Category: READING

Liminal Thinking – Dave Gray #reading

Liminal Thinking: Create the change you want by changing the way you think by Dave Gray is a book that I have toyed with reading for some time. I remember the occasion, quite a few years ago now, when, sat in a presentation at a Teaching and Learning Conference at work, I first encountered the concept of liminal spaces – transitional spaces or places that sit, rather fuzzily, between two different states, spaces or places. Since then, I have become rather fascinated by the concept of limnality, especially where this exists between one state or space that is very familiar and another that is largely, or even wholly, unknown. It’s a concept that I leaned on when writing my poem It Is Time (which should appear on this site in the not-too-distant future, as long as I am able to navigate the liminal space that is wedged between now and then…). So it was not that surprising that when I was looking for a new audiobook to listen to on my way to and from work, Liminal Thinking pushed its way to the head of the queue.

Unfortunately, my ‘reading’ of Liminal Thinking was something of a disappointment.

First, I don’t think Gray’s book is really about limnality at all. Instead, I think it’s a book about how bias creeps into the development of a personal world-view, and how being aware of this can help us to challenge our instinctive thoughts to develop a more robust and accurate set of beliefs. I’m inclined to think that the introduction of the word ‘liminal’ into the title of the book was primarily a case of the author trying to find a distinctive ‘buzzword’ in the hope that it might catch on and become associated with him in similar fashion to ‘atomic’ (Atomic Habits by James Clear) and ‘tiny’ (Tiny Habits by B.J.Fogg). But perhaps that my natural tendency towards cynicism coming into play…

Secondly, my experience listening to this audiobook reinforced a feeling that has been growing inside me for a while now, namely that it doesn’t really work to listen to certain kinds of non-fiction and hope to get much out of the experience. I am thinking here of books that are in any way a bit how to-ish in character. This is because unless you are prepared to be constantly stopping to bookmark segments or to rewind to listen again so as to catch details fully, it’s just not possible to come away from the listening experience with anything tangible (such as some kind of notes), and with no physical, print version available either, there is then nothing to refer back to later on. Still, if nothing else, this does mean that Liminal Thinking taught me one good lesson: that I’m not going to waste my time listening to this kind of book any more.

My experience with Liminal Thinking wasn’t entirely negative. Gray does a nice job of succinctly capturing six ‘principles of beliefs’, namely that:

  • beliefs are models
  • beliefs are created
  • beliefs create a shared world
  • beliefs create blindspots
  • beliefs defend themselves
  • beliefs are tied to identity

These principles are designed to highlight how the things we believe are not necessarily true reflections of reality but are, instead, built on thoughts that we have, mostly automatically, as we process our interactions with the world around us through our unique, personal, and mostly unconscious, set of biases and filters (things like ‘confirmation bias’ or ‘spotlighting’). Gray argues that with the right practice, it is possible to develop the ability to challenge one’s beliefs, and modify the way that we respond to inputs, so that what we come to believe about the world is a more accurate, or at least more reliable, model of our reality. He does this by introducing a number of so-called ‘liminal thinking practices’. These are:

  • assume that you are not objective
  • empty your cup
  • create safe space
  • triangulate and validate
  • ask questions, make connections
  • disrupt routines
  • act as if in the here and now
  • make sense with stories
  • evolve yourself

Most of these practices are pretty much self-explanatory, but if you asked me to explain what it means to ’empty your cup’ (in this context) I’m afraid that I would fail the task… You see, I have developed a belief that when it comes to trying to retain the knowledge and ideas conveyed in non-fiction writing, listening to an audiobook doesn’t work, and that means that whatever ’empty you cup’ is referring to went in one ear and out of the other. What’s more, I am pretty much convinced that no amount of questioning, safe space, routine disruption, story-telling or personal evolution is going to change my mind…

Voluntary Simplicity – Duane Elgin #reading

Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin was the March 2025 choice for the TimeCrafting Trust Book Club that I am a member of. I think it’s fair to say that it is unlikely that I would have read it otherwise, although the ideas that it covers – Simplicity and to a lesser extent Minimalism – are certainly ones that I am interested in.

