All the Books I Have Known

I also read somewhere that reading interests change on the average every 4 years. This statement might be an artifact of the American educational system which is neatly broken into 4-year blocks. In grade school (in the former Soviet Union) my reading were from the canon of children's adventure literature: Dickens, Scott, Dumas, Cooper (he is much more readable in Russian), Gaidar. In junior high, when I was most interested in archaeology, I read archeology and ancient astronaut books. In high school, when I began to be interested in science - pop physics and science fiction. In college, as my interests broadened, my reading horizons expanded, and I read much worthy stuff. Now I just make sure to vary the dosage between fiction and non-fiction, depending on whether I need relaxation or mental stimulation.

How to keep up with what's out there

Books to take to coffeeshops

• Manfred Schroeder, Number Theory in Science and Communication - I was never terribly interested in number theory, but I regret it now. It is a fascinating subject, and Schroeder's book is a wonderful place to start. He is highly readable, if prone to corny jokes, but the best thing is his ability to show how obscure statements of mathematics can have far-reaching effects, e.g. how fundamental theorem of arithmetic leads to the well tempered scale, and other wonderments. His other book Chaos, Fractals and Power Laws is a similarly engaging look at the wide ranging manifestations of chaos, and a good non-technical, though intellectually demanding introduction to the field.
• Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene - The wonderful quality of this book is that it teaches you how to think about evolution, and many things become clear when you apply this thinking to evolutionary problems, both within the book and without. The cover blurbs "...makes you think like a genius...", and that's right.
• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb - though not terribly thought provoking this hefty volume captures the times, the impetus, the horror of chemical warfare of WWI, the hell of fire bombings Dresden, and of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many of the details of the eyewitness accounts were new to me, as I am sure they would be to many from the victors' side.
• Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women's Biology - a critique of the gender biases that creep into the way science is practiced as well as into science itself. Ruth Hubbard, a prefessor emeritus in biology at Harvard, has become a perceptive critic of the gender/class related biases in everything from behavioral to molecular biology, since her political awakening in the 60's.
• Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? - I never finished this book, since it is a rigirous scholarly study and I don't have much experience with reading historical studies. This book documents 17-18th century attitudes towards women, women in science, and so on. One of the things she spoke about in the talk I heard her give, was how Linnaeus came to coin "mammals". At the end of the 18th century, in response to an increased demand for labor force and to stem high infant mortality rates, there was a political movement to get mothers to suckle their babies, instead of giving them to wet nurses. Out of 7 characteristics of mammals, Linnaeus chose breast-feeding to unite us with the animal world (as well as to underscore the importance of breast feeding), and wisdom to separate us from it (as in Homo Sapiens), a distinction driven by stereotypes of male/female differences.
• Bram Dykstra, The Idols of Perversity - this book deals with fin-de-siecle attituded about women and how they were expressed in art. It has a maddening chapter on how Darwinism was used to explain women's and other races's inferiority. A great fun to read, and I find the many pre-Raphaelite illustrations in this book beautiful, despite their contorted message.
• Angela Davis, Class, Gender, and Power - one of her recent books. I like Davis for her clear and penetrating thinking, and her scathing social commentary. She came to speak here not too long after LA riots. I was in the overflow crowd that were forced to watch her on closed-circuit TV. She had such a forceful personality, that we gave her a standing ovation even though she was not physically present.
• Barrow and Tippler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - I still have to finish this one, but how can you resist a book by physicists which demonstrates the necessity of human existence, and derive the value of fine structure constant from the basic principle that we are alive to ponder it!

