The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin

This is one of the most enjoyable novels I've read in some time.  The writing is beautiful - sparing and descriptive.  There is an atmospheric quality that suffuses the narrative but, unlike the planet's snow and ice, doesn't smother it.  The setting is a wintry planet populated by humans who are neither fully male nor female most of the time (hermaphroditic may be the best way to think about it) who monthly for a period of a couple of days change into either fully male or female form so they can reproduce.  The rest of the time they are androgenous without sexual drive.  The implication of this for their society and their relationships is the real gem in this story.  Truly a great read.

The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick

There are brilliantly written descriptive sequences early in this novel about Frank Frink, one of the protagonists.  And the writing with missing words and incorrect punctuation when Tagomi is speaking feel original.  However, I found this novel murky and difficult to follow.  That may have been Dick's intention, for it does seem to be about a dream (nightmare); even the narrative about Juliana and Joe have a film noir quality.  And then again my overall lack of enjoyment may just be that I couldn't get the TV show out of my mind.

Train to Pakistan, by Khushwant Singh

Partition of the British Indian empire in 1947 into India and Pakistan is the setting for this tale. Muslim, Sikh and Hindu live peacefully side by side in villages throughout the empire prior to Partition (just as Christians, Jews and Muslims lived peacefully side by side throughout the Middle East for hundreds of years and Americans of diverse faiths and cultures live together peacefully in current day United States). During Partition, this balance is disrupted as people of differing religions are moved to their new countries by the new governments. Millions of people were killed. This is a tale of one such village in Punjab. I think diversity makes a society strong and living among people who are different from you keeps them familiar and less threatening in their "otherness." When we segregate into homogeneous groups and put up walls, people who are different from us become even more unfamiliar. These homogeneous groups lose capacity for open and tolerant thinking; they worry among themselves about things not worrisome and become afraid. Bad things come of this. This is a cautionary tale for Americans (and the French and British, too)  - the rise of populist/nationalist groups and the rhetoric surrounding the election of Trump as President augur things similar. America is better than this.

Marrow, by Robert Reed

Everything in this story is a little too large (or long) to fully imagine. By the end, though, I had a fairer grasp of its scope. I suppose that by the time humanity has developed the expertise to explore other regions of the galaxy (without the aid of space/time warping devices), it will also have evolved the ability to extend its lifespan - I guess it would need to - for traveling around the galaxy at a not insignificant fraction of the speed of light would, nevertheless, take hundreds of thousands of years. Against this backdrop place a spaceship the size of Jupiter with rockets larger than moons, fuel tanks the size of small planets and a hidden world deep within its core the size of Mars. The masters (not the builders) of the ship are humans who can live nearly forever. The most interesting part of this story is what happens as a society evolves and the role of religion/belief systems in shaping it. The wonder of the story is in the size of everything and, to a degree, how the ship is maintained. What's missing, for me, is how humans evolve in terms of their thinking, what distracts them from the tedium of life (if it is, indeed, tedious), their moral grounding and philosophy when one lives for hundreds of thousands of years. What continues to provide them pleasure? Intellectual stimulation? In the end, a reason to keep living? These ideas are noticeably absent. Short of this, it was a really cool read.

By the way, I've been reading Asimov's Foundation series (more than halfway through). Hence my absence in the blogosphere.

In the Kingdom of Ice, by Hampton Sides

This is the story of the USS Jeannette, the U.S. Navy boat which in 1879 carried 33 men north to find the North Pole. Two years on a ship trapped in arctic ice followed by a 1000 mile journey by foot and small boat to the Siberian coast and then winter sets in, again. This is a survival story that rivals, even eclipses in some ways, the Shackleton story (see earlier post from 2014, as brief as it was). I particularly enjoyed the non-expedition narrative - life in the mid to late 19th century in the U.S., other expeditions and the romance of adventure (why this was deemed so important in the public and government's eyes), current state of knowledge regarding Earth's geography - many thought that there was an open sea at the North Pole which was surrounded by an "annulus" of ice (a fairly ludicrous thought in retrospect especially given the nascent stages of the Industrial Revolution), and the exploits of Bennett, the owner of the New York Herald newspaper (the paper of the day) which financed the entire expedition. This is a rapid and engrossing read. Truly worth my time (and thanks to my colleagues who told me to read it).

