Last week I dreamt of two blog posts, hoping that I would have the energy to say something, anything. Perhaps that hope was naively predicated on the idea that I would have something to say. As yet, I still don't know if there is nothing there, nothing worth saying, or if perhaps what wants to be said wanders a tad too close to vulnerable territory. No extra posts then, and it is best to stick with a format, in this case the bookish format.
So what did I read in July? Obviously, if you look at the list below, I read a lot, over 20 books. I was able to do little else. My body was fighting its own battles, primarily telling my ego to sit still and be quiet. I did have study plans, but even those became too ambitious. There were times when I read with a plan, and times I just floundered about. Now I look at it all and see a tangled mess that I don't know how to parse. I am not certain that there is thread here, just the random entertainments of a person in all her humanity searching, sometimes hiding....
What I have decided, however, having spent far more time than I had hoped attempting to sort this out, is that 21 books is too many. I cannot write coherently about 20 books in one post. No one wants to read about 20 books. It is likely that no one wants to read about 10 either, and equally likely that coherence will be marginal at best. Nonetheless, I am breaking my July book review into two. First up will be those books colored green and blue in the list below, which are all non-fiction. The remainder of the list, primarily fiction, but not entirely so, will appear in the second post, either later this week or early next week.
68. Thomas Seyfried, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease.
69.Eric Kossoff, Ketogenci Diets: Treatment for Epilepsy and Other Disordors.
70. Lee A Reich, Uncommon Fruits Worth of Attention.
71. Leofranc Halford-Stevens, A Short History of Time.
72. Margery Allingham, Look to the Lady.
73. Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.
74. Robert A. Weinberg, One Renegade Cell: How Cancer Begins.
75. C. S. Wilkins, Bandera Bound Book 2.
76. James Hillman, Healing Fiction.
77. Herbert M. Shelton, The Science and Fine Art of Fasting.
78. Peggy Knickerbocker, Love Later On
79. Arundhati Roy, Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction.
80. KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning.
81. Neil McKinney, Naturopathic Oncology.
82. Joanne Fluke, A Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder.
83. Scott Zesch, The Captured.
84. Herman Pontzer, Burn.
85. Toni Dwiggins, Quicksilver.
86. Karin Slaughter, False Witness.
87. Kristen Hannah, Firefly Lane.
88. Ann Cleeves, The Crow Trap.
89. Amy Greene, Long Man.
Let's start with the more ambitious reading. As had mentioned back in May, I had accumulated a stack of books related to cancer both directly and indirectly, and had a rough plan for getting them all read. That plan has remained rough, but I have made progress. I started with Thomas Seyfried's book, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, which I found both challenging, fun, and fascinating. In one sense, it would have made more sense to read Robert A. Weinberg's The Biology of Cancer first, as that would have given me a broad introduction to the currently dominant view of cancer development and treatment. But Seyfried addressed much of Weinberg's text in his own book, and there were many chapters where I was simultaneously reading Weinberg and Sefried side-by-side. My edition of Weinberg is newer than the one Seyfried referenced, and some ideas have changed over time, which is probably good. It seems to me that these two views of cancer cannot exist separately, although at the moment they seem to. I am hoping that changes. Yes cancer is caused by a change in the DNA of cells, but it is also quite obvious that these changes affect and are affected by metabolic changes to the ways that cells operate and grow. There is much yet to discover. And although our knowledge of cancer has grown by leaps and bounds, the effectiveness of this knowledge remains questionable; treatment lags far behind. Weinberg himself admits that as much as we have learned about cancer, and as fascinating as cancer DNA is to the researcher, himself included, cancer DNA research is unlikely to yield a cure. That admission alone seems to be a powerful statement, and one that motivates me to power on. I am still reading Weinberg. I went back and started at the beginning after finishing Seyfried, and got about a third of the way through the book before my body told me that even intellectual pursuits were pushing the bounds of my available energy. I just picked the book up again recently, and hope to finish it this month, along with a huge stack of research papers, which will not be reviewed here, but the volume of which seems to keep growing.
Other books in this category would include Eric Kossoff's Ketogenic Diets and Herbert M. Shelton's The Science and Fine Art of Fasting, both of which I picked up after recommendations from Seyfried who is very interested in metabolism and the role diet plays in cancer development and recurrence. Both are informative and thought-provoking although of little interest to the general reader. The book by Shelton is not actually the one Seyfried recommended, but is the book I could get my hands on. Shelton's book, a classically early 20th century text, was frustrating to me as he referred to many experiments and data, but unlike modern texts, was not very good at actually providing references. At least I can say that is one less rabbit hole for me to fall into.
Robert Weinberg's One Renegade Cell is, I suppose, considered a classic in the popular science vein, an attempt to explain cancer for the non-science audience. It is actually quite good, and quite readable, but now also somewhat out of date. It is clearly written, does not fall into either pandering or fear-mongering, and I found it an easy enough read that offered little new to say. I will keep it though. I suppose it should have been the first book I read. Neil McKinney's Naturopathic Oncology, has proven to be an invaluable reference work (along with Seyfried) and I am glad to have read it as well as have it on hand when both my Integrative medicine physician and my oncologists make treatment recommendations. Both books focus on the research to date (at the time of writing) and both point to solid resources for further exploration.
