useful thing

What’s the most useful book you’ve ever read? And, why?

This week's Booking Through Thursday is a good one. 

I think this one is a tie, and it goes to my two favorite works of nonfiction: Dunant's Dream by Caroline Moorehead, and Song of the Dodo, by David Quammen.

Dunant's Dream is about the formation and history of the International Red Cross. It focuses primarily on the period up to and including WWII, but does also spend a few chapters tracking the organization to the 1990s. It's an absolutely fascinating and inspiring book; there are very, very few things I am willing to apply the adjective "inspiring" to, and this is definitely one of them. I learned a lot about the organization, of course, but it also provides some context and narrative punch to certain historical events. So there's a large swathe of history - mainly European/American, but also Asian - from about 1860-1945 - that I have at my mental fingertips, because of this book.

Just as useful in my collection of knowledge - and that's how I judge usefulness, I suppose - is Quammen's book. Song of the Dodo is a remarkable accomplishment; it's a compellingly readable but also fairly technically complex book. About island biogeography, a phrase I revel in saying as often as possible, because it makes me sound Smart.  So Quammen's book taught me a vast amount about evolution (and the development of the theory of evolution - Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, I salute you!), in addition to all manner of quirky things about various oddball animals and places. My sense of world geography - particularly, perhaps obviously, insular geography - was practically created by this book, as is my grasp of evolutionary theory and adaptations. I also learned quite a bit about various animals - Komodo dragons, which will cheerily strip the flesh from your bones in no time at all; the kiwi bird, one of only a very few bird species which has a good sense of smell; the fact that not only are elephants buoyant, they can swim.

Between these two books, which I read at roughly the same time (in the year or two after I graduated college), my worldview and sense of place and history was radically altered and formed. I've read each book more than once, which - since each is many hundreds of pages long - is remarkable, given the subject matter.

both are infinitely recommendable, too. Quammen in particular i find myself referencing; he himself is NOT a scientist (in fact, his college degree was in English), so he has a marvelous grasp of language and story and structure, as well as an outsider's need to simplify and analogize highly complex scientific ideas. It's an incredibly readable book - narratives of his own travels to remote insular outposts of wildlife study (Mauritius, the Aru Islands) intermixed with scientific and intellectual history as well as explanations of scientific theories and phenomena. 

Having read Quammen's book makes me feel smart as a whip, and that is immensely useful.

speak, memory!

I've been a little children's lit-avoidant lately. This is not a terribly good thing, but it's also (probably) not a permanent thing. I've read the 2009 Newbery and Printz winners in the last week and a half, so I'm not giving up entirely - not to mention the small fact that I am teaching a children's lit class this semester and thus must keep up with the reading.

Intsead, I've been reading "adult" books, a phrase which always makes me cringe a little. I caught myself, earlier this month, thinking of them as "real" books, and then wanted to crawl away and hide under a rock (making THAT false distinction essentially undoes the last 12 years of my academic life).

I've read some Nabokov - The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Despair. I've read some Kazuo Ishiguro - Nocturnes, which made me want to write my own book of fiction, and Never Let Me Go, which made me cry. I read, oddly enough for the first time, The Aspern Papers. I say oddly enough because I have been a devotee of Henry James since I first met him, way, way back in my second year of college. But his shorter fiction has somehow evaded me, so I dug in.
And now - though I feel a little embarrassed to even be writing this, it feels so pompous - now I'm reading Proust. Even more pompously, I refuse to call the book by its English translations, because they do not sound lovely or melodious at all. But A la recherche du temps perdu - THAT sounds beautiful. "Rechercher" is one of my favorite French words (ack! pomposity overload!) - I love saying it, I love the look of it on a page.

I have never read Proust, somehow - again, probably because he's French, and essentially a modernist, he's escaped the sad limits of my specializations. There is also simply something daunting about the prospect of a multi-volume work, even to somehow who consumes books at the rate I do.

I consulted a colleague (oooh, pomposity again!) about which edition is best, and recommendation in hand, went off to the library. I found the edition I wanted - Moncrieff, with Enright's updates/revisions - tucked away in the wrong place in a shelf adjacent to the Proust fiction shelves. Materially speaking, it's a lovely edition - this wonderful fat little hardback with a pale cover. I am deriving enormous tactile satisfaction out of simply holding the book, carrying it from room to room.

At any rate, I dove right in and I'm dazzled thus far. I've been reading, for the dissertation, Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, and it's of a piece with the beginning of Swann's Way.  All that small, careful attention to rooms, to hallways, to spaces, to nooks and niches within the house. Even the description of the narrator's bed as a nest - it's all Bachelard (or rather, Bachelard is all Proust). 

And then, the madeleine and the tea. And memory - memory, speaking and dreaming.

It's not terribly original or interesting to be interested, literarily, in memory, but I find that I am. I also find that I'm reading a lot of memory-centric (mnemocentric?) books lately - look. Nabokov. Ishiguro. David Small's Stitches, which is a memoir. Despair, the narrator tells us, is written BY his memory, it's his memory telling the tale (but then being conveyed again by the Russian author to whom the narrator alludes). I am constantly, continually haunted by a book I don't own and can rarely find, Georges Perec's absolutely staggering W, or the Memory of Childhood.
It's all about memory.

It's made of memory.
Memory, drawn up and out of a cup of tea, and the crumbs of a cake.

Proust writes, briefly, of the voluntary memory, and - essentially - the boringness, the invalidity of it. The voluntary memory is not interesting or valuable. It is the involuntary memory that has meaning, that reveals meaning.

This distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory intrigues me. I find myself, some days, awash in involuntary memories. Yet when I try, consciously, to recall a face or place or time, I cannot always retrieve it from the deep files of my brain. And the voluntary memories may make one smile, or wince, slightly - but the involuntary memories make your heart stop, make your breath catch.

it can be a song, a smell, a word, a place, a color, a taste.
a cup of tea.
a crumb.