[personal profile] blogcutter
I'll tackle the "how" first. The truth is, reading has become a bit more of an ordeal than it used to be. It's not a matter of being illiterate or dyslexic - the problem is much more physical and mechanical than that, the result of my ageing eyes. Still, I'm very interested in the whole relationship between medium and message. If you listen to a novel as an audiobook, how does that affect the way you relate to the characters and the story? I've never been much into audiobooks, although I've listened to one or two. I've read a handful of large print books (although the selection as far as paper books go is a bit limited). Then of course there are the ubiquitous e-books. I have a kobo e-reader (which always seems to need recharging, even when it's been mostly turned off), and a kindle program on my laptop. But that's never been my preferred way to read, although the adjustable font size is certainly a useful feature.

For now, I'm mostly reading the same formats I've always preferred: traditional paper newspapers and magazines, and books on paper. It's just that I generally have to look over my glasses or remove them completely and put the page right up to my face. It means I don't generally read for long periods at a stretch like I used to.

Anyway, on to the "what".

I recently finished The Arc of the Swallow, by S.J. Gazan. Her first book, The Dinosaur Feather, was voted Crime Novel of the Decade by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.

Like The Dinosaur Feather, Arc of the Swallow takes place in an academic setting. A biology professor is found hanging in his office one day and the death is dismissed as a suicide. But the PhD candidate whose work he was supervising is aware he was just on the verge of releasing some groundbreaking and highly controversial research regarding vaccination in the developing world. She and several of his colleagues are convinced that he would never have killed himself, particularly at this point in his career.

The book combines an enthralling murder mystery, which is pure fiction, with some interesting and factual information about the Bandim Health Project in Guinea-Bissau, where a Danish-founded research group discovered some disturbing non-specific effects of the high-dose measles vaccine on the mortality of girls - their mortality DOUBLED after the vaccine was introduced. Had the WHO not withdrawn the vaccine (albeit very quietly), it could have cost at least half a million additional female deaths per year in Africa alone!

Subsequent research points to the conclusion that ALL vaccines have some nonspecific effects, though luckily most of them are beneficial ones. And in April 2014, the WHO finally decided that more research into the nonspecific effects of vaccines was warranted. For more on the Bandim Health Project, see http://www.bandim.org

My own take on this is that there was resistance to acknowledging the findings in both the prosperous first-world nations and in the developing world, but for very different reasons. In the former case, the attitude was "Well, we mustn't encourage Jenny McCarthy and all those wacko antivaxxers who think vaccines cause autism, so vaccination must be presented as unambiguously positive in all instances"; in the developing world, girls and women are considered (at least by those in power) as inferior and expendable so the attitude is "Well, if the effects are limited to the female of the species, then who cares?!" Needless to say, both extremes are severely misguided. "Vaccine-hesitancy" as I've recently heard it called, is a legitimate stance that deserves a thoughtful addressing of concerns on both an intellectual and an emotional level.


The other book I recently finished reading was Us Conductors, by Sean Michaels, about the inventor of the theremin. I've seen and heard a thereminist in action a few times now, at both this year's and last year's Music and Beyond festival. It's a fascinating and eerily ethereal instrument. And Us Conductors, a novel about the inventor of the theremin, his life in New York City, his marriages and doomed love affair and his subsequent return to and imprisonment in the Soviet Union, makes for some gripping reading.

Finally, I'm about two-thirds of the way through one of Doris Lessing's shorter books, Memoirs of a Survivor. While she called it something like an attempt at or a fragment of an autobiography, it certainly doesn't read like a traditional memoir or autobiography, although it's told in the first person. But the characters in it, be they fictional or otherwise, are certainly preoccupied with survival, so at least that part of the title is accurate! The "I" of the story - I don't think we actually learn her name - finds herself early in the book saddled with a girl of about 12 or 13, named Emily, brought to her by a man who assures her that Emily is her responsibility now. Emily and her cat-like dog named Hugo live with her for the next year or two and Emily gets drawn into the street-culture of transient children and youth outside, who seem to be homeless or at least more or less left to their own devices most of the time. In the building where the narrator and Emily are living, a wall periodically opens up and the narrator sees visions of the recent past - perhaps ten years ago - when Emily was a much younger child and had parents and a baby brother. She tries from these visions to piece together who Emily is and where she's come from.

I'm trying to decide what books to tackle next... something not too long or challenging, while still being interesting.
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