Dawn's Reading Blog

I once went through a True Crime phase that eventually waned, but in looking through my books for something mindless to read recently, I stumbled on Everything She Ever Wanted. The cover promised a lot more mayhem than was delivered, but isn’t that always the way? The dissatisfying part of true crime is that you can never really be sure that “he dunnit” or what he done or why. People are the real mystery, which is why mysteries are better without real people.

You’ve heard of comfort food. I have comfort books. Mind you, the comfort books are often accompanied by some comfort food and some comfort drink, but there’s nothing to soothe the soul and take my mind off my troubles like chocolate, a glass of Chardonnay, and Agatha Christie. Sure, I know the ending to every one of them, some more than others, but maybe that’s part of the healing. For all my love of mystery novels, I’m not really a big fan of suspense.

I read three of hers in three days lately, kind of a submersion. I was tired by the end of the third and only skimmed it to make sure my memory of the denouement was right. So Agatha goes back on the shelf and I go back to facing reality. Still, I thank her. She and I have been down a few roads.

ABC Murders
Crooked House
Hallowe’en Party

I expected to enjoy this series of essays by Tom Wolfe more than I did. I enjoyed Bonfire of the Vanities and I enjoy “hooking up.” I’m sorry to say that Hooking Up is just ego massaging on the author’s part. There are some good bits and some bits that aren’t about how swell he is, but there aren’t many of either.

Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes?: Bodies, Behavior, and Brains–The Science Behind Sex, Love, and Attraction is the sort of book I normally enjoy: a review of psychological studies linked to corresponding real life experiences. But I didn’t enjoy this one. It’s too depressing to realize that we are that shallow. The author makes a point of it being men vs. women, which contributes to the depressing air of the book, but we’re all human and some of the ways in which women suck are sprinkled in there too.

So men really like big breasts and women really like big bank accounts and maybe there’s nothing we can even do about it because it’s programmed into our genetic code, but I don’t think I need to read about it anymore. Thankfully, we are not all the average. I can find a man who loves my big brain and moderate boobs and can love his short stature and moderate earnings right back.

Also, the book was printed in purple. I could have hated it for this alone.

The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language is not quite a book for the amateur linguist, but the unschooled can still get a lot out of it. There were places where the author lost me with too many vocabulary words, but the history of the study of language evolution was very interesting and I learned a lot about the players in the field and the current level of understanding.

Of course the book doesn’t tell you what the first spoken word was. There’s no way to know, since verbal communication doesn’t leave fossils, unfortunately. But you get an idea of how language may have started with gestures and certain canned sounds that grew to more individualized sounds over many generations. You also get an appreciation for how complicated our language is and how much we take it for granted. When you think about it, it’s a miracle (not to mean that I attribute it to a supreme being of some sort).

Perhaps most interesting is how much I learned about evolution in general. I’ve heard all the arguments about evolution being a theory, not proven, and I’ve heard the counter-arguments that evolution is thoroughly accepted by all scientists as a principle, only there are some specifics to work out. Although I doubt the author intended this, the weight of the evidence bolstering the theory of language evolution, which is not generally accepted, showed how ponderous the evidence in favor of evolution in general is. Language evolution necessarily starts from evolution as a foundation.

As a bonus, I now know who Noam Chomsky is and will be able to appreciate the endless references to him.

Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver is a dense book. I was interested in the recent controversies over the possible link between vaccines and autism and the recommendation for HPV vaccination in girls as young as twelve. Unfortunately, the book only lightly touches on the latter.

I learned more than I meant to about the history of vaccines, their successes and failures. I hadn’t realized there were so many missteps or that the history of vaccine went so far back. Many people, regarding the HPV vaccine, have made the point that it’s too new and we don’t yet know what the end result will be. After reading this book, I think it’s a very valid point. Vaccines can be contaminated, can give the patient the disease they were intended to prevent, and can have unforeseen side effects or long term effects. Although modern medicine has learned a lot from past incidents, it seems wise to not be in the first wave of people being vaccinated.

