Posts

, , , ,

428. Lab Girl

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:  Hope Jahren

Genre:   Nonfiction, Science, Memoir

290 pages, published March 1, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Lab Girl is written by acclaimed scientist and geobiologist Hope Jahren who has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil.  Jahren writes about both her long, difficult journey to become a world renowned scientist and insights from her botanical experiments.

Quotes 

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.”

 

“Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help.”

 

“Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to

  1. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that

waited.”

 

“A CACTUS DOESN’T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet.”

 

“Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.”

 

“We love each other because we can’t help it. We don’t work at it and we don’t sacrifice for it. It is easy and all the sweeter to me because it is so undeserved. I discover within a second context that when something just won’t work, moving heaven and earth often won’t make it work — and similarly, there are some things that you just can’t screw up. I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don’t want to. I really don’t want to. We make plans: he will share his strength with me and I will share my imagination with him…”

 

“I have learned that raising a child is essentially one long, slow agony of letting go.”

 

“No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor — to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only once chance to guess what the future years, decades — even centuries — will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.”

 

“My true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances.”

 

“Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.”       

 

“The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only – a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat – but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves.”

 

 

“After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant’s yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now.”

 

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.”

 

“I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all of these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can. Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along. I don’t take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it. When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn’t take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.”

 

“A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die.”

 

“America says it loves science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it.”

 

“Plants are not like us. They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening.  Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood…”

 

My Take

Lab Girl is an informative, interesting and inspirational memoir by the talented scientist/writer Hope Jahren.  Jahren had to overcome a lot of obstacles and endure some tough times before receiving recognition for her work as a geobiologist, but she would not have chosen any other path.  I especially enjoyed reading about her relationship with the idiosyncratic Bill Hagopian, a true American original, Jahren’s career long scientist sidekick.

/by
, , , ,

242. Fahrenheight 451

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:  Ray Bradbury

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia

175 pages, published October 1953

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary

Ray Bradbury’s science fiction classic Fahrenheight 451 is set in a dystopian future where books are verboten because the powers that be deem them to make people unhappy.  The main character is Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to burn books.  After a few interactions with a teenage neighbor named Clarice, Guy comes to realize that something is missing in his life.  As begins to defy society’s rules by keeping books, he becomes a hunted man.

 

Quotes 

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

 

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

 

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

 

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

 

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

 

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”

 

“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They’re Caeser’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, “Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal.” Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”

 

“It doesn’t matter what you do…so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”

 

“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”

 

My Take

I first read Fahrenheight 451 in high school.  I enjoyed it then, but think I liked it even better on the second reading more than 35 years later.  As an avid reader, it is hard for me to imagine a world without books.  They enrich my life deeply and make me think about ideas in whole new ways.  That is the point Bradbury is trying to make.  Without exposure to ideas both old and new (with books as the premier transmission form), we are destined for a life of mediocrity and banality.

 

/by
, , , , ,

200. The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Marianne Boeke

Author:   Douglas Adams

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Humor

193 pages, published June 23, 1997

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Right before the Earth is to be destroyed to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.  Together, Arthur and Ford journey through space aided by a galaxyful of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed, ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian (formerly Tricia McMillan), Zaphod’s girlfriend, whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; and Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he’s bought over the years.

 

Quotes 

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

 

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

 

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

 

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”

 

“A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”

 

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

 

“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”

 

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

 

“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”

“Why, what did she tell you?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”

 

“For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.”

 

“So this is it,” said Arthur, “We are going to die.”

“Yes,” said Ford, “except… no! Wait a minute!” He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. “What’s this switch?” he cried.

“What? Where?” cried Arthur, twisting round.

“No, I was only fooling,” said Ford, “we are going to die after all.”

 

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

 

My Take

While preparing the summary for this book, I was reminded of the reasons that it didn’t really do it for me (it seemed better suited for the geeky teenage boy cohort).  However, while pulling out some quotes (which, more often than not, were very clever), I found myself liking the book a bit better.  What can I say, a mixed bag.

 

/by
, ,

95. Ordinary People

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:   Judith Guest

Genre:  Fiction

263 pages, published October 28, 1982

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Ordinary People is set in upper class town of Lake Forest, Illinois during the 1970s and tells the story of the Jarrett family, parents Calvin and Beth and their son Conrad.  Before the action of the book begins, there was a second Jarrett son, Buck, who was killed in a boating accident while his brother Conrad survived.  The book focuses on Conrad’s coming to grips with his brother’s death.  While Conrad is shunned by his beautiful and perfect, but ultimately cold-hearted mother, his therapist and father are there to help him survive.  

 

Quotes

“Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.”

 

“People have a right to be the way they are.”

 

“Riding the train gives him too much time to think, he has decided. Too much thinking can ruin you.”

 

“Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.”

 

“The small seed of despair cracks open and sends experimental tendrils upward to the fragile skin of calm holding him together.”

 

“Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningless actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.”

My Take

I saw the movie version of Ordinary People (a pretty good movie, but undeserving of the Best Picture Oscar) back when it was released in 1980 and was constantly comparing the novel to the movie while reading it.  While the novel is not as good as the movie, it is still readable (while seeming a little dated) and managed to hold my attention.  I found the character study of the ice queen mother Beth to be particularly interesting.  Too bad there wasn’t more of her story in the book.

/by