City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg

This is clearly an ambitious novel and I dove in with enthusiasm, even trying to figure a way to bring it with me on a trip to the Caribbean. I hadn't yet started using a Kindle. The book is 900 pages long and a brick in weight. I settled for Azimov for my trip instead (Foundation) and found myself the other night looking longingly at Azimov's Foundation and Empire as I struggled down the homestretch of Hallberg's novel. The last 100 pages including the night of the blackout moved like molasses at forty degrees. Perhaps this was me (I?) and the filter through which the book was experienced. Perhaps I tired of the writing style. Or maybe the plot slowed and the musings of the characters and narrator were not enough to sustain me. Maybe I didn't have the energy. Maybe because of the weirdly placed large and rare words sprinkled regularly throughout the text, seemingly incongruent with the words around them? They were not frequent enough to have me keep a dictionary at my side (for example like reading Christopher Hitchens). In many ways I feel similarly about this book as I do about Tartt's Goldfinch - long and well written in places but ponderous at times and ends clunkily.

Brave Genius, by Sean B. Carroll

One of my colleagues recommended this to me on the recommendation of her son (a pathology resident at the same institution as the author). This is the tale of two French Nobel prize winners (Albert Camus, literature and Jacques Monod, physiology or medicine) who were friends and who also served in the French resistance during World War 2. The first half of the book is about France during the war and the resistance; the second half of the book is about the postwar restoration of French society and the conflict between Communism and Western societies. While both are interesting, the battles that followed the war, both with weapons (e.g. Hungary) and in science (Lysenko), and how these guys, and others, slowed the influence of communism and non-rationalist ideas, are the treasures of this book. The positive influence these men had on their country and the world during the decades after the war is astounding (not to mention the crazy things they did as members of the French resistance). It's remarkable that I've read Camus, indeed one of his novels (The Plague) is one of the best books I've read and one of only a few I've read more than once, yet I didn't know a lick about his personal life. I've studied genetics as part of my medical training and learned about Monod's work in school, and didn't have an inkling about the extraordinary life he led outside the laboratory. This is a great read - something for many people here (World War 2, France, philosophy, science).  

The Curve of Binding Energy, by John McPhee

I was late to the sciences, struggling through basic requirements in high school and then completely ignoring them through college. After almost a decade in the working world I returned to school to become a physician. One of the premed requirements I had to take before even applying to medical school was physics - a counter intuitive exercise for me, at least in the beginning (a few early Saturdays were almost entirely spent trying to figure out the direction of forces, resultant acceleration, and so forth).  With time came a modicum of aptitude and I began to enjoy the subject - in particular, the section on subatomic particles. Rutgers (where I did my post baccalaureate premedical schooling) didn't go so for as to teach us how to build a nuclear reactor (or bomb, for that matter), and McPhee's book doesn't either, though it comes close. The book is really the story of Ted Taylor, a nuclear physicist of note who worked with the biggies at Los Alamos and other places in the decades after World War II. His contributions to both the development of the science (e.g. how to increase bomb yield while reducing the size of bombs) and the safeguarding of nuclear material are significant. McPhee's writing is vintage - crisp, lean and easy. As I tell my friends, and have probably scribed before, the guy could write about paint drying and make it interesting. No need here - an interesting topic unto itself. And, despite being written in the early 1970's, it still holds form today. Though I imagine the safeguarding of nuclear material is more secure now 40 years later.

A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson

It was an advertisement for the movie that moved me to read this, finally. Though I've known of the book for years and listened to Deb (wyf) wax poetically about its humor and though I've hiked many a mile on the Appalachian Trail myself it's taken some time to get around to reading it. I liked it. Not as much for the humor, there's plenty a funny moment, but for the description of the varying degrees of misery one encounters while humping a 40 pound pack up and down rocky trails. Rocky trails are what the Appalachian Trail does best - it's a mountain range, after all - and an old one at that (400 million years, give or take). I've hiked out west on some lovely smooth packed dirt trails - they have nothing on the AT. I'm keenly aware of how miserable one can get on the trail. On my first foray into the woods (22 years old, pemigewassat wilderness and Mt. Garfield in NH) I was still a pack a day smoker and thought it prudent to carry canned food in my pack. You may imagine how successful I was. Bryson is excellent at pacing a narrative and weaving in the past; the sections on the history of the trail are particularly enjoyable and I have to wonder if he has a personal gripe against the National Park Service - about which he has few good things to say. There's a funny sequence where he thinks a bear invades his camp one night. This resonated with me because I, too, have been awoken in the middle of the night in the woods by a horrific noise that scared the living !&%$ out of me and my fellow hiker (MG will know of which I speak) - it just turned out to be two "through hikers" who heard someone down the trail snoring and, thinking it was a bear, made quite the racket to scare it off. Walking in the woods is one my very favorite pastimes - I'm glad I read this book.

Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall

I read this in the spring of 2015 on a recommendation from a co-worker at Waterbury Hospital. It's the best running book I've ever read - that's not saying much since I've only read a few. Nevertheless, it's a great adventure-type read, irrespective of your views on running. From a timing standpoint it coincides with the barefoot craze (you know those runners with the five toe slip-on glove-like shoes?). I'm not a barefoot runner but the tips I picked up have helped my foot tendinitis tremendously. 

