November was ushered in by high winds and chilly temperatures.  Our wind chimes clanged wildly all night, but they have such a nice tone, I didn’t really mind.  We were waiting to see what happened on election day, hardly daring to hope that we’d fire Trump.  But it happened, and there was much rejoicing, at least among those I count as friends, which apparently now includes most of the world outside of the US.

My reading mojo went to hell this month.  I’ve managed to listen to a few audiobooks, but my concentration for any kind of visual reading was just shot.  I dipped into several books in the first couple of weeks of the month, but never got very far.

Random bookishness:

[image error]Synchronicity:  On the day (November 1) I finished reading The Tangled Tree, a book about genetics and horizontal gene transfer, I came across this article about the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  The recipients, Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Dr. Jennifer A. Doudna, were cited in the closing chapters of the book as among the most likely researchers to be awarded this prize, making the book particularly timely.  More on The Tangled Tree in my review below.

Overthinking everything: One of the books I read this month was by Tananarive Due, a writer whose name had always perturbed me because I couldn’t quite make myself believe that it was pronounced the way it was spelled.  I was sure it was more complicated than that.  And I was wrong.  It’s pronounced Tan-anna-reeve Doo.  Just that simple.  And I now feel quite silly having twisted it into something quite other in my mind.  I confess that I actually chose the book (The Good House)  so I could hear her name pronounced properly.  I’d have wanted to read it anyway, but the audiobook came along at the right time and in a 2-for-1 deal.

The Tangled Tree A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen – I had totally forgotten that I borrowed this from the Brooklyn Public Library until I went to my bookshelf on Overdrive and saw that I only had a few days left on the loan.  As I was hoping for a good audiobook (Nothing was holding my attention.) I renewed the loan and set to listening, and I am so glad I did because this book is fascinating.  Yes, there’s a lot of purely technical stuff in it, but it’s not daunting at all because it’s so well integrated with a layman-friendly narrative about the people who have defined the field of genetics over the centuries.

And very specifically it’s about horizontal gene transfer.  What’s that?  It’s exactly what it sounds like.  A transfer of genes from one biological entity to another, but not vertically as with standard reproductive modes, but horizontally and immediately.  For a very long time, nobody believed it was possible, or rather, only a few people believed that it was and they were pretty much dismissed as crackpots.  But now it’s a proven phenomenon, and its existence has opened up the research in genetics to things like CRISPR/Cas9, the field in which Drs. Charpentier and Doudna, mentioned above, have just received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  Yeah, the book is that timely.  And it’s quite wonderful.  You don’t have to be a biologist or chemist to understand it, you just have to have a passing familiarity with the concepts of genetics.

The Good House By: Tananarive Due – This is a riff on the bad house trope.  Angela, who has inherited a home in a small town in Washington state, seems to have a difficult time connecting even to her family.  She and her husband have been separated, and she has a less than optimal relationship with her son.  An ex-lover who is living in the same town is clearly once-burned-twice-shy, and it seems that Angela’s only friend is one of her clients.  Tragedy follows tragedy as the horror builds and Angela has to figure it all out before everyone she cares about is taken from her.

Fair enough.  That’s a pretty classic set-up; not sure fire by any stretch, but it’s the kind of thing that keeps you reading.  Alas, even though it was well written, I felt that it was too long to be really gripping.  A good trim would probably have made it a lot scarier. (Always bearing in mind that with horror, I’m a hard-sell because the only things that truly scare me are other people.) The characters are good, the narrative is good, but it just goes on too long, in my opinion.  Still I think it’s worth a read even if I did nod off listening to the end.

Gilded Needles By: Michael McDowell – What a strange book this is.  It started slow with one of those overviews of what a gaggle of characters are doing on New Year’s Eve — the sort of narrative where you keep waiting for something to actually happen.  But it does sort itself out fairly quickly with a story of revenge that plays out in late 19th century New York.  It takes a long time to work out which family is actually worth caring about, and even then it’s a close thing.  But it’s clever in the way it involves the reader in their lives, keeping us just at the right distance so that our judgements are not always reliable.  The narrative itself is a bit pastiche-y, but by no means difficult.  In the end, I was wholly won over not just by the book, but by the people I hadn’t expected to like very much.  That’s a neat trick on the part of an author.

Fish Whistle: Little Short Essays by Daniel Pinkwater – I went through a period where I adored Pinkwater and read everything I could get my hands on.  But on revisiting this book of essays after being reminded of his short story “Wempires” I was a whole lot less captivated, particularly by the title essay which I remembered as being hilariously funny.  Only this time it wasn’t.  It was amusing, but it didn’t leave me hiccupping with laughter the way it did the first time I read it.  I borrowed a stack of Pinkwaters through Kindle Unlimited, and now I think I’d better return them unread.  I’d rather keep my memories intact.  This doesn’t mean I don’t recommend Pinkwater.  I do, particularly his Baconburg (Chicago) novels.  But I think he’s one of those authors who proves the adage that you can’t go home again.

The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols By: Genevieve von Petzinger – A somewhat different view of neolithic cave art.  von Petzinger here unravels not the major images, but the smaller, not often noted ones, symbols repeated from site to site, common techniques, and other factors which suggest a good deal of connection between the groups that created these images.  Really interesting stuff that doesn’t go over all the same old territory.

Atom Land By: Jon Butterworth – I had high hopes for this book when I began it because the author started out with some clear metaphors for complex ideas.  Alas, not only does he beat the metaphor into the ground, but its use becomes pointless given the sheer difficulty of the ideas he’s dealing with.  This is one of those wordswordswords books but as you progress there’s not a lot of “Oh I know these words!” moments to be had.  There are better books on the quantum realm, I think.

Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos  Priyamvada Natarajan  Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers – I was reading this about the time the post-election craziness went into full swing, so while I can report that I enjoyed it, I can’t really tell you much about it.  It occupied my mind, which at that point was all I could reasonably hope for.

So that’s it, pretty much.  Not a lot to show for a whole month, but let’s face it, November 2020 was not like other months.