west of the moon

so, about those books.

So, as promised, what I thought about some of the books on the big 2007 list.  I want to start with a little disclaimer, though--these aren't really book reviews proper.  I think a good book review should probably have some critical infrastructure, and should certainly have more thought put into it.  This book list was the leisure-reading list.  I didn't include the books I read for course prep, or for academic use.  When I read something for academic purposes, I think about it differently, with a whole critical infrastructure; I don't generally bring all that mental machinery to bear on books that I'm reading just for pleasure.  So I'm thinking of this more as my reader reactions to the books, not as actual reviews.  (If that distinction even makes sense outside of my head.)

• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.  I loved everything about this book, and it's one of the rare books in my life that I wish I could read again for the first time.  It was beautiful, and weird, and surprising, and I didn't want it to ever end.
• Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai.  I also loved everything about this one--it's one of the best books I've ever read, although I felt constantly off-balance while I was reading it.  It only took me a page or two to figure out that it has nothing at all to do with that Tom Cruise movie of the same name, thankfully.  It took me much longer to figure out what it -was- about, but that was okay. 
• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green.  So, Jenn said in the comments on the earlier post that she has trouble sorting out her reaction to The Last Samurai from her reaction to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, because she read them at around the same time.  I read The Curious Incident a couple of years ago, right after I read The Speed of Dark; it was an unplanned sequence, and an unfortunate one, because both books feature autistic narrators, and The Speed of Dark was so goddamned brilliant that The Curious Incident couldn't help but look sad and gimmicky in comparison.  And then when Black Swan Green came out, I saw people comparing it to The Curious Incident, and as a result I had no interest at all in reading it.  But everyone kept saying how good it was, and I had loved Cloud Atlas so much, so I finally gave it a try, and I liked it quite a bit.  It didn't have that light shimmery kind of brilliance that Cloud Atlas had, but it was really good, entertaining and weird and smart.
  
• Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.  I confess, I only read this because I saw the movie.  I like Jon Krakauer quite a bit--Under the Banner of Heaven is a fabulous book, and one that I couldn't stop talking about for weeks after I read it--but the book just didn't sound that interesting.  I only saw the movie because I was in the mood for a movie and it was playing at a convenient time, and I liked the movie, I think.  I think.  I feel a little bit like the movie I saw was not the same one Sean Penn thought he was making, like I was seeing something in it that wasn't quite there, or wasn't intended to be there.  Mostly, though, I came out of the movie desperately curious to know how Jon Krakauer had put the story together, and I was hoping that the book would give me that story.  It didn't, but it was a good read anyway. 
• Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone.  These were fabulous.  I have no idea how to talk about them--they're so different from most of the things I read.  For that matter, they're so different from each other!  But such good books.  (I'm not thrilled with the change in Maria from the first to the second book, but I'm hoping that when I finally get a copy of the third in the trilogy, she'll make more sense.  She's only a cameo in the second book, after all.)  But so strange.  Davies has this talent for weaving together a string of weird coincidences that, when they finally come together, look less like gimmicky coincidence and more like the pieces of some larger puzzle falling naturally into place.
• Allegra Goodman, Intuition.  This was completely a comedy of manners in the academic world--no, wait, when I write that sentence it sounds like Jane Smiley's Moo or something, and this book is nothing like that one.  And I actually had a little trouble while reading it, because my brain kept trying to map it more directly onto the David Baltimore / Thereza Imanishi-Kari incident.  (It maps pretty directly on its own, there's no need to force an even closer correspondence.  But somehow I kept trying.)  But the characters all made sense, and all seemed like people I know--not that anyone in the book reminded me of anyone particular, just that each one of them felt a little familiar.  Slightly melodramatic, but in an entertaining and fairly realistic way.
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.  True story: when I graduated from college, I had two weeks before I had to start at my new job, and I told myself that I would use part of that time to read some huge epic classic that I'd previously neglected.  I settled on Anna Karenina, checked it out of the library, and over a period of a few days I read nearly a third of the book and just adored it. But then I put it down for a few days, and when I went back, I couldn't remember who anyone was or how they were related to each other, and I was too demoralized to start over.  I finally got around to trying again, and I still adored it.  The big secret about this book is that it's a soap opera dressed up as high art.
• James Halperin, The First Immortal.  This book was absolutely horrible--it's practically a caricature of itself, and just kept getting stupider and more awful.  I don't think I finished it, actually--I gave up somewhere around the time when Our Hero, having attained immortality, adopts the eight-year-old clone of his dead wife, who he raises expecting that she'll be his new wife once she's, y'know, past puberty.  One hopes. 

More later, but that's a start.

constructive criticism.