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

I muscled through this in July 2015 while on vacation in Maine. Typically I stop reading books when I lose interest. In this case I didn't, hoping that the story and prose would gain traction.  And for about 200 pages two thirds of the way through there was some promise - good solid prose and moments of real art (well, at least in my mind, for whatever that's worth). However, the tale disappointingly ends in a 30 page stream of consciousness on something about love, child-parent relationships, time, art and immortality - hard to make sense of what the protagonist was trying to tell me. Your time would be better spent reading Mark Helprin.

The Origins of Aids, by Jacques Pepin

If you think that the AIDS pandemic began with a promiscuous French airline attendant in the early 1980's you would be wrong.  Though our cultural awareness begins here I think.  HIV, the causative agent of AIDS, has been around quite a long time in humans (at least as far back as the first decades of the 20th century - well documented by analysis of archival specimens and DNA analysis of mutation rates of existing strains of HIV) and in chimps as nearly genetically identical SIV for many thousands of years before that.  Pepin, a microbiologist and researcher, does an exhausting job outlining the origins of AIDS from its beginnings in the jungles of central Africa to its global spread.  His theory, and I would argue that the preponderance of evidence moves it out of the hypothesis stage to theory, is that the virus jumped to humans from chimps (the common chimp, pan troglodytes) from incidental contact during hunting (a human hunter butchers a chimp with a machete and gets contaminated by chimp blood).  This hunter either makes his way to a city that rapidly urbanized during 20th century colonization (e.g. Leopoldville), sleeps with a prostitute and disseminates the virus in this manner, exponentially, for the prostitute sleeps with many others, or remains in the rural areas of the Congo and gets treated parenterally (e.g. intravenously) for Yaws, sleeping sickness or another tropical disease, contaminates the syringes, which are reused frequently without proper sterilization, and launches the exponential spread of the virus in this manner.  Either way, the exponential spread of the virus was enabled by colonization and subsequently spread globally by international trade and travel.  Pepin's work is scholarly and exhaustive in detail, documenting epidemiological data for central Africa mind numbingly at times.  Too much for the lay reader and sometimes even for me (I'm a pathologist).  Nevertheless, if you are interested in the true origins of HIV, or even certain aspects of 20th century central African colonization by Belgium and France, it is well worth your time.

Under the Skin, by Michel Faber

Not sure how I stumbled across this. I probably read it in an online review of another book. Like most good stories, the reader's perspective/feelings/orientation to the world changes with the telling. For me, the real strength of this tale is how Faber inexorably pulls you into a different place from where you started - the simple, taught, style of the narrative, along with its brooding milieu. A bit weaker is the thinly veiled social commentary; I suppose it reduces the story to allegory. Nevertheless, it is nicely crafted and worth the effort.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

A great read, I would argue, on its own with its humor, pace, rich character development and craftmanship. Yet, even better is that almost every other page has some vague reference to a Tolkein tale or sci-fi adventure, both of which I am a fan. And much of the story takes place in NJ, my home for 35+ years, with a good swath in my own college town of New Brunswick (Rutgers). How nostalgic did I feel when Diaz placed Oscar in some geek-sponsored club meeting in the river dorm basement classrooms?

The Social Transformation of American Medicine, by Paul Starr

One of my colleagues gave me this book to read after tiring of listening to me kvetch about the complex, sometimes idiotic, and irrational structure of our health care system. Idiocy seeming to impact everything from hospitals and their push/pull relationships with providers to government regulation and payment systems (really? cost-based pricing?); not to mention the operational inefficiencies that seem to be such an ingrained part of every (well, maybe not every) hospital. I'm still baffled by it all, but it certainly makes more sense now that I've read this encyclopedic journey through the evolution of health care in the U.S. I don't suppose most people would find it terribly interesting and, admittedly, it really gets into the weeds at times - but for me, a physician and business person, it sure helps me frame my world a little better.

