Books Borrowed This Month
Your Brain on Food by Gary L. Wenk
A Long Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan
Uprising by Margaret Peterson Haddix
The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt
Twice Told with drawings by Scott Hunt
Your Playlist Can Change Your Life by Galina Mindlin, Don DuRousseau, and Joseph Cardillo
Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins
Clear Away the Clutter by Susan Wright
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter

Books Received This Month
The Vicious Deep by Zoraida Córdova (preordered in January)
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Changeling by Philippa Gregory

Books Finished This Month
Transcendence by C.J. Omololu
The Best American Science and Nature Writing edited by Elizabeth Kolbert
Your Brain on Food by Gary L. Wenk
A Long Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Clear Away the Clutter by Susan Wright
The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter
Changeling by Philippa Gregory

I’ve had so much school this month that I’ve read very little outside of that. I’m way behind on magazines, it’s taking me forever to read the A.S. Byatt book, and I’ve been lazy about the gym, which is the place where I tend to get a lot of reading done. But I didn’t buy any books, except ones for class, so that’s a win!

I remain disinterested in fiction, for the most part, and more excited about memoirs, science, and history. But reading the Byatt has been nice, because it’s been ages since I read fiction for adults, and I’m loving it. I don’t think it’s actually because the book is good, though–it’s more that I just want to hang out with the people in it.

So it’s interesting that last night I was writing a quick, informal review of a book on GoodReads, and I spent a great amount of time grasping for a word that I could literally see and hear, through some kind of curtain, in my head, but could not totally get out. I am very, very attached to my thesaurus, which is weird when you consider that I almost never need to look words up when I’m reading. I understand and remember the meaning of most English words, and I can look at them and probably tell you what language they come from, but I can’t call words up out of my head without a problem. And even though I can read a page of Spanish and be perfectly satisfied with the 80-100% I probably understood, I have a lot of difficulty translating word for word, and I absolutely hate it when people ask me “how do you say [blank] in Spanish?” because I cannot tell you, even if I previously spoke or read the word in question. I suppose my language skills are based on nuance, context, and intuition, not direct correlation. This is probably also why I don’t keep my languages separate in my brain, and why I don’t think I’ll ever be totally fluent in any of the languages I’ve studied, because they mix together. From growing up, my most comfortable way of talking about tropical fruit is to say the names in Portuguese, I use regionalisms and Spanglish slang, especially when talking about cultural or food things, I’m not funny except when I’m using Yiddish, and I adore learning new compound German nouns, because they are so damn good at expressing ideas.

But I still cannot remember words like “obfuscate” (last night’s word in question) when I need them, and even though I love my thesaurus and dictionary, they’re really not helpful, since the only way I could think of to express my need for that word last night was “to make more confusing or cloudy,” and thesauri don’t work that way. And, given that I am a writer and graduate student, and given that I appear often to be younger than I am, and given that I appear to be black, and all of those things color who I am and how I am perceived, I really worry about this lack of word-call-up ability. (There’s got to be a better term than “word-call-up”–help?) I feel that my blog posts especially don’t show me to be nearly as intelligent as I am, and I promise you, I’m well above average in traditional “intelligence” terms (IQ in the 130s, Ravens test 99th percentile, etc). I’m not trying to prove or disprove the validity of traditional intelligence, only to try and understand what bearing it has on my own life and my own opinions of what make me and other people interesting, valid, relevant, smart, worth listening to, talented, etc. Because I don’t seem to satisfy my own requirements for those things, and yet so-called “objective” tests, as well as my own experience with language, would seem to suggest that I am those things at the same time.

This morning I wanted to procrastinate my insane reading load for this week’s beginning of summer school, so I downloaded my “natal chart,” which is a 14-page reading based on my date, time, place, and year of birth. I have a secret interest in astrology, not because I read my horoscope every morning (I get three horoscopes emailed to me every morning–”regular,” Chinese, and singles and promptly forget them as soon as I read them), but because it brings up interesting questions of theology and psychology for me, and because self analysis is a hobby of mine. Those endless and typo-ridden 14 pages were full of mostly relevant insight, which I say both because it works if you want to believe it, but also because it said a lot of the same stuff that I say in my journal when I’m analyzing myself or recording my ideas, feelings, angst, etc. I have somewhat split personalities, I am moody (and diagnosed bipolar with OCD tendencies), I struggle to find balance in my life, I am obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge and ideas, I love working towards social justice, I have musical inclinations, etc. One of my favorite insights was that I have incredibly obsessive, thorough, and just plain good preventative healthcare regiments. One of the things that came up again and again (it’s divided into various astrological things I don’t totally understand, but basically it outlines what each various planetary alignment or whatever has to do with your personality) is that I am working towards a way of putting my mark on the world, and that my challenge is to do so while learning how to focus, since I am naturally inclined towards wanting to learn EVERYTHING (duh), and how to express myself in the best method that shows how smart and interested I am.

