Brain research

Just finished Left Neglected. I liked this book a lot! I liked the way she described the difficulties/symptoms of Sarah’s condition without being clinical. I loved her sense of humor. I was amazed at the amount of research involved in writing the book and way she went about it.

So, I’m very excited to attend tonight’s UWEC Forum: V.S. Ramachandran. Here’s small blurb from the UWEC news release:

Ramachandran is known as a storyteller who is able to concretely and simply describe the most complicated inner workings of the brain. He is fascinated by patients who have unusual abilities or defects in the way they perceive the world. These include such puzzling phenomena as the phantom pain experienced in a missing limb, the inability to recognize a familiar face following a stroke, and the belief that one is actually dead. Ramachandran investigated many of these strange cases in his acclaimed book, "Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" (1998)

On Canaan's Side

I chose to read On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Berry based on an NPR blurb about 2011’s best books – best in that they stuck with the reviewer. I remember this one being described as ‘haunting’. On finishing the book, I decided I liked it quite a bit, but didn’t think it lived up to that description. Until a couple weeks passed and I find myself still thinking about it. I still can’t put my finger on why.

Here’s some information from The Guardian on it:

In his fifth novel, Sebastian Barry takes up the story of another of the Dunnes, the family whose members have appeared in Annie Dunne and A Long, Long Way and in his play The Steward of Christendom. Eighty-nine-year-old Lilly Bere recounts the events of her life as though mesmerised by the vivid incompleteness of a remembered dream

By anybody's reckoning, Lilly's life is a traumatic one, encompassing multiple bereavements and separations, material hardship, numerous upheavals and unrelieved exile from an oppressed and divided homeland. Her indomitability […] derives in part from the very invisibility and stoicism that she has had to cultivate and for the joy in small reliefs and pleasures to which that has led.

This concentration on isolating tiny fragments of experience and apprehension makes for an intense and immersive read, one in which brutal events are cast in a diffuse light that gives them an almost mythic quality. But the narrative's dreamlike qualities do not eclipse Barry's determination to scrutinise the less travelled byways of history and to give a voice to their buffeted, battered but nonetheless enduring victims.

Sherlock Holmes

I thought I would share this quote to our discussion about Sherlock Holmes from last night:

"Sherlock Holmes is, said Sherlockian scholar Edgar W. Smith, 'the personification of something in us that we have lost, or never had. For it is not Sherlock Holmes who sits in Baker Street, comfortable, competent and self-assured; it is ourselves who are there, full of a tremendous capacity for wisdom, complacent in the presence of our humble Watson, conscious of a warm well-being and a timeless, imperishable content. The easy chair in the room is drawn up to the hearthstone of our very hearts. [...] And the time and place and all the great events are near and dear to us not because our memories call them forth in pure nostalgia, but because they are a part of us today.
" 'That is the Sherlock Holmes we love--the Holmes implicit and eternal in ourselves."
--The Illustrated Sherlock Holmes Treasury