magpie's shiny things

Tony Hillerman writes a pre­dictably sol­id mys­tery. With a world that lives and breathes and is very dif­fer­ent from the green, moist Pacific Northwest that I con­sid­er home. A month or so ago I start­ed at the begin­ning of the Navajo series with The Blessing Way and am now up to Coyote Waits a lit­tle more than half way through. These are my choco­late chip cook­ies of the moment. I read an hour or so in the evening. (Sadly these are not avail­able as audiobooks.) 

Speaking of audio­books. Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age is accom­pa­ny­ing me and the dog on our morn­ing walks. Not my favorite Stephenson. It moves too slow­ly. Which is an odd thing to say about a Stephenson, con­sid­er­ing that he is the mas­ter of the extend­ed expos­i­to­ry aside. But here we’re not talk­ing about asides we’re talk­ing about pieces of the nar­ra­tive that bog along with­out much hap­pen­ing. I don’t feel much for the lit­tle girl Nell which isn’t help­ing the sto­ry hold my atten­tion. I find Miranda and the oth­er adults much more inter­est­ing. Nonetheless a fine bit of a sto­ry to accom­pa­ny me on the dai­ly ram­ble as the weath­er grows increas­ing­ly crisp (or late­ly foggy.)

Speaking of dogs. I’ve just fin­ished Cat Warren’s What the Dog Knows. All of the scent train­ing and nose­work peo­ple I know are read­ing this right now.
This is a clear-eyed look into the world of work­ing dogs. Not sugar-coated or fil­tered through a need to make the dog, Solo, a hero. Warren is hon­est about the some­times dif­fi­cult nature of the high­ly dri­ven work­ing dogs and about the pos­si­bil­i­ties, lim­i­ta­tions and unknowns of the use of scent detec­tion dogs. Her account of their ear­ly train­ing ses­sions will make any­one who is hon­est enough to remem­ber their first cou­ple of ses­sions with any sort of scent­ing dog wince in empa­thy. (I still strug­gle to keep my damned hands from fidgeting.)
There are sto­ries of both their suc­cess­es and fail­ures. Solidly aca­d­e­m­ic — which may make you a lit­tle crazy as she fact checks some of the most cher­ished myths about dogs’ noses and their abil­i­ty to dis­crim­i­nate scents. But you’ll also learn about dogs’ roles in the death rites of ancient civ­i­liza­tions, an attempt to train vul­tures to search for cadav­ers, and some odd moments from the his­to­ry of mil­i­tary dogs. There are exten­sive notes at the end of the book if you want to dig into the back ground infor­ma­tion for yourself. 

Ordinary Genius Kim Addonizio who is best known per­haps for her poem What do Women Want. This book is a guide to mak­ing poet­ry. So what? There are dozens of books about mak­ing poet­ry, why should you read this book rather than one of the oth­er poet­ry books out there?
Because there are lots of sharp edges in this par­tic­u­lar knife draw­er. And not many lace doilies. Lots of exer­cis­es that explore words, phras­es, and mean­ings that are reveal­ing not just for poets but for any­one who works with words. The exer­cis­es that prompt you to dis­sect and repur­pose clichés are worth the price of entry. 

Three from much ear­li­er this year. 

In non-fiction, Charles Wheelan’s Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from Data. Professor does stats for dum­mies. Lots of base­ball. I kind of like base­ball and there are some amaz­ing things being done with num­bers in base­ball. But most­ly it’s the old stand­bys, drug research and the large scale health sur­veys with a lit­tle ter­ror­ist track­ing, some SATs and grades, and a soup­con of beer. Yeah, the beer and brew­ing stuff is inter­est­ing. All in all, dull. So I’m still look­ing for some­thing that’s inter­est­ing enough to make the basics stick in my head for more than 20 minutes.

I had much bet­ter luck with The Best Science Writing Online 2012. edit­ed by Jennifer Ouellette. A curat­ed col­lec­tion of the best of a year’s worth of blogs, columns, and essays pub­lished on-line. We’re incred­i­bly lucky to have so much good writ­ing on sci­ence avail­able to us. There isn’t a field of pur­suit in which there aren’t at least two or three well writ­ten sources for the enthu­si­as­tic ama­teur to fol­low along. Open sources sci­ence is at it’s best in the new sci­ence journalism.

No mat­ter what your favorite field there’s bound to be some­thing in here for you. Maryn McKenna talks about pub­lic health, Rob Dunn about insects, and Ann Finkbeiner about sci­ence itself. Better yet you’re prob­a­bly going to find some­thing here that you’ve nev­er seen before — like the church forests of Ethiopia described by T. Delene Beeland. Tens of thou­sands of islands of Afromontane forests pro­tect­ing and pro­tect­ed by church­es. Some may be as many as 16 cen­turies old. They are a thing I’d nev­er heard of, and that I’m grate­ful to know about now. 

In fic­tion, Six-Gun Snow White. Catheryn Valente revis­its an old tale in a novel­la set in the wild west (and mid-west) Rewriting fairy tales is dan­ger­ous ter­ri­to­ry. It goes wrong more often than not. I can’t say that this goes wrong. It just does­n’t quite go right. Nearly, almost, so very close that you can for­give the off notes and leaps and jud­ders but… not quite right. Not because she does­n’t have a very firm grasp on the tale in ques­tion. There’s not a fairy tale that Ms. V can’t dis­sect and rebuild, This time it’s a mat­ter of car­ing too much that the mes­sage be right. And then there’s the mat­ter of not hav­ing a grasp on the set­ting. She does­n’t want to live there, not like she has in all her oth­er retold tales. She did her research, there are sil­ver mines and enslaved min­ers; misog­y­nis­tic, slight­ly stu­pid cow­boys; des­o­late, para­noid (right­ful­ly) Indians; and a per­fect­ly, moral­ly ambigu­ous rob­ber baron with a (cliche alert) down trod­den wife/step-mother to the child Snow White. Whose real name is nei­ther Snow nor White. But it fails… it falls on its white is not bet­ter, step-mothers may be vic­tims them­selves, let’s turn all the tropes on their heads sword. Sadly, because it has the best fairy tale mir­ror ever. One with no mag­ic, only reflec­tions. Note that this is a novel­la — but the kin­dle cov­er price was $5. The hard­cov­er, if you can find it, is fetch­ing $40. I should have such a fan base.