I write a Mon­day Col­umn every cou­ple of months for 3 Quarks Dai­ly. Pre­vi­ous posts are col­lect­ed here. This is the lat­est one.

Decem­ber has a way of creep­ing up on you. It seems just a few weeks since sum­mer was here and Abbas was mak­ing hay in the Alps.

2008 has been a year of fear and hope. Mighty finan­cial insti­tu­tions have col­lapsed overnight and Amer­i­ca has elect­ed its first African-Amer­i­can Pres­i­dent. Appar­ent­ly, Rein­hold Niebuhr and Niet­zsche are among Barack Obama’s favorite authors, although I can’t imag­ine he has had much time for read­ing this year. Which is a pity as there have been some great non-fic­tion titles pub­lished in 2008.

For me one of the most mem­o­rable was Proust and the Squid: The Sto­ry and Sci­ence of the Read­ing Brain by Maryanne Wolf (pub­lished in the UK this year by Icon). It’s an enthralling cel­e­bra­tion of the sci­ence and “com­plex beau­ty of the read­ing process”. In evo­lu­tion­ary terms, read­ing is a recent­ly acquired cul­tur­al inven­tion that uses exist­ing brain struc­tures for a rad­i­cal­ly new skill. Unlike vision or speech, there is no direct genet­ic pro­gramme pass­ing read­ing on to future gen­er­a­tions. It is an unnat­ur­al process that has to be learnt by each indi­vid­ual.

As direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Read­ing and Lan­guage Research at Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty in Boston, Wolf works with read­ers of all ages, but par­tic­u­lar­ly those with dyslex­ia, a con­di­tion that proves “our brains were nev­er wired to read”. Wolf there­fore has much of prac­ti­cal val­ue to say about why some peo­ple have dif­fi­cul­ty read­ing and how to over­come this. Read­ing sto­ries to pre-school chil­dren is cru­cial, she says, as it encour­ages the for­ma­tion of cir­cuits in the brain, as well as impart­ing essen­tial infor­ma­tion about fight­ing drag­ons and mar­ry­ing princes.

Wolf’s sto­ry of the devel­op­ment of the read­ing brain cov­ers many fields, from lin­guis­tics, archae­ol­o­gy and edu­ca­tion to his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture and neu­ro­science. In par­tic­u­lar, she high­lights the brain’s aston­ish­ing plas­tic­i­ty, its “pro­tean capac­i­ty” to reor­gan­ise itself to learn new skills. Accord­ing to Wolf, we are all born with the “capac­i­ty to change what is giv­en to us by nature.” Right from the cra­dle we are “genet­i­cal­ly poised for break­throughs”. She mem­o­rably para­phras­es Dar­win: “bio­log­i­cal­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly, read­ing allows the species to go ‘beyond the infor­ma­tion giv­en’ to cre­ate end­less thoughts most beau­ti­ful and won­der­ful”.

For thou­sands of years, the process of engag­ing with texts has enriched us, both exis­ten­tial­ly and — as Wolf’s remark­able book shows — bio­log­i­cal­ly. Dif­fer­ent lan­guages put their own unique stamp on the brain, cre­at­ing dis­tinc­tive brain net­works. Read­ing Chi­nese requires a dif­fer­ent set of neu­ronal con­nec­tions from those need­ed to read Eng­lish. As the writer Joseph Epstein has said, “we are what we read”. Doc­tors treat­ing a bilin­gual per­son who devel­oped alex­ia (inabil­i­ty to read) after a stroke found aston­ish­ing evi­dence of this. Although he could no longer read Eng­lish, the patient was still able to read Chi­nese.

2008 was unques­tion­ably China’s year. From ter­ri­ble earth­quakes to space walks and, of course, the Olympics, Chi­na was rarely out of the head­lines. Out of this year’s red tide of titles about this end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing coun­try, I found two par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable: Chi­na: A‑Z, by Kai Strittmat­ter (Haus) and Chi­na: Empire of Liv­ing Sym­bols, by Cecil­ia Lindqvist (Da Capo). Both use lan­guage as a spring­board to explore Chi­nese cul­ture and his­to­ry.