So there’s my problem. I don’t sound smart when I do express myself and my ideas, even though I know I am. I don’t remember big words, even when I understand them, and for the most part, I don’t care, because whatever words come most naturally, as long as they mean what I want them to, should be the best. This post itself is a great example of how I think fast, write fast, and don’t look back unless I feel like editing, which I don’t, except in the case of fiction and essays for school. I get word of the day emails, and they have as much influence on my as my horoscope and flash sale emails, and I read quickly and competently and with interest, but I’m never totally clear on what I’m most interested and how best to say it. Also, I would really like to spend my career just thinking and writing and reading and working on getting better at expressing the fruits of those activities, but I don’t know that that comes with a salary and benefits.

Anyway. Then college happened, and I gained like 20 pounds and barely exercised and had steadily worsening breathing problems compounded by the wrong medication and bad stomach problems. When I was 21 1/2, I realized I was a pound away from having an officially overweight BMI, and that’s when I decided things had to change. Now, two years later, wellness is like a full-time job that never stops being challenging, but at least it’s now become more or less routine. But it easily gets boring, so I’m always looking for new recipes to make me excited about not eating potato chips, and new exercises and fitness magazines to make sure I’m never too bored to be healthy.

I have to be honest, though, and say that I need a lot of outside stimulation to make me excited about not eating out and not taking 24/7 advantage of my Hulu plus account. Much as I hate how dependent we all are on tiny computers that fit in our pockets, and much as I still have ZERO interest in owning a smartphone, one of the biggest things that helped me on my way was keeping a food and exercise diary on Self.com so that I could keep track of how I was doing. I think most of us can be tempted into doing a lot of things if it allows us to play with buttons and typing. Also, quite frankly, and I know this makes me seem more like a communist than the socialist I am, but I totally support any place of employment that requires some sort of commitment to wellness (and I also support those that require their employees–or highly encourage them–to be involved in volunteer or social justice work), because I think when it comes down to it, we all know that we need outside forces to get us to do anything that’s not X-Box or alcohol.

So I read this article about geeks who came up with a start-up app to help increase wellness in the workplace, and I thought it was sadly genius–sad because it’s a mark of how crap of a society we 21st century Americans are that we live in a place that actively teaches us not to be healthy and then demonizes us for it, while the rest of the world seems to not have quite such a hard time being healthy, so long as they have access to food and water, and genius because it acknowledges that we are who we are, and it works with that to use our bad habits–constant phone attachment–to create a good one.

I am a big fan of meeting people where they stand as the key to getting any engagement at all. The more time I spend in library school, the more I become convinced that I don’t belong in a library. I will happily work in one and be more than qualified to do so, but I’d much rather take my skills in reader’s advisory, youth development, special populations, literacy, and social justice and do something more interdisciplinary, working with other social work/behavioral health/counseling/teaching professionals and reaching at-risk youth in all areas, from reading to academic achievement to wellness to civic engagement. I don’t know where that will take me, but I know that I have the interest and skills, and I know people like the dudes who created that app are the types of people who are going to provide people like me with the tools and incentives today’s people need to do stuff that we’ve lost interest in. Obviously it will never be acceptable to say that we should sit on our computers all day and lose all of the humanity we used to have, but these sorts of apps and programs don’t do that. They just start where we already are, because they acknowledge that the most sustainable kind of change is one that works naturally with how people already function.

So even though I know I essentially waste money on subscriptions to Self AND Shape, and that I have more cookbooks and bits of paper with recipes than I’ll ever need to cook, and that the last thing I need is more Internets to be committed to, I’ll always support new innovations, and I’ll try a lot of them, at least for a bit. I don’t need a food and exercise diary anymore, and now I’m onto mini workouts in magazines. Later, who knows? But small changes based on my comfort zone are so much more effective than overhauls.

