End of Decade Reading List

By: | December 24, 2019

Every year, the People of LWON reach into their bookshelves and Goodreads lists and towering intellects to tell you what you should be reading in the holiday season–or any other free time you may be gifted with. This is our sixth year of such pontificating. Among the books below is your next favorite:

Ann:  As always, what I read for work is usually not what  I’d read if I didn’t have to. So when I read for just reading, it’s almost always fiction.  This year, I went through a bunch of Rumer Godden who belongs, in my mind, to the group of intelligent, literate, elegant (usually women) authors (Hilary Mantel, Penelope Fitzgerald, Jane Gardam) of books which have plots plus characters you’re interested in and in which nothing expected happens.  Godden is especially good at slightly unsympathetic children and people whose faith drives them, with varying consequences. Her last book, published at age 90, had the excellent title, “Cromartie versus The God Shiva Acting through the Government of India.” I haven’t read that one.  You read these books for the reason that people have always read books, to meet the people in them and hear what happened next and how it ended. So I recommend them all.

 Jenny: You know what was a lovely read? The Cat’s Table by Michel Ondaatje. It’s the story of a Sri Lankan boy on a boat crossing the Indian Ocean in the 1950s with a cast of eccentric, mostly lovable characters (plus a mysterious prisoner) who help shape how he sees and experiences the world. It’s vivid and lyrical and kind of magical, a childhood adventure–a sort of circus on the sea–unlike any other I’ve encountered in literature. I was sad that it had to end.

Emma: For fiction, I recommend Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice, an apocalyptic tale set in a remote Anishinaabe community that shot through with both dread and hope. I loved his writing style–as crisp and clear as new-fallen snow. An excellent winter read. For non-fiction, I recommend How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. What sounds a bit like a guide to becoming more productive by wasting less time on social media turns out to actually be a fairly radical argument against being more productive in the first place. Using art, nature, and the hijinx of urban birds, Odell makes an exciting case for resisting our current digital capitalist system without withdrawing and for connecting to one’s bioregion in emotionally meaningful ways. 

Jessa: Having read all 3,000 pages of the CFA level 1 curriculum this year in preparation for a 6-hour finance exam, I had decidedly less time for recreational reading, but I did manage to catch up on some of the works people had been raving about—Tara Westover’s Educated and Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl both more than lived up to their respective hypes. But if I cast my mind back to the last ten years of reading, the book that reliably delivers is the one I search out from the news agent’s every three months—Lapham’s Quarterly. It’s the sort of thing where everyone in some circles knows it, and in others, nobody does. You could think of it as a sort of themed, global, pan-historical Reader’s Digest. All I know is that several times over the course of reading a Lapham’s Quarterly, I will raise my head from its pages and say to myself, I F-ing love Lapham’s Quarterly. 

Cassie: You’ve no doubt read Educated: A Memoir. Or someone has told you to read Educated. But if you haven’t had the chance yet, GO READ IT! Enthralling. I could not put it down. I’ll also recommend Fleishman is in Trouble. I can’t promise you’ll love it (I did. Others didn’t.) But it will keep you interested and you will have feelings about the characters. Strong feelings. Shifting feelings, perhaps. And then you’ll be able to discuss those feelings with all your friends. 

Cameron: Lost and Wanted, by Nell Freudenberger. It’s a novel about theoretical physics + grief + friendship + the uncanny, which is my happy place. (Not the theoretical physics, really. But the combination.) I also sunk deep into Barbarian Days, by William Finnegan. This one is about surfing–but I think you don’t have to be interested in surfing to enjoy it. I read it before bed every night and dreamed of waves.

