Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

#531
Title: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Year: 2010
336 pages

Sex, scatology, other stuff, and space travel. Roach is funny as hell, with long, delightful tangents that wheel away from the narrative (not unlike Frank Poole after HAL finishes him off). Readers of Roach's other books will recognize the points of intersection (corpses, e.g., or sex in space). I'd have liked more on the temperament needed for long space voyages, but that's about my interests, and perhaps not Roach's.

Just like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso

#532
Title: Just like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso
Author: Mark Vonnegut
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Year: 2010
224 pages

In the interval between The Eden Express and the present memoir, Vonnegut's diagnosis has shifted from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder. This isn't surprising for two reasons: 1) He responded well to lithium, which today we generally understand as tipping the scales toward a bipolar diagnosis; and 2) schizophrenia is a garbage category for a lot of disorders that include psychosis (and in my opinion, may not be etiologically related). These days, there's a lot less hebephrenic schizophrenia and a lot more bipolar II.

The Eden Express makes more sense as a narrative of manic and depressive episodes (leavened with a plethora of recreational substances). It's wild, fast, roller coaster-like. The author is not in consensual reality for much of the story. By contrast, Just like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso is a normalized book, slower and perhaps less interesting, although the contrast over time is fascinating. Read the two together as a really good look at how disruptive unchecked bipolar disorder can be.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

#530
Title: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Author: Jack Weatherford
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Year: 2005
352 pages

An interesting and entertaining history of the Mongol empire. The tone is sympathetic and the author asserts that the Mongol invasions of European towns and cities were not as horrific as European history books assert. This has caused angry and vituperative responses from some reviewers. I'm not in a position to compare conflicting accounts, but mildly note that generally speaking, whoever tells the story spins it in their favor. Also, I'm awfully sorry that some Christian communities were attacked. I agree that that might well have been horrible. Perhaps, in the spirit of reciprocity, those reviewers might consider how those gentile communities treated the Jews who lived there. Lots of horror there as well.

Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath

#529
Title: Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath
Author: Michael Paul Masdon
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Year: 2009
314 pages

Light on science, long on condemnation of almost every medical professional and system except his own hospital. Rife with grammatical problems and incorrect usage. Head trauma is a serious and underserved phenomenon, but I've seen heroic and sustained efforts on behalf of people with TBIs, so has Mason. Instead, read Where is the Mango Princess?, which also indicts TBI health care, but with more specificity and better balance.

The Colors of Space

#527
Title: The Colors of Space
Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Publisher: Walsworth Publishing
Year: 1988/1963
141 pages

As opposed to Proust, this reminds me of early adolescence in a positive way. I received a few bucks a week for allowance and I'd rush to the bookstore, then stand in delicious agony before the fantasy and science fiction racks, endlessly considering which 1 or 2 paperbacks to get. I'd usually get 2 at $1.50 or $1.75 apiece, go home, read them, and the next day face 6 more days without books. The Colors of Space recalled this experience: I started it on DailyLit, sent for the next installment, sent for the next installment, and before you know it, I was done and started on the second Marion Zimmer Bradley. As to plot and writing, these were also familiar--straightforward space cowboy story, simple plot, no real subplot, resolution, space cowboy becomes a space cowman. Mind you, I'm not complaining. It's like eating a little bag of lemon drops--sweet, familiar, pleasant, and not of great consequence.

#526
Title: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher: Eigal Meirovich
Year: 2009/1921
48 pages

Cute and a little stupid, though, I imagine, less so in its era. Man grows backward; is castigated; dies/is born.

Swann's Way (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu #1)

#525
Title: Swann's Way (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu #1)
Author: Marcel Proust
Translator: C. K. Scott Moncrieff
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1970/1913
474 pages

At this time I would like to quote from that finest flower of the cinematic arts, Barbarella: "It amuses the Great Tyrant to resent the expense of feeding orchids to slaves." This, then, was my experience of the first volume of Proust's massive yet strangely static A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. It amused me to resent the effort of reading Proust, finally finishing a mere 28 years after I began. That's a lot of orchids.

As a story, I found it too interior and agonizingly self-scrutinizing for my taste, though I applaud Proust's thoroughness. Swann's Way was one of four books I began simultaneously on DailyLit, reading 1 to 3 segments a day for the last ever so many months. Although it wasn't my intention, all are encyclopedic, each in their own specially hellish and complete manner. I will characterize them as I complete them. Swann's Way, which I finished first, is a compendium of internal states and perceptions, exquisitely masticated until the fibrous pulp disintegrates in an undifferentiated mass that is not as sweet as one might have anticipated or hoped. It reminded me of a person I once dated when I was young. This person would say things like "When I get up in the morning to go to work, I think, 'What's the point? Why don't I just kill myself right now?'" And when this person would say these things, I would think, "Okay,  go ahead. It would be more interesting than this endless rumination on what tiny slivers of experience mean." You must remember that I was 13 or 14 at the time, and wouldn't have enjoyed an actual suicide. Still, Proust puts me in mind of being 13, not only due to the minute dissection of every nanosecond and potential action, but because of the excruciatingly preadolescent social behavior of almost every character, petite bourgeoisie or no. I've seen Proust hailed for his skewering of the rising middle class, but I must report in all honesty that it reads like a middle school lunchroom, replete with titters, frosty and unexplained snubs, crises of meaning and interpretation, and once in a great while a moment of relief that merely presages the return of unendurable social strictures. Imagine Swann as the band teacher, 35 perhaps but still at the mercy of those pimply smirks. Today's cold entree is orchids.