Category: READING

A couple of years ago I heard an interview with Atul Gawande, a US surgeon/professor/writer about his book “Better – A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance” as part of a Scientific American podcast. Several aspects of this interview stayed with me and I made a mental note that I should read his book. Then a few weeks ago this interview was repeated and it spurred me on to finally get a copy which I have now finished reading. “Better” sets out to discuss how it is possible to improve the success rate of medical care in a number of settings from hospital hygiene, to battlefield injuries to “routine” treatment of medical conditions. It is a brilliant book, even for someone who, like me, has no particular interest in medicine (and who struggled somewhat to read a detailed description of the process of completing a Caesarean Section…). Gawande, tries to identify the factors that turn “good” into “better”. One simple example, which was used in the original interview I heard, is of improving hygiene in hospitals to limit spread of infectious diseases – the answer is not to search for some fancy new procedure; it’s something much more basic, namely to ensure that everyone properly washes their hands every single time that they should do. Simple.

There are two particular quotations that I liked. The first is this:

“When you make an effort, you find sometimes you are not the only one willing to do so.”

and the second comes towards the end of the book and is a kind of summary of the whole book:

“Arriving at meaningful solutions is an inevitably slow and difficult process. Nonetheless, what I saw is: better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes Moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.”
[this one is SO good I’m going to add it to the bottom of my work email signature I think]

The final chapter of the book looks at what it takes to become what Gawande calls a “positive deviant”. This is someone who stands out from the crowd and makes a difference, who naturally makes things better and who continually raises the bar. He comes up with five suggestions for how one might make a “worthy difference” and become a positive deviant. Whether he is right or not, I think they make a great list and what particularly pleased me as I read them each in turn is that it turns out that I already do most of them…

1. Ask an unscripted question: i.e. talk to people; find things out about them; make human connections
2. Don’t complain: “it’s boring, it doesn’t solve anything, and will get you down”
3. Count something: gather data on something, anything; look for the patterns; learn something interesting about something that interests you
4. Write something: “by offering your reflections to an audience, even a small one, you make yourself part of a larger world”
5. Change: “it often seems safest to do what everyone else is doing – to be just another … cog in the machine”

What a great list – I’m going to work harder on number 2 and, to a lesser extent, number 5, and with a bit of luck, I’ll get better.

I’ve just finished reading Mark Haddon’s second novel “A Spot of Bother”. Mark Haddon (he’s got a fairly odd website here) came to prominence a few years ago when his book “The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time” which, if my memory serves me right is about a boy with Asperger’s Syndrome who wakes up to find a (dead) dog in his garden pinned to the ground with a garden fork. It was a much lauded book because of the nature of its central character and the way that it was written to capture his thoughts. It was a children’s book – but only sort of. Anyway, “A Spot of Bother” is about the mental breakdown of a retired man (George) who finds some eczema on his leg, thinks it is cancer and proceeds to enter a downward spiral of panic, and irrationality. His situation is not helped by the fact that his daughter is getting married for a second time to a man who everyone thinks is unsuitable and his son has broken up with his boyfriend but the final straw occurs when he returns home unexpectedly to find… well, I won’t tell you what he comes home to find because that might spoil the story.

I did enjoy reading this book, but I also didn’t enjoy it. George’s descent does not make pleasant reading – it’s just too plausible in some ways and whilst the book is funny in places it is also rather dark in places. One thing is for sure though, DO NOT do what I did. DO NOT read the section just about halfway through (leading up to page 250) just before you go to sleep. That section is NOT for the faint-hearted.

If you read my last entry you will probably have guessed that I have been reading a historical novel based on the life of Genghis Khan – you wouldn’t be wrong. Last night I finished reading Conn Iggledun ‘s “Wolf of the Plains”. This is the first book in a series following the life of Genghis Khan and at over 500 pages is a fairly meaty read. The book has been out for a couple of years but I only picked it up after buying the third book in the series at less than half price via an offer linked to The Times newspaper (which I buy on Saturday’s). Having bought the third one to read in the future I thought I should get hold of the first and second titles and was lucky enough to pick up Wolf of the Plains almost instantly in one of the local charity shops on Mutley Plain where I often buy books. I’m glad I did, because I really enjoyed Wolf of the Plains and thought that Iggledun did a great job of weaving together the factual stuff with a story that zipped along nicely with lots of suspense and exciting set pieces (bloody battles etc). I have been reading the historical novels of Bernard Cornwell for some time and have dipped into one or two other authors of this genre but I have to say that Iggledun runs Cornwell close and perhaps even beats him when it comes to producing a good page-turner. The only problem now that I have finished Wolf of the Plains and left Genghis Khan having defeated the Tartar hordes and in charge of a set of newly united tribes is that I’m going to have to get hold of the second title “Lords of the Bow” – I’ll be making plenty of trips to the charity shops over the coming weeks!

