Bill Bryson- A Short History of Nearly Everything

This is one of those books that you can never read too many times, because there's so much in it that you can only absorb so much at once. I think I'm on my third go round. I use it to teach science class in elementary school, and it is phenomenal for that. Why not make science fun? Apparently Bryson agrees with me. No wonder I love him. That and he makes me laugh like a lunatic. Oh Bill, if only you weren't old and hirsute and married...

Bryson has a knack for picking out the most interesting characteristics of the people and things that he's writing about so that you want to read more. For example, Einstein is much more interesting as a genius who was terrible at math and wrote his seminal papers while working as a patent clerk, third class (his petition to become second class was rejected), than just as a genius. When he's writing about the first time that people became seriously concerned that a meteor might crash into the earth, and the realization that a meteor caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, he writes that by the time this notion was proposed by the scientific community (the 1970s), there had already been a movie called Meteor made, starring, in Bryson's words, a few major movie stars, "and a very large rock." Or something to that effect. He cracks me up!

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I ADORE Bill Bryson's books. But don't let that prejudice you. *lol* He really is phenomenal, and even if you have always been terrible at science (I'm okay at biology, so-so at chemistry, and awful at physics), you'll get this book, and learn a lot. And it makes you feel better about yourself as a person, too. One of the most respected astronomers (no, I can't remember his name, so sue me) thought that shadows on the moon were caused by migrating clouds of insects. That's gotta make anyone feel smart.

Update!

I actually have been reading a lot now that I'm done the thesis, but I've been neglecting the blogs as I get settled back into life in Ontario. Hence, time for a bullet list of what I've perused lately:

• A.S. Byatt- The Virgin in the Garden
• Audrey Niffenegger- The Time Traveler's Wife (for about the fifth time- my favourite book)
  
• Susan Vreeland- The Girl in Hyacinth Blue
• Alvin Lee- James Reaney
• J.K. Rowling- Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows (twice)
• Annie Proulx- The Shipping News
• Raymond Chandler- The Big Sleep

That's really all that I can remember right now, but I'm sure there were a couple more. I'm going to start on Lives of Girls and Women as soon as I'm done The Shipping News, so I'll let you know how that one goes.

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Thesis background reading

Canadian reading

Still reading, and writing, just not here

I'm motoring through my thesis, which doesn't leave me a whole lot of time for extracurricular reading, although I did just finish Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book Love in the Time of Cholera, which was fantastic, and I just started Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, which is next on my list of Canadian things to read. I'm also rereading Wilkinson's journals, The Tightrope Walker, which is both fun and productive. And that's that!

No time to write, so you get a list

I've been reading a lot lately, but I don't have time to blog about it at the moment, so I'll just list the books I've read lately and blog about them later:

• Elizabeth Smart: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
• Northrop Frye: The Great Code
• Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism
• John Ayre: Northrop Frye
  
• Donna Hay: Off the Shelf
• Steven Pratt: Superfoods Rx
• Steven Pratt: Superfoods Healthstyle
• Al Gore: An Inconvenient Truth

As you can see, most of the reading has been for my thesis, but when I've got time, I'll tell you about it. It's quite interesting.

Charlotte Gray- Mrs. King: The Life & Times of Isabel Mackenzie King; Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill

I decided to do a double post for these ones, as they are both by Charlotte Gray, and both are histories of major women in Canadian history. As I stated when I wrote about Reluctant Genius, I really quite enjoy Charlotte Gray's biographies. Canadian history, as all of my international students last summer assured me, is really boring and dull. I'm not sure how much I agree with that, but I do enjoy leaning about it through the lives of interesting people more than I enjoy reading history books. Reading about women is even better, for their experiences are ones that often get forgotten in the writing of history.

I was especially interested in reading Sisters in the Wilderness because of how central Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill are to my field of work, which is modern Canadian poetry. The Bush Garden, Northrop Frye's collection of essays about Canadian art, which I believe was the last book that I blogged about, takes its title from the writings of Moodie. Margaret Atwood uses the two extensively as characters in her poetry, and the whole trope of the threatening and inhuman Canadian landscape throughout Canadian literature essentially begins with them. I often find myself reading Anne Wilkinson's "green order," her attempts to create a green world which she then transforms into, as her way of speaking against Moodie and Parr Traill's visions of the Canadian landscape and her way of humanizing it. Aside from all of that, I wanted to know more about what exactly they did experience when they, two cultivated English ladies, arrived in a Canada that was essentially untouched by humanity. I can't imagine what I would do if I had to go through what they did--giving birth alone in a log cabin, living on potatoes for the whole winter, not being able to clothe or properly educate your children--but Gray makes it vividly imaginable. It also fascinates me that neither Moodie or Parr Traill allowed the hardships of their lives to diminish the need that they felt to write. I'm considering trying to formulate a PhD dissertation around the subject of motherhood and writing in Canada, and these two are the prime example of the ways in which it can be done.

Mrs. King I picked up because I was enjoying Gray so much that I wanted to continue reading her. I vaguely remembered hearing something about William Lyon Mackenzie King's Oedipal complex when I was in school, but that was about all I knew about Mrs. King. Let me tell you--this woman was quite something. Her father was William Lyon Mackenzie, the famous rebel, her husband was useless, and her son was the Prime Minister of Canada. Out of all of these men, she was the type to attach herself to the one who could do the most for her; hence, her strange relationship with her son. From the letters that they exchanged, F.R. Scott and Dennis Lee's poems about Mackenzie King sound about accurate; she used to show him her underwear for his approval, and I don't know how much times have changed, but from today's perspective, that's just strange. It was quite an interesting book though, and I'm definitely going to find more by Gray, as reading her is an enjoyable way to learn.