Towering Tsundoku -- BOOK THOUGHTS

 

BOOK THOUGHTS

Towering Tsundoku

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
– W. Somerset Maugham in Books and You.

After a sort through the other day, my unread nonfiction books are newly organized. Of course, my shelf space did not grow, so they are still stacked on the floor of my home library. But at least they are stacked in a more orderly way, not teetering and toppling when anyone goes near and not blocking the overflowing shelves.

I love nonfiction, including travel writing, books about food, books about books, general memoir, expatriate memoir, biography, house and home books, popular history, and general nonfiction. Some of my favorite nonfiction authors are Simon Winchester, Susan Orlean, Nora Ephron, Peter Mayle, and M.F.K. Fisher. The nonfiction authors most represented in my TBR stacks and on my TBR shelves are William F. Buckey (from my dad), Elizabeth David, Nancy Mitford, Mark Twain, and John Updike. I do not have as many matching sets as I do with fiction books, but I am a sucker for NYRB Classics, especially the nonfiction ones. 

But two things keep my TBR nonfiction stacked on the floor instead of arranged in alphabetical order (by author) on my shelves, like I do with my TBR fiction. First, when we build our home library, I had way more fiction than nonfiction. So I dedicated one whole wall to my unread fiction books and only one bank of shelves along the opposite wall for unread nonfiction. I had no room for any more nonfiction books, but of course acquired more faster than I could read them and make space. Second, as much as I enjoy nonfiction, I always end up reading more fiction than nonfiction, resulting in tsundoku towers wherever I find space.

I daydream about a time in my life when I can start reading at the top of one of these stacks and read straight down the stack, right to the bottom. 

My current nonfiction read is An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David. I had hoped to finish it last weekend, but am savoring it slowly. Next up is Menagerie Manor by Gerald Durrell. 

Review: The Man Who Loved China

Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China is still the definitive work on the subject, in continuous print since the Cambridge University Press published the first introductory volume* in 1954. In The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester turns his inquisitive eye and keen wit to Needham’s life and accomplishments, wrapping personality, history, politics, and science into the kind of irresistible story only Winchester can produce.

Needham was a biochemist, not a Sinologist. He became interested in the Middle Kingdom only after falling in love with Lu Gwei-Djen, a Chinese scientist in Cambridge to study with Needham and his biologist wife Dorothy. After learning Chinese, he obtained a pre-WWII diplomatic post that allowed him to explore China and send truckloads of books and documents about China’s scientific and technological history back to Cambridge.

As with his wonderful books about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything, Winchester uses the compilation and publication of Needham’s masterpiece as the backbone of this biography. He branches off from the central story to discuss the Needham’s socialist politics, his unconventional love life, and his role as one of Red China’s most “useful idiots.”

This last item concerned Needham leading a commission to investigate allegations that America used biological warfare during the Korean War. In 1953, he issued a report substantiating the claims, although it was later determined that the Chinese government, with Soviet help, staged the whole thing. As Winchester put it, “Needham was intellectually in love with communism; and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him.” Needham was under a cloud for years as a result. America refused him a visa until the 1970s. Only the quality and stupendous success of Science and Civilization finally redeemed his reputation.

Simon Winchester could write an interesting book about garden mulch, so it is no surprise that The Man Who Loved China, based on a fascinating life, is a fascinating book. This is one of his best.

* Science and Civilization in China is now a 25-volume set, although many volumes were written by others under Needham's direction and still others after his death.

OTHER REVIEWS

Age 30+ . . . A Lifetime of Books

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