Top 10 Non-Fiction

As promised to my sister Jen, a list of some of my favorite non-fiction through the years. I probably left out some good stuff, but it was fun to remember all my favorites as I wrote this.

10. In Defense of Food, by Michal Pollan. This book is a simple and quick read, but simple in the sense of elegant cohesion rather than simple-mindedness. The author's premise is (simply): eat food (not processed chemicals), not too much, mostly plants. His point is that nutrition science is how we got into our current confusion about food, and that since its advent our diets have rapidly deteriorated, leading to epidemic obesity and heart disease. He promotes going back to basics, like actually eating whole foods rather than nutritionally-concocted food products like snack packs and diet bars. We once knew how to eat when it was passed down through families and cultural tradition. Time to go back.
9. Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks. Oliver Sacks is a brilliant writer as well as a neurologist; the extraordinary case studies he cites wouldn't be quite as dazzling in lesser hands. Sacks explores the many strange ways music can interact with the brain, offering examples as diverse as Nabokov's purported "amusicality" (complete lack of enjoyment in music, hearing it only as an unpleasant din) to how musicians with debilitating memory loss can reclaim a part of their identity through performance. Fascinating and fun.
8. The Children in Room E4, by Susan Eaton. I enjoy reading books based on education, but I am often suspicious of them: too often, they are so often heavily political or obnoxiously sappy (my Foundations of Education professor actually made us read Tuesdays with Morrie. For a grad school level course! Shudder). Even Kozol's excellent Savage Inequalities felt at times forced and manipulative to me. The Children in Room E4, in contrast, meticulously cites the history of desegregation legal battles and Civil Rights advocacy: Eaton uses this foundation to build an excellent argument for how education in the years since Brown v. the Board of Education has become increasingly resegregated due to white flight and the housing industry's racist policies of the '60's and '70's. The book then goes on to promote integration as a solution best for everyone--if we believe in a the virtues of a racially and economically diverse society, where better to start teaching mutual tolerance and understanding than in public schools?
7. Alphabet Juice, by Roy Blount Jr. I love Blount's premise--that words really maybe aren't just arbitrary symbols for the things they represent, as linguists claim--and I love even more how he goes about whimsically and unscientifically cataloguing the way words' connotations shift based on their sounds. It is more of a celebration of words than an actual argument, and so fun for a language-lover to read!
6. The First Word, by Christine Kenneally. Kenneally provides a succinct history of linguistics, from the 19th century through and including Chomsky with his various adherents and detractors. The purpose of the book is to explore the new research into evolutionary linguistics, long a taboo topic among linguists who considered it to irrelevant or unscientific. She takes a chapter by chapter approach, examining research into what aspects of anatomy, cognition, culture, and socialization may have been necessary to the evolution of language. Ambitious and far-reaching yet designed for someone with little or no background in linguistics, though to be frank, those without a passion for the field may find it tedious.
5. Green Metropolis, by David Owen. This book was fantastic: practical, logical, well-supported, convincing of the need to conserve energy and rely less on oil, and heavily critical of the popular "green" movement with all its inconsistencies. The author asserts that the American, Thoreau-based environmental tradition is counterproductive in focusing on movement away from the cities, long demonized as environmentally unfriendly. Convincing data show that city-dwellers, by virtue of public transport and smaller apartments (and therefore less stuff) are far more environmentally efficient than their suburban and rural counterparts; they are fitter, too, from all that walking. He attacks architectural organizations for awarding "green" awards to commercial buildings with all the new ecological bells and whistles, located miles from where any of its employees live and thus requiring them all to commute large distances to get to work. He likewise pokes holes in the logic of a wealthy family in a huge home, interviewed for the newspapers for their recent environmentally friendly, multi-thousand dollar gadgets. In the interview, the patriarch congratulates himself for doing "the right thing." As Owen points out, the positive environmental effect would have been far greater if the family had simply bought an "energy efficient" (i.e. smaller) home. Good stuff.
4. Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman. I read this book a few years ago, and unlike most of the other books on this list, it is filled with a book-lover's ruminations, and is therefore not an informational text. Fadiman is intensely readable, likable, and relatable. She has that rare gift for description where you find yourself squealing in delight, "yes! yes that's it exactly!" A fast, pleasurable read.
3. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell is a premier story-teller, and here he explores the role of snap judgments, which can be astoundingly accurate, uncomfortably revealing, or harmful, depending on the situation. His arguments are not always the most air-tight I've ever seen, but the questions he asks and the angles he takes are invariably interesting and fun. Blink was my first experience with Gladwell, and it was easily devoured. He's good brain candy!
2. Into Thin Air/Into the Wild. Yes, these are two different titles by John Krakauer. And they are both fabulous--the first describing the author's role in the disastrous Mount Everest expeditions of 1996, the second an attempt to understand the intense and uncompromising personality of Chris McCandless, who ventured into the wild to live a Thoreau-like, simple, and deliberate life without hypocrisy, and ended up being killed: the wild unpredictability of nature that he had come to crave was his undoing. After reading Krakauer's account, I don't believe McCandless would have seen his death as the ultimate tragedy.
1. Collapse/Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Really, these two books could be separately listed as my number 1 and 2 entries. While both are written in the incomparable style of Jared Diamond, their subjects are sufficiently diverse to stand alone. Jared Diamond is hands down my favorite non-fiction writer. His entire process is so appealing to me: come up with a befuddling, comprehensive, unanswered question--why did the Old World conquer the New, and not the other way around? (Guns, Germs, and Steel), or why do some societies suddenly collapse? (Collapse, clearly)--compile a mountain of data, build a theory, test it against the data, and then overwhelm your reader with extensive and meticulous evidence. His books are the scientific method at its best: intensely creative, painstakingly methodical, refreshingly interdisciplinary. LOVE his stuff.