Books to relax by the fireplace with

• Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World - a book that attempts to be an intro to the history of philosophy, a philosophical mystery, and a fairy tale puzzle. Though Gaarder is quite engaging when discussing Greek philosophy, he runs out of steam by the time Sophie meets her mysterious mentor. Since I was already familiar with the elements of Greek philosophy, what I wanted from the book was an introduction to medieval mystics, British empiricists, German romantics, with which Gaarder was much too sketchy. But this is a novel, after all.
• Barry Unsworth, The Sacred Hunger - a Booker Prize winner for 1992 (?). A very involving tale of a slave ship from 17th century England and various people associated with it. It raises many deep moral questions that we are still struggling with today. This is one of the best, most powerful books I have ever read. Pascali's Island gives the reader a slow start, but inexorably draws one in, with its story of intrigue and human frailty. It is ultimately, a musing on the nature of reality. This slim novel shows Unsworth to be a master of his craft, able to weave a fine story and characters and at the same time focus on the big questions of life. I bought The Stone Virgin for its beguiling cover, and Barry Unsworth's name on it, but the book did not justify my high expectations. It was a straighforward narrative, a pale immitation of multilayered, multithreaded style of his other works.
• Margaret Laurence, The Diviners - my boyfriend loved this book by Canada's preeminent writer. However, I found the characters so recognizable, the life described by Laurence so familiar, that it was almost too emotionally draining to read it. She is a great writer, really... I just wished she chose cheerier topics.
• Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum - maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but I just love the tales of conspiracies by occult groups. This novel, rightfully called encyclopedic, can also be read as a primer on medieval mystery societies. I found each page fascinating.
• A.S. Byatt, The Possession - another Booker Prize Winner. Like Eco's book, it tells a novel while filling the reader in on the particular branch of author's knowledge, in this case Victorian poets and writers, real and imaginary.
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky - any of his works. In order of my preference: Brothers Karamazov, Devils, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground. I stopped after 50 pages of The Youth, shortly after the 2 suicides and a murder, because each time I would pick the book up to read, I would get acutely depressed. My boyfriend, for his sanity as well as mine, prevailed upon me to stop reading Dostoyevsky. Well, what else can you expect from a writer who was in a group of people about to be executed, but saved at the last moment by a pardon? A lesser mind in that group went insane. FD drove his readers insane.
• Mikhail Bulgakov, Master and Margarita - This book has everything: farce, drama, retelling of the Faust legend, a socialist realist retelling of the Crucifiction. It begins with a conversation between the devil and a communist, and quickly moves to some of the more memorable characters in contemporary Russian fiction, like Behemoth, Devil's feline gun-toting companion. Great fun, but serious literature too. I once checked out a slender volume from a whole shelf of volumes of literary criticisms on this particular work. The analogies between Pontius Pilate and Stalin, and Christ and the people, was very revealing. This is one of those books that should be read in class, or with a volume of critical theory, but can be enjoyed even by those who miss all the subteleties. Bulgakov's Heart of the Dog travels similar territory - in a scientific experiment a dog's brain is transplanted to a criminal, who proceeds to claim his proletarian rights in hilarious ways, but it lacks the sparkling witticism and depth of M&M.
• Valery Bryusov, The Fiery Angel: a sixteenth century romance - explores a love triangle (supposedly based on author's experiences) between an earnest young man torn between Love and Good, a simple woman prone to visions, and a knight whom she fancies to be alternately an angel or a devil trying to seduce her. Quite instinctively (though I would be curious to find out if he was familiar with Freud's work) Bryusov made the connection between religious experience and sexual hysteria implicit in this novel, which Prokofiev turned into a ballet, with shocking (fot his time) scenes of witches' sabbath.
• Alexander Kuprin - one of my childhood favorites. I have translated some of his stories.
• Colin Wilson, Mind Parasites - This one might not appeal to you if you are not into conspiracy theories, occult powers, etc., but again, I absolutely loved it. For this work CW was inspired by creatures of Aleister Crowley's imagination, who live deep within the earth, and who feed off negative emotions of humanity. It is up to our heroes, rational, strong-willed, optimistic archaeologists, to come up with a plan to defeat these evil vampires that sap humanities intellectual strengths, so that we can all evolve into higher beings. Philosopher's Stone follows adventures of another rational, strong-willed and optimistic hero in search of the key to immortality. CW's preoccupation with sexual deviance, and criminality, got on my nerves. The God of the Labyrinth made me feel depressed and despondent, and put an end to my CW streak. If you like this kind of stuff, check out The Outsider, for short accounts of sexual exploits of cultural movers and shakers. Well, there is also the categorization of philosophy into optimistic and pessimistic, and its consequences, but tales of Lord Byron's promiscuity is all that remains.
• I have been so frequently disappointed with contemporary fiction, which reads more like movie scripts than literature (this list is rather long, but I would single out Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Smila's Sense of Snow, Lives of the Monster Dogs, for dashing my expectations), that I had almost resolved not to read any more contemporary novels. I am happy to say, my faith is contemporary fiction has been restored by back to back reading of two extraordinary novels - Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, and Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha. Both went far beyond the obvious, got the reader intensely involved with the characters, and vividly painted life in alien worlds - mid-19th century Canada in the former case, and mid-century Japan in the latter. As with the best of novels, reading these works was akin to an out-of-body experience --- they presented such a complete picture of the world and its peoples, that it was easy to forget you were simply reading.

Books for the beach

• Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination - the space age version of the Count of Monte Cristo, and is just as impossible to put down. Like all good science fiction novels, it sparkles with intriguing ideas and vividly imagined societies. Why is it that Victorian culture is frequently imagined as our future destiny?
• Anne Rice, Interview with a Vampire and Vampire Lestat
• Donna Tartt, The Secret History - Tartt read like a one-novel author. She had some interesting experiences in college that she fictionalized for the novel, though I hope not, since murder was involved. It brought back my college memories that were starting to go stale.