Sum

Although I hate the phrase, you know how various industries like to have their "rock-stars"? Those men or women who maybe work in an industry that normally doesn't receive much attention but gains some notoriety because of an individual being gregarious and engaging as well as creating brilliant work? Like a Jacques Cousteau or a Carl Sagan, for instance. Even now, you think of underwater exploring, you think of ole Jacques.

I think the field of neuroscience has that guy right now. He is David Eagleman, the author of this book. He has a book out on the brain called Incognito which is receiving some press and as far as being gregarious and engaging, I'll let you make the call:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
David Eagleman
www.colbertnation.com
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This aired after I had read Sum. Sum is a collection of....visions? They are too short to label them essays or stories. Each is about three (small) pages in length, Forty in all. Each one depicts the possibility of what the afterlife looks like. What happens at the end of life depends, in part, on how life came to be so there's some ideas as well as to how we came to exist as human beings and what it might mean.

Eagleman's imagination is mind-boggling. How many possibilities of an afterlife can you come up with? Forty? They are well thought out and described and it really makes one wonder about organized religion and religious belief systems.

Want some examples? How about the possibility that "God" is a married couple? Or that he is the size of a bacteria making us so small as to be completely insignificant to him.

Science, religion, neuroscience - all tied together in a tidy, entertaining bundle. And even though the idea of reading a book about the brain doesn't interest me, I expect I will end up reading Incognito.

Update: The answer to my "Who's that Astromon" question should be obvious now. David Eagleman, while he might be capable of posting a better OPS than some of the guys on the Astros, is a neuroscientist and not a AAA baseball player.

Stolen World

You would expect from the title of the post that this would be a review of another book on art crime. Fooled you! It's about reptile crime.

Who knew there was such a thing? Apparently in the sixties and seventies, before governments started cracking down on it, there were a number of guys who made fairly decent livings smuggling reptiles for private collections and zoos. In a way, very similar to art crime (minus the forgeries and replace zoos with museums). The big difference is that the guys who dealt with smuggling reptiles also had an obsession with reptiles themselves. Reptile smuggling isn't exactly a field you get into for the money.

Jennie Smith's book is primarily about two dealers who continue in the reptile trade into the 2000's. I didn't much care for them and the book is based mostly on interviews with them. As such it is one-sided and being as I didn't like the fellows, I didn't really care much about the outcome of the story/their lives.

I also disliked Smith's writing. It was as boring as her name. I was surprised to find that she makes a living writing. Yeah, I disliked it that much. I think in part because it reminded me of my own writing (which I really don't like). Dry, a lack of description.

I signed this book out, in part, because it had sat on our new book shelf for four months without anyone signing it out before me. I kind of felt bad for the book. Having read it, I don't feel bad anymore if it sits untouched.

Personal Days

I had a feeling before I read this that it would be similar to Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End. Life working in an office. Funny stories a la something you might see in a Dilbert comic or the movie Office Space (I've never seen the show The Office but I imagine it might be similar). The book started that way. Some witty situations, most of them written in such brief segments I at one point thought that perhaps this novel could be serialized on Twitter as a series of Tweets.

But then it stopped.

There are layoffs and things get weird and the text reads more like your typical novel. Stuff stops being funny or interesting and the last half of the book was a chore to read.

The only other thing of note is the attempt to have the story told in the third person plural. The narrator is "we", a group of co-workers. But so many of the individuals encompassed by the collective are mentioned individually, it really didn't seem like there was much reason for having the narrator be plural rather than singular other than as a forced literary device.

I could recommend the book for its first half, but to be honest, after the passing of a few weeks, I hardly remember enough of it to do so. It's a pretty forgettable book.

A Barn in New England

In my review of Andorra I mentioned that there is another book I turn to when I am feeling the effects of summer and wanting to be somewhere else. That book is Joseph Monninger's A Barn in New England.

Monninger is a professor who decides to move with his girlfriend, Wendy, and her son, Pie, to a barn in Warren, New Hampshire. The word barn means different things to different people. I refer to the building behind my house where I work out as a barn even though it is only about sixteen feet square and a couple of floors high. It's not a barn where I'm going to keep cattle. It is a wooden building with beams that resembles, well, a barn, albeit a small one.

Similarly, Monninger's barn is a bit hard to picture as a barn because of its enormity. It once housed animals so you know it is pretty big. The only thing about this book I don't like is that there are no pictures of the barn. You have to imagine it. Or be a decent researcher. From things mentioned in the book, I tracked down an old postcard that had a picture of the barn. Here it is:



That's the barn on the left. Mammoth, huh? It is four stories high. So the book is about their move to the barn, their first year in it, the town and townfolk, the renovations they make to the barn, and the lives of a couple in love/family. I love it. It's one of my favorite books of all time.

