I will read, even with my bad eyes

I've been reading a lot lately, although I have to stick with books with reasonably sized print! I've been on more of a fiction jag, as a "treat" during the stress of writing up my thesis. (I normally read mostly fiction, but it is so expensive here--$25 to $30 for a paperback--that I don't indulge as much because I read them too quickly. Non fiction I can manage to make last a few weeks, so the investment seems "worth it".) Here's a quick overview of books I've finished off in the past couple of months:

• Touchstone by Laurie R. King---divine as always. LRK is absolutely my favorite author. I'd been saving this as a treat for a couple of months.




• Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron---I was excited about this because I have this romantic obsession with the silk road, but this book turned out a bit too British for me, meaning I found myself reading every sentence three times because I kept feeling like I was missing words and couldn't quite put things together.
  




• American Gods by Neil Gaiman---I couldn't put this one down. Low key current-day scifi with an air that reminded me a bit of Neal Stephenson, who runs a close second behind LRK in my list. I'm pleased to see Gaiman is quite prolific!
  




• In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan---Fabulous, as Pollan always is. His books make me laugh out loud on the tram, garnering all manner of stares! His manifesto: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Food as in actual food, not processed foodlike items. Not too much, as in, within a healthy context of meals enjoyed with others rather than by the bagful in front of the TV/steering wheel. Mostly plants--well, that's clear enough.
  




• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova---A reworking of the dracula story. This had suspense like mad right up to the end when it sort of ran off a cliff into thin air. The suspense didn't build UP to anything. It was an enjoyable read, though.
  




• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood---forgot I'd already read this, but Atwood is such a fabulous storyteller!
  




• The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney---nicely done and I loved the atmosphere of frontier Canada. Lots of snow!
  




• The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld---I was a bit leery of this as I'm not the biggest fan of Freudian psychoanalysis, but this was an enteraining read.
  




• Sepulchre by Kate Mosse---I enjoyed her first book, so I figured I'd give this a read. Yikes. Formulaic, boring, and a short story stretched out to the length of a novel. I kept wondering why I was still reading--I seem to have finished it out of grim determination or something.
  




• Deja Dead, Death du Jour, and Deadly Decisions by Kathy Reichs---The first one started out pretty stiff and formulaic but she seems to have warmed up to things and I'll probably finish out the series once I'm within range of a used bookstore.
  




• Lifting a Ton of Feathers by Paula Caplan, which I already discussed.
  

current reading:

• Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie---post colonial Africa. Interesting but so dense it's a bit slow going for me. It's so completely another world that I have to stop and think every few paragraphs.
  




• Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser---I'm enjoying this a lot. Biography can be so hit or miss, especially with famous people who wind up with a "cast of thousands" that I can't keep track of. This one is nicely handled.
  




• Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood by Bill Hayes---just started this, but it's entertaining so far.
  




• Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser---about life changing events. I don't know if I could have handled this in the aftermath of my own humpty-dumpty post-south-pole experience, but it's very interesting reading now that I have a little perspective on the whole saga. The book I was able to read and relate to right in the dark of the dungeon was Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong (and it's sequel, The Spiral Staircase) about her 7 years as a catholic nun.
  

Right now I am also a little bit obsessed with Rory Stewart. He's written a pair of amazing books about Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm not sure why I find him so fascinating--I think partly it's the the way he represents people he has encountered--he seems to have this deep empathy and a completely non-judgemental view, which (I find) is very hard to achieve in a foreign culture. He also seems totally fearless, and does things I wish I could do but know I never will, like walking across Asia, or being able to live in a totally foreign culture. (When I moved to Switzerland I thought I was so tough for moving abroad, and then one of the master's students in our group moved to China and then sort of wandered off to Tibet for a year.)

I always feel like I should put links in for books, but I hate linking to Amazon because I feel quite strongly about supporting local bookstores. Thoughts?

A ton of feathers

I just returned Lifting a ton of feathers by Paula Caplan to the library. I have library issues. I love libraries. I love the idea of them, and I love being in them. I worked in 2 college libraries for a total of about 3 years and I loved it. But, I'm not a very good patron. I always check out more books than I can read by the due date, and I have some bizarre chore-avoidance issue that flares up and I can never, ever remember to get my books back on time. My late fees pile up so high it's cheaper for me to just buy books. Bad, Andrea!

