Summer Reading, Jen Cole: “I’m Reading A Heaping PIle of Things…”
Writes Jen Cole: I’m reading a heaping pile of things, and my reading style is to have several books going at once, picking up at any given time what I’m in the mood for. Here are a few select books and excerpts:
EARTH’S NATURAL RESOURCES (John Walther)
Beryllium is primarily used as a hardening agent in alloys, in particular beryllium copper (BeCu). BeCu is a weldable, machinable, nonoxidizing, acid resistant, ductile copper alloy. It is therefore, employed in high-tech applications even though it is relatively expensive. Other items that incorporate beryllium are golf clubs, wheel chairs, and dental appliances.
THE DRUNKARD’S WALK: HOW RANDOMNESS RULES OUR LIVES (Mlodinow)
We also make Bayesian judgments in our daily lives. A film tells the story of an attorney who has a great job, a charming wife, and a wonderful family. He loves his wife and daughter but still he feels that something is missing in his life. On night he returns home on the train he spots a beautiful woman gazing with a pensive expression out the window of a dance studio. He looks for her again the next night and the night after that. Each night as his train passes her studio, he falls under her spell. Finally one evening he impulsively rushes of the train and signs up for dance lessons, hoping to meet the woman. He finds that her haunting attraction withers once his gaze from afar gives way to face-to-face encounters. He does fall in love, however, not with her but with dancing.
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (Gruen)
But there’s nothing to be done about it. All I can do is put in time waiting for the inevitable, observing as the ghosts of my past rattle around my vacuous present. They crash and bang and make themselves at home, mostly because there’s no competition. I’ve stopped fighting them. They’re crashing and banging around in there now. Make yourselves at home, boys. Stay awhile. Oh, sorry – I see you already have. Damn ghosts.
A PHILOSOPHY OF DIRT (Lagerspetz)
This view of the civilizing process is one version of the theories of modernity that have been around for about as long as there has been modernity to devise theories about. David Hume believed in the gradual softening and refinement of manners. Rousseau also believed that such development had taken place, only adding that it was a form of corruption brought about by twisted social conditions. One more important precursor to Elias is his fellow sociologist Max Weber and his theory of the successive realization of Western Society under capitalism. Interesting specifics about Elias were his attention to seemingly banal details of everyday life as markers of general hinges in mentality, his ability to connect those details to changes of social structure, and his incorporation of the (originally Freudian) concept of the unconscious. In these respects, he arrived independently and somewhat ahead of time at a research approach reminiscent of the French Annales School.
A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS (Hosseini)
Laila opened her mouth to say something. It wasn’t that Mammy didn’t have a point. Laila knew that the days of innocent, unhinged frolicking in the streets with Tariq had passed. For some time now, Laila had begun to sense a new strangeness when the two of them were out in public. An awareness of being looked dat, scrutinized, whispered about, that Laila had never felt before. And wouldn’t’ have felt even now but for one fundamental fact: She had fallen for Tariq.
COLLAPSE (Diamond)
Ea
ster’s chiefs and priests had previously justified their elite status by claiming relationship to the gods, and by promising to deliver prosperity and bountiful harvests. They buttressed that ideology by monumental architecture and ceremonies designed to impress the masses.
AT THE WATER’S EDGE (Zimmer)
Nineteenth-century embryologists took the first steps toward understanding how the tetrapod ear evolved. Searching for homologies between fishes and tetrapods, they found that the stapes in the human ear corresponds to a large bone that helps support fish jaws, known as the hyomandibular. The human jaw opens like a door, swinging on two hinges where it contacts the skull, as muscles anchored to the head and neck pull it back. When a Devonian lobe-finned fish opened its jaw, however, it had to conduct a biomechanical symphony. Its skull was a loose collection of bones held together by ligaments. The hyomandibular served to brace the upper and lower jawbones against the back of the brain case. At the same time it was also helping to flare open the gill flap in order to let the stale water pass out of the head of the animal. As cluttered as this arrangement might seem to us, it worked well for a lobe-fin. Since the muscles and bones it used for breathing and feeding were coupled together, it could hut prey by opening its gaping mouth and sucking them in.
THE SIXTH EXTINCTION (Kolbert)
If Faustian restlessness is one of the defining characteristics of modern humans, then by Paabo’s account, there must be some sort of Faustian gene. 
Several times, he told me that he thought it should be possible to identify the basis of our “madness” by comparing Neanderthal and human DNA. “If we one day will know that some freak mutation made the human insanity and exploration thing possible it will be amazing to think that it was this little inversion on this chromosome that made all this happen and changed the whole ecosystem of the planet and made us dominate everything,” he said at one point. At another he said, “We are crazy in some way. What drives it? That I would really like to understand. That would be really, really cool to know.”
Also reading, but haven’t cracked yet: Dead Man Walking (Prejean) Blink (Gladwell) My Inventions (Tesla) In Praise of Idleness (Russell) Destiny of Souls (Newton)