Monninger somehow creates a sense of idyllic realism. Living in a place like that isn't easy. Insulating, heating, restoring rotted wood including support beams. It takes effort and money. It's not easy and Monninger doesn't pretend it is. Yet the writing is never whiny, never defeatist. The trio are, if anything, resilient. They plug away and turn what was once a barn into a home.

Monninger's writing is exquisite with great details. And always just the right ones in the right amount. I always find it difficult (I have read this several times) not to feel inspired by reading this. A search for home has always been a struggle for me and while where I live now is as close as I have been, that summer heat still makes me want to move further north.

But beyond the building, the love Monninger feels for Wendy and Pie is also inspirational. A building isn't really a home without people and there is a lot of love in this story without it becoming sappy.

Whether or not I become Monninger's neighbor remains to be seen. In the long run, I have a feeling I'll likely stop short of New England, say, oh, I don't know, somewhere in rural New York. Until then, I'll keep plugging away at my own old house and barn and be inspired by Monninger.

Who's that Astromon?

One of these players was not in the Astros starting lineup last night. Do you know who it was?

Jose Altuve
Brian Bogusevic
Carlos Corporan
Luis Durango
David Eagleman

Is it the guy whose last name ends in A,B,C,D or E?

Born to Run

Amidst all my other activities, I continue to try and work out, lose weight and get in shape. One of the things I have been trying to do is run more. The idea of lugging my carcass around for any distance is a little concerning because of the amount of force being put on my joints, particularly my knees. How to run without putting strain on my knees?

After looking around a bit, I decided I'd give barefoot running a shot. There are some folks out there who think that the footwear that Nike et al provide us actually do more harm than good - that we didn't have to worry about overpronation and crap like that until the shoe companies started making shoes for it. The idea is that running is natural and our foot is meant to move a given way (more ball of the foot oriented) and less the way shoes force us to (heel to toe). So I gave it a shot. And I found that running barefoot is a lot less jarring.

When I do run, I run on pavement and so the recent heat tsunami has made me a little too toasty for getting out and running barefoot. Nonetheless, I was pretty jazzed to find that I might be able to get back into running (I ran track and cross country in high school and was a biathlete in college. Of course that was tens of years and pounds ago).

In my excitement, one of my co-workers suggested that I read the book Born to Run. It was a very popular book in this area about a year or two ago and I knew that the fleet of women runners that work out at the local Y had all read it (it may have been a book club book). Another co-worker overheard our conversation and she recommended it. Our copy was out so I drove to a nearby library and grabbed their copy. The librarian there told me that she wasn't a runner, wasn't interested in running, and she loved it. I don't think it could have come any more recommended.

All the recommendations were right. I loved it.

Right off the bat I knew I would I enjoy it. The author, Christopher McDougall, is my size, lives in rural, Amish Pennsylvania and the book opens with him trying to get himself into shape by running. Just like me! When he suffers an injury while running, he begins to explore alternatives. McDougall discovers a reclusive tribe of Indians in Mexico called the Taramuhara who are considered by many to be the best long-distance runners in the world. He begins to research them and finds that not only are they great runners, they love running, tend to be injury free, run in the barest of footwear and have a mostly vegetarian diet.

Along the way, McDougall encounters a bunch of interesting folk, ranging from drug dealers to ultra-marathoners to an American who picked up and moved to Mexico to live near the Taramuhara. In the end, a race is arranged between the Taramuhara and some of the top ultra-marathoners in the world with McDougall, big carcass and all, joining them and completing it.

It's a great book and a great story. Like the one librarian said, even if you aren't interested in running, it is fascinating and entertaining. If you are interested in running, it will help you look at and question some of the beliefs you may have held to be true.

The Way Through Doors

This was an interesting piece of meta-fiction. The main character, Selah Morse, is a struggling pamphleteer who is hired by his uncle to work in some sort of odd secret governmental organization. One day he is out in the street walking and a beautiful woman races out of a building into a street where she is struck by a taxicab. Morse accompanies her to the hospital where he claims to be the woman's boyfriend. The woman has amnesia and cannot remember anything of her life. Morse takes her back to his place and begins to try and recreate her memories by telling her a story.

As his story progresses, characters within his story begin telling stories of their own and then characters in those stories tell their own stories. Some of those stories reference people from the previous stories but not always in ways that were expected. One story, for example, is an almost identical recreation of the first pages of the novel but with some minor twists. Along the way there are a number of interesting characters, the most prevalent being a Coney Island boardwalk mindreader who is wrong more often than he is right.

All in all, I liked it. There didn't seem to be much of a point to it all outside of the oddball style but it was fun. The author barely constrains himself when it comes to realism but although it is imaginative, it is not outlandishly so. I could see a re-read being beneficial to try and catch more details and such and the book is short enough to do so. Worth checking out if you want something different.