Sally: I spent the year in a state of numb horror about the world. It’s a little rough to watch the slow dissolution of the future I was raised to believe in. But just because hope doesn’t follow the old narratives doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! What are the new futures no one has thought of yet? I went on a science fiction and fantasy binge, not to escape but to find stories that would spark new hope. Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse, is a cracking new take on a familiar fable. It takes place in a world drowned by the climate flood that we are all now living in vague fear of. The Native gods have returned to North America to protect the First Nations from its worst effects. But they have brought ancient monsters with them too. The story follows a young woman with a terrible power she has gained at great cost – isolation from anyone who could possibly help her to cope with it. Roanhorse’s is the kind of writing that makes you dread the dwindling number of remaining pages. Luckily, the sequel – Storm of Locusts – kicks exactly as much ass as the original. 

Fans of lonely kickass protagonists might also enjoy the Murderbot Diaries, a series of novellas by Martha Wells. Her protagonist is neither a he nor a she, but a biohybrid creation of neural circuits grown around a robot chassis in order to maximise its lethality. The builders left out the unnecessary bits that make you adept at empathy and social connections and social triangulation, fluff like that. So when it accidentally achieves self-awareness, instead of going full Terminator, its primary objective becomes self-care by isolation and binge-watching box sets. Wells’ prose is so funny, moreish and relatable (chicken soup for the socially anxious soul) that I couldn’t help imbuing the murderbot with my own gender. To me, she’s a she and possibly a me. 

The closest thing to a blueprint for navigating our uncertain future is Gamechanger, by L.X. Beckett, an uneasy meditation on how the fascism of the social media hive mind might be the only thing that gets us out of the ecological mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. A truly Faustian bargain. You can read the prequels for free.

Michelle: I listened to the audiobook of Milkman during a long flight, and months later I still miss the main character. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead made me laugh—right before it sent an actual chill down my spine. The Testaments stole me away for an entire day, and I’m not sorry. White Bird, a graphic novel by R.J. Palacio, the author of Wonder, made my whole family cry—after which we read it again.

Want even more suggestions? Here are the previous years’ book recommendation lists:

2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

Image: The Scholars, by Ludwig Deutsch, 1901

Ice skating: an overanalysis

By: | December 23, 2019
Skating monster, Hieronymous Bosch, Wikimedia Commons

This post appeared about a year ago, when I first joined LWON. I’m reposting it now because the Boschian horror that is ice skating season has crept up on me again, and I still don’t have disability insurance.

“This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink in El Dorado Hills, California. The “Family Friendly Winter Wonderland” was in a shopping mall surrounded by faux-Tuscan mansions, and the rink was packed from barrier to barrier. Pete promised peppermint bark and beer if I stuck with our plan, though, so we went ahead and rented skates.

A miniature choo-choo train chugged around the perimeter of the rink, packed with gleeful little boys. Parents lounged around the rinkside bar, day-drinking under heat lamps. No one else seemed concerned about the list of sponsors on the rink’s barrier: Marshall Medical Center, Thayer General Surgery, the West Coast Joint and Spine Center.

When Pete asked me to go ice skating with him over the Christmas holiday, I feigned excitement. Pete grew up in rural Pennsylvania and learned to ice skate as a kid. I grew up near Sacramento, California, where it hardly ever snows. Despite living an hour away from ski resorts in Tahoe, I have never mastered any sport that involves attaching blades, boards or wheels to my feet.

I wanted to be enthusiastic. But then — perhaps my fellow science journalists will relate to this  — I made the mistake of entering “ice skating” into PubMed, the United States National Library of Medicine’s online database.

“Did you know that hundreds of people have been poisoned by carbon monoxide emissions from Zamboni machines at indoor ice rinks?” I asked Pete one evening, as I downloaded a case study about a girl who got impaled with an inline skate in the vagina.

There were dozens of epidemiological studies tallying the injuries associated with ice skating, ranging from broken wrists to fractured skulls to infectious warts of the feet. Many had clever titles like: “A chilling reminder: Pediatric facial trauma from recreational winter activities,” and “Skating on thin ice: a study of the injuries sustained at a temporary ice skating rink.”

