Dear readers,
Other than reading, my favorite hobby is eavesdropping. Sometimes I scheme to combine the two, bringing a book to a bar and enjoying a mental rotation between pages, overheard conversations and drink. (Vodka, neat. Cold. Yum.)
The other day I sat beside two local teachers and was privy to a gem. One, explaining why she had decided to quit teaching sixth grade, admitted to the other that “I just didn’t like their energy or ideas.” Meaning the “energy or ideas” of the sixth graders.
Oh how I (silently) laughed! And then, entering Jane Marple mode, listened raptly until the teachers finished their drinks, in hopes of puzzling out what grade the teacher had switched to. It was never revealed. But the remark abided and is my new favorite synonym for de gustibus non est disputandum. And with that anecdote about the futility of accounting for taste — below are a few books that suited mine.
—Molly, proud ex-sixth-grader
Three broad (and doubtless overlapping) audiences come to mind for this book. The first is “people who enjoy learning about metaphors.” The second is “people who doubt that a page-turner about physics exists.” The third is “people who have young children and are nervous about having to answer the kinds of profound elemental questions that kids ask, such as ‘Daddy, what is light made of?’”
Zajonc’s book is a cheerfully heretical study of how humans have contemplated light and vision throughout time. He touches on the Egyptians and roams through Empedocles, Alhazen, Grosseteste, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Faraday, Planck and dozens of other guys and centuries that I will elide to spare your weary scrolling finger. His gift is to render a procession of theories persuasive while showing how each reflects the priorities and assumptions of its era: material, spiritual, temporal.
Like any history of science, the book is both humbling and wonder-inducing: look how wrong we were, and continue to be! But what compelling varieties of flaw we produce!
Read if you like: Lewis Carroll, pinhole photography, the films of Charlie Kaufman, Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer”
Available from: The book is currently free to borrow from the Internet Archive. It is also available from Oxford University Press — or, quite likely, your local library.
“The Torqued Man,” by Peter Mann
Fiction, 2022
How come this literary spy novel didn’t sell a million copies? Well, maybe it did and I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe the movie adaptation already came out; maybe it starred Oscar Isaac (What can’t he do?) and won several Academy Awards. Who’s to say.
The novel’s time is the early 1940s, its place a gloomy Berlin where people cringe beneath air sirens and eat margarine “so synthetic it glowed.” Character No. 1 is Frank Pike, a sexually dynamic Irish resistance fighter and committed skulduggerist with low impulse control. If you were a German intelligence operative recruiting spies for the Reich in 1940, would you land on Mr. Pike? No! But you are not Adrian de Groot, Character No. 2, a tender philologist forced (by war) to pivot to a career as an ineffective spy handler. He falls in lust with Pike and retains him for nebulous tasks that Pike — ever determined to convert busywork into adventure and patriotism into treachery — instantly undermines.
Clever genre elements and felicitous prose? Oh yes; this novel is the elusive cake that you are allowed to both have and eat.
Read if you like: “The Day of the Jackal,” Hans Fallada, imagining a zither soundtrack to accompany your daily movements, zwieback
Available from: A good bookstore or Harper Perennial
Why don’t you …
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Resign yourself with a grumble to substandard Agatha Christie after depleting the Top 10 — only to find yourself pleasantly surprised? John Lanchester observed that “Christie’s work is on three different tiers, with masterpieces at the top, decent genre work in the middle, and outright self-basting turkeys at the bottom.” Ha! This particular title bypasses Tier 2 entirely and manages to combine Tiers 1 and 3, Lord knows how, but it paired nicely with my recent — and perhaps your future — insomnia.
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Measure your capacity for quiet determination against that of the main character in this tale of suspense set in a cabin in the Italian Alps?
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Ask whether it’s ever really too late to become a big-wave surfer with this ethnography of the sport? A perfect book for those who perspired through the HBO series “100-Foot Wave.”
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