Super Combined Skiing Versus Ice Dancing

I just watched last night's Olympic coverage on our digital recorder. The mens' super combined? Breathtaking feat of skill, agility, strength, timing, and quick reflexes. Interspersed was ice dancing: Russians dressed in fake Aborigine costumes, grimacing and doing fancy footwork. Certainly ice dancing takes coordination, skill, hours of practice. But if it's an Olympic sport, why not add ballroom dancing? Ballet? Cheerleading? Perhaps, as a friend pointed out, the Summer Olympics equivalent is synchronized swimming. So the rule must be that it is a sport if you're not doing it on a traditional surface (i.e. "the ground"). As the same friend pointed out (thanks, Jenica), we do have trampoline. High-flying trapeze, anyone?

Favorite Fiction

I promised my sister Jen that I would make a book list to match my movie list of a few weeks back. While that list covered only the previous decade, I decided not to limit this one, and it includes all my favorites. I realize it is heavily slanted to the nineteenth century, but this is unapologetically a list of my favorites and not intended to represent any kind of impartial judgment.

10. Crime and Punishment, by Feodor Dostoevsky. Dark—overwhelmingly dark, a book that can get you inside the mind of a cold-blooded murderer and make his act seem not only possible, but disturbingly familiar: reading it was like living through a nightmare where you find yourself committing an unthinkable act. One of many nineteenth century novels where the main male character is haunted by the legacy of Napoleon.

9. Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell. The plot and characters echo Austen: marriageable daughters, an extraordinarily self-centered step-mother, local gossip threatening to turn a respectable girl's innocent act into a scandal; cads, fools, and disapproving parents muck up chances for the couple you know should be together. But where Austen holds up a mirror to society and invites her reader to laugh, Gaskell illicits sympathy, repeatedly asking “what if?”: What if a man had recognized how silly and shallow a woman was before marrying her as a replacement mother for his child, what if a woman reacted to her own daughter with more maternal instincts and less selfishness and jealousy, what if a man realized the pain and distress he caused his wife by erupting into bursts of temper before her untimely death? There is no going back in such cases, but the tragedy of poor choices is apparent.

8. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. A twisting plot, misleading certainty, and an ending both satisfying and fraught with ambiguity characterize this thinking person’s Da Vinci Code. The story opens as a mystery—monks are dying in morbid fashion—with “William of Baskerville” and his Watson-like apprentice, Adso, being brought in to solve the mystery. Weird, surprising, and filled with literary in-jokes (there is a character modeled and even named after Jorge de Borges, author of Labyrinths, listed below).

7. East of Eden, by John Steinbeck. As a general rule, I am not such a fan of Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and Tortilla Flat though beautiful, sometimes funny, and powerful, I found too bleak to be riveting. East of Eden has its flaws, but it is such a rich tale and so simlutaneously compassionate and unflinching in its portrayal of humankind—but infused with great love and hope—that I felt a huge sadness when I finished reading it. Recommended to me by my mother, I read this book my freshman year in high school, making it the first book I completed on this list. As such, it holds special emotional value.

6. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges. This is not actually a novel but a collection of short stories and essays. Weird, science-fiction-esque, and so utterly imaginative and unexpected that reading it was thrilling and exciting; its intelligence also made it satisfying. I have never read anything quite like it, and it was extraordinarily fun.

5. Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James. Bravo to Henry James for the construction of one of the most interesting women in fiction, Isabel Archer. She is beautiful, intelligent, and fascinating. She acts from a desire for freedom and independence, and one senses a desire not to be pigeon-holed, or passive in the course of her life, only to end up married to a man who wants to keep her and control her as if she were a painting in his collection. Social mores limit her freedom to escape, but she likewise refuses to reject society and accept another suitor’s offer of scandalous escape—what would that be, after all, except another sort of prison and dependence?

4. Smilla’s Sense of Snow, by Peter Hoeg. What exactly is this book? Conspiracy thriller? Mystery? Science fiction? The title character is bluntly rude and direct to the point of being anti-social, and she is fantastic. She routinely shocks with her brutality, both in cutting through the niceties to expose hidden agendas, and in her unexpected physical capabilities. No one in the book is quite who they seem, everyone has a hidden agenda, and Smilla herself has a history that makes her both complicit with and sharply antagonistic to the establishment.

3. Middlemarch, by George Eliot. In terms of sheer emotional connection, this is probably my favorite book. The title refers to an entire village and follows the lives of many of the villagers, so like East of Eden it is grand in scope. While I love the character of Dorothy, the closest the book comes to a central heroine, I am equally fascinated by Doctor Lydgate, a brilliant and well-intentioned local doctor who finds his ambitions cut short by his marriage to a beautiful, charming, and utterly vapid and self-centered woman. This is the nineteenth century before divorce was considered a viable option, and it is never even really implied that he has ceased to love her: it is more that his professional and personal ideals are irreconcilable with what attracts him in women.

2. Persuasion, by Jane Austen. I am annoyed by how Austen has been appropriated by the chick lit crowd. If people like her stuff, why should I care what their reason is? Those who crave Austen only for the romance only are missing what makes her so brilliant: her sharp wit and good-natured eye for what makes people universally ridiculous. Her observations, while very centered in the world of the early 19^th century British upper classes, are completely hilarious for how timeless they are. My copy of Persuasion is currently lent out, but I can drop in a favorite excerpt from Emma: “One accompaniment to her song took her agreeably by surprize (sic) –a second, slightly but correctly taken by Frank Churchill. Her pardon was duly begged at the close of the song, and every thing usual followed. He was accused of having a delightful voice, and perfect knowledge of music; which was properly denied; and that he nothing of the matter, and had no voice at all, roundly asserted.” Besides the social commentary, her prose is brilliant: rhythmical, and somehow both acerbic and gentle. No one but Austen would write a line like that.

1. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. As in the likewise brilliant but often rambling War and Peace, Tolstoy succeeds in creating scenes and characters that are not only realistic but true. There are passages, dialogues, and even internal monologues that so perfectly capture what it is to be human that I am in awe of Tolstoy’s powers. How can a man possibly portray a young woman in her late teens with such astonishing accuracy? And then he depicts interactions between people in a manner so painfully convincing that, were it not that the sheer number of such events in his books makes it unlikely, the only explanation seems to be that he must have lived through many similar moments himself. A book enjoyable, moving, and wonderfully executed.