I don’t want to do a sappy post of realizations and accomplishments and failures, so I’ll instead post some lists. I love lists. I have always loved making lists.

The first list: Words I have had to teach my computer this year so as to get rid of the annoying red squiggly underline

• Metafiction
• Metafictive
• Picturebook (one word)
• Historiographic
• Paratext
• Narratology
• Waterstained

List two: Experiences in which I used my LIS skills in ways I had never considered/tried before

• Going to New York City twice to look at the archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (part of NYPL) in Harlem, all in the pursuit of research for my novel and inadvertently also teaching me how to use archives as well as making me consider the ethics of library culture, and how archive use, while technically available to anyone (at least in a public library system) is rather discriminatory and unwelcoming.
• Wrote a paper for class on a missed opportunity for librarians to do outreach and create partnerships with other entities and am going to continue reading and researching and eventually turn it into a publishable paper.
• Started writing for the YALSA blog despite the fact that I have never worked in a library. Founded a research column in which I round up interesting scholarly articles that either already have relevance to libraries or that could be applied to library science and services.

List three: Podcasts I started listening to this year and why

• Mixed Chicks Chat: After I read Heidi W. Durrow’s novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, I found out about this podcast that she co-founded with two other mixees. I never thought I was much of a fan of podcasts, but this one has slowly grown on me and made me feel like I have more of a community that shares my experience, even if I don’t know them. A lot of the time I listen to this and then end up musing about my own experiences or my writing more than listening, but that’s good, too.
• Studio 360: I can’t believe it took me so many years to know this NPR show existed! When I was home for winter break I heard it in the car with my mother and immediately had to download. It’s like a much better version of what I try to do with this blog–namely, talk about all forms of media and pop culture in an intelligent but also fun and personally relevant way. <3
• NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts: so many of my favorite musicians end up on this podcast, which videotapes them doing short acoustic sets in the tiniest room for a concert ever. Highlights: K’Naan, Stars, First Aid Kit, the Cranberries.
• The Splendid Table: this obsession is only a couple weeks old, but considering how obsessed I am with food media lately, it seemed like a necessary addition to my collection.

List four: Bad habits I have combated

• Having multiple jobs: I only have one! For, like, seven hours a week! And it means I actually get homework done, sometimes do volunteer work, and otherwise am much more sane than ever before!
• Reading too much fiction: I am almost bored with fiction now that I know how entertaining chefs can be and how simple neuroscience can be to understand when a scientist with actual writing skills tells you about it.
• Always being on the computer: I kind of hate being online now, to be honest, and unless I’m really into a bunch of reading or television show watching, I’d rather be reading, exercising, or timing myself to see how quickly I can get through a deck of Set (about 13 minutes now….taking recommendations for similar games I should be playing with myself to keep my brain plastic and away from words and computers and books).
• Being messy: okay, this is a work in progress. But I really am making strides to reduce clutter, and I’m much better at being decently neat most days of the week, at least.

Okay, a little boring except the first list. Blame it on my brain being fried, from continuing vertigo/inner ear issues+general grad schoolness. But seriously, having my brain fried because of school is something I have been desiring since I was 10, probably. Hurrah for finally achieving my dreams of being bogged down and significantly challenged but engaged with schoolwork!

There’s something about buying a Kindle that makes you more willing to read self-help books. Eating Mindfully can definitely be categorized as such, but it also makes some really good points about eating smaller meals, enjoying the smell of your food before you eat it, and taking time to enjoy the entire process of food, from buying the groceries to chopping them up. Albers brings up psychological and physiological reasons to eat more slowly and mindfully, and makes points that should appeal to a variety of readers, from those who are interested in New Age sap and those who just want to lose weight. She quotes Buddha, cites quotes and results from her own patients, and gives little exercises to do. You can write yourself a mindful eating contract, learn how to meditate, or take time to use your five senses.

I will be honest and say I only officially did one of the exercises. And the book is mad repetitive, yo. It could have been a lot shorter. I also recommend not reading it on Kindle, because it’s hard to keep track of the format of the book when you’re reading on a device that doesn’t allow formatting to be a thing. I can’t say that this book is amazing, because it’s definitely too New Agey for me to want to read again, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make a lot of good points. And even not doing the exercises is fine, I think, as long as you read it mindfully.

