August pleasure reading, part 2

This month I also read the book Lucy by Laurence Gonzales; it wasn’t something I’d normally read but it jumped out at me when I was returning the last round of books I borrowed from Duke’s library.  I had been talking to one of my labmates about Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which she saw and said was entertaining but really impractical from a scientific POV.  For instance, the guy in the movie did his experiment once on one animal then immediately said “We’re ready for human trials!!!”.  We had just been talking about this when I picked up Lucy in the library to read the inside cover and it talks about one character rescuing a girl only to discover she’s a “human hybrid, half human and half monkey…”.  So since we’d just been talking about things shown in mainstream media that are ridiculous to scientists (ie: DNA tests that take half an hour to run so that the criminal can be caught just in time) I decided to give it a read.

It was pretty entertaining and the author threw a lot of scientific garble into his description of how Lucy was made, but even with my somewhat limited understanding of genetics I know that the sentences were not coherent.  But I guess using a lot of multi-syllabic scientific jargon is really all you need if you’re just writing a book for the general public to enjoy.  It’s not like this author was claiming this could really happen.  It kind of made me want to read Jurassic Park again, just to see how Crichton described that process now that I’m not 12 and know more about science.  I am currently reading a book called Congo by Crichton, but maybe then I’ll reread Jurassic Park and The Lost World.  I also checked out Funny in Farsi, which I read in high school but don’t remember much about except that I liked it.  I read Firoozeh Dumas’ other book and talked about it here, but I’d like to read her first book again.

Last week I also read Something Borrowed and Something Blue by Emily Giffin, but I’ve read them both a few times, so there’s nothing to summarize really.  It had just been awhile since I’d read them.  It feels like I’m averaging 2+ books/week this summer!  Maybe it’s because I know writing my prelim is fast approaching and I’m trying to get all my pleasure reading in while I can…