For Strittmat­ter, a Ger­man cor­re­spon­dent in Bei­jing for 10 years, Chi­na is “a land of con­tra­dic­tions”. (This reminds me of Bohr’s delight­ful com­ment: “How won­der­ful that we have met with a para­dox. Now we have some hope of mak­ing progress.”) After spend­ing two decades in a Maoist labour camp, author Zhang Xian­liang says: “it’s because Chi­na is a mys­tery, that it’s so dear to me”. He is now a mem­ber of the Com­mu­nist par­ty and a suc­cess­ful busi­ness­man. Bend, adapt and move on seems to be the les­son here. Per­haps the Chi­nese have learnt this phi­los­o­phy from one of their most beau­ti­ful plants – bam­boo.

“No plant moves me as pro­found­ly as bam­boo,” writes Lindqvist, “most of all the sound of its thin, dry leaves as they rus­tle in the wind.” I agree com­plete­ly. One of the first things we did in our gar­den was plant bam­boo. I can see it now from my desk, sway­ing sen­su­ous­ly. In storms it can be blown almost flat but the next day it is upright again. Accord­ing to Lindqvist, the resilience of this won­der­ful grass taught the Chi­nese a pow­er­ful les­son about how to face dif­fi­cul­ties: “Bend, adapt, of course, but nev­er aban­don ideals. Nev­er be defeat­ed. Oth­er winds will blow, all in good time.”

There are, of course, many Chi­nas — it is a vast con­ti­nent uni­fied by a com­mon lan­guage, stan­dard­ised as far back as 221 BC. In Strittmatter’s “pock­et dic­tio­nary” of Chi­nese cul­ture, it is “the mag­ic of the char­ac­ters them­selves” that tells the sto­ry of this para­dox­i­cal land. An entry in his book about the fam­i­ly (jia) high­lights the impor­tance of the Con­fu­cian virtue of ser­vice. For the Chi­nese that means “some­times serv­ing the state, gen­er­al­ly the fam­i­ly, and always the par­ents”. In a dis­cus­sion of chop­sticks (kuai zi) he notes dri­ly, and entire­ly accu­rate­ly, that they are pri­mar­i­ly an “instru­ment for mea­sur­ing a for­eign­er’s abil­i­ty to inte­grate”. From gan bei (cheers) to why xiao zi (pet­ty bour­geois) was once an insult but is now cool (ku), this is a delight­ful­ly wit­ty and insight­ful guide to today’s Chi­na.

Lindqvist’s remark­able study broke new ground when it was first pub­lished in Swe­den near­ly twen­ty years ago. Reis­sued this year, her book explores the ori­gins of mod­ern Chi­nese writ­ing in pic­tures and objects over 3,000 years old, such as ora­cle bones. An art his­to­ri­an who spent her life study­ing Chi­nese cul­ture, Lindqvist weaves archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence of the ear­li­est Chi­nese char­ac­ters togeth­er with the coun­try’s his­to­ry to demon­strate Chi­na’s unique cul­tur­al con­ti­nu­ity. It’s believed writ­ten lan­guage arose first in Mesopotamia, although Wolf cites recent evi­dence that sug­gests Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs may be old­er than even Sumer­ian cuneiform writ­ing. No one uses either today, but mod­ern Chi­nese script is recog­nis­ably sim­i­lar to the ear­li­est forms of writ­ing in the region. Chi­na “is a con­tin­u­a­tion in direct lin­eal descent from the cul­ture that arose in the long val­ley of the Yel­low Riv­er dur­ing the 5th mil­len­ni­um before the begin­ning of our cal­en­dar.”

