Reading RoundUp

Yes, it really is October already. I ask rhetorically, why did September go past so quickly? Maybe because I spent half the month in this chair, in front of this screen, blowing away fifteen years of writers block. Perhaps there is a Dan Brown effect. I understand he published a new book last month after years of writer's block. I'm afraid I have only ever gotten around to reading one of Dan's oeuvre. In 2004 when it came out in paperback here, which was years before it did in the States, I was in the airport on my way to meeting Bob, who was at a conference for work, in Cannes. There it was piled up in the airport book store, with previous recommendations by friends in the States as a great read, I succumbed to The DaVinci Code.

Cannes, in March, is really quite a boring place. The LaCroisette promenade is blocked with heavy equipment as the beach clubs are being made ready for the upcoming season and Festival; after you have climbed up to the museum in the castle on the hill above the scenic port, frankly there is little else to do. The bank conference organiser was Bob's friend, and we had been allocated a beautiful room overlooking the sea, so for much of the week I holed up in this luxury room watching French TV. I learned that Charmed seems like a much more interesting show when Piper, Phoebe and Prue are speaking French. I re-learned the craft of crochet after a 30-year hiatus, and remembered that US and UK crochet stitch instructions are different by a factor of one — a US single crochet is a UK double crochet and so on up the number scale — but the bag came out great. And I read the worst book ever written. It was so bad that I forced Bob to read it in his conference breaks. He too was enthralled by the pure awfulness of the writing. The bonus for us was that after the conference, we spent a week or more driving around Provençe and Languedoc and came upon the very places Mary Magdalene and her companions roamed after setting off from the Holy Land in 40 A.D. Their boat landed in the Camargue village of Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer where the church commemorates Mary, the Virgin's sister, and Mary, mother of the apostles James and John — hence the plural "Saintes" — who settled in the village and were buried in a small oratory built to establish Christianity in continental Europe. Mary Magdalene and her siblings wandered farther — her brother Lazarus, who had been raised from the dead previously, went to Marseilles and eventually died again in Cyprus. Her sister Martha went to Tarascon where she tamed the local monster, the Tarasque, a cross between a dragon, a scorpion, and a turtle, apparently, in this photo from Wikipedia. When the townspeople killed the monster, unaware he had been tamed, Martha made them feel so guilty, they all converted to Christianity and named their town after the monster. Mary Magdalene went first to Marseilles, then retired to a cave in the Saint-Baume mountains and was buried in the church at St-Maximin-a-la-Sainte-Baume. When we stopped at the church, a funeral mass had just begun, so we were unable to see what sort of shrine is in the church. There is no mention in any of the legends that the family was traveling with a child however. Undoubtedly a mere oversight in the legends, now set straight for all of us by Dan Brown.

I have notched up two more books since the last reading roundup. I devoured the second Jackson Brodie novel, One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson while we were in Bruges. I am a fan of the convoluted plotting that introduces at least a half dozen characters and events, all of whom are eventually twined together as the novel progresses. Hallelujah, the library had volume three, When Will There Be Good News, on the shelf when I returned volume two.

C.P. Snow's The Masters, chosen by one of my book groups, was quite a wonderful read. An old-fashioned novel with chapters, chapters with titles, chapters whose titles appeared as a phrase somewhere in the chapter. No magical dream sequences tilting reality; no mystical butterflies flitting in and out. The Masters is a slice of life at a Cambridge college in 1937 where the current Master is dying of cancer and a new Master must be elected by the Fellows. The novel is part of an eleven volume series, called the Strangers and Brothers Sequence, narrated by one of the Fellows, Lewis Eliot, who teaches law at Cambridge and maintains a practice in London, one foot in academia, one foot in the real world. The Sequence chronicles Eliot's life and career from start to retirement, but this volume remains, claustrophobic, within the walls of the college as they choose one of their own to be Master. The moments of political power play are subtly told, mostly through dialogue, but the reader is always forced to keep up with the mind games being played by the major characters.