I’ve just finished Ed Smith’s “What Sport Tells Us About Life”. Ed Smith was a professional cricketer (who played a few times for England) but he has now developed a career as a journalist and writer. His book WSTUAL was much lauded in the media when it came out and, as someone who likes sport and likes analysis, it seemed to be very much my cup-of-tea. It is basically a series of essays about various aspects of sport and watching sport (cheating, money, leadership, coaching/management) which each try to connect with some  observations of how we lead our lives more generally. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t as interesting or insightful as I thought it was going to be. I think this is perhaps because there is no over-arching theme or argument. I particularly liked one section on how different people watch sport in different ways, within which there was a comment from the head of British Airways, who, when watching sport, focusses on the leadership that is taking place. He grew up in Australia and played cricket in a team that was captained by Rodney Marsh (who went on to be one of the greatest cricketers and wicket-keeper-batsmen there has been). He noted that Marsh (and others) were successful leaders because “They set people up for success by creating the right environment” (one that is confident, tough but always fun). I like that quote and I like the idea that the “right environment” should be one involving fun. That’s something I am going to try to hold onto in my own work.

Last week I finished reading the third and final book in Tim Severin’s Viking series – “King’s Man”. Tim Severin is best known as an explorer/writer/broadcaster who has re-created a number of famous voyages and journeys from history, but a few years ago he decided to enter the “historical fiction” market and wrote the first of his Viking series. Being a regular reader of other books in this genre (particularly those by Bernard Cornwell) I came across Viking 1 in a bookshop and since then I have acquired and read all three books in the series. Now, I think it is fair to say (and the fact that I have bought all of these books in discount bookshops provides some support) that Severin is no Cornwell – the books are readable and weave together fiction and real history well enough but they’re not especially well written or gripping. The aspect of the writing that amuses me most is that Severin clearly seems to get bored with writing the detail that accompanies large parts of the plot and every now and again he just decides to move the plot on in one big step. So, we get pages and pages of day-to-day detail and then, quite suddenly, the main character goes off somewhere and in the space of a few sentences a couple of years have passed or his female companion has been killed in a house fire or some such dramatic event occurs.

The last book I read was another piece of non-fiction, namely Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” (see Malcolm Gladwell’s website for further details). This is a book about the process of making snap judgements about things and about how we should value this kind of judgement properly but also act with caution in relation to them. The book ranges around a lot of different subject matter and although I found it all interesting I was particularly struck by the section on bad judgements made by armed police and the similarity between their perception when under the stress of chase scenarios and when gun fire is underway and the perception of individuals with autism. In both cases, the people involved seem to stop seeing other people around them as people and only see them as objects, the consequence being that that do not pick up on the valuable visual clues provided by the human face and use the ability of the human brain to instantly read these clues. A couple of days after reading this book I was listening to a Scientific American podcast that was reporting on some new research on toddlers with autism. This suggested that toddlers with autism did not look at people’s eyes (the “window to the soul”) but instead look at the mouth if there is speech or hands (e.g. if someone claps). I was struck by the parallel here – autism seems to involve children looking directly at the source of physical disturbance (e.g. mouth/hands producing a noise) and not seeing people as people and armed police making bad decisions seem to be transfixed by the noise of gunfire, stop looking at faces to gauge more about their target’s real behaviour or intentions – both groups stop perceiving others as people and respond to them only as objects. This is definitely a simplistic way of looking at things but the coincidence of the two ideas does seem to point in something like a single direction.

I like to mix fiction and non-fiction reading and often alternate between the two. The last book I completed was “The Falls” which is the twelfth Inspector Rebus novel by Ian Rankin. This one has an interesting plot that is not simply a crime investigation but also has quite a bit of character development compared to some of the other books in the series. As usual with Ian Rankin, it was a throughly enjoyable read although I was left with a feeling that if they had investigated the obvious suspects properly in the first place and hadn’t muddied the waters by involving a number of external people in the police investigation then things might have proceeded an awful lot quicker. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been such a good story!