The Secret of Scent by Luca Turin (19 of 166)

One Sentence Summary: A persuasive argument for biochemist Luca Turin's theories regarding the mysterious scent molecule.

Excerpt:

"The voice of Nombre Noir was that of a child older than its years, at once fresh, husky, modulated and faintly capricious. There was a knowing naivety about it which made me think of Colette's writing style in her Claudine books. It brought to mind a purple ink to write love letters with, and that wonderful French word farouche, which can mean either shy or fierce or a bit of both. I immediately bought a very expensive half-ounce in a little square black bottle." 

I am thoroughly intimidated by anything more than cursory approaches to the sciences. For the most part a decent student in high school, I hung on by the skin of teeth in science classes year after depressing year. It is not that I do not appreciate science; don't get me wrong. I actually love it. I experience the same strange pull to it that I do to all fields with any mystery left to them. It is just that curriculum everywhere manage to squeeze all of the goodness out of a thing and replace it with the knee-knocking fear of senseless equation running. Equations are beautiful things, but not when they have stripped down to their use on standardized testing. You catch my drift. I think that it must be nearly impossible to separate a love of this world from a love of science. High school achieved it. Remarkable.

Something that I do have a decent understanding of is perfume. It may a seem a superfluous sort of interest, a bourgeoisie fascination, but I would argue that belief to come from a root of ignorance. Scent is integral to our relationships, to each other, to ourselves, and to our environment. It is the sense most strongly linked with memory and association. And yet, when it comes to finding the sensory calling card that you will leave most subtly and inexorably on those you meet, we deem the pursuit vanity. Why am I into perfume? Because it is complicated and romantic and different for every person out there, because it is full of beautiful language both technical (fougere, aldehydic, chypre) and descriptive (blousy, biting, sensual, woody), and because the legacy of scent is so strong.

Taking into consideration the above two paragraphs, one begins to understand how I managed to finish a book that, by its very nature, gave me test-taking anxiety. Luca Turin writes on his topic with so much passion and excitement that you cannot help but feel that scent molecules are the most important thing to happen to science since the microscope. Even as I labored through pages of complicated (for me) formulas, it always became worth it for me upon reaching another milestone where the shop talk turned back to perfume. Turin managed to make his book about more than his theory (which is fascinating, by the way)- he managed to make it a scientist's love letter to an arcane and under-appreciated art form. Better than that, he wrote with all of the sass of a self-assured Frenchman. Like a complete bad ass, he shrugs off his nay-sayers by casually reminding that he has used his theory of scent to generate synthetic molecules for Flexitrol for several years now. Excuse me, but:

I only wish I had a better grasp on the technical aspect of this little treatise on scent.

I would like to take a Chemistry 101 class and then return to this text to see what else I can take away from it. But Luca Turin sounds like someone I want to take up over the perfume counter in some back-alley Parisian boutique and talk Coty, Chanel, and everything in between, up, down, and diagonal. 

Shelf Status: Keeping for now. Perfume books are few and far between.

I Have a Problem: Book IV

I am stress buying.
Most people have some sort of persistent nervous behavior, a tell that gives them away when life becomes poker and the stakes are set strenuously high. There are stress eaters, exercise-a-holics, and within many of us lurks a closet shopaholic that emerges, debit card held high and legs churning to the closest depot for our consumption of choice. I am the last sort, if that has not yet been made clear. And as there are enough decisions on my shoulders to crush Atlas, at the moment, I spent all sorts of money that I don't really have on books yesterday. It was modest, as book hauls go, but it was significant for me.

The lad and I speak often about the rush of daily life- how the modern world does not lend itself to the sort of contemplation of one's surroundings that enrich a life. When I spotted this "country diary" and looked through its beautiful pictures and scripted entries, I knew that here was a woman who would have understood our distress.

I have this Great Gatsby joke that I tell strangers. In my defense, I always ask if they've read the book before I regale them with my recycled hilarity. About one awkward minute later we find that they don't really remember enough from that one high-school perusal fifteen years ago to decipher just why my joke was funny. This is always very sad and yet I am no closer to giving up on the joke as an effective ice breaker. Someday, the gathered crowd will howl in paroxysms of mirth and I will know at that moment that I have found my people.

I work with perfumes nearly every day and have really grown to love the intricacies of their compositions, as well as the cloudy history around each group of scents.This is an altogether different approach from what romantic write-ups I have read, almost always as part of a publicity file, and I'm looking forward to it.

To be honest, it was the title that attracted to me this.
Sometimes I struggle to do this.
Who doesn't?

148, 149, 150, 151

Okay. NEW RULE.

Before I can purchase any single new book that qualifies (AKA Books I Own But Have Not Read), I must read TWO from the existing list.