Perfume critic Ksenia Golovanova about favorite books

IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF"we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, perfumery critic Ksenia Golovanova shares her stories about favorite books.

I was forced to read the circumstances, honestly. Books are the only thing that was at home from entertainment, and at home I, being a sickly child, sat and lay, with a thermometer under my arm, more often than many. In the summer, in the southern steppes of my grandmother, none of the children entrusted to her was ill, but the heat was always such that we were lying exhausted in the garden under the apple trees and — correctly — read. The choice in the village library was small: either the novels of Daniel Steele, or the Soviet agitliterature, or the school classics, which already had to be passed during the lessons, or nasty science fiction with funny covers. In the end, I chose saifay and fantasy - I started with bad samples, but as a result, the best came to the shelves and in my head, for example Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman’s books. To these genres, which are traditionally considered literary litebrow, I am grateful for a lifelong vaccination against snobbery, including reading.

I have friends — wonderful people who, however, will commit seppuku with a blunt book spine if someone finds them with a vampire romance. I have never been ashamed of my literary preferences: in my reader there is some kind of Young-Advert, Charlene Harris books, and biopunk (especially biopunk!). The latter partly satisfies my interest in the natural sciences: in childhood I dreamed of becoming a biologist, and then I went to journalism. Now, besides fiction and fantasy, I read a lot of non-fiction for work. Fortunately, perfume criticism - at least in the form in which it is close to me - is tightly tied to chemistry, physics and botany, and thanks to these workbooks, I partially live the life I did not choose in the end.

Paolo Bachigalupi

"Clockwork"

Genetics is most interesting to me, so I read a lot of literature on the topic. As a result, biopunk is a favorite sub-genre of science fiction: in my childhood I reviewed the Jurassic Park dozens of times, a little later, Gattaku and Resident Evil. Unfortunately, literary biopunk is not very rich in new authors: it is a laborious genre, genetic engineering and other biotechnologies cannot be taken for granted. I think this is one of the reasons why Bachigalupi wrote his "Clockwork" for so long - seven years. The action takes place in Bangkok of the future, and this Bangkok is one of the best, if not the most outstanding portrait of the city in the entire history of Saifai. Combustible minerals are expected to run out, huge territories are flooded as a result of global warming, the world is controlled by genetic corporations that create GMOs that are resistant to bioterrorism.

All of the above lies on the paintings of the Thai capital: the market stalls are filled with durian mountains - and then they sell rice with altered genes, water buffaloes are pacing the streets - and the factories are recreated from mammoth DNA. From all this, the head is spinning: how cool it was invented, what living, believable details. The problem with Bachigalupi is exactly one: he has few books. Fortunately, after the "Clockwork" came out a beautiful young edalt-dilogy, written in the same universe: "Ship Destroyer" and "Drowned Cities". I read it with delight and almost died of happiness, I can not even imagine what should happen to teenage readers.

Philip K. Dick

"Ubiq"

I read everything from Dick, from stories and big novels to magazine interviews - I didn’t read the letters he wrote to the FBI and accused Stanislav Lem of propaganda of communism. Dick fell into difficult circumstances: his book, the novel "Ubiq", brought a friend to my hospital - along with Bowie's disks and his photos from a road trip around Europe. Then I was just transported to a regular ward after a difficult operation, droppers were put in to muffle the pain. From drugs, I drifted between reality and sleep all the time, and everything seemed unreal, like Rick Dekard's electrician - it turns out that I read my first book of the author, who today would be called a drug addict paranoid, under serious analgesics.

If you retell the plot of "Ubiq" - androids, perfumes, time travel - then you decide that this is nonsense. But this is one of the most beautiful and meaningful books in the world, the absolute ideal of a science fiction novel, a work for the mere existence of which you can remove the stigma of “low genre” from science fiction. Actually, for me, this book is important precisely because after it I finally stopped being ashamed to read the saifai.

Kurt Vonnegut

"Galapagos"

"Galapagos" is often called the saddest novel of Vonnegut. The plot is really funny: it is a dystopia about the consequences of an environmental catastrophe. It’s hard to say more without spoiling the pleasure of those who haven’t read Galapagos, the plot of the novel is quite unusual and terribly inventive, a real find for a great script writer.

The idea is still relevant: the Earth is a fragile organism that humanity with its great brains (Vonnegut called the main problem at the very beginning of the novel) could not save. With intelligence, everything is good (“Progress is our main product,” wrote Vonnegut in his first novel), but not very soulfully, and therefore civilization is doomed. In my opinion, this is the best book about the ethics of technical progress and one of the best - and the most ridiculous, despite the tragic plot - about evolution.

