Whoops, false alarm TChem, it wasn't your package.

It was, um, more sockyarn.

Yeah. I have been trying not to buy any more, but I heard about the Blue Faced Leicester sockyarn that Simply Sock Yarn had, and so I had to get a skein.

It's for science. (As - and apparently I am the only one who actually remembers this - Clyde Crashcup was known to say).

Because if I can't RAISE heirloom breeds, at least I can knit with them.

Anyway, that's not the main theme of the post. I'm going to do a quick run-down of recently completed books, to continue my Books Completed theme, so I can count them up at the end of the year and feel a little better about my "misspent time." (And all the hours of "House" and "Dirty Jobs" I watched).

First off is a fairly simple mystery story. I read this one on the way up to Winona, on the train. It's called "Death at Gallows Green" and is by "Robin Paige" (a pseudonym for the prolific Susan Wittig Albert and her husband, Bill).

This is from a series of historical mystery novels. I'm guessing that either she or her husband is a specialist in history because their novels (she also writes the Beatrix Potter series of mysteries) has lots of historical detail. It doesn't quite give the gripping, you-are-there feel of Bruce Alexander's "Sir John Fielding" series, but they are still pretty good books.

This was actually the second novel in the series. Kate Ardleigh (a young American woman who inherited her maiden aunts' British property, and, presumably, enough money to live on) is the main character. A secondary character is Sir Charles Sheridan. (Not to give too much away, but Kate and Charles apparently marry in a later book). Beatrix Potter also makes an appearance in this novel, as a woman visiting one of the sprawling country houses. Kate sort of befriends her.

The story itself is pretty good. A murder, a smuggling plot, and a missing child are involved, without giving too much away.

I have to admit I'm still not sure how I feel about fictional novels - especially mystery stories - that have "real" people written into them. If I had had a rather famous relative, say, my Great-Uncle Fritz, the opera singer, had been as famous as Caruso and someone decided to write him into a mystery...I think I might be just a trifle ANNOYED, at least if I had known Great-Uncle Fritz, and if the portrayal of him didn't seem accurate.

(And yes, I did actually have a Great-Uncle Fritz who was a German opera singer. I don't know much else about him other than that. He's one of the rather large cadre of relatives on my dad's side who never married or had children. [and you know, I kind of take some odd comfort in looking back over the family tree and seeing all these maiden aunts and bachelor uncles...I like knowing I'm not the only one in family history not to be paired off like a Noah's Ark animal])
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I also finished "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." Fun, fairly light (even though I got MASSIVELY ticked off at that fraud, Lockhart. Grr. He got what he deserved.)

It's funny, I was so not into the series when it first came out - I read the first book and was all "meh, it's a series for children" and didn't want to read the rest. But then I saw the (excellent) movies and decided I wanted to read the novels as well.

There are some departures in this book from the movie - some because it would have made it too long, some that were probably too hard to film as written. So it's interesting to read the book.

Potter-world, I have to admit, is a world I kind of would like to inhabit. The idea of having magic to do the role of a lot of things we have technology for. (After all, what is the "Marauder's Map" but a form of Wizard GPS?). And things seem more stylish, somehow - it's almost a little bit like steampunk in that regard - some thought is put into the design of everyday objects, rather than stamping out some anonymous piece of plastic or metal that is exactly like all other six million made that day.

And I also think another reason I like Hogwarts? The faculty, even though some of them may not be much liked, are by and large respected. Some even inspire a certain fear. I have to admit it - some days I find my students a bit too "familiar," and I'd love to fix them with a McGonigal-like stare and get them to quiet down and put a bit of professional distance between themselves and me.

I just in general like "school stories." And apparently a lot of other do too, given the books' popularity.
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I also finished that book on chestnuts - "The American Chestnut: the life, death, and rebirth of a perfect tree" by Susan Freinkel.

I didn't think quite as highly of the book as some of the reviewers did. At times I felt a bit like it skimmed the surface, and focused more on the personality conflicts between researchers (or the weirdness of the solo folks) than it did on the actual work they were doing. Still, it surprised me in places - I had always assumed the American chestnut was all-but-extinct and that people had largely given up on it (barring some kind of fantastic development in biotech). But there are quixotic scientists scattered across the country, who are looking for ways to save the trees. Some are interested in hybridizing the remaining stock with Chinese trees (which are closely related, but a species that is resistant to the blight). Others want to try to study the few remaining survivors - some of which have resisted the fungus. Still others look to biotech for a solution - either engineering in genes that will allow resistance, or cloning the few resistant individuals out there. And finally, there are those who are looking to "fight fire with fire" - there is a virus that seems to largely deactivate the fungus.

But in all cases, there is no one perfect solution. The virus only works on some fungal strains. Some of the hybrids don't do so well. Biotech is controversial and it can be very tricky to get it to work.

And there's controversy. A lot of the die-hard chestnut fans resist either hybrids or genetically-altered trees being sold as "American chestnuts" (I can see their position though I'm not sure I agree).

It does make me sad, though - to think of this tree, which was apparently such a big part of the Appalachian and Ozark forests 90 years ago, now almost totally gone - almost forgotten. I've never seen a chestnut tree in the wild. I've never eaten a "real" American chestnut (Supposedly they have a different flavor from the Italian or Asian chestnuts that are the ones you buy in the store).

And there is an interesting question, which Freinkel never really explicitly raises - how do you get people to care about something that was mostly lost long before they are born?

I don't know. And yet there are an awful lot of people who care about the chestnut. Granted, some of them had grandparents who remembered the trees. Or some came from Europe where the European trees persisted (again, a different but related species - however, some of the Italian populations are susceptible to the blight).

Freinkel DOES raise the question of "Is a restoration project ever as good as the orignal?" And she quotes some people who adamantly say NO, that restored landscape will never be as good as undisturbed native landscape, and who take a very discouraging tone.

And you know? As a person who has DONE restoration ecology, who is interested in restoration, that struck me. I mean, I think they have it a little wrong - they act as if the restorationists are claiming, "Oh, it's OK to destroy stuff - we can always make it new" or "restored habitat is just as good as the original."

I don't think (most) restoration ecologists ever even contemplate that. For most of us, I think I see it this way: think of the bombing of Dresden in WWII. I don't know enough about the situation to argue whether or not it had to happen, or whether it could have been prevented - but that is beside the point; it happened. Hundreds of historic buildings were destroyed - turned to rubble in two days. Many civilians died.

And the response afterwards could have been one of a number of things:

First, everyone left could have just thrown up their hands and said, "Look at the terrible things humans have done" and walked away and left the piles of rubble for the next several hundred years.

Or, they could have said, "We must plow this under and pretend it never happened. Put up new modern office blocks and apartments on the place. Pretend that Dresden never was."

Or, what they mostly did - look at the wreckage, shake their heads, and go "This is terrible. But we should try to put back at least some of what was lost." I don't think anyone believes that the opera house or the churches (or the synagogue that was rebuilt - which was not destroyed in the bombing itself but was earlier destroyed on "Kristallnacht" by the N*zis) is exactly the same as what it was before. But the effort was made to restore and reconcile.

And I tend to think that is what we should do in the natural world. Mourn what is lost, but not spend excessive time or energy on beating ourselves up for what our ancestors did (right or wrong). Instead, to channel that energy to trying to make things work again, trying to make things beautiful again. But I don't think we can ever claim that a restored forest or wetland is equivalent to one that remains in its native state.

And so, I think the handwringers who seem to suggest we should NEVER do restoration because it's at best a counterfeit of the "real" world can lead to more problems than they solve...should we leave the "jumbos" from strip mines, with their acid runoff and erosion, because they are better monuments to human greed and misunderstanding of the natural world that way? Or should we try to level them and deal with the acidity of the soil and plant trees and turn an eyesore into something that's not quite so bad.

I guess what I'm saying is I'm not really down with the concept of flagellating ourselves for the sins/ignorance of the past; that it's better to move on and do what we can to improve things that are messed up.

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The last book I want to mention was The Spy who Came In from the Cold.
It's an interesting book - rather different from what I typically read. (Despite my once having claimed to "like spy stories," I think I based that assessment solely on a single John Buchan novel I read one rainy fall afternoon).

One thing that's a bit unsettling about the book is, up until the end, you don't know for sure who is going to break bad on whom. You don't know exactly what the alliances is, who is a double agent, that kind of thing.

And you know, I kind of liked that about the book. It made it seem realer, even though on several occasions I had to put the book down and read something lighter. (I found the "trial" that happened in East Germany particularly difficult to read. Especially when they were making Liz testify.)

BIG BIG SPOILER ALERT....be forewarned. Don't scroll down and read unless you've read the book or don't care about stuff being given away.


















Liz and Leamas die in the end. Trying to get into West Germany. It's not clear whether Mundt (who appeared to be trying to help them) sold them out, or if he just tried and failed.

I will openly admit I wanted a happy ending to the book. Even though I suppose there were very few happy endings to that sort of a thing during the Cold War.