‘I am very curious to know which books you’d choose’ purrs GrrlScientist, so I shall attempt to assuage her curiosity forthwith. Thirdwith, actually, as I am now obliged to read another exciting episode of Harry Potter and the Stem Cells of Barack Obama to Gee Minima. ’xuse me. Back in a mo.
Later
It’s not as easy a task as you’d imagine, and thinking it over I ran the risk of being left in a quandary, totally helpless and at the mercy of the emergency services and their monkey wrench. However, I avoided its dismal clutches and can now give you my reading list. Pay attention at the back.
Robert Gittings: Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats
Many years ago when the world was young I had the honour and privilege to be appointed Regents’ Professor at the University of California, where (at UCLA) I taught a graduate seminar course called Publish or Perish, which was all about how to write papers and get them published. Then, as now, I was convinced that in this increasingly competitive age, accessibility and good writing can only stand a beginning scientist in good stead. Any fool can be taught how to work machines that go ‘ping’, but good writing is a skill of equal or even greater value. I advised my students not to learn creative writing, but to study literature – to read and learn from those writers who could really write, and do so concisely.
One complaint sometimes offered by authors trying to salami slice shoehorn papers into Nature is that our length constraints prevent them from presenting all the data that the referees demand. This is an excuse as lame as ‘I did my homework but the dog ate it’. It is one of the marks of Keats’ genius that he could express a world of event and impressions in a single line. One of the points Gittings makes in this anthology is that Keats (by his own admission, in his letters) was far more successful with his shorter works – the Odes, mainly – than with his longer poems, some of which degenerate into what even Keats regarded as hackwork by comparison. It’s less often remembered that Keats was trained as an apothecary, a trade in which a well-turned observation might have been the difference between life and death.
Jane Austen: Emma
If consumptive and agonized self-flagellation is not to your taste (although I can’t imagine why not), the same lesson of acute observation expressed as a well-turned line is found in the works of that Dominatrix Doyenne of Delicacy, that Mistress of the Miniature – Jane Austen.
I always thought that Austen’s works were, you know, for gurlies. After all, here she was, writing during the Napoleonic Wars, when soldiers were bayonetting and blowing one another up all over Europe for absolutely years and years, and the most exciting thing that ever happens in a Jane Austen novel is that the heroine drops a teaspoon. (Note for younger readers – the spectacle of buff heroes ripping off their blousons and diving into fountains only occurs in TV adaptations aimed at chavs the masses). But after a while I realized that this is precisely the point. It is by making mountains out of molehills (what we literary critics call ‘the Size 34B Jewish Bra Effect’) that Austen achieves her comedic and dramatic effects, as well as revealing an unmatched talent for homing in on detail – and not only that, the right detail. What scribbler-of-lab-notebooks could want for anything more?
Any of Austen’s shell-like oeuvre would probably do, but Emma is one of the only two of hers I’ve actually read (the other one being Elizabeth Bennet’s Guide for Young Ladies to Optically Stimulated Luminescence Dating), and that, twice. As Austen scholar and author David Lodge has observed, a second reading of Emma is better than the first, as you better appreciate the agonies of the heroine as she stares helplessly up the juggernaut of her own panjandrum.
Later Still
Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths
The theme of acute concision in a small and tautological space is continued with Borges, one of my favourite authors and a true Gem of the Southern Hemisphere. Borges’ secret was that he suffered from a hereditary eye problem which meant that he couldn’t write for very long without getting tired. No long novels for Borges: instead he turned his handicap to magnificent advantage in a series of very short fictions – essays, really – that are stripped of adjectival and adverbial clutter, and pack a greater punch for all that. If there is an antonym of purple prose, this is it. Borges’ stories concern literary and scientific conundrums, in particular musings on the infinite. Perhaps surprisingly for someone whose style is terse in the extreme, his influences included Poe, Wells, Lovecraft and Anglo-Saxon epic. Do not think Labyrinths a collection that can be passed in an idle afternoon – each tiny tale is neurofryingly intense.