I got this book with the intention of joining in a virtual book club about it over at ScienceWomen. March was a wee bit busy for me, though, and I didn't get very far in the book. In fact, I'm so far behind on blogreading after my trip to Tromso that I haven't even read the other posts about it!

I had trouble finishing the book for a couple other reasons. One is I'm having trouble reading small typefaces still (just started my eye PT last Friday), but the other is I found the content so depressing I just couldn't bear to pick it up. The book is about women in academia, and it's meant to be supportive in the sense that "knowledge is power" and it does have a ton of great advice. But I just couldn't get past the whole bigger problem of it. The fact that we need this book to begin with, and the vast extent of the problems addressed in it. It's overwhelming.

I guess I'm also a bit bitter about the whole issue right now. For many years I kept being told that if we just get more women into science, we'll reach a critical mass, and the whole culture will start to change. Reading Virginia Valian's book Why so Slow opened my eyes to that being a lie. There is a deeper problem that both men and women value women's input less, and respect us less, etc, that underlies everything. It's no longer enough to just keep packing women into the pipeline, letting each one of us flounder about wondering why we, individually, seemed to like it less than many of our male colleagues. I know so many women who have left science, but almost no men. Yes, that is totally anecdotal, but the statistics back that up.

Just today at our group meeting a colleague gave a practice talk, and I found myself silent. Normally I'm the first one to pipe up with comments and suggestions, but I just couldn't bear it today. The stares, the silence, and knowing that my suggestions are never implemented. I don't expect all my ideas to be used all the time, but when I see, month after month, that my ideas are always the ones to be glossed over, it gets tiring. It could just be coincidence that I'm the only female in the group, but Valian's book convinced me otherwise.

I also wasn't so motivated to read it because I'm pretty burned out on academia in general and have already decided to leave it after I graduate. I've totally lost perspective on the "pros" of academia and see mostly the "cons", so a whole book of cons and how to fight them was just too much.

For example, a new study came out recently about sexism in peer review. The Women in Science blog have a nice writeup about it. Normal peer review in science is single blind--the authors don't know who the reviewers are, but the reviewers see the authors' names. There was one ecology journal that changed its review process to be double blind and after several years Amber Budden looked at how many women were published--it had increased dramatically. No other ecology journal showed an increase over the same time period. It's incredibly depressing.

I think I might have avoided late fees, though, so it's not all bad!

And I've made a decision about what I want to do next. I've really been struggling with that for a long time, but the spiritual exercises I did in February and March really helped clarify things for me. I've decided I want to teach high school science, in particular to under-served kids. I know I'd be an awesome teacher, and it's also really important to me to feel like I'm contributing something. That the world is a better place, in however small a measure, because I was in it. I also feel like it will start to integrate the different parts of my life. Teaching feels like a calling to me, and is in harmony with my values and religious beliefs. It also promotes social and environmental justice, both of which are extremely important to me. Van Jones (here and here and here) is one of my big heroes right now. Ok, this might be the most stilted paragraph about something that I'm actually incredibly excited about. I should post the mind map I drew about teaching. The "so exciting it actually paralyzes me with looking-forward-ness" part totally grew and grew and overtook the "bad" or "fear" parts.

I have my own action figure

I almost peed my pants when I saw this--I have an action figure! For those who don't know, I spent a year at the south pole. I'm pretty sure that's a face mask/gaiter, not a beard, so that this toy can be either gender.


The bag is coming along--I put the side stitches on holders so they can become the straps, and bound off the front with icord, and I'm halfway through the flap. I would have preferred to do it all in purple but I realized I don't have enough yarn. Oops. This bag is getting really heavy--it's used a lot of yarn. Good thing it will be felted and thus able to bear its own weight....




I'm reading several books, as always.

• Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy. This is in-bed reading, which I've limited to novels only as otherwise I lose chunks of information when I read past fully-awakeness. I've read 2 others by this author, both of which I enjoyed, this one is not grabbing me so much. She writes about the Jamaican immigrants/children of immigrants in England. I'm very into immigrant experience right now, since I'm struggling through my own expat, temporary immigrant experience...
  