Ray Bradbury

"Something terrible is coming"

I regularly re-read this book once a year, at the end of October - this is how I started a tradition. I like to synchronize my reading with the literary time of “The Terrible”: there the action takes place just “in one week of October”, before All Saints Day. Late autumn is generally the best time for horror: dark, dark, the city smells of raw leaves, soil and mycelium. And "Something terrible ..." is a horror, even if all the horrors in it are not naturalistic, but rather symbolic.

Bredbury cares about childhood, or rather the borderline state between childhood and adolescence: many of his heroes are twelve or fourteen years old, and the characters of “The Terrible” who have to go through a difficult test of evil, too. This is the age when, according to Bradbury, a person chooses between light and darkness in his soul: either surrenders to the dark half, or defends the best that is in it. This book is very close to me - I think we all make this difficult choice every day.

Suzanne Clark

"Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell"

The publishers sold Strange and Norrell as Harry Potter for Adults, but Rowling do Clark as a petty pest Malfoy before Volan de Mort. This historical fantasy is the best proof that there are no low genres. There are wonderful books about vampires, when Ann Bilson takes over and writes the novel "Suckers", about zombies - if the author is Colson Whitehead.

John krakauer

"In thin air"

At one time my husband buzzed all my ears about this book, a big fan of the extensive journalistic reports. “In thin air” is the testimony of one of the participants in the ill-fated expedition to Everest in 1996, which turned out to be the most tragic in the entire history of commercial ascents.

I finally read the book at the most inopportune moment: I was to travel to Rwanda, where forest tracking was planned at an altitude of four kilometers. Being an asthmatic, I bought all sorts of pills for altitude sickness and almost calmed down, but on the plane I decided to read “In Thin Air”, whose characters constantly suffer from oxygen starvation. I flew to Africa in horror, but also in admiration: it is terribly embarrassing that the book captures you like a thriller, although you know that many of its heroes actually died, but Krakauer is an excellent journalist and brilliant storyteller. It seems to me that every student of journalism should read "In thin air" - this is the best guide to reporting.

Emily Ents

"Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts"

My passion for genetics began with this book. More precisely, it all started with a genetic test, which I passed as an editorial assignment, and then, taking an interest in the topic, downloaded Frankenstein's Cat, an excellent starting book for those who are just starting to understand biotechnology.

It is dedicated to transgenic animals that contain alien DNA in their cells, and consists of several cases: transgenic goats, in whose milk there is a cure for diarrhea - a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of lives in poor countries every year, and fluorescent aquarium fish with embedded fragments DNA jellyfish, and cloned dogs, and other guests from the future, which has already arrived. An excellent example of the most promising, ethically ambiguous and related to all areas of modern science.

Luca Turin and Tanya Sanchez

"Perfumes: The A-Z Guide"

Luca Turin is a biophysicist, the main perfume critic of modern times, a man who launches perfumers with one review and, as quickly as spent satellites, takes them into orbit. Tanya Sanchez - his wife and co-author. Both fantastically erudite people who write about perfume in the context of world culture, synesthetics, brilliant linguistic stylists. I do not exaggerate when I say that this book has determined my career choice: I read it and realized that perfume criticism is the most interesting thing that can happen to a “sniffer” journalist. If you know English, then it is better to read it in the original: the Russian translation is not perfect, hides the beauty and imagery of the language.

Chandler burr

"The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry"

Chandler Burr, an American journalist and former perfume critic of The New York Times, has written several books, this one is the best and most interesting for the general reader. It has two plots. The first is about how Jean-Claude Ellen, appointed perfumer in Hermès, collects - not without difficulties - the famous fragrance Un Jardin Sur Le Nil. The second is Sarah Jessica Parker, together with the perfume concern Coty, creating the fragrance of her name.

Reading is very fascinating and useful, especially for those who still see the perfume industry as a factory for making magic bee pollen. And here, instead of pollen, there are emotional scheduling, stupid focus groups, senseless business trips, and other mouse scuffling, behind which, however, there is an amazing process of creating perfumes — as technologically as creative.

Christopher Kemp

"Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris"

The program work on the origin of the most mysterious and very expensive perfume component - gray amber. Spoiler: gray amber is taken from the bowels of some sperm whales, sometimes it smells of shit and, sometimes, looks like it. This is absolutely amazing substance that, once in the water, can swim in the ocean for decades, caught up by the waves. It interacts with sea water, with air, with sunlight, it undergoes various physical and chemical reactions, in a word, it only gets better as wine in a barrel over the years spent in the sea.

This transformation is one of the most interesting in perfumery, and the amber business is one of the most complex and competitive, with a mass, pardon the pun, pitfalls. I am friends with many of the gray-amber earner - strong, honest "sea guys", and some of the stories that they tell me would not be missed by any editor in Kemp's book. But even without these stories - a great book for anyone interested in perfumery.