Admittedly, it took me six months to finish, but I finally plowed through the final quarter of Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory tonight in an urge to get to reading other books. Unlike many readers that I know, I don’t read multiple books at once; my dogged unwillingness to not give up on reading this has forestalled a number of other things. That, and the fact that I’ve been insanely busy since September and have largely fallen out of the habit of reading at long stretches since I’ve entered my twenties. I read a lot in my teens, and while I still read a fair amount now, it’s far more stuff in short bits—blog entries, magazine articles, Wikipedia entries. Yes, I’ve forsaken the pleasure of engulfing myself into the world of a book because I’m too busy worrying about not knowing other things that are going on!

I’d be interested to see what Kandel, an historian and a psychoanalyst by initial training and initial career, would have to say about my reading habits. I think that he’d argue that they’re an outcropping of my neuroses. I think that he’d also consider that, after my initial exuberance to plow through his tome, the death of my sister-in-law not two weeks later interrupted the reading and provided an unrelated but associated event in my brain that made it difficult for me to come back to the book. Even tonight, as I pulled the book out of my backpack—where it had been since my trip to Houston six weeks ago, during which it never was even opened—I recoiled a little. But I resolved to finish it, and I have.

I find it difficult to summarize my feelings on the book. I found it to be terribly fascinating and written such that someone as myself, who has nothing more than a barebones familiarity with biology, could understand it. Admittedly, Kandel approached biological research with an intellectual rigor hardly seen in previous decades; as he notes, biology was considered a “soft science” a century ago, far removed from the rigor of chemistry [which never interested me much] and physics [which certainly did, although I became an engineer anyway]. Admittedly, I come from a technical background, so I’m not the best judge of how your average reader is going to pick up the book—although I find it unlikely that a näif is likely to pick this up at the airport for a little light reading on the red-eye from LAX.

If you’re of a technical bent and are interested in how the mind works—even if you’re not terribly interested in biology as a whole—I think that you’d find it interesting. Since I first began reading it, I’ve known who I’d next hand it to—my friend Jonathan. Jon, perhaps you can steal a page from Stephen’s book and read in the middle of the night when your daughter won’t sleep.

Back tomorrow with some more reading, something that I’ve wanted to do a fair amount of whilst on vacation.