Things to do during a snow day . . . make that a snow week!

1. Read

2. Play online boggle

3. Catch up on lesson plans

4. Taxes

5. Clean out the refrigerator (only--rats!--they aren't picking up trash because there's no curb anymore!)

6. Play online boggle

7. Call your sister

8. Check your email obsessively

9. Play online boggle

10. Check netflix in the vain hopes that an excellent looking movie will be on the "watch instantly" feature

11. Try youtube for movies you have an inkling to watch that aren't on netflix "watch instantly"

12. Eat your neighbors' baked goods

13. Shovel. And then shovel again!

14. Play online boggle

15. Kitchen dance parties

16. Write the mundane details of your boring life on your blog

17. Play online boggle

Plot Structure and Teaching

There is a linguistics professor at Georgetown who specializes in the way that people unconsciously convert their lives into narratives. As we relate important events, over time what we tell begins to have a more and more story-like structure with the typical plot elements of rising action, climax, and resolution. We may even add in devices like foreshadowing for effect. It's not that we're lying, but we're trying to see the sense in our lives, and telling stories is the ways that humans construct pattern and meaning.

We're fixated on traditional plots, in fact. Maybe this is why every romantic comedy is staler and more clichéd than the last. It's become so bad that I only saw the poster for the latest Amy Adams movie and I could summarize the entire plot. And then when you do finally get a movie with a more innovative story, which maybe defies a convention or two, you get people complaining, "this movie has no plot!"

I do think our lives have meaning, or at least that they can be meaningful if we choose to live deliberately. But I also think that real life doesn't fit well into the traditional plot structure boxes, and maybe this is why so many movies on subjects I know and understand very well play a little false. Take "Stand and Deliver"--a great film, based on the very real and very inspirational teaching career of Jaime Escalante. Watching it again as a new teacher, I couldn't help but feel very discouraged: I had challenging students and background deficits to overcome, just as he did, but I never reached the triumphant turning point where the troubled student became inspired, cooperative, and suddenly blossomed into a star.

I had the same experience with "Freedom Writers." The opening scenes where she feels overwhelmed and discouraged are familiar; likewise I can absolutely relate to her determination and the way she is touched by her students’ daunting struggles. Again, though, I have never had a breakthrough with the toughest kid in the way the movie portrayed, and while I feel that students have learned well and been successful, I’ve never achieved anything approaching the soaring triumph of so many traditionally low-achieving students. What I have seen is the student who was failing come to a realization of his potential and convert F’s into C’s, or a child who claimed to hate reading realize that maybe reading could be okay if she could just find the right book.

Teaching, much like I imagine parenting, is powerful, but you cannot work all miracles. Reading up about “Stand and Deliver,” I learned that Jaime Escalante pointed out the discrepancies between the film and reality: the years that passed between beginning his teaching career and offering the advanced mathematics courses, and more notably the fact that students in remedial math could never have taken advanced calculus and been successful on the AP exam, particularly in the passage of one year. I am glad that the screenwriters and directors of these films chose to convey a positive message, but I can’t help thinking that the message could still be inspiring if it admitted the occasional failure, the outlier to the traditional plot. I recently saw “The Class”, a French film based on the memoirs of a middle school teacher working in a troubled, low-income school. There is a moment towards the beginning of the film where he has a bit of a breakthrough with one of his most reluctant students. You see the student beaming and can sense the teacher’s thrill. And then later, the same student has a violent outburst in class, at least partially caused by the teacher’s thoughtless and offensive comment regarding another student; the student is later expelled, and you hear no more about him. The moment is heartbreaking, depressing, but ultimately truthful.

I do believe there is purpose behind my work, and that keeps me motivated. But I also have a string of "stories" with no resolution--their names are Rosbin, Helton, Danny, Huma, Suju, Elber, Nelson. Perhaps a stronger teacher could have found a way to help these students succeed. Or perhaps their stories more accurately represent the truth of my profession—the kids whose unresolved failures fit so poorly into a traditional plot.