I've had a string of days full of tiny irritations--each little thing is insignificant on its own, but as they accumulate I start to feel like I'm being nibbled to death by cats.  I've locked myself out of my campus office five times in two days, locked myself out of the house once, and even managed to lock myself out of my locker at the gym.  A lot of the campus-office lockouts happened because I had to move offices--it's much easier to forget your keys when your hands are full of books, papers, and miscellaneous office accoutrement like tea canisters and little plastic airplanes.  Moving offices is itself slightly irritating, because it's a very physical reminder of my impermanence in this department, and on top of that, the new office is much further from the water cooler and the copy room.  (Do you see what I meant when I said these were tiny insignificant irritations?)  One of the books on order for my spring semester class hasn't come in yet, which means I can't check page numbers for assigning reading on my syllabus, and the library's only copy has gone missing, which means that I -still- can't check page numbers -and- we probably won't have a copy of the book on course reserve for students who can't afford to buy their own copy. 

Tiny, minor, absolutely petty things.   For me, the best way to wipe out this state of mounting irrational irritation (somewhere inbetween the mood Jed calls "the mullygrubs" and Holly Golightly called "the mean reds") is to get thoroughly involved in some kind of work, so I've thrown myself head-first into next semester's course prep, even though we're almost two weeks away from the first day of class.  I have a course reader, I have a syllabus (although still tragically lacking specific assignments from the missing book), I have the first lecture done and good outlines for the next few. 

Part of my preparation for the new semester involves reading course evaluations.  At the end of each course, our students are asked to fill out evaluation forms for the instructors.  The forms are anonymous, and instructors aren't allowed to look at them until after final grades have been submitted.  It's never been clear to me whether course evals actually mean anything.  People applying for jobs will use selected quotes from the evals as "demonstrations of teaching excellence", and I hear rumors that they may be involved in tenure review, but I don't know if they're used for anything else.  From what I can tell, a lot of faculty members never even look at their course evals.  I like to check mine over, though, to see if there are any general trends in my teaching I need to pay attention to. 

As I'm writing this, it's occurring to me that the best advice for reading course evaluations is the same as the best advice for dealing with manuscript critiques from a writing workshop.  You'll get some completely contradictory responses to the exact same material, and you can't take any one response too seriously or try to change everything that people suggest changing.  That said, if almost everyone says that you need to change one particular thing, you should think about changing it.  You may not end up making the change, but you should at least think about it.

With all of the caveats in mind, I do take my course evaluations very seriously.  After my first semester teaching, a lot of people said that they found the material interesting but didn't always see what the point was.  The next semester, I did more signposting ("here is the thing I am about to say, here is why it is important") and made more frequent (and more explicit) connections between the specific topics and the overall course themes or concepts.  At times it started to feel ridiculous, like I was telling them the same things over and over again, but the feedback the next time around was extremely positive, and many students said that all that signposting and connection-drawing had really helped them understand the material better.  All of my students say that I talk too fast, and I'm actively working on that, but apparently with only minimal success.   I've even taken some of those sharp stinging critcisms to heart--one of last fall's evaluations said "she keeps saying that things are 'interesting' when they aren't really."  Since then, I try to not refer to things as "interesting", because that's subjective.  As the authority in the classroom, I can say that something is "relevant" or "significant" or "meaningful" or "important", but "interesting" varies from person to person.  (To be briefly immodest: every semester, I get a few evaluations that say things like "I took this class because I needed to fill a requirement, and I've never liked history classes before, but Professor Groppi made it really interesting!"  I hope those students realize how incredibly valuable that kind of thing is to a teacher, not because it's useful per se, but because that's the kind of comment that gets you through the bad days.) 

The one thing that consistently jumps out at me from my course evaluations, though, is how visual these students are, at least in terms of their expectations.  I use PowerPoint presentations in my lectures, but fairly minimally.  Whenever I mention a specific person, I try to have a picture of that person.  Whenever I talk about geography, I try to have a map.  I use diagrams to illustrate some key concepts (important in teaching the early history of science), I use pictures of scientific apparatus, and (I'll confess) sometimes I just use pictures for visual distraction or amusement value.  My presentations are mostly images, though, not "key concepts" or bullet points or outlines.  Every semester, the student feedback about the visuals hits the same two points:  they want more pictures, and they want bullet-points and outlines.  (This semester, someone even suggested that I use embedded video clips, to liven things up a little.) 

This is one area where I feel like I'm swimming against a current.  I understand that the bullet-point PowerPoint is practically an industry standard at this point, but I don't like it.  As a visual display, I don't think it's a good way to communicate information, but more importantly, I think it's bad pedagogy.  It short-circuits some of the information processing that the students need to be doing on their own.  I don't want them going down some list of key ideas and ticking them off as I recite them--I want them to be fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, seeing the categories and connections and contexts.  The bullet-point teaching style always looks to me like a slide backwards towards rote learning and recitation, and that's not what we should be doing, certainly not at the college level, and certainly not at a school like Berkeley, where I can reasonably assume that my students have an educational background that's prepared them to do this kind of work.

