Tuesday, February 10, 2004

What Do I Read?

imageI’ve noticed that I never talk about what I read on my blog.

I’m not really into fiction. Yeah, I know, I’ve been doing the novel-in-a-month thing, but I think that’s more of an exercise than anything else.

My taste, first off. I’m a science aficionado. Not science fiction, which is great for movies and TV shows and books and all, but I like pure science. I think it goes back to trying to understand this mixed-up world of ours. I read a lot of consumerist science stuff (‘cuz I’m not well-versed enough for the real journals). I’ve been reading Scientific American for many years, Discover, because it’s great for really short bursts of reading, kind of like the Entertainment Weekly of science journals. I like Tuesdays because that’s the day that the New York Times has their expanded Science section. I like physics and the ideas behind quantum physics and the search for the superstring theory. I don’t understand it all and I’m trying to read Brian Greene’s book right now, The Elegant Universe.

I like the life sciences and I’m fascinated by the beasts that are only recently gone from our world, like the Steller’s Sea Cow (like a manatee only twice as big and lived up off the coast of the Alaska). I like stuff about animal behavior and organization. I like to watch bees and ants and I’m interested in animal culture as it relates to understanding our own brains. I like it when we discover that crows are smart, because I hope it makes us more humble.

When I was a teen I read books like Carl Sagan’s Dragon’s of Eden and everything of Lewis Thomas I could get my hands on. I struggled to get through Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which I never did and it still sits on my shelf as a testament to my failure to learn more about the mathematics of music.

I like geology and plate tectonics. Mostly because I lived in Humboldt County, which is pretty much on top of the Gorda Plate as it’s being subducted under the North American plate and from the geology class I had at college, someday that fault is going to rip starting at the Mendocino Triple Junction and head all the way up the coast to the Juan de Fuca plate and past Seattle to Vancouver. It’ll be a big earthquake - that’s the Big One - not the San Andreas that’ll hit North America. For some reason I check the recent quakes every day. Like that’s going to warn me.

My favorite TV show is Nova - it has been since I was a kid. I remember the first show I watched on Nova was about dreams and the subconscious. I think that was in 1977, back when we still had a little 14” black and white TV. I watch the Discovery Channel and National Geographic channel but I think that they sensationalize stuff a lot or gloss over the reality of our breadth of knowledge. They also only like to do shows on stuff they can get film of - so you can count on lots of animals and not a lot of hard science.

Don’t get me wrong, I like other brain candy type TV shows - I’m embarrassed to list them, but it goes something like this (in really no order), Star Trek (Enterprise at the moment), Angel, Stargate, ER, Law & Order. I’ll watch silly sitcoms or reruns of old shows on Nick at Nite (Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched), but that’s all it is, brain candy. As empty as a bowl of starlight mints.

I think my interest in non-fiction is actually pretty helpful as a writer. I know that there are plenty of other playwrights that try to merge the technical with the dramatic (Stoppard, David Auburn, Michael Frayn).

POSTED BY Cybele AT 1:21 pm    

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During November it's all about me writing a novel. Sometimes it's about whalewatching. You know, and then there's other stuff.