreds of sequencing machines several years to do it. One part of my thesis project is an experiment involving the sequencing of 18 different mouse exomes (a fragment of the genome that includes only genes, not the rest of the "junk" and regulatory stuff). And that will take maybe a month. A decade of engineering has reduced the cost and time such that something that took multiple nations and several universities several years, now takes the Wash U sequencing core a few weeks... and most of that is just data analysis. CRAZY!
Ok, anyway, on to the book. I do love me some science writing, and I particularly enjoy it when the scientist doing the writing seems like someone I would actually want to meet. Such is the case with Dr. John Sulston. The book is written wholly from his perspective, and he comes across as the genial bearded Englishman that he is. Oh and of course he's brilliant to boot, though he doesn't write with much ego at all, unlike other Nobel Laureate authors (cough Dr. James Watson cough)
The book could be somewhat dry and there were parts that even I, nearing the end of my Genetics PhD training, found hard to understand. I can't imagine how a lay reader could slog through some of the information on cloning and YACs and BACs, etc.
The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the personal story of Dr. Sulston's career. Maybe it's just because I'm a scientist and I want to know how you can remain in such a cutthroat field without being a bit... well... difficult. I also enjoyed his perspectives on the comparison between British and American scientific practice and how the politics of working with the NIH from overseas worked.
Of course, the main draw of this book was the conflict between Dr. Sulston (and the whole publicly-funded sequencing effort) and Dr. J. Craig Venter, who led a corporate sequencing initiative with the goal of patenting gene sequences for profit. Dr. Sulston very clearly does not like Dr. Venter, and the portrayal of their conflict could get a little caustic and overly-specific. But, since Dr. Sulston was expressing my view of things anyway, I didn't mind it too much.
Patenting the human genome is wrong. Publicly funding medical research is essential. Free enterprise and the free market is all well and good, but the ethics of the marketplace have still not caught up with the realities of technology and medicine. Until they do, I will not trust my genetic information to some company that wants to use it to benefit shareholders at my expense. Also, I've heard Dr. Venter speak at conferences twice. He doesn't do much to dispel the image of him as a megalomaniac thrill seeker trying to get the most money out of modern science, whether that image is fair or not.
Anyway, I would give this book 8 out of 10 for me, but probably 4 out of 10 for the average reader. I wouldn't recommend it to a friend outside of the biomedical research community, but I'd happily give it as a holiday gift to all my fellow bio-nerd friends.
Anyway, what I picked up in the mean time was The Common Thread, a book about the sequencing of the human genome way back in the day when that shit took forever and cost a lot of money. For perspective, when John Sulston et al were working on sequencing the first human genome, it cost millions and millions of dollars and took multiple sequencing centers with hundreds of sequencing machines several years to do it. One part of my thesis project is an experiment involving the sequencing of 18 different mouse exomes (a fragment of the genome that includes only genes, not the rest of the "junk" and regulatory stuff). And that will take maybe a month. A decade of engineering has reduced the cost and time such that something that took multiple nations and several universities several years, now takes the Wash U sequencing core a few weeks... and most of that is just data analysis. CRAZY!
Ok, anyway, on to the book. I do love me some science writing, and I particularly enjoy it when the scientist doing the writing seems like someone I would actually want to meet. Such is the case with Dr. John Sulston. The book is written wholly from his perspective, and he comes across as the genial bearded Englishman that he is. Oh and of course he's brilliant to boot, though he doesn't write with much ego at all, unlike other Nobel Laureate authors (cough Dr. James Watson cough)
The book could be somewhat dry and there were parts that even I, nearing the end of my Genetics PhD training, found hard to understand. I can't imagine how a lay reader could slog through some of the information on cloning and YACs and BACs, etc.
The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the personal story of Dr. Sulston's career. Maybe it's just because I'm a scientist and I want to know how you can remain in such a cutthroat field without being a bit... well... difficult. I also enjoyed his perspectives on the comparison between British and American scientific practice and how the politics of working with the NIH from overseas worked.
Of course, the main draw of this book was the conflict between Dr. Sulston (and the whole publicly-funded sequencing effort) and Dr. J. Craig Venter, who led a corporate sequencing initiative with the goal of patenting gene sequences for profit. Dr. Sulston very clearly does not like Dr. Venter, and the portrayal of their conflict could get a little caustic and overly-specific. But, since Dr. Sulston was expressing my view of things anyway, I didn't mind it too much.
Patenting the human genome is wrong. Publicly funding medical research is essential. Free enterprise and the free market is all well and good, but the ethics of the marketplace have still not caught up with the realities of technology and medicine. Until they do, I will not trust my genetic information to some company that wants to use it to benefit shareholders at my expense. Also, I've heard Dr. Venter speak at conferences twice. He doesn't do much to dispel the image of him as a megalomaniac thrill seeker trying to get the most money out of modern science, whether that image is fair or not.
Anyway, I would give this book 8 out of 10 for me, but probably 4 out of 10 for the average reader. I wouldn't recommend it to a friend outside of the biomedical research community, but I'd happily give it as a holiday gift to all my fellow bio-nerd friends.
I suck at this blogging thing...
I'm still here! I'm even still reading... just not posting.
The hubby and I took a trip out to Washington and Oregon over the summer and got sucked in a bit by the fabulous book stores of Seattle and Portland, so we put our book buying hiatus on hiatus briefly. Yes, I know, bad me. Bad, bad me. But the books... so many books! I will post reviews of the books I read in that chunk of time at a later date (when I'm at home and can look at all the titles again to remember what they were). Anyway, now I'm back to my old list and plan to keep going. And maybe I'll remember to blog about it too.
The hubby and I took a trip out to Washington and Oregon over the summer and got sucked in a bit by the fabulous book stores of Seattle and Portland, so we put our book buying hiatus on hiatus briefly. Yes, I know, bad me. Bad, bad me. But the books... so many books! I will post reviews of the books I read in that chunk of time at a later date (when I'm at home and can look at all the titles again to remember what they were). Anyway, now I'm back to my old list and plan to keep going. And maybe I'll remember to blog about it too.
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