You know, I'm too young to be a cranky old woman. The good news for my students is that this semester's class ("History of Science in the United States") covers a modern-enough time period that I'll have a lot more pictures available to me than I have in past semesters.  (Y'all have no -idea- how hard it is to find good illustrations of people, places, and equipment when you're dealing with, like, ancient Mesopotamia or the Kingdom of Kush.  Even in slightly more modern times, all of my portraits of Indian and Islamic mathematicians and astronomers last semester came off of postage stamps.) 

Ishi Courtyard.

Ishi Courtyard.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi

Trees in the rain.

Trees in the rain.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi

bibliophile.

I have just been informed that the Bay Area is either having or about to have a Massive Winter Rainstorm of Epic Proportions.  (I can hear it raining outside, so we may already be in the midst of it, but it doesn't sound like it's raining all that hard yet?  I don't know.)  I don't mean to diminish the importance of the Massive Winter Rainstorm, if only because I live in a part of the country where people build their houses on the sides of steep hills, and bad rainstorms can wash those houses right off.  In my life, though, the rain mostly only means that the mail in my mailbox gets wet and I have to juggle my umbrella and my coffee when I walk to my campus office. 

I know that we're a few days into 2008, but I have one last 2007 wrap-up to do, and that's a book list.  2007 was, among other things, the year that I started reading again.  I've always been a compulsive reader, but I got so worn down at the end of the dissertation process that I wasn't able to process anything more complicated than trashy romance novels and well-worn half-memorized favorites.  I stopped reading new books entirely, it seemed like, and that felt wrong.  About a year and a half ago, I emailed a lot of my friends and asked them for reading suggestions, old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, genre, literary, whatever.  Tell me the names of some books you like, and I'll try to read them, I said. 

And that's what I've been doing.  I've been reading a lot of books that I hadn't read before, and it's such a good thing for me.  I haven't liked all of them, but I've liked most of them, and I've loved a few.  I tried to reconstruct the list of books I've read in the last year or so, and it's hard, because I don't really keep lists or records.  The list that follows is a reconstruction based on a few sketchy documentary sources and a quick scan of the bookshelves.  (I've gotten most of these from either BookMooch or the library, so it's been a pretty cost-effective reading surge.)  Almost every book on this list I've meant to blog about, even just a brief reaction, and kept not getting around to.  I may still try and do that, at least brief reactions, but for now I'm just going to list them.  If anyone's particularly curious about what I thought of any of these, though, let me know, and I'll try to get to those first.

• Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai.
• Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books. (I may not have read all of them, but I think I got most of them.)
• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.
• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green.
• Robertson Davies, Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone.  (still trying to track down a copy of The Lyre of Orpheus, the third book in the trilogy.)
• John McPhee, Annals of the Former World.  I don't think I've actually finished this yet, though.  It's just so hard to carry around.
• John McPhee Coming Into the Country. 
• Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.  Particularly interesting read as a set with Coming Into the Country.
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
• Julie Phillips's Tiptree biography.
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep.
• Kate Chopin, "Pale Horse Pale Rider" and "The Awakening"
• Mary McCarthy, The Group.
• Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave and a few of the sequels
• Joan Vinge, Snow Queen (and World's End, and Summer Queen, which I haven't finished yet)
• Naomi Novik's Temeraire books.
• All of Kate Wilhelm's Barbara Holloway books (except I think the most recent one, which I haven't found a copy of yet)
• Michael Chabon, Summerland.
• Walter Mosely, Devil in a Blue Dress
• Bill Buford, Heat
• Janet Kagan, Uhura's Song
• Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon
• Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors and Dry, A Memoir
• James Halperin, The First Immortal
• Stephen Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park
• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
• David Halberstam, The Teammates
• Ben Mezrich, Bringing Down the House
• Leon Lederman, The God Particle
• Allegra Goodman, Intuition
• Jane Smiley, Duplicate Keys
• Alexandra Ripley, On Leaving Charleston
• Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance
• Willo Davis Roberts, The Girl with the Silver Eyes
• Caleb Carr, The Alienist
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
• Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
• Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy
• Kate Wilhelm, Juniper Time
• Charles Stross, The Clan Corporate
• David Halberstam, The Summer of '49
• J.D.Robb, Innocent in Death
• Tess Gerristen, Bloodstream
• Nora Roberts, Angel's Fall
• John Scalzi, Old Man's War
• John Scalzi, The Ghost Brigades
• Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy

I may have forgotten a couple, but I did resist the urge to not list the books that I think will make me look less smart.  There's no shame in reading mass-market thrillers and romance novels.  Also, some of these are books I've read  before, but long enough ago that I didn't really remember them that well.

And that's 2007 in books.

new year's flower.

pink flower.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi