Bellwether

Bellwether by Connie Willis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fad researcher Sandra Foster just wants to know what caused women to start bobbing their hair in the 1920s - but what she gets is an aggressively incompetent assistant, a longer budget request form, and a chance meeting with a man who seems immune to every trend.

Sandra sees herself as the sane point in the turning world - even though her hobby is systematically checking out her favorite books so that the library won't get rid of them, and every moment of her day is spent  analyzing pop culture. She struggles to understand why people are suddenly wearing duct tape armbands and rolling their eyes, and wishes that things like politeness and chocolate cheesecake would catch on.

Flip, Sandra's rude assistant, is possibly the most irritating character in literature (aside from Lydia Bennett), and she could be Ignatius J. Reilly's trainee When Flip's misdelivery of a package leads Sandra to the office of chaos researcher Bennett O'Reilly, Sandra doesn't realize that the chance meeting will lead her to borrow a flock of sheep just to keep the unconventional scientist around. This isn't even the craziest thing that happens in Bellwether.

Connie Willis has a way of writing that makes you feel as though you're inside a screwball comedy. The romance aspect here is slightly underplayed but charming (I could use more of Bennett). Sandra's company, HiTek, has a level of internal dysfunction to rival Office Space's TPS reports or the Feds' toilet paper memo in Snow Crash. Best of all, each chapter begins with fascinating tidbits about historical fads, from Hula Hoops to dancing mania to diorama wigs.

Bellwether is every bit as smart and funny as you expect a Connie Willis book to be, and the perfect way to start your summer reading.

Interested in the idea of complexity? Continue on with The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, or Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan

(0 stars: DNF)

Have we cultivated plants, or have they cultivated us? Pollan argues that the sweetness of the apple, the beauty of the tulip, the intoxication of marihuana, and the control offered by the potato have shaped humankind - not the other way around.

I was kind of enjoying this book's combination of botany and cultural history (a la Malcolm Gladwell) until I hit the section on marijuana and the tenuous connections Pollan draws between it and religion. I just couldn't. I don't buy it when writers offer thinly supported materialistic explanations of religious phenomena, and I found Pollan's ponderings on the "profound" thoughts experienced by those who are high ridiculous. Also, his metaphors and literary references are sometimes a stretch that require too much credulity for me to follow. (Johnny Appleseed is not Dionysius. Sorry. No.)

I couldn't even make it to the potato, which is a shame because I love potatoes.

The best part of the book for me came near the end of the first section on apples, when Pollan visits a tree library full of seeds that come from Kazakhstan, the cradle of the original apple tree. His description of the tulip bulb speculation craze in Holland barely touches on a very interesting time in history, one I would love to read a book about. If there had been more history and science, and less pseudo-philosophical maundering, I would have enjoyed it more (and probably finished it).

But it's the kind of layman's science and history that has stopped seeming clever to me because these books tend to be sloppy with the details - too caught up in drawing broad, easy conclusions from sketchy knowledge. Journalists rarely make great science writers when short pieces are made book-length.

If you loved this book, sorry. If you want other books that combine cultural history and science, check these out:

Susan Orleans' book The Orchid Thief, which has fascinating details about orchids

Any of Malcolm Gladwell's books, especially The Tipping Point

Tulipomania by Mike Dash tells the full story of the Dutch tulip craze