THE SINGING SANDS

This was the last of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant mysteries, published posthumously in 1952, and it ended up being my favorite—surpassing The Daughter of Time, which, although it appeals heavily to the historical nerd in me, is really just a playful curiosity in the Grant canon; the stakes are a lot higher here. Like Daughter, The Singing Sands has Grant on sick leave from his Scotland Yard job, but this time his illness is mental, not physical: he’s had a nervous breakdown and is traveling to Scotland to recuperate at his cousin’s house when, naturally, he stumbles across a murder. Although he struggles not to get involved, of course he can’t resist the temptation to sleuth for long. I’m always a sucker for a reluctant hero, but Tey takes it farther than the usual “one final heist” trope. What’s interesting about this book is how very introspective it is; the real focus is on Grant’s emotional state, with the mystery existing primarily as his means of redemption—large portions of the story don’t relate directly to the crime-solving plot at all. Alan Grant is a complex, intelligent character, and it’s a pleasure to watch his mind at work. It’s pointless to mourn what might have been, but I can’t help wondering what would have happened to him if Elizabeth Mackintosh (Tey was a pen name) hadn’t died of cancer at age 55. I’m definitely sad to have come to the end of this series and Tey’s limited yet oh-so-pleasing oeuvre.

A SINGLE MAN

I saw the movie when it came out (yay, Colin Firth) and thought it was beautiful, but it never occurred to me to seek out the book it was based on until I was perusing the rare book exhibit at the Huntington Library (where we are members) a couple of months ago, and one of the rotating displays happened to feature the first page of Christopher Isherwood’s original manuscript. A and I stood there and read it, then turned to each other and said, “This is really good.” I promptly went home and put the book on hold at the library, and I was not disappointed. Both daring and restrained, transcendent and simple, this slim stream-of-consciousness story of a day in the life of George—a middle-aged British professor grieving the sudden death of his partner—is a singular achievement. Not only is it a milestone in gay literature, but it also captures its time and place so well (Southern California in the early 1960s) that I’m surprised it doesn’t appear more often alongside the usual suspects (Raymond Chandler, John Fante) on lists of great L.A. novels. Although the film admirably captures the tone of the book, I was surprised to find that the actual events varied significantly; director Tom Ford added a lot of original touches that are not strictly true to the book, but are so much in keeping with its sensibility that I almost can’t say which version I liked better (a rarity in comparing book-to-screen adaptations). Both are gorgeous, absorbing, and moving.

Here are the first two paragraphs that caught my attention at the Huntington that day:

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognised I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it had expected to find itself; what’s called at home.

But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder; one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labelled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until—later or sooner—perhaps—no, not perhaps—quite certainly: It will come.

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

There was so much buzz about this book when it came out earlier this year that I assume you know all about it already, but just in case: Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black working-class woman who died agonizingly of cervical cancer in Baltimore in 1951. Before her death, without her knowledge, doctors at Johns Hopkins took a sample of cancerous cells from her tumor and ended up using them as the source for the first-ever line of human cells that could survive and grow in a laboratory culture. Her cells, christened HeLa, spread across the globe, becoming the go-to resource for medical research, from testing the polio vaccine to being shot into space. For a long time, Lacks’s husband and children had no idea any of this was happening, and few members of the scientific community or the public knew the truth about where the cells came from. In her painstakingly researched book, Rebecca Skloot sets the record straight, providing the full story of Henrietta Lacks, her cells’ massive contributions to science, and her family’s struggle to discover and understand what really happened to their mother.

I tend to avoid trendy books, at least until the buzz dies down and I can get a better sense of their enduring value, mostly just to save myself some time—I would read almost every book I could get my hands on if given the opportunity, but life is only so long and I already have a to-be-read list that approaches 100 items, so I need to be judicious sometimes. Immortal Life sounded interesting to me, but so do a lot of nonfiction books, and then where do you stop? Luckily, I met someone at a party who had just listened to it as an audiobook and highly recommended it. Of course! This was the perfect solution for me, since I could still get the content without having to devote precious reading time to it. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a huge audiobook fan, but I do better with the nonfiction ones because I’m already conditioned to listening to factual content on NPR, and the books just feel like long news stories. And Immortal Life was an absolutely riveting listen, like a 10-hour episode of This American Life. I listened to it everywhere I drove for the next few weeks, not just on my daily commute but on my way to friends’ houses or while running errands. Lacks’s story is amazing, and Skloot tells it with intelligence, sensitivity, restraint, and grace, particularly as she details her interactions with the surviving members of the family and her rollercoaster friendship with Lacks’s daughter, Rebecca. The book is informative, entertaining, and moving, an addictive mixture of biography, medical history and ethics, science, race and class issues, and investigative reporting. I highly recommend it, whether in paper or audio form. It’s so good, it would have been well worth my precious reading time.

(As a trivial but amusing aside, I was surprised to learn, during a chapter on the history of cell culturing, that Bill Cosby’s “Chicken Heart” routine, which I listened to over and over again on the record player as a kid, was based on a real radio show about a chicken heart that ate New York City, which was in turn based on a real quack scientist who claimed to be keeping chicken heart cells alive in culture. You can’t make this stuff up, apparently.)