Lindqvist shows how the old­est char­ac­ters are rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al (“man” depicts a per­son in pro­file and dates back to the ear­li­est ora­cle bones) and these remain part of today’s lan­guage. In this beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten and illus­trat­ed book, lan­guage and images come togeth­er to tell a com­mon sto­ry about the root­ed­ness of the mod­ern script in the ancient signs. Draw­ing on her long expe­ri­ence of the coun­try — its sights, sounds and tastes (includ­ing a few recipes, such as pork with bam­boo, onions and dried mush­rooms) — Lindqvist cre­ates an evoca­tive and com­pelling cel­e­bra­tion of lan­guage as a car­ri­er of cul­ture.

Anoth­er book that mem­o­rably explored our love affair with lan­guage this year was Off the Page: Writ­ers Talk About Begin­nings, End­ings and Every­thing in Between, edit­ed by Car­ole Burns (Nor­ton) As a non-fic­tion writer, I have immense admi­ra­tion for what nov­el­ists do with lan­guage. It seems to me fic­tion is a kind of alche­my, a mix of sci­ence and mag­ic, fact and poet­ry. Attempts to explain this process often fall flat. But not Burns’ book. She inter­views 43 authors about the writ­ing life, from the nuts and bolts of fic­tion (how to breathe life into a char­ac­ter) to more gen­er­al com­ments on inspi­ra­tion and influ­ences. AS Byatt starts her nov­els with a “block of colour” (“Babel Tow­er is black and red, because of blood and destruc­tion”). For Paul Auster the sto­ry comes first: “I find the book in the process of writ­ing it”.

All agree on one thing: writ­ing and rewrit­ing is nev­er easy. Joyce Car­ol Oates finds the first draft the hard­est: it’s “like hack­ing one’s way through a thick jun­gle with some­thing like a but­ter knife”. Richard Bausch recalls how he wrote an entire 800-page nov­el before decid­ing it was real­ly a short sto­ry. The process of cut­ting it down to size was, he says, like pass­ing a kid­ney stone. Ouch. “Every­one goes a lit­tle mad as a writer”, says Ali­son Smith, and most inter­vie­wees agree. Even Mar­tin Amis admits to the occa­sion­al “crazy-sci­en­tist cack­le” while writ­ing.

I sym­pa­thise. After fin­ish­ing my last book (it took over three years), I just want­ed to lie in a dark room and lis­ten to sooth­ing music. But I guess all writ­ers are suck­ers for pun­ish­ment – I’ve just start­ed research­ing a new book: a cul­tur­al his­to­ry of cities. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing time to be writ­ing about urban his­to­ry – this year we offi­cial­ly became an urban species with more peo­ple liv­ing in cities than in rur­al areas. There are of course many won­der­ful books about urban his­to­ry. John Reader’s excel­lent Cities (2004) for one, and Peter Hall’s mas­ter­ly Cities in Civ­i­liza­tion (1998) which focus­es on cities as cen­tres of inno­va­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty. Inter­est­ing­ly, Hall only men­tions Chi­na a few times in 1169 pages – a sign, per­haps, of how fast the world is chang­ing and the aston­ish­ing rate of urban­i­sa­tion in recent years. By 2020, there will be ten cities with more than twen­ty mil­lion cit­i­zens, gar­gan­tu­an cities such as Jakar­ta, Del­hi, Mex­i­co City, São Paulo, New York, and Tokyo.

As it turns out, 2008 has been a vin­tage year for urban stud­ies. Gail Fenske’s beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trat­ed biog­ra­phy of the Wool­worth Build­ing, The Sky­scraper and the City (Chica­go), is one of my favourites. It is a superb study of the New York sky­scraper that became emblem­at­ic of the world’s first sig­na­ture sky­line. Cass Gilbert’s inspir­ing cathe­dral to com­merce opened in 1913. This Goth­ic spire offered New York­ers pass­ing by on the side­walk “an expe­ri­ence of sheer ver­ti­cal ascent unri­valled by the taller but stepped-back sky­scrap­ers of the 1920s”. Fenske tells the fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry of this building’s inspi­ra­tion, design, con­struc­tion and its place in the city that has come to define the mod­ern metrop­o­lis. The pin­na­cled tow­er no longer dom­i­nates New York’s ver­tig­i­nous sky­line but it remains a mon­u­ment to the soar­ing ambi­tion of its own­er and archi­tect, as well as to human aspi­ra­tion and the desire to con­quer ver­ti­cal space.

