Chemistry
February 2022 Book Choice: Chemistry by Weike Wang
March 2022 Book Choice: The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
It is debatable as to weather someone working on a PhD should read a book in which the main character is also working on a PhD. It could go badly for the protagonist, and the reader could get discouraged. However, as I seem intent on sticking my hand in the argon-box (you’ll see, and note that I said “hand” and not “head”) academic memoirs are all I want right now. Maybe they are all I have ever wanted.
Maybe there will come a time when I don’t want them at all again ever.
But then, I would probably start reading academic Quit Lit.
This book was great. It kept me hooked listening til the end, and I even went back a month after finishing it and listened to the first couple chapters again. Unfortunately for my desires, the main character is only in the lab, struggling to make gold (basically) for the first couple chapters—and I just loved that visceral detail that can only be provided by an eyewitness: an Incredibly Successful Colleague to compare one’s self unfavourably to, ever minute of the godforsaken day, the daily rythyms of failure – lunchtime – failure, the brutal pronouncements of a distant professor. I am not saying this was my experience, but this part of the book is very real and I found, extremely engaging. Scientists—they take their work so seriously. Or perhaps, anyone can fall prey to taking it too seriously, I certainly do by times—and yet it IS serious, all the time.
Not just because, in a lab setting, you could open the argon box and kill everyone, but also in academia in general—and this tendency may actually be worse in the humanities: if you don’t look serious, all the time, the greats that be are not going to recognize you as a contender and support and promote you.
In the hard science disciplines at least, it should be less disputable—your sheer number of papers, sooo quantifiable and rank-able, should win the day.
It’s all just very interesting, and I completely recommend it as a read. There is the one misogynist colleague, who openly speaks the misogyny that exists; but he does recognize the Incredibly Successful Colleague’s achievements, and the ISC is a woman, and so his misogyny seems lessened: it is there and not there. It is air.
There is the complexity of a relationship where both partners are in academia, in the same field: but one is shining and the other floundering. There is so much there. And then, the main character starts to hit that point in her life, where she is finally realizing that she has too much unresolved psychological baggage that has nothing to do with academia—to go forward in her life until she starts to work on it.
Her journey back through her past, although very interesting, was not my favourite part, and why I would not personally re-read this book, although the discussion of immigrants’ lives in the US, and difficult (borderline abusive) parents is both engaging and important. I think for some people, reading the latter half of this book will be devastating and restorative. I preferred more how the heroine finds herself, by falling back on the things she knows, which is Chemistry, and science, and the forces that work in the world: she does know so much and it is lovingly and enthrallingly explained.
Really it is a quite perfect book, with something for a lot of people: difficult upbringings, a relationship breakdown, and the inner turmoil of not being able to bring one’s PhD to a close, but having to go on living anyway.
5 billion stars.
In March I listened to another audiobook, called “The Plot” and it was not good. It was—pretty damn terrible. However, I am keeping it in my list of 12 Books a Year, because it really did serve as excellent “literary roughage” (yes, that concept I am always banging on about, that one can’t read good books all the time) as in, it totally clarified for me what I do want to read next.
This book starts off soooo promisingly though, to my tastes—it begins in an academic setting, a college-level semester-long creative writing retreat; it starts in remote upstate Vermont, in a spooky forest…and then it just makes no use of that setting. It starts with some academic side-eyeing (oh, now I recognize the name, she has won a Prize prize, ooh, she must actually be a high-flyer) and the requisite self-comparisons, which I find very intriguing as a dynamic of a group. The main character also detailed all his career triumphs and stagnations in the beginning and I was here for it—-
And then it changes into a poor detective story with a hundred eye-rollingly convenient lucky breaks, and a solution that you can see from its very first mention (in about chapter 3 of 35). It was the WORST. It had TWO characters and no subplots, no distraction from the agonizing stupidity of the “plot.” And, very fittingly in a way, it is supposed to be about the “plot” for a novel that was SOOOOO GOOOD that it was stolen (there is a bit of meta hemming and hawing over whether a writer/artist can “steal” a plot), but really, the plot as it is gradually revealed was not more intricate or surprising than that of any made-for-tv movie. I did know from the beginning, really, that the stolen plot could never live up to the premise of this book, but I did hope. That was dumb, but hey, I did manage to finish this novel because the audiobook narration was smooth and I kept thinking “there is NO WAY that the main character can be THIS DUMB.”
Reader, he was.
Should have been called “The Plod.”