alaina browne lives here

reading list

And I'm back! I've been battling the worst cold ever since the day after Christmas, and just starting to feel human again. Now that I have a good bit of free time on my hands, I've decided to catch up on all the fun reading that I neglected last year due to academic reading/studying fatigue. Here's a list of what I've got:

Just purchased:
Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain and How it Changed the World by Carl Zimmer
The Tangled Wing by Melvin Konner
Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Started, but not finished:
Nature via Nurture by Matt Ridley
The Best American Science Writing 2003, edited by Oliver Sacks
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (finished 1/13)
Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph LeDoux
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
Gentle Bridges : Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind by Francisco J. Varela
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (unlike the rest of the books in the "not finished" category, I've had a hard time getting into this one)

Not yet cracked:
Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, edited by Boris Fishman
Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio

So if you'll excuse me, I have some reading to do.

good books should be shared

Go borrow some of my books at Booklend.net! (Thanks Mark!)

Marathon man

A longish profile of Haruki Marukami at the Guardian, Haruki Marukami: Marathon man (via Caterina):

But then Murakami undertakes most things with a certain intensity. His intimate knowledge of music and food gives him material to colour his fiction; the exercise provides the fuel for his work. "I've been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse," he says, with a mildly rueful air. "Getting older, getting worse. It's natural. I used to run a full marathon in three hours and 25 or 26 minutes. Not any more. I ran the Boston marathon last weekend and it took four hours, flat." Whether he finishes fifth or a 1,005th in such an event is not a matter of concern. "I'm not competitive in that sense. I'm a writer, not a professional runner. It's fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration."

review of Nature via Nurture

The Guardian has a short review of Matt Ridley's new book, Nature via Nurture:

'The more you discover genes that influence behaviour, the more you find that they work through nurture, and the more you find that animals learn, the more you discover that learning works though genes,' says Ridley. It is bravura stuff, particularly as Ridley is known as a fairly committed adherent to the cause of inherited influences. Nevertheless, he has produced a balanced, entertaining gallop through the world of environmental influences and genetic impulses.

Songbook

From McSweeney's:

HORNBY FOR THE HOLIDAYS!

This holiday season, McSweeney's is excited to release Songbook — a brand-new collection of essays by Nick Hornby on 31 of his favorite songs and songwriters. This hardcover book has 4-color illustrations throughout and comes complete with a compilation CD filled with 11 songs discussed in the book. If you like Nick Hornby, and you like music, and you like artwork by Marcel Dzama, then this is just the thing for you and your loved ones.

How not to get a PhD

Extract from Estelle M. Phillips' and Derek S. Pugh's How to get a PhD outlining common points of failure, including a handy action summary:

Be aware of the seven ways of not getting a PhD:
· not wanting a PhD; · overestimating what is required; · underestimating what is required; · having a supervisor who does not know what is required; · losing contact with your supervisor; · not having a 'thesis' (i.e. position, argument) to maintain; · taking a new job before completing.

Work to understand the implications of these traps fully in your own situation and determine not to succumb to them.

Re-establish your determination regularly when blandishments to stray from your programme of work recur.

I just felt like I became a god.

From a long interview with Haruki Murakami (via bookslut):

LM: I think just about all of your novels are in first person. Have you ever thought about not writing in first person?

HM: Yes, for a short time I tried to write in the third person, but it didn't work out.

LM: What's the problem? Is it not as interesting? Is it the voice?

HM: When I tried to use third person, I just felt like I became a god. But I don't want to be a god. I don't know everything. I can't write everything. I'm just myself. I would write something just as myself. I don't mean that I really am the protagonist but that I can envision what my protagonist sees and experiences. Writing lets me enter my own subconscious; that's the process I use to tell my stories. It's the most exciting thing I've ever done. For me telling a good story is like what happens when I walk down the street. I love the street and so when I'm walking I'm watching everything, hearing and smelling everything. When you do this, the world changes--you're experiencing everything in a new way. The light and the sounds and your emotions. That's the way writing is for me. I'm forty-six and married, but when I'm writing I can become twenty-five and unmarried. I can walk around in somebody else's shoes--and feel those shoes. Writing becomes your second life. That's good.

slim, elegant, somewhat dark

Paul Auster profile at the Guardian:

Paul Auster is a slim, elegant, somewhat dark man who writes slim, elegant, somewhat dark fiction in a slim, elegant, somewhat dark house. The one thing that doesn't suit him is his name. "He is the opposite of austere," says McCrum. "Because of his work, people expect him to be too cerebral, too difficult. But he's very thoughtful and warm, and actually quite funny, which always surprises people." The novelist Peter Carey, who has been friends with Auster since the former's move to New York a decade ago, says: "Paul is an extraordinarily calm person, and this, I think, comes very much across in his writing."

translating Murakami

Email roundtable on translating Haruki Marakami (You really should go read it in its entirety):

Philip Gabriel: One moment that stood out to me most recently was when I was working on SPUTNIK SWEETHEART: In chapter five there was a short quote from Pushkin's poem Eugene Onegin. In cases like this--quotes in Japanese from other languages--of course you need to find the original language, and with languages other than English, I try to locate a reputable, existing translation. I hadn't realized Eugene Onegin was a book-length poem, and visualized myself sitting there for hours trying to locate these lines in the English version. Fortunately, the lines came early in the poem. What was interesting was that I located four different versions of the poem, from which I copied out these translations of the lines:

After the Quake

Murakami's After the Quake - review and excerpt at NYTimes.