Temporary ice rinks like the one in El Dorado Hills, I found, can seriously strain the capacity of local emergency rooms. Going to a rink where alcohol is served increases injury risk, as does being an adolescent boy or a beginner.  “The research suggests it’s my civic duty not to go ice skating,” I told Pete.

He wrapped compression bandages around my wrists and helped me hobble onto the ice. “This is going to be the longest hour and a half of my life,” I thought, clinging to the barrier. Kids were hurling themselves across the skating rink at knee-height, apparently intent on taking down as many adults as possible. From the vantage of the beer garden it must have been hilarious. (See Christie’s post on why falling is so funny.)

Remembering the boy with undiagnosed hemophilia who hemorrhaged after a freak skating accident in New Hampshire, I focused on not slicing any of the children with my skates. Pete glided up beside me, looking composed and carefree. He tried to start a conversation. “Can’t talk,” I growled. “Ice skating.” 

Some of my apprehension came from chronic lower back pain, which developed in my early thirties and may have started with a hoola hooping accident. I was at a party watching a twenty-something levitate the hoop with her hips and got a little competitive. “Hold my beer,” I said to a friend, and threw my back out with the first gyration. Sometimes, when the pain flares up, it’s excruciating to reach the toilet paper.

I contemplated the children tumbling across my path. They were not focused on preserving their ability to walk or go to the bathroom. They were not thinking about their anemic health insurance plans, or mentally calculating what a 40% copay for a wrist fracture would cost. Ah, to be young, and let parents pay for emergency room visits!

So focused on not falling was I that the power ballads blaring from the rink’s loudspeakers barely penetrated my consciousness. By a third lap I had gained some balance, however, and started listening to the music. I hummed along to “Friday I’m in Love,” summoning my inner teenager. Humming helped tune out the voice in my head screaming HOW WILL YOU TYPE IF YOUR WRISTS ARE BROKEN?! , and I let go of the barrier.

By the end of “Born in the USA” I had completed a full circumnavigation of the rink, unsupported. As I completed a fifth loop, Pete zoomed up beside me and offered me his hand. We skated until the sun went down and the neon rink lights came on, turning the ice lurid purple. As “Don’t Stop Believing” exploded from the loudspeakers, I released Pete’s hand and did a final victory lap. I made my New Year’s resolution: In 2019, I’ll buy disability insurance.

Not me — Sasha Cohen. Photo credit Rich Moffit, Wikimedia Commons.

A Little Storm Crosses the Mountains

By: | December 20, 2019
tall storm cloud over a green mountain, with a rainbow

One day last summer I went for a late-afternoon drive with my parents into Rocky Mountain National Park. From the safety of the rental car, we drove into a hailstorm, then into a parking lot to wait out the hailstorm–which stopped, so my dad pulled back onto the road, and it immediately started again, and finally we found another safe spot to pull off while the ice balls plonked on the car and bounced off the pavement.

A little farther along, we stopped at this curve and watched as the storm made its way across the resort town of Estes Park. It was a tiny storm but its route happened to coincide exactly with ours, as we traveled in opposite directions.

I don’t have anything profound to say about it. It was just a productive little storm cloud on a beautiful July afternoon. I was glad I was inside something with a hard roof instead of outside on a trail. And isn’t it a pretty picture?

Photo: Helen Fields (me)

Golden Boy

By: | December 19, 2019

I fell in love in Japan. He was older, and so very tall. There was a glow about him, warm as sunshine. I could have sat and watched him for hours. Even though we didn’t have that much time together, I knew I would never forget him. He was so present, so grounded. Resilient after years of living, marked by all of the storms, both meteorologic and political, that he had weathered.

And so alone—not just on that path near Nijo Castle, but in the world. He had no living relatives. On a family tree, he would sit on a distant, dangling branch, separated from his kin by millions of years.  And there was something about this solitude that was irresistible, too.