On the other hand, the link between autism and vaccine just isn’t there. Most strikingly, there are different camps of the anti-vaccine crusade making completely different, and sometimes contradictory, accusations. Those who were betting on mercury are being disproven as mercury got eliminated in the US back in 2000 (and hasn’t been present in England for quite some time) without reducing autism levels. Of course there are other theories.

The book is generally written to a lay person’s level of understanding but occasionally takes a more technical turn. It was heavy at times but worth reading. One of the most important points the book makes, over and over, is that vaccination is more for the good of the community, which accrues a significantly lower risk, than for the good of the individual, who incurs a slightly higher risk.

Why do I like reading true stories about children with mental or emotional handicaps? I don’t know, but usually I do. Schuyler’s Monster: A Father’s Journey with His Wordless Daughter was somehwat of an exception. Frankly, I didn’t think much of Schuyler’s Father. Although his devotion to his daughter is touching and his writing style is highly readable, he’s kind of a jerk and that really comes across.

Schuyler’s handicap is an unusual brain disorder that leaves her mute though, in her case at least, high functioning in other ways. She seems like a pleasant social girl and I hope we’ll hear something from her own pen somewhere down the road. It’s too early to tell how well she’ll learn to communicate using alternate devices but there’s reason for hope. And it’s great her father advocates for her so strongly. One just wishes he was perhaps not such a jackass about it.

Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers is the memoir of a lesbian who gets involved with transgendered teenagers, mostly male-to-female. This isn’t a subject I can claim to know anything about, but it’s an interesting one. I learned a lot about the challenges these kids face and you certainly do get a sense for how strongly some of them feel the disconnect between their physical and mental genders. It’s curious how some people feel like they’ve been born the wrong gender while other people simply feel non-stereotypical. For instance, I have many stereotypically male characteristics, habits, and interests, but I’ve never doubted my identity as a woman.

Cris is more patient with the kid she semi-adopts than I would be. Gender issues aside, these kids have a lot of other problems, so kudos to her and her partner for taking on such a troubled teen and sticking with her.

I read Accidents in North American Mountaineering every year because it comes free as part of being an AAC member. As the years go on, there are fewer and fewer surprises. Truth is, accidents are caused by the obvious things (exceeding abilities, under-protecting) and mitigated by the obvious things (wearing a helmet, tying stopper knots). There are no new ways to die.

But every year something stands out, if not for novelty then for tragedy, or perhaps pure presentation. This year there were two such incidents for me. One was the death of a well-known climber at Wind Rivers, Wyoming caused by a tourist throwing a rock off the top of a formation. A seemingly random, horribly preventable, tragedy. I was particularly sensitive to this accident when it occurred because Steve was on his way out to the Wind Rivers the very next day. The climbing community was naturally very angry at the tourist, who ultimately wasn’t charged, but who among us has never thrown something off the top of something? It’s like skipping stones on a pond: a natural human impulse. I feel for both the tourist and the climber’s family. There were no winners here.

The other incident was more memorable for its retelling. Sometimes climbers send their own accident reports into ANAM and this was one of those. Told in the first person, they have a greater immediacy, and this particular incident was recounted without foreshadowing. When one of the climbers dies before the tale is done, the reader is as surprised as the narrator must have been at the time. This was a prime example of how small mistakes and bad luck can accumulate into an unexpectedly fatal epic. I expect we’ve all been there, except with a few fewer mistakes, or a bit less bad luck, and so we live and have a good story to tell and never know how close we came.

A Three Dog Life is the memoir of a woman whose husband suffered brain damage in a car/pedestrian accident. At first her husband’s condition improves and he’s able to come home briefly but then it declines. He has no short term memory, can be combative and confused, and is occasionally irrational. She sticks with him, although he’s largely institutionalized, even moving closer so that she can see him more frequently and bring him home for visits. It sounds like their love continued.

Interestingly, although she mentions it only once and briefly, their marriage was unhappy and perhaps failing prior to the accident. She says she was “miserable” before and “happy” afterwards and feels some (natural) guilt for that. But the book doesn’t focus on her guilt. It focuses on her ordinary daily life with her three dogs and her warped husband, which goes to show that we can adjust to anything as normal over time.