Category: READING

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!

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.