Alaskan Range: Brain Processing
...Readers can go from Jane Austen to O’Brian and not miss a beat, except where the former writes about the country life of women in England circa 1810, the latter, who kept a first edition of “Pride and Prejudice” at his bedside, specialized in describing the lives of sailors in the same period in impeccable detail. In fact, Austen’s brothers were prominent sailors, and O’Brian wrote as if he was related...
Greg Hill is again re-reading his favourite author.
It’s no secret that my all-time favorite author is Patrick O’Brian, and I’m currently re-reading his magnificent, 20-book series of historically-drenched novels about British life and love during the Napoleonic Wars. O’Brian came to my attention in 1992 through a NY Times Book Review of his work by Richard Snow, editor-in-chief of American Heritage Magazine referring to the author as “the best historical novelist ever.” As is usual when a glowing book review is encountered, our library already possessed it. I read one, was irrevocably hooked.
Readers can go from Jane Austen to O’Brian and not miss a beat, except where the former writes about the country life of women in England circa 1810, the latter, who kept a first edition of “Pride and Prejudice” at his bedside, specialized in describing the lives of sailors in the same period in impeccable detail. In fact, Austen’s brothers were prominent sailors, and O’Brian wrote as if he was related.
Though not one to re-read books, I’ve consumed this 7,000 page work in either print or audio form probably five or six times (who’s counting, anyway), with each experience revealing fresh and fascinating aspects. Besides being a rousing, historically accurate tale, there’s intriguing insight into all the ways humans can express strong emotions, especially love.
The two central protagonists, a naval captain violinist and a physician-spy cellist, are initially attracted by their mutual affection for music, and there are CDs containing all the music mentioned in the series. The captain loves food, especially soused hog’s face and drowned baby pudding, so there’s a cookbook of period recipes. And there’s an atlas, a movie, opposing biographies of O’Brian, and several narrations of the series in audio-book form.
Confession time: I complete fewer than one-in-twenty books I begin; unless it’s really compelling, I’m soon off to the next. Although there are oodles of great books and finite amounts of reading time, I’m convinced that re-reading a book deep enough to withstand it is worthwhile. Being immersed in O’Brian again has led to several recently encountered books and articles having special resonance.
Everyone with any sort of patience loves having stories told to them by good storytellers; it was true in pre-electricity days, and the circulation statistics for the library’s audio book collection show it endures. Good narrators enhance audio books enormously, and according to a study by the Child Development Institute titled “10 Years of Brain Imaging Research Shows the Brain read Sound By Sound,” our brains read by sounding out the letters and words.
MRI tests have shown that when we see letters and groups of letters, our brains sound out what we’re seeing at lightning speed. The “brain is processing one sound at a time, but we perceive it as a whole word. In good readers the process is so fast it appears they are reading whole words, but in fact they are converting the letters on the written page into sounds. The brain then recognizes groups of sounds as words.”
So who spoke the first words? Someone long ago in southern Africa, according to a New Scientist article by Ferris Jabr titled “Evolutionary Babel Was in Southern Africa.” The article describes a computer program designed by New Zealand university professor Quentin Atkinson that determines the comparative number of phonemes, “the sounds that make up words, like ‘c,’ ‘a,’ and ‘tch’ in the words ‘catch,’” in various languages. Atkinson found that “African populations have higher genetic diversity than European, Asian, and American populations,” and they have the greatest phonetic diversity, being the only place on earth where clicks are employed in the spoken vocabulary.
I also re-read a lecture titled “How to Read, How to Write” by novelist Vladimir Nabokov published thirty years ago in Esquire Magazine, of all places. Being relatively new to the world of literature back then, I was moved by Nabokov’s urging to find one or more “great books,” books with depth and nuance, and re-read them throughout my life. I encountered some good ones, but O’Brian’s story and characters grabbed me hardest.
Now O’Brian’s characters are my dear friends, and as Mark Twain noted, “Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience; this is the ideal life.”