The same publisher has also come out with The Naked Foods Cookbook: The Whole-Foods, Healthy-Fats, Gluten-Free Guide to Losing Weight and Feeling Great. I loved the title immediately, because I love it when cookbooks have other themes but still happen to be gluten-free. And this is the best kind of cookbook, because it’s one you can actually read, and I’m all about reading my books more than using them as guides to doing stuff. A companion text to a book about naked kitchens (meaning healthy, mindfully grown, as close to natural as possible, not processed foods), the book is like taking a cooking class without having to pay hundreds of dollars. It offers instructions on chopping methods, substitutions, and other stuff that chefs always know and we regular people are always slightly confused about. The recipes hit a lot of bases, from raw vegan foods to sauces and dressings to add to just about anything to stuff you’ve actually heard of before but now have a much better method for cooking.

I have to say, I liked the cookbook a lot better than the other book, but they’re both worth checking out. If you don’t mind the sort of cheeseball approach to Albers’ book, you will find it full of things that really do make perfect sense. But Floyd’s cookbook is great because it’s written with a voice that acknowledges that cookbooks with that approach are usually cheesy and New Agey, so it moves away from that. You can eat meat with it. You can be lazy sometimes. You can think some of the recipes are gross, and she won’t be mad at you. You don’t have to feel dumb because you didn’t know what a julienne cut was. It’s like a for dummies book that’s for smart people.

Even though I hate being cheesy, I have to admit to myself that since buckling down and really taking care of all of the things that were ailing my body and mind, I have a really positive outlook on life. It scares me whenever I notice it, but that’s how it is. So I’m glad I read both of these books, just because they’ll help me keep that positive outlook, both secretly on my Kindle when I check back on Albers’ suggestions, and more loudly when I use the recipes in Floyd’s book. I’m rededicating myself to the pursuit of a love of food and a healthy relationship with it. I’m getting way better at curbing my binge eating. I actually did use Albers’ mindful eating contract and wrote it in my journal. I’m looking forward to perfecting my knife skills. These books are great reminders and impetuses for change.

Books Borrowed This Month
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 edited by Elizabeth Kolbert
True Notebooks by Mark Salzman
The Sisters Grimm: Fairy Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley
The Academie by Amy Joy

Books Received This Month
Eating Mindfully by Susan Albers
The Naked Foods Cookbook by Margaret Floyd and James Barry
Born Wicked by Jessica Spotswood
Lies Beneath by Anne Greenwood Brown
Transcendence by C.J. Omololu
Anthropologies by Beth Alvarado

Books Finished This Month
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
True Notebooks by Mark Salzman
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
Cuba 15 by Nancy Osa
The Sisters Grimm: Fairy Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley
The Academie by Amy Joy
Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan
Born Wicked by Jessica Spotswood
Eating Mindfully by Susan Albers
The Girl Sleuth by Bobbie Ann Mason
Lies Beneath by Anne Greenwood Brown

I was going to talk about how proud I am that I have been reading less, but my list doesn’t really reflect that. Except it does, because a lot of those books were read in one-day blitzes. This month I learned to slow down and start listening to podcasts more. Clarity! New ideas! Focus! Attention span! All good things. Lots of reviews to come next month, because I have lots of goodness from Netgalley on my Kindle.

But it just struck me that my argument somewhat falls apart when I consider that I very much like listening to (and watching videos of) Marina and the Diamonds. I’m going to try to explain the difference between her and artists like Gaga, and also explain why I like her. She’s definitely in the “tradition” of current pop, which is like stylized, commercialized performance art. But it’s still way different from shitty installations in contemporary art galleries and pop stars who go for shock-factor-cum-esoteric-ness. I totally admit that it could just be that I have followed Marina & the Diamonds a long time, so I’ve read her blogs and listened to her demos, and also that I just happen to find her music more aesthetically pleasing than Gaga’s, but I think it’s more than that.

