Category: READING

Last night I finished reading “A Piano in the Pyrenees” by comedian and writer Tony Hawks (publishers mini-website here). This is the fourth book by Tony Hawks that I have read, beginning some years ago with “Around Ireland with a Fridge” and followed by “Playing the Moldovans at Tennis” and “One Hit Wonderland”. I’ve enjoyed all four books and I did enjoy reading the latest one, which is an auto-biographical account of how Hawks, on something of a whim, bought a house in the Pyrenees with the intention of using it as a place to practice the piano. The reader follows Hawks as he gets to know his new neighbours, tries to build a swimming pool and muses on love. The writing is witty but not hilarious and at times I was left feeling that it was a bit embarrassing for a nearly middle-aged single bloke to write so openly about his failures, his friends and his missing love-life etc. (his earlier books have all been based on a deliberately silly venture rather than a relatively normal chunk of his life). Still, it was an easy and fun read, and although he comes across as being someone with a certain amount of inner sadness, he does “bloke banter” very well.

Last night I finished reading “The Hundred Days”, the 19th novel in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series. If you haven’t come across these books, they are naval history novels set in the late 18th/early 19th (you may have seen the film “Master and Commander” which is based on one of the books – I have it on DVD but have never managed to find time to watch it). Jack Aubrey is a sea captain who leads various voyages of derring-do, always accompanied by Stephen Maturin, naval surgeon, naturalist and intelligence expert. The novels slowly weave stories of long voyages, bloody battles at sea, political intrigue etc. They are slow reads – it takes weeks to move around at sea and the books depend greatly on O’Brian’s attention to detail and the subtle interplay between his main characters. Anyway, in “The Hundred Days”, Aubrey and Maturin disrupt Napolean’s attempts to mobilise mercenary troups in the Mediterranean and prevent a large amount of gold from reaching its intended recipients (Napolean’s allies). Rather shockingly, and completely out of the blue, towards the end of the book a character who has been at Aubrey’s side throughout the series is blasted by a cannon-ball. Returning the book back to its place on the shelf I was dismayed to find that there is now just one more left for me to read in the series before I have to bid farewell to Aubrey and Maturin altogether.

On my walk into work this morning I listened to last week’s Scientific American podcast (something that I thoroughly recommend to anyone who has a general interest in science). The bulk of the episode comprised an interview with Tyler Volk  from New York University discussing his recently published book called “CO2 Rising: The World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge”. The interview provides a useful introduction to the problems posed by increasing levels of carbon dioxide on Earth and the book is certainly one that I will put on my list of future reads (at present it is only available in hardback, published by MIT Press). One of the things he does in the book is to track various carbon molecules on their different routes around the Earth’s carbon cycle , giving each molecule a name and a personality. That might sound a bit “cheesy” but judging from the interview it probably works.

Well, it took me the best part of a month and in the end I was quite relieved to get to the end but I have just finished reading an excellent book called “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive” by Jared Diamond (Penguin Books website entry). It presents detailed analysis of the probable reasons why past human societies such as Easter Island, the Greenland Norse and the Mayans collapsed, considers collapsed or collapsing modern societies such as Rwanda and Haiti and then examines what these collapses can tell us about the possible future of present societies. It considers the problems facing societies such as modern-day Australia and China and examines the way that our continuing, non-sustainable use of the Earth’s resources, population growth and globalisation impact on the future prospects for human civilisation. It is a huge book with many interesting and challenging components but also one of those books that becomes something of a blur by the time you have finished it. However, I certainly found that it challenged the way that I think about our future and reminded me that significant changes will occur in my lifetime and will impact dramatically on the world that my children will live in as adults. It is not a book that offers no hope, in fact it is one that helped to re-energise me to continue with the small changes that I am making in my own life that may help in some small way to preserve future human societies.