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A year in marsupial review

By: | December 18, 2019

We’ve reached the end of another trip around the sun, which means Twitter is chockablock with year-end round-ups — here’s what I wrote, read, accomplished, etcetera — a phenomenon that generally leaves me feeling like a feckless, uncultured slacker. This December, though, I’ve resolved to celebrate my experiences rather than wallow in retrospective regret. For in 2019 I traveled to Australia and fell, head over heels, for marsupials. 

To know marsupials, I’m convinced, is to love them. First are their delightfully mellifluous names, most of which have Aboriginal origins: bilby, bandicoot, quoll. (It’s high time the Tasmanian devil, that noble recycler of offal, was rechristened the purinina.) There’s their tangled, engrossing biogeography — they evolved in North America, believe it or not, before following a land bridge to South America, traversing modern-day Antarctica, and settling happily in Australia, where they speciated wildly. (South America is still home to a third of the planet’s marsupials, and is also the source of the United States’ only native pouched critter, the opossum, which at some point wandered up the Central American isthmus and into the unlatched dumpster of our hearts.)

And then, of course, there’s the pathos of their reproductive strategy — the blind, pink joey, an embryonic jellybean that by all appearances should absolutely not be finished gestating, tenaciously clambering from cloaca to pouch, locating a teat in the warm dark, and fusing itself to its mother like a vestigial limb. The offspring of placental mammals — floating lazily in hermetically sealed comfort — are mollycoddled by comparison.

The European colonists who invaded Australia, alas, didn’t afford marsupials the respect they manifestly deserve. Settlers dismissed the continent’s fauna as stupid and maladapted — a form of prejudice dubbed placental chauvinism — and opened a Pandora’s box of non-native predators and competitors (cats, foxes, rabbits, sheep). Since colonization, twenty-nine species have vanished from Australia’s ecosystems, the world’s highest extinction rate. If ever there was a mammalian infraclass in desperate need of recognition, then, it’s Marsupialia. 

So without further ado: Here, in no particular order, are the Five Best Marsupials of 2019, each accompanied by a celebratory haiku. (Don’t most year-end lists feature haikus? No? Let’s move on to some photos before the internal logic of this post deteriorates further.) Note: These selections are objective and incontrovertible. All pictures by yours truly.

The Black-flanked rock wallaby

Cliff faces may be

Weird spots for macropods, but

Who are we to judge?

The Tasmanian devil

Out, facial tumors!

When all else fails, put stock in

Natural selection.

The common wombat

A rear-facing pouch

Is handy when you spend your days

Digging like a fiend.

The wallaroo

What’s the purpose of

Saltatory locomotion?

Granted, looks awesome.

The eastern bettong

Oh, prey of foxes

Oh, nocturnal fungivore

The mainland is cruel.

Eel communication

By: | December 17, 2019
I’m tellin’ y’all, it’s sabotage

If there’s any animal that could use a new PR agency, it’s got to be the electric eel. I mean, think about it – what other animal doesn’t even have its own correct name? You’ve probably heard that an electric “eel” is no eel at all but rather a fish (a knifefish, to be exact). From this basic signal that we couldn’t care less, the list of insults continues: for centuries we figured “the” electric eel was a single species. When we finally bothered to check, it turned out there are actually three.

But who cares? Electric eels are just slimy things that will zap you to death, right?

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LWONers Wonder Politely if Their Books Might Make Good Gifts

By: | December 16, 2019

When LWONers aren’t writing LWON posts for your edification and pleasure, some of them are writing books. Excuse our self promotion, but we think our books are pretty good, and as it is the holiday season, we wanted to make sure our dear readers are aware of the latest ones. See below for the books we’ve written this year (also other years), one or more of which might make the perfect gift for someone you know. You’re welcome.

The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Richard Panek. Nobody knows what gravity is, and just about nobody knows that nobody knows what gravity is. The exception is scientists. They know that nobody knows what gravity is because they know that they don’t know what gravity is. A brief history of a big idea.