Once it was Lon­don that broke all urban records, from size to pol­lu­tion. On Brick Lane by Rachel Licht­en­stein (out in paper­back from Pen­guin in the UK) is a won­der­ful­ly evoca­tive and per­son­al por­trait of a part of the East End of Lon­don that has been home to suc­ces­sive waves of immi­grants. Chick­sand Street, off Brick Lane, is where Bram Stoker’s Drac­u­la slept in a cof­fin of Tran­syl­van­ian earth. In the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry the Huguenots arrived, lat­er there were Jews from East­ern Europe (includ­ing Lichtenstein’s own grand­par­ents) and now it is home to a thriv­ing Bangladeshi com­mu­ni­ty. An artist, Licht­en­stein has lived and worked in Brick Lane since the 1990s. She evoca­tive­ly weaves togeth­er her own expe­ri­ences with those of her fam­i­ly and inter­views with for­mer and cur­rent res­i­dents, rang­ing from a Bangladeshi school­girl (“Brick Lane is like a part of Bangladesh”), to the foot­loose Lon­don author Iain Sin­clair, who used to work in the 300-year-old Tru­man brew­ery, and the poet Stephen Watts, who tells her: “There is a tidal wave of sound and mem­o­ry rush­ing down that street.”

The “sen­so­ry encounter” with cities is the sub­ject of Dell Upton’s Anoth­er City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New Amer­i­can Repub­lic, pub­lished this year by Yale. The stench and cacoph­o­ny of ear­ly nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can cities must have been ter­ri­ble, judg­ing from Upton’s impres­sive research. Using trav­el jour­nals, diaries, and let­ters he shows how the “insis­tent and impor­tu­nate sights, sounds and smells sur­passed any­thing pre­vi­ous­ly known in the new nation”. To read his book is to be immersed in the sen­sa­tions of the city.

In New York, “pub­lic pork­ers” roamed the streets up until the mid­dle of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. Indeed, hors­es, cat­tle, and goats shared the city with their two-legged own­ers. Most Amer­i­can cities had no drainage sys­tems and rub­bish was thrown out into the street form­ing a putre­fy­ing heap known as “cor­po­ra­tion pie”, until scav­engers hired by the city dis­posed of it. Upton argues con­vinc­ing­ly that the expe­ri­ence of liv­ing in noisy, stink­ing ante­bel­lum cities spurred a reformist desire in many urban com­mu­ni­ties to real­ize the ide­al of a shin­ing city upon a hill: “The relics of civ­i­lized life that bom­bard­ed the sens­es, and the mixed throngs that crowd­ed the streets of ante­bel­lum cities, were the cru­cible with­in which city dwellers formed a sense of what it meant to be a cit­i­zen of a repub­li­can city.”

Of course, build­ing Utopia is eas­i­er said than done, as Robert H. Kar­gon and Arthur P. Molel­la show in Invent­ed Edens: Tech­no-Cities of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (MIT). Mod­ernist reform­ers embraced tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions to solve nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry urban prob­lems such as con­ges­tion, pol­lu­tion and dis­ease. From Ebenez­er Howard’s sem­i­nal notion of the “Gar­den City” in the 1890s, to the new urban­ist Cel­e­bra­tion in Flori­da in the 1990s, Kar­gon and Molel­la argue that the tech­no-city was a bold social exper­i­ment, but one that in the end was doomed to fail­ure. For despite using the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy, at the heart of these ide­al cities was a nos­tal­gic yearn­ing for small-town life. What the authors term “tech­no-nos­tal­gia” cre­at­ed a fatal fault line run­ning through the tech­no-city: “the machine in the gar­den is a seduc­tive dream, but a prob­lem­at­ic real­i­ty”.

