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Aug. 18th, 2008 10:09 amI forgot to log Ellis Peters' St. Peters' Fair, the fourth Cadfael book, but that's not a huge loss really; I'm enjoying my (slow, slow) re-readthrough of the Cadfael series but I have nothing in specific to say about this one. I do continue to really appreciate the way the plots of the books grow naturally out of the history of the period - the civil war between Maud and Stephen is woven through and inextricable from the mysteries, rather than being just a background setting against which Things Happen.
I have slightly more to say about Brenda Maddox's Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. Rosalind Franklin is mostly known as the woman who didn't win a Nobel Prize for her contributions towards discovering the structure of DNA. A friend of mine (who majored in biology) lent this to me after I told her that I was trying to read more nonfiction, and despite knowing absolutely nothing about biology, and in fact not having taken a proper science class since high school, I enjoyed it a lot. Although it occasionally gets heavy on the 'what-ifs' and 'was she robbed', what makes the book interesting is the author's struggle to reconcile Rosalind as a character. You know, when you think about it, writing a biography is sort of like RPing a fictional character - no, really, hear me out! You have various bits of canonical evidence - facts about their life, documents, their own letters, sometimes witness testimony (but those come from unreliable narrators), and you try to reconcile them to each other to write about what happened in between. When a biographer says, 'it seems likely that George Washington did not feel conflicted about not saving the British children,' he might just as easily say 'it wouldn't be IC for George Washington to care about saving the British children.' A good biography is often basically a character study, and that's why they're interesting.
I have slightly more to say about Brenda Maddox's Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. Rosalind Franklin is mostly known as the woman who didn't win a Nobel Prize for her contributions towards discovering the structure of DNA. A friend of mine (who majored in biology) lent this to me after I told her that I was trying to read more nonfiction, and despite knowing absolutely nothing about biology, and in fact not having taken a proper science class since high school, I enjoyed it a lot. Although it occasionally gets heavy on the 'what-ifs' and 'was she robbed', what makes the book interesting is the author's struggle to reconcile Rosalind as a character. You know, when you think about it, writing a biography is sort of like RPing a fictional character - no, really, hear me out! You have various bits of canonical evidence - facts about their life, documents, their own letters, sometimes witness testimony (but those come from unreliable narrators), and you try to reconcile them to each other to write about what happened in between. When a biographer says, 'it seems likely that George Washington did not feel conflicted about not saving the British children,' he might just as easily say 'it wouldn't be IC for George Washington to care about saving the British children.' A good biography is often basically a character study, and that's why they're interesting.