Lastly, Herman Pontzer's Burn fits only tenuously into this category. Pontzer is simultaneously fascinating and maddening; the book could have used a good editor. When he is talking about his own research about human evolution, and the role metabolism and diet play in evolution, he is fascinating. The book is useful for this information alone because it tends to turn a lot of stories we tell ourselves about diet and metabolism on their heads. But he gets into trouble because he repeatedly ignores research in related fields of nutrition and nutritional epidemiology, and impugns the research of others without going further into his own epistemology. He. tells many stories and anecdotes that seem to serve no purpose, and often come to no conclusion. He falls into the same traps he accuses others of, the same traps we all fall into, the traps of cognitive dissonance, and he explains them away repeatedly by stating "It's complex", using complexity as an excuse rather than as an opportunity for further exploration. And yet, I have no real regrets with reading the book even though I am not yet sure where the information I gleaned will take me, or any of us.
The other nonfiction books I read are a rather mixed lot although there was intention behind my choice of reading material, at least at the time the choice was made..
Lee Reich's Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention was, in its own way, perfect fantasy reading for a time when I cannot work in the garden, and realize that my time and priorities for gardening may have been permanently changed over the course of the last year. I have had the book for years, and have certainly perused sections of it over those years, even if I have only read it from cover to cover once or twice. This time was particularly poignant because I realized the fruits I miss and really wish to grow, namely currants in all their forms, are not suited to my current climate. Truly fantasy reading to soothe the soul of one of my fantasy selves.
Leofranc Halford-Stevens' book A Short History of Time cropped up as I was shifting books on one of the shelves to make room for some of the books listed above. It is not really a discussion of the nature of time itself but a history of the myriad ways humans have measured and marked the passage and existence of time. I picked it up to reread on a whim and it was interesting enough -- fascinating, even, in sections -- and probably a good reference if one needs to be reminded that the way we look at time today in Western culture is neither preordained or universally accepted. I have put the book back on the shelf although I am not particularly inclined to read it again. Its status may change.
James Hillman and KC Davis are, I suppose on opposite ends of the psychological repertoire, or at least these books are. Davis's How to Keep House While Drowning is a very short, easily read self-help book about, yes, housekeeping. But it is also about more than that; it is about letting go of shame, and about new ways of thinking about taking care of oneself and, with oneself, one's environment. I think Davis has a good way of looking at the way our brains judge our actions, and in finding ways to help us accept these quirks without adding unnecessary judgement. James Hillman's book, Healing Fiction, is a much deeper and more serious tome, but in some ways it plays well with Davis' book, even though they were not intentionally read together. The latter book is really a book for psychologists and is not particularly geared to the general reader. And yet I always find Hillman fascinating; his books allow me to think about things I think I know in different ways, and that is enlightening. I suppose what I like about the book might or might not be what a professional psychoanalyst might find useful. I love the way Hillman looks at the essential question of "what does the soul want" and then explores the fictions we devise to both clarify and occasionally obfuscate these yearnings. I love the often subtle layering of his text; the examination of Freud, Jung, and Adler; but also the sense of exploration and deft thread of ideas that Hillman weaves in and out, never really shrinking the complexity of human development but at the same time not open-ended. Hillman explores the necessity of story in our lives while simultaneously questioning both the constraints and the possibilities, both of our stories themselves and the way we tell them, our stories impose on our understanding of our lives. This is a book I could read again and again, and perhaps see and understand in new ways with each reading.
The other two non-fiction books came to be on my list due, at least in part, to their relationships to fiction. Scott Zesch's book, Captured, is about the real-life stories of children on the Texas frontier who were captured by Indians. I read it because I had recently reread Paulette Jiles' novel News of the World. I found it fascinating, both in its stories of a Texas long gone but with which I am still partly familiar, and with its deep exploration of the two cultures and their deep misunderstandings and misrepresentations of each other. Well, this hasn't changed in all of human history, but it is interesting to see how this clash of culture can play out in the lives of children and of families. Zesch started writing this book to explore his own family history; I believe the story he tells is important to our history, and the history of the development of this country, to what makes us who we are.
Arundhati Roy's book, Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction, was purchased last August after I heard Roy speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. I started to read it at that time, then put it aside. Apparently Roy has written much about politics and her beloved India and Pakistan, has written more non-fiction than fiction. But I what I found most fascinating about this book is the way Roy writes about language, about language and culture, the way it shapes us, but also the way it used against us, to mold us in certain ways, mostly political, and in what is lost and what is gained in that process. The political and the practical are not that separate in our lives, and one cannot really separate the novelist from the writer of political essays. We want to separate our lives into convenient little rooms, each with defined doors between them, doors that can be opened or shut at will. Roy explores the ways this is really not possible, the ways story and language and politics all interweave to make us who we are. Reading this book, I now think I need to reread both The God of Small Things, and especially The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which I think I underestimated.
There you have it, the first half (more or less) of my July reading. The rest will follow. At least I have material for at least one more blog post. There is hope that thought and word will once again meet and that act of blogging will once again find its own groove.