Elgin bases large chunks of the text on a survey he was involved with several decades ago (the first edition of Voluntary Simplicity was published in 1981) which probed the motivations and thinking of many individuals, from many different countries and walks of life, who had opted to simplify their lives. He is at pains to point out the most common perceptions of those who choose to live a ‘simpler life’ – that they tend to be anti-technology, anti-innovation and backward looking – are not generally correct, and that living simply does not have to mean living in poverty, in a rural and/or plain environment, nor does it necessarily result in economic stagnation. In fact, Elgin makes the case that the ever increasing number of people who are choosing to live with simplicity are doing so because it provides a path to greater satisfaction with life, with a deeper connection to the entire world around us.

As the book proceeds, it becomes more and more focused on the necessity that we live more simply in order to survive on the planet as population growth continues, climate changes ever more significantly and obviously, and natural resources are depleted. And, of course, the need for solutions and responses to the challenges that Elgin describes has become significantly more pressing in the years since the book was first released. But Elgin does not get all of his future-visioning right. He places great emphasis on the potential for television to be the vehicle through which positive messages about simplicity can be delivered and is rather dismissive of the potential for new technologies to invade this space. Nevertheless, Elgin’s arguments do mostly stand up to scrutiny.

I felt that Voluntary Simplicity was an ‘okay’ read, although I am sure that there are better, and more up-to-date, books on this topic. I don’t think that it is surprising that prior to reading the announcement that Voluntary Simplicity had been picked as a Book Club book I had ever heard of it or, indeed, of Duane Elgin himself. However, I did my reading did lead me to four quotes that I really liked. The first, comes from one of my favourite sources, the “quote-factory” commonly referred to as Henry David Thoreau. It has perhaps a rather depressing tone – ‘life is frittered away’ – but I think this is what lends it the power to motivate change:

“Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify.“

I also really liked Elgin’s own take on the power of simplicity, namely that:

“Simplicity is the razor’s edge that cuts through the trivial and finds the essential.“

and I enjoyed his statement that:

“Our bodies are biodegradable vehicles for acquiring soul-growing experiences.“

‘Biodegradable vehicles for acquiring soul-growing experiences’ – I mean that really is life in a nutshell isn’t it?

Best of all, I think as a result of its own simplicity and the rhythm of the language used, is an adage that Elgin attributes to the New England Puritans:

“Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.“

That’s not a bad maxim to try to live by, at least to some extent.

The Ink Black Heart – Robert Galbraith #reading

Oh J.K. Rowling (a.k.a. Robert Galbraith)… Why oh why do you seem to be obsessed with writing ever longer lengthier novels?

The Ink Black Heart is the sixth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, written by J.K. Rowling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The plot follows Strike and his former assistant, now professional partner, Robin Ellacott, as they try to get to the bottom of a complex and grisly crime – the murder of the co-creator of a highly successful online cartoon series (The Ink Black Heart of the book’s title) in the very graveyard in which the cartoon is set. The story plot is typically convoluted, throwing in lots of characters, many of whom are suspects at some point, with all of the action happening alongside the ongoing will-they-won’t-they saga of Strike and Robin’s frustrated relationship.

Compounding this complexity, the plot is made even more complicated to follow by the fact that large chunks of the dialogue between some of the characters takes place via online messaging threads. This throws up two issues for the reader. First, because the characters involved in the online messaging conversations hide their identity behind anonymous usernames it is some way into the book before you know who is talking to who (obviously, this is deliberate). Secondly, it is an (impossible?) challenge to work out how to read up to three parallel conversations between different pairs or groups of, sometimes overlapping, individuals. I can understand why the Rowling/Galbraith chose to write these sections in this way – the chat threads take place within an online game that is based on The Ink Black Heart cartoon – but I felt it made reading the book unnecessarily hard, and at times rather frustrating, work.

I should come clean… In general, I’m not a fan of long books. I like to feel that I am making reasonably rapid progress through a novel and that I won’t get stuck on the same book for more than a few weeks. So with The Ink Black Heart extending to around 1200 pages it took me a while to summon up the courage to make a start on it. However, it wasn’t simply the length of The Ink Black Heart that set me off on the wrong foot, because I’ve also had a long-standing gripe about the way that Rowling’s books seem to get longer and longer with each new one that comes out. This happened with the Harry Potter series, in which the first three titles were quite short, easily-tackled, but still satisfying stories, as the later volumes became progressively more ‘doorstop-like’ each time one appeared. I still enjoyed all of these books, but when I read them I really