Dirty Snow, by Georges Simenon

A little boy, born to a prostitute, raised in a village by others and only infrequently visited by his mother. How can we expect good things to come of this? As the story opens we find Frank, now a late teen, living with his mother who runs a whorehouse out of her apartment in German-occupied France during the Second World War. Frank doesn't seem to have young male angst or teenage burdens of identity and acceptance. He is dangerously unfettered - the German soldiers, police, older men who frequent the taverns, mother's customers, prostitutes, Holst and his daughter, Sissy, who live across the hall all have potential to act as either physical or psychological influences on Frank. Yet, he has little or none. He only seeks the companionship of bad people who lurk in bars, who steal and connive, but doesn't try to impress. Frank does bad things - kills a man for no good reason and takes his gun. Kills a woman he knew as a child so that he may steal her watches. But his actions do not reverberate in his conscience; Simenon spends little time in allowing Frank to rationalize his actions. Does he have a developed amygdala? In many ways he is Camus' stranger - amoral, sociopath. However, one cannot help but to blame his environment. After being imprisoned for passing stolen currency, it is a woman in an apartment window keeping house in a building across from the prison that consumes Frank. He weaves a narrative of the woman's life, married with a small baby. We see in his fantasies his lost childhood and lost adulthood. He will never now have the opportunity to marry a woman and have a child of his own. And the time has past for a loving, nurturing childhood. Sissy, from across the hall, was Frank's one chance for love. And it is her love, or expression of love, that serves as the pinnacle, culmination, of his life. Somewhat ironically, it is his mother who seemingly spends more time visiting Frank and sending him stuff while in prison, now too late to make a difference. I don't read this tale only as an existential exercise. Nor do I think of Frank as a complete sociopath. The tale and its lessons are found in the simple grit and poverty of war and occupation and how a young person without guidance is at great risk of failing to develop a proper sense of self and conscience. 

A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin

I held out for years on the HBO series, not for any philosophical or ideological reason, and only have recently watched them - if you have seen the series, like it, and have not read the books, you should - there is an enormous amount of wonderful stuff missing from the show (understandably) - and, frankly, I don't know how you can watch the show having not read the books - way too confusing. I thought that if the series is that good, the book(s) are probably worth some time. And they are. Caveat - you have to be patient. The novels run some 800 to over 1000 pages apiece; the first 600 pages of the first volume (Game of Thrones) deal mainly with character development and the history of the land, Westeros - a necessity for the complexity of the story to come. Don't have much to say about the text itself - it's reasonably well written and paced (I guess) appropriately - though some will drown I suppose with the plodding course through the first half of Game of Thrones (the pace is veritably brisk when compared with Robert Jordan's novels - aagh, I gave up after four of those). The plot certainly picks up steam with the second installment, A Clash of Kings, and then roars through the third, A Storm of Swords, before settling down a bit in A Feast For Crows - nevertheless, the storyline continues to evolve with new characters appearing. The fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, is more of the same and makes me wonder if the story will ever resolve. I am a bit fatigued, but if you are interested in fantasy/adventure, these are worth your time.

Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

You'd think I spent the summer lounging without a book; two months and counting since my last comment. I'm muscling my way through at least three books, one of which I managed to finish last evening. Embarrassingly, despite my affection for SciFi, I had read very little Asimov. I may have read one of his robot books a long time ago but cannot remember for certain and cannot pick it out from a list of the hundreds of books he wrote. I like this book for it's philosophical bent and its landscape is littered with cool little futuristic gadgets. The thrust of the story is the idea that the past, with appropriate statistical modeling, can be used to predict the future - when presented at a conference of mathematicians it sets off a cat and mouse chase. Crisp dialogue and some really thoughtful ideas on what it might mean to be able to predict the future make it appealing. Asimov also tackles the arc of history - humans had been settling the galaxy for over 12,000 years when the story takes place. One idea is that even though technology is excellent at recording history, the repeated reading and writing of the information to the media is still flawed and, over the millennia, old records are lost. I don't know how well that holds up to reality but it does call to mind DNA replication - despite its accuracy, the DNA polymerase still makes mistakes and the repair mechanisms are not perfect - introducing mutations and subsequent loss of fidelity. Repeat thousands of times and the product looks markedly different. I think I'll read Foundation next.

Endurance - Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing

Makes pale in comparison any other trial. It's hard to imagine how they survived. A great tale.

Act of Passion, by Georges Simenon

Another of this prolific author's romans durs seeping with brooding misery. One can only hope that as a leech draws blood from its host, so to will Simenon's work absorb our own little miseries. Maybe that's why I like them? Echoes of Camus' The Stranger and even, at times, Doestoevsky's Notes from Underground decorate this confessional tale delivered in a letter to a court official after a guilty verdict of murder. The murderer takes us along as he chronicles his life and slowly loses his sanity, all the while convinced of that sanity, like most mad people are. After all, a mad person's reality is no less real to them than it is for us. I particularly like how tidy and non-convoluted this tale is. The murderer is a doctor who becomes abusive to his lover, a young, promiscuous, woman he meets in a train station. He wants to return her to a purer state before she grew up and started sleeping with men. Perhaps his obsession with her is wrapped up in his profession as a healer. Perhaps he is obsessed with her because he can control her in ways that he cannot control his wife. Or, perhaps, because he had a controlling mother. The physical violence is his poorly evolved way of dealing with the conflicts within him. The rationalization of that violence is a manifestation of the intellectually evolved, yet warped, way the mind deals with conflict. Psychic blindness and madness may be the result - clearly so in this case.