Snow is best known for his lecture/article/book The Two Cultures, delivered in 1959, and now being commemorated in its 50th Anniversary year. Snow believed the two cultures — of science and of the humanities — had grown so far apart both among scholars and the public, they could hardly communicate with each other. I'm not going to pretend I know what his arguments were, nor what his critics said, because I haven't read the lecture or the commentary. Back in the day, the Enlightenment day that is, science was called "natural philosophy" in academic parlance when it was taken for granted that arts and science were not separate. In 1770s England, Joseph Priestley as a scientist could discover the element oxygen, but have his house firebombed – and eventually flee to Pennsylvania – because of his Unitarian religious beliefs. The same theme was explored in the Darwin show we saw at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge a few weeks ago focusing on how visual artists adopted the findings of "natural history" when painting landscapes or anthropomorphising cute puppies .

I will admit that although I am an "educated, enlightenened" person, I shy away from science when I am confronted with a concept that might require some effort to understand. Bob has a subscription to the wonderful magazine New Scientist, which presents recent research findings in language a layperson can understand. Every week I look at the cover, think "oh that's interesting," and rarely inquire any farther. Megan lists Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything right after Dorothy Dunnett in her list of favourite books, and she has been after me to read it for years.

I think in the States, our education system does a better job on instilling some science into "non-scientists" than the UK, where students who go on to university begin to study specialised subjects after they finish their school-leaving exams (the GCSE tests) when they are sixteen. During the last two years of secondary education, in preparation for university entrance, students choose three to five subjects to be tested on at the end of the two years (the A-level exams), but the subjects they choose are related to the course they wish to study at university, and when they reach university, they will study only the subject of the course they have been admitted to and some ancillary subjects related to their core area. In the States, of course we normally continue studying science all four years of high school, and most universities have curriculum distribution requirements. While most everyone grumbles about these "outside the comfort zone" classes, I fell in love with botany and then ecology back in my day at Mount Holyoke, and Susan loved her opportunity to study ornithology at Bowdoin.

So while we Americans have the chance to study science longer, we are the ones who now seem to have a serious problem with accepting scientific information. While I might shy away from science, I still believe what scientists have to say. I certainly believe that science may be the only thing that will save the planet from the mess humans have made. Yet if I believe polls, most citizens of the States have some doubts about various findings in this realm of knowledge, and many citizens outright reject some of the most basic principles of the universe. Was there ever a more embarrassing moment for the States, when the Republican presidential hopefuls for 2008, stood on a TV stage and argued that they believed less science than anyone else on that stage. Yes indeed, we're all with Archbishop Ussher now, and we'll be celebrating the earth's 6,013th birthday on 22-23 October this year. Isn't it time to propose this date as a national holiday? Now I read that fewer people believe in global warming these days than the numbers who believed a few years ago. What's to believe? This isn't a faith-based argument over a supernatural deity. Even the conventional argument that climate change is a natural event, yada yada yada, so we don't need to panic, doesn't change the outcome. Of course there have been climate changes not caused by human activity — in some cases because there were no humans at the time – but those changes still wiped out large numbers of species, according to the geologic record. There is no reason that you can't adhere to Bishop Ussher's time-scale and also believe that droughts are longer and drier than in the past, temperatures are rising, seas are rising, currents are changing . Whether you believe the past is thousands or billions of years old, the evidence is still the same; the cause of change can be attributed to God or to humans, the outcome is still the same.

The Christian right abetted by the Republican party of know-nothings have perpetrated evil in the United States, but perhaps the worst has been the politicisation of science. In the 1970s, the PBS science programme Nova had an episode about the tremendous advances made in the study of genetics during the 1920s by Russian scientists who were already positing the idea of some sort of genetic replication mechanism. When Stalin came to power, true scientific work was suppressed in favour of crack-pot theories promoted to further goals of the state. I remember thinking how glad I was to live in a modern country where science was respected and would never be politicised. How did things move in the wrong direction so quickly? C. P. Snow worried that representatives of the two cultures could no longer communicate with each other. Humanities scholars who expected scientists to be familiar with Shakespeare's poetry, did not accept they should equally understand Newtonian laws of physics, thus demeaning the quality of scientific principles. Today, the rift has deepened to where one side of the divide will now deny the validity of the other side's work. Tinkering with communication will no longer save us from plunging into a dark age.