• When They Severed the Earth From the Sky by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. This was the last non-fiction I tried to read in bed (bad move), so now I've started it over in the light of day. It's about how our cognitive process, especially the language pathways, frame our experience and thus how we encode myths. Or, its about decoding myths into the historical events behind them, which is aided by understanding how we process language itself.
  
• How to Get a Job You'll Love by John Lees. Self explanatory. The latest of many in this vein, indicating I still haven't come to grips with this issue. Sigh. The author is British and this book is very ... british. I actually threw it across the room yesterday in frustration. Not understanding plain english is very frustrating. Did I mention my blood sugar was a bit low at the time?
  
• Stalin's Peasants by Sheila Fitzpatrick, about the forced collectivization of farming in the 1930s. I read a book 2 years ago about the gulags (Gulag by Anne Applebaum) which was riveting. This book is a bit more academic and slower going. I read the gulag book right when I started working with a bunch of historic Soviet data at school--kind of gave me some bad juju. Of course, the Nazi data I was working with took the juju cake. It's meteorological data, FYI. It's data, it's good data, but I still feel creeped out using it.
  
• Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler, also a bit academic and thus slow going. These last two books are also physically quite heavy, so I'm not so keen to carry them around. I do a lot of reading on the tram, apparently.
  

Random bits

I just came across a neat blog and I liked how she just kind of gives little updates of stuff. I'm still a blog newbie (although I made my first blog in 2003 after meeting Glenn when I was in NYC for a long weekend, applying for a NYC Teaching Fellows program that I am still grateful I didn't get into. I would have been eaten alive...) and have never really figured out what to write about. Leading to a terminally dull blog. Terminally, as in, so boring it might actually cause someone to have a fatal accident when they fall, asleep, off their chair...

One of the perks of having an office job is that I can whip through a lot of blogs in between getting little bites of work done. I do this on purpose after reading the article "Working it Out" by Virginia Valian. This was right after reading her book Why So Slow. Both of them were hard-to-put-down good. The article in particular completely changed my view of how I work. I tend to work really hard for, like, 4 minutes, and then fuck around for at least 30. I always felt really guilty, and I have all this anxiety about being 'caught' (having an officemate who looks over my shoulder and makes comments about what is on my computer screen does not help). But the thing is, this is just how I work and trying to force myself to work continuously results in actual physical agony as I literally wrestle with myself I'm squirming so hard in my chair, and I don't actually get any more work done. I just make myself miserable. I seem to produce a reasonable amount of work, in the end, working at my 4:30 pace. My bosses have always been happy as far as I could tell, and I keep on getting new and better jobs. Valian talks about her own struggle to accept a somewhat similar working style, and I just thought, yeah, why not just accept that this is how I am?

Anyhow, short story long, I spend a lot of time reading blogs and stuff. And I love it. I love science, not so much the actual, nitty gritty doing of it, but the idea of it and all the exciting stuff going on. I subscribe to a lot of science press releases at Eureka Alerts. I am like some kind of science vacuum cleaner, hoovering through tons of material in a very superficial way and then dropping little tidbits into my conversations. My friends love me for this. They love that when they need info on some obscure something, they can come to me and 99% of the time my mouth will open and the words, "Oh I just read a book/article about that" will come out. I can't quite figure out how to turn this talent into a job, which is a shame because I am really, really good at it. I can't exactly charge my friends for 5 minutes of information! But god damn, if I could just spend my time sifting through all this stuff that interests me and then directing people to exactly what they need to know, I would be a happy camper. Whoa. That sounds like a librarian, now that I think of it. Except not just books, but info in general and general resource locating (be it the store where you can buy that obscure cleaning product or the website to learn about yarn conversions).

So here I introduce a new 'feature', a kind of web round up of the most interesting stuff I've stumbled across 'lately' (where lately is just however often I get around to this. Ideally daily, but I guess not quite).


The process of science, which is supposed to be objective, but it operated by subjective, irrational humans.

One of my eternal, lingering anxieties, is about my published work. I am always finding mistakes in my code, and I worry that after I send something in I'll find this huge mistake in my work. Apparently, all science has the possibility of being wrong, and most of it is. Now, they mean this in the sense of new discoveries changing or contradicting old ones, but I guess a lot of it is just plain mistakes or bad thinking or bad math.