Another caveat: I enjoy intellectualism and deconstruction/analysis, so this could be another reason I prefer Marina. I see Gaga as primarily about shock, and secondarily about attaching fake meaning after the fact. And it’s never all that shocking–”oh, women are objectified, so let me point to my crotch a lot! Aren’t I pushing the envelope?” Meh. Marina, on the other hand, is a complete package and she is all about acknowledging that. She said she wanted to be a popstar, so she made herself one–she writes pop songs that talk about pop and pop culture, she does herself up to look like a popstar trying to have a persona, and so she has one. She plays with electronica by making her voice electric. I don’t mind the performance art because it’s totally self aware, so I can deconstruct the nuances if I please or understand pretty easily what statements she makes. Also, she’s fun. This is the same reason I can respect (if not particularly enjoy, except for a handful of songs for the gym) Katy Perry, Bowie, Flight of the Conchords, etc. Concept artists are more fun than concept albums, I think. And I think it’s absurd when you pretend as if being a concept isn’t exactly what you’re doing.

So if you like Lady Gaga, I’m going to say that you probably have objectively less of an ear for music and less of an eye for aesthetics than the average human, even adjusting for cultural differences, because she’s just not that great. And if you like Katy Perry, I will support you, but I will not buy a ticket to her concert. I’m more of a quiet person.

And there it is. I think the real reason I loooove Marina is that her songs conceptually match the ones I try to write, except that hers are good. And most important, she’s not afraid to be loud. Somewhere in my growing up I way, way toned down my extrovertedness and succumbed to my shy side. And even when I was an extrovert, there were still many things I did not do, and the biggest was never to exit my personal bubble, which very closely mimics the shape and size of my body. I don’t dance, I don’t jump up and down, I started wearing more black clothes and flat shoes, and people always think I’m angry at concerts because my happiness stays inside me. Hell, I even straightened my hair so that people would notice me and catcall me less.

What fascinates me about Marina is her willingness to get so outside of her immediate body, I think. I am jealous of that, but it also scares me. I love the idea of being an artist like she, because I imagine she’s quite clever and, probably like me, enjoys a huge, varied diet of music, movies, and books. She knows her shit, and she also has a consistent style and persona, even while she grows. That’s not something I’m so sure I have, and not because I’m still changing as rapidly as I used to, but just because I don’t know how to do that. If I wanted to be a person like Marina, I would overanalyze it and make lists and charts and diagrams about my influences and cut out pictures of fashion and art so that I could always check to make sure I was living them. Marina, on the other hand, seems to just have it in her, whereas all of my ideas only seem to come out like this. Words, connections that work in my mind but that don’t sound so pretty when I write or say them.

Also, I still have to say, I get easily tired of Marina if I listen to her too long, but I could listen to her new acoustic set over and over again. It’s the silly, self conscious performance aspect, the snappy lyrics, and a quieter approach. This I could maybe do, if I took sexy lessons and no-more-shyness lessons. Maybe.

Maybe I’ll write a novel about a performance artist sometime?

/**/

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That said, like I said in my post for 50/50 Me, things on the Internet have the tendency to make me want to know something about everything, and the subjects I am interested in reading about grow at a much faster rate than I read—and that’s saying something, because I have trained myself to read, with understanding and engagement, rather quickly. (Practice makes perfect, right?) So my to-read list grows very quickly, and I have a difficult time deleting books from it, for a variety of reasons.

1. If I added it to my to-read list, something made me want to read it, and usually my memory works in such a way that seeing the title or cover will trigger a conversation with a teacher who recommended the author or an article I read that was inspired by a collection of poems, or whatever. I think I owe it to my memory to at least keep it on the list, in the hopes that someday I might get to it.

2. I feel social pressure and guilt if I don’t read certain things. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of this—for example, I don’t feel the need to read Twilight, ever, and I have accepted that there are some types of books that I just don’t care for—like, for example, most mysteries or novels on the NYT bestseller list that claim to be sensations (read: The Help or Freedom). But if someone I really respect or someone who knows me very well gives me a specific reason to read something, I feel like I should. Also, while I say that it’s unnecessary to read the classics when sociocultural insiderness gives you most of the information you need about them anyway, I secretly would like to see what all the fuss over Lolita and Wuthering Heights and Portrait of a Lady is all about.

3. I have bipolar disorder, and also I’m a human, and also my scholarly self is very comparative literature-based, so I have a variety of interests naturally, supplemented by the wonder that is hyperlinkage. I need a varied, vast to-read list because, depending on my current mood, my outside commitments as far as school reading and work exhaustion, and whatever events are occurring in my life, different genres and topics resonate with me.