“Richard Panek takes us on a journey that is original, brave, and ultimately very beautiful: a reminder that sometimes science isn’t a solution but a search.” — James Gleick, author of Time Travel: A History

Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places  (Torrey House Press), by Craig Childs. This is a short, pocket-sized book (think stocking stuffer!) of experiences in North American deserts, flying through a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, walking along routes of ancient shell traders in the dunes of northern Mexico.

“In the actual Southwest, blemishes count as much as beauty. Character abides in both, which is how Craig Childs sees it. And to see the desert through his eyes, as Virga & Bone allows us to do, is to glimpse its tangible, imperfect glory. This is a bright hard gem of a book.” — William DeBuys, author of A Great Aridness and The Last Unicorn

Good To Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery (W. W. Norton & Company) by Christie Aschwanden. Named to Science News’s top books of 2019 and NPR’s favorite books of the year.

“This authoritative, delightful, and much-needed book slices through the hype around athletic recovery, and will surely cement Christie Aschwanden’s status as one of the world’s top science writers. I laughed a lot, and learned even more.” — Ed Yong, best-selling author of I Contain Multitudes

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018), by Ben Goldfarb. Eager reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers”―including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens―is hard at work restoring these creatures to their former haunts, from the Nevada deserts to the Scottish highlands. Eager is a powerful story about one of the world’s most influential species, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and climate change. Ultimately, it’s about how we can learn to coexist with our fellow travelers on this planet. Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and named a best book of 2018 by the Washington Post. 

Unlikely Heroes (Workman) by Jennifer S. Holland. Full disclosure, this book has been around for a while. But it makes such a great gift that we’ve decided to include it here anyway. It’s part of a series that began with the wildly popular Unlikely Friendships, the New York Times bestseller packed with true stories of unexpected bonds between different species. This third book in the series, also a best seller, features animals doing equally remarkable things for others–helping, adopting, nursing, saving lives. Perfect for children, teachers, friends, mothers-in-law, even the surly kid who mows your lawn. As one fan on Amazon commented: “OMG these stories are amazing!”

Suggestible You (National Geographic) by Erik Vance. Also not new. Also a pretty good gift for that crazy family member who swears echinacea and crystals are the secret to a healthy happy life. Interestingly, it’s also the perfect gift for that stubborn loved one who just won’t stop making fun of your echinacea and crystals. This book steps past all the Twitter fights of whether alternative medicine is effective or not and digs into exactly what happens when your belief changes your body. And it’s not what you think.

“A Note on the Type” WTF

By: | December 13, 2019

You finish the book, you don’t want it to be over with, there’s still one more printed page, so you read it.  “A Note on the Type,” it says, and heads off  into the highest weeds: the name of the font in which the book is printed, then the font’s forebears, its continuing history, its inventor, its inventor’s history, and sometimes its virtues.  This is blindingly irrelevant, unsatisfying, and irritating, and so on purpose I never read it. 

Until the book I just finished, Imogen Gower’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, when I hit the “Note on the Type” page and kept on reading:  

This book is set in Caslon, a typeface named after Willliam Caslon (1692-1766).

Aaaand it just goes on from there, the better part of a page. The voice was slightly prissy and assumed I wanted to know a great deal about the William Caslon and his adventures in, as it said, “typefounding.” Caslon founded a family of typefounders but before that, he was apprenticed to an engraver of gunlocks (and of course gun barrels too) in London, then opened his own shop for silver chasing.  I don’t know the meanings of: typefounding, gunlock, silver chasing, and a part I left out, bookbinders’ stamps. Caslon’s skill in cutting letters – I don’t know what that is either – attracted two printers whose names I’ll furnish if you need me to and who backed him to buy typefounding equipment.  The fonts Caslon cut for a folio edition of John Selden – of whom I’ve never heard – “excited great interest” and thereafter Caslon just went from strength to strength. His font has many virtues, each ennumerated, and its “general effect is clear and open but not weak or delicate.”  

WHY is this interesting? WHY? And who thinks I want to know? And who in the name of the sweet baby Jesus writes these things? 

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