The whole vaccine-autism issue is a great example of ordinary people having lost their faith in the scientific process. This is really interesting to me. On the one hand, I'm a scientist and I see that the scientific method is ideally a logical, evidence based method of testing hypotheses and moving forward. It should be objective. But there's that word should. The process is done by humans, and we are subject to bias in what questions we choose to investigate, how we frame the question, and how we present the results. As a person who has been pretty maltreated by the western medical system, I've lost a lot of faith in this process. For example, I think massive studies looking at the 'average' response are kind of beside the point in a lot of cases. In my case, you might go out and test 100 people and ask "does wheat make them sick?" You would get a 'no, pretty much not" answer, with some responses floating around the outlier of 'yes'. You might conclude that "wheat does not make people sick". That answer isn't helpful, though, if a person has celiac disease. In that case, wheat makes us very, very sick. I see the point of testing large numbers of people for an average response, but I am not the aggregate of large numbers of people. I am me. So I don't really care about some mythical 'average' response. This entire "this is irrelevent" aspect applies to a lot of things in medicine, as far as I can tell, and really drives me nuts.


Neurology-ish

music and the brain

how praise affects kids

sleep deprivation

Switzerland
yes they are this obsessed with rules here.

BBC and their cat obsession

I think on of the BBC editors must love kitties, because they always have these great cat stories on there. I like kitties, myself...

yarn

This week I am obsessed with the incredible colors in Estonian unspun yarn, as seen in these shawls. Two yarn vendors are here and here.

Puberty

I'm halfway through this report about the declining age of puberty which starts off with this disturbing sentence:

"Over the past few years, studies have revealed that girls as young as two are entering puberty."

It's written by Sandra Steingraber who is one of my favorite writers.

Why so slow

I just finished Why So Slow, about why there are still so few women "at the top" in academia, business, or any profession. It's pretty disturbing, documenting the kinds of small slights and difference treatment/reactions that women experience. On their own these things are very small, but they DO add up--the author discusses the accumulation of advantage and shows mathematically how this kind of thing adds up over a lifetime.

One thing I really liked is that she didn't discuss family responsibilities in too much detail. Sometimes I feel like women are ghetto-ized when the whole "balancing family and work" burden is placed on our doorstep, as though children are entirely our responsibility. I feel like it perpetuates the cultural assumption that men DON'T need to balance this too (and take up their share of family responsibility). It also never rang true to me that this explained why there are still so few women in the upper reaches of any profession.

As discouraging as it was (a lot of things need to change), it was also validating--at least I know I'm not just imagining it when I think that many suggestions I make at a meeting are ignored only to be mentioned 5 minutes later by someone else and then discussed.

hatred, craving, and delusion

I just started Destructive Emotions, and I'm riveted. It documents a mutli-day conversation between the Dalai Lama and a handful of top neuroscietists about destructive emotions. In Buddhism the three really destructive, corrosive emotions are hatred, craving, and delusion. I'm not at all trained in Buddhism, but here is my take on these three:

• hatred is pretty clear--that horrible, soul-overtaking rage and loathing of someone or something.
  
• craving is fixating on something, obsessing about it. I read once the Buddhist expression "happiness is not wanting", which I've found to be true--the more I want something and focus on it and chase after it the more miserable I make myself. This isn't to say I never want anything or pursue something. I'm talking about the next level, where obsessing about the thing eats away at me, takes over my thoughts day and night.
  
• delusion--perhaps my 'favorite' because it's been the most enlightening for me. Some years back I embarked on a course of what I like to call "emotional surgery" where I cleaned out some dead wood I'd accumulated over the years. One thing that came up over and over was what I called dishonesty, or delusion, where I consciously or unconciously distorted the truth about a situation. I may have thought I was doing myself a favor but this distortion inevitably led to some resentment and misery on my part. To give a small, perhaps trivial example, if I go into a shop and the clerk is rude to me, I previously would leave the shop and be angry the rest of the day about how that clerk was rude to ME, and trying to ruin my day. It's a very self-centered way of viewing the world. The fact is I have no idea what was going on with the clerk (family or health problems? who knows!) and I could choose not to take it personally. There are a million more examples, but they all tend to revolve around me adding a layer of interpretation or meaning to something, and this delusion, or untruth was the source of much of my unhappiness.