4. There are certain types of books, at least in my eyes, that have to be read slowly and in small doses. These are things like poetry and science writing and ethical or religious texts. So, while I might feel like the majority of my intellectual energy is dedicated to absorbing just a few poems or one essay on economics, I still need to read something else for the other hours of the day, because what else would I do with my time, so that demands a varied list as well—it’s good to have a fast-paced dystopia on your hands so that you don’t get too bogged down by Frank O’Hara.

5. One of the ways I manifest as a hipster is that I have a major intellectual snobbery chip on my shoulder, and I love knowing that I have read books that other people haven’t, or that other people will find twee or quirky or intriguing—and for the most part, I also honestly want to read whatever book it is, but this may define whether I choose a title on paper or on Kindle.

6. Lately I have this idea that reading is a magical form of osmosis, and that anything I read that could fall into the category of health or self-help or mental/emotional wellbeing will instantly change my life based solely on my reading of it. Hence my recent addition of many texts on ethics, religion, eating habits, and self-definition.

So I’ve accepted that I’ll never actually carve a chunk out of my to-read list, because each thing you read, whether good or bad, probably makes you want to read something new. But I still like to wonder how much faster and how much more often I can read books while still achieving understanding and interest.

So last month and over a bit of February (remember, I had vertigo, so my brain fried itself and I spent 10 days not being able to comprehend more than three written sentences at a time), I read Reading in the Brain, which, while dense, is pretty awesomesauce. It’s about exactly what the title says, duh. I read it at a very convenient time, since I’m taking a class titled Literacy and Services to Underserved Populations. One of the things I keep realizing in library school is that, for someone who considers herself rather enlightened and attuned to social justice issues, it really hadn’t occurred to me that there were so many issues surrounding illiteracy, like learning disorders, the obvious social structures and issues that keep children from finishing school, and more. So coupling my natural interest in how social politics perpetrate inequalities with the actual science of how reading works was interesting, because it made me worry for a minute that I would take a stance that teachers don’t know what they’re doing, and being a progressive Democrat who is the daughter and sister of teachers, I DO NOT DO THAT. EVER. Because teachers, generally speaking, super duper know what they’re doing. But I digress. Dahaene described the entire neural process of how the brain, fascinatingly enough, has basically two simultaneous processes, one for recognizing letters and one for recognizing full words, even if that word is actually written incorrectly or includes typos. Fascinating stuff. I can’t really explain it to you as well as he did, and at times he got slightly too technical for me, but given that this was not my first time in the neuroscience book rodeo, I think it was probably due to my overtaxed brain.

But that’s the thing. I can’t explain it to you, and the fact that neuroscience is something I find really interesting, and the fact that I have a rather good conceptual understanding of all the information Dahaene gave me, makes me want to point out why it is I can’t be a PhD neurologist, even though I think I would really enjoy it. It took me years to learn that I find neurology interesting, because I only ever enjoyed science classes when the science was puzzle-based, like balancing chemical equations. But the way science is taught in the US, it is based on rote memorization more than context. In every science class I can remember, the idea was that I already knew what the teacher was talking about, and therefore we would build on that, and that was never true. I bravely signed up for a neuroscience class my junior year of college, called The Biology of Sensation, the description of which sounded like an Oliver Sacks book. But, even though it was cataloged as an appropriate general education science course, it was also a second-semester course for majors, so I was lost when it came to drawing cells and having background knowledge of college-level biology. I faltered every day in class, but when I’d go home and look things up online, or when I read the book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better, which, again, used good prose writing skills to explain things in a way that used language that appealed to my more conceptual mind.

If I had learned science in this way first, and then gone into the details of drawing a cell, I think I could have achieved more in science. And not that I’m suffering in life, and not that I’m not happy in my chosen field, but when you think about the efforts being made to get women and people of color into the sciences, it’s a shame that they lost me.

It’s not like I’m the only person who notices this. There are MFA programs in science writing, because it takes a special kind of person to understand stuff on the cellular level and transfer it to a place where an educated but not in-the-field person can grasp it. And universities are always trying to figure out how to make their science majors and professors see the value in good skills of rhetoric and speaking. It’s just too bad that there aren’t more scientists like Dahaene and Sacks, even though there must be (since I have an ever-growing science reading list), who stress this approach in science class, and who develop college-level courses that make science accessible to people with more humanities-trained minds. Because I love learning this stuff, but I’d never pass the MCAT.