Labyrinths is the English version, more or less, of the original Spanish collection, Ficciones, so if you know Spanish, that’s your bag.
The Oxford Book of English Verse
One of the reasons I like poetry, especially of the more formal sort, is that it forces you to concentrate, choosing those words you need with great care, rather than rambling on in the more-or-less brownian, random-graph and Levy-Flighty directionless way that I’m doing now. In a way, a scientific paper is like a poem – it is short, and has a formal structure, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t achieve such a brief estate with elegance and grace. I took this book away with me for a few days about a year ago on an abortive writing retreat. It was the only thing that stopped me going dribblingly insane and chewing the carpet.
Henry Gee: Jacob’s Ladder: The History of the Human Genome
No book list would be complete without one or more of the lecturer’s own, so I don’t see why this should be any exception. In this tome the Gee looks at the history of the genome not as a string of bases, but as a concept, the agency that creates form from the formless. In this way, the Gee shows that science is not, as you might think, a seamless progression from ignorance into knowledge, but that at each stage the practitioners of science thought that theirs was the apotheosis of their zenith and had good reason for doing so.
One of my heroes is Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799), an advocate of the idea of preformation – that all future generations were somehow wrapped up inside the egg. People these days might assume that this idea was the product of idle theorizing and a diet of mouldy bread, but it came as a surrprise to the Gee as he researched this book that Spallanzani had nothing but contempt for armchair speculation, and supported all his ideas on the basis of rock-solid experimental procedure. Preformation died with Spallanzani, overturned not by more intelligent people, but by better techniques – the microscopy (or, at that time, the micRococoscopy) that looked ever closer at tissue and failed to find these compressed germs of the future.
The lesson for young scientists is that truth is not an absolute, but a moving target, one’s solid results becoming as evanescent as effluvia smoke not by one’s own stupidity, but by the application of new methods and new ways of looking at things.
Even Later Than That
Henry Gee (ed.) Futures from Nature
To continue this theme, I’d want my youthful charges to understand that science does not progress by ever greater refinements of things that are known, but by venturesome exploits over the edge – into the unknown. Science fiction writers have always understood this, even if many scientists have not: Futures from Nature is a collection of 100 small yet synaptically supercharged examples from the pages of Nature, each one just long enough to make you think, to jolt you from your conventional thought-ruts. Borges would have been good at this sort of thing.
Jennifer L. Rohn (ed.): The Open Laboratory 2008
A common stereotype of scientists is that they are drones who converse in equations and suchlike arcane formulae. Open Lab ‘08 is the latest of a now-traditional series in which a bunch of the year’s best science blogs are collected for one’s delectation. Yes, the blogs are all about science, to a greater or lesser degree, but the not-so-hidden subtext in the instant-reaction tomorrow’s-silicon-chip-paper world of the blogosphere – in other words, what makes each of these blogs memorable – is that they are not so much about science as the writer’s human reaction to science. A young scientist will see, from these entries, that scientists are not remote godlike entities but actual real people.
With that encouraging thought in mind I turn to the final book on my list.
Jennifer L. Rohn: Experimental Heart
This is a novel, and in many ways a conventional one. The hero overcomes adversity, rises to a challenge, solves a mystery, foils the villain and gets the girl. So far, so Harry Potter and the Columns of Sephadex. What sets this apart is that it’s all about scientists, working in a scientific environment explored with you-are-there detail. This book, more than any other I’ve seen, reveals the sights, sounds … heck, even the smells … of a hard-working rock band cell-signalling laboratory. This book is refreshingly free of any rosy illusions about the scientific life. It will either entice you to become a scientist, or put you off forever.
I’ve decided not to tag people – first, because I’m too lazy: second, because I wouldn’t want to oblige people to a lot of work and at the same time imply that others not so tagged oughtn’t rise to the challenge: third, because it’s now way past my bedtime.
So go ahead. Make my day.
