“Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,”… elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.”
See what Your Brain on Fiction looks like.
***
Just when you think a phenomenon has gone and died forever, someone ends up in the hospital over a LITERARY ARGUMENT. Can’t wait to know what this was about. (“Tolstoy was the master!” “No, you ignorant scum, Turgenev is God!” “How dare you! [Punch]”)
Kidding aside, I hope the poor guy is okay.
However, I can’t say the same for this brilliant commenter who chose to type the following words at 3:37 pm on March 19:
“This is why I don’t read books. People who read tend to be anti-social and violent as we see here. Plus aren’t all great writers drunks? Probably rubs off on their fanbases.”
So right, yet so wrong.
***
Books I can’t wait to read next week:
V.S. Ramachandran, the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at 
UCSD: “In this elegant and provocative book, Sam Harris demonstrates—with great intellectual ferocity and panache—that free will is an inherently flawed and incoherent concept, even in subjective terms. If he is right, the book will radically change the way we view ourselves as human beings.”
Free Will, by Sam Harris
**
“A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile 
solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.”
Listen to the NPR interview here.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed
**
“In When I Was a Child I Read Books [Marilynne Robinson] returns to and expands upon the themes which have preoccupied her work with renewed vigor.
In “Austerity as Ideology,” she tackles the global debt crisis, and the charged 
political and social political climate in this country that makes finding a solution to our financial troubles so challengin. In “Open Thy Hand Wide” she searches out the deeply embedded role of generosity in Christian faith. And in “When I Was a Child,” one of her most personal essays to date, an account of her childhood in Idaho becomes an exploration of individualism and the myth of the American West. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as one of our essential writers.”
When I Was a Child I Read Books, by Marilynne Robinson
***
Books I’m glad I read last week:
“Stunned to learn that her son, Sam, is about to become a father at nineteen, Lamott begins a journal about the first year of her grandson Jax’s life.”
For those of us who cherished Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year this is something wholly different, but still in possession of the same wit and tenderness.
A Journal of My Son’s First Son, by Anne Lamott with Sam Lamott
**
Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth: “Susan Cain is the definer of a new and valuable paradigm. In this moving and original argument, she makes the case that we are losing immense reserves of talent and vision because of our culture’s overvaluation of extroversion. A startling, important, and readable page-turner that will make quiet people see themselves in a whole new light.”
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain
**
“Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, the 
legendary Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple. Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother’s suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, and Julia gains power, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment.”
Doesn’t that sound like loads of delicious fun? It was!
The Vanishers, by Heidi Julavits
Have a quiet, wonderful weekend, everyone. And happy reading!
-Aida
The Other Day at Portrait... 