Kar­gon and Molel­la also dis­cuss Oak Ridge in East Ten­nessee, a once secret city cre­at­ed as part of the Man­hat­tan Project. The plan for this tech­no-city was inspired by the same nos­tal­gic yearn­ing for an ide­al­ized gar­den city, with tree-lined streets and “organ­ic clus­ters” of hous­es. There is, how­ev­er, a shock­ing irony about the fact that the peo­ple who lived in this utopi­an city were build­ing a super­weapon designed for one pur­pose – to anni­hi­late cities.

The nuclear age is the sub­ject of Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger’s enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive A Nuclear Fam­i­ly Vaca­tion : Trav­els in the World of Atom­ic Weapon­ry (Blooms­bury). Where are you going for your hol­i­days next year? How about the Semi­palatin­sk Test Site in the for­mer Sovi­et repub­lic of Kaza­khstan? It is, appar­ent­ly, a bona fide tourist des­ti­na­tion. But remem­ber to pack your Geiger counter and iodine tablets. As Hodge and Wein­berg­er dis­cov­er, the site is still high­ly radioac­tive. Most of the cold war sci­en­tists who lived in the near­by secret nuclear city of Kur­cha­tov have now returned to Rus­sia, but some tech­ni­cians remain. Asked about the mea­sures they took to pro­tect them­selves from radioac­tiv­i­ty, one replies dry­ly: “Before every test, we drank grain alco­hol.”

Hodge and Wein­berg­er are a hus­band-and-wife team of defense reporters turned nuclear tourists. As the title sug­gests, the authors did indeed vis­it many of the places dur­ing their hol­i­days: every­where from Iran’s Esfa­han Ura­ni­um Con­ver­sion Facil­i­ty, which sup­plies mate­r­i­al to the top-secret ura­ni­um enrich­ment facil­i­ty at Natanz, to the Neva­da Test Site (a “sand­box for nuclear weapons design­ers”), and the Cheyenne Moun­tain bunker (“the ulti­mate cold war retreat”). In Los Alam­os, where the first atom­ic bombs were designed, the authors noticed that the sci­en­tists some­times had pic­tures of their favorite nuclear tests hang­ing above their desks and could describe, “in lov­ing detail, the very per­son­al rea­sons for their choic­es”. One sci­en­tist even named his son after the 1952 Ivy Mike H‑bomb test. But Los Alam­os has­n’t designed a new nuke since the 1980s, and has become lit­tle more than a “repair shop for nuclear weapons”. The sci­en­tists are not hap­py: “the mood at the lab hov­ered some­where between depres­sion and despair”.

Reveal­ing­ly, although Hodge and Wein­berg­er inter­viewed many politi­cians and sci­en­tists, they failed to find any­one who could say what the pur­pose of the nuclear arse­nal is now. The nuclear weapons indus­try, cost­ing bil­lions of dol­lars a year, is an enter­prise that has “lost its way”. Their impor­tant con­clu­sion is that it is time for the US to think the unthink­able and “explore prac­ti­cal options for elim­i­nat­ing the nuclear arse­nal”.

No doubt that’s a pol­i­cy Noam Chom­sky would sup­port. In Inter­ven­tions, which appeared in the UK in paper­back this year, he notes that the US spends as much on its mil­i­tary as the rest of the world com­bined. Anoth­er shock­ing fact: appar­ent­ly the essays in this col­lec­tion by one of today’s lead­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als have been pub­lished in news­pa­pers all around the world, but were large­ly ignored in the US.

Accord­ing to Chom­sky, the tac­it assump­tion guid­ing all US for­eign pol­i­cy is now “we own the world, so what does it mat­ter what oth­ers think?”. From Iraq and the war on ter­ror, to Iran’s nuclear ambi­tions and US sup­port for Israel, he accus­es Wash­ing­ton of accel­er­at­ing the race to destruc­tion. Hope­ful­ly, Amer­i­ca will soon be turn­ing over a new leaf under Pres­i­dent Oba­ma. Lead me to that radi­ant city upon a hill…