Last updated:
Friday, 13 Feb
2009 - 23:48 UTC
Henry – in your specific case, I would have thought a map of public transport routes would be particularly important.
Henry, Frank Wilson wonders in his blog posting Quite a selection … “. . . if Jacob’s Ladder is accessible to the likes of me.”
she stares helplessly up the juggernaut of her own panjandrum sounds rather like (inevitably doomed) attempts to “tweak the biology backlog” (from whatever its current state is into some other, presumed more desirable, state).
PS Highly recommend the rest of Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey, in particular, might appeal to a Futures editor. But they are all fabulous, and all can be re-read many times.
Funny thing, Northanger Abbey. Given my fondness for the Gothick, I thought I might like it. I’vee tried several times but I’ve never managed to stick with it.
They never managed to make a good film or TV adaptation of it, either. It actually is my least favourite Austen – Emma and Sense and Sensibility are my favourites….or is it P&P? Or Persuasion? Or Mansfield Park….? I don’t know – but you might enjoy S&S, for the sisters aspects if none other (thinking of Gees minima and minor).
I totally agree that Jane Austen is not just for gurlies. But for the price for of the Emma paperback in the link you provided, you can get Classics, a collection of classic texts (including Sense and Sensibility) for your iPhone.
If you ever feel inclined to polish your German language skills for that paper in Paläontologische Zeitschrift, reading Kurt Tucholsky or Bertolt Brecht will teach you beautiful German.
Sense and Sensibility is my favorite Austen novel, but that might have something to do with the Ang Lee film version, and … errrr … Alan Rickman.
Following Martin’s comment, I find myself wondering why I haven’t read more Brecht than just the more popular Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Sezuan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. I read all three in both English and German a number of years ago, thoroughly enjoyed them, but failed to read any other Brecht plays.
Ahhhh, Alan Rickman in that film! (My daughters think I’m nuts when we watch it for the zillionth time and I say that for the zillionth time.) I had better stop here before we get onto the generation-gap in the appeal of Legolas vs Aragorn.
@ Maxine and Kristi: Sense and Sensibility was the only other Austen I’ve managed to read all the way through, and I enjoyed it hugely. I enjoyed the film, too, though my attention was captivated more by the young Ms Winslet than Mr Rickman, as you might imagine.
@ Martin: I’m ashamed to say that my German has now declined to the point of extinction. At high school I read and enjoyed Frisch – Biedermann und die Brandstifter but my teacher, keen to get me to read something more challenging, got me on to Zuckmeyer. I’m afraid the dialect of Der Hauptmann von Kopenick was so confusing that I gave up completely ….. !!!
@ Maxine: Why Rickman as Severus Snape is “hawt”, but Rickman as Colonel Brandon is “boring”, might be one of the great intergenerational mysteries of our time.
I have to repress the urge to mentally smack Marianne every time I re-read Sense and Sensibility.
Mmm, Alan Rickman. And Aragorn.
I was once talking to a friend about the progression of Star Wars crushes. We both started off liking Luke (the non-threatening good boy type), but moved on to the ruggedly handsome daredevil Han Solo when we got older. We concluded that the natural progression would be to find ourselves 40 years old and with a crush on Chewbacca. This has not materialised yet, but there’s still time.
It is true that Alan Rickman as Snape is extremely off-putting – that hairdo! Even worse than the one he has in Galaxy Quest. But, Kristi, I am stumped on “hawt”.
In a fortunate moment of serendipity, two people in my house began watching Lord of the Rings again last night (Sunday) – they have got as far as Rivendell (almost) in the Fellowship, so I was able to cast the odd beady eye in the Aragorn direction in between distractions from the Internet.
Marianne – every Jane Austen book has at least one character like that. Spices it up a bit;-)
Excuse me, ladies, but do you want to … er … get a room? The Cliftonville Hotel in Cromer has very good rates at this time of year.
We concluded that the natural progression would be to find ourselves 40 years old and with a crush on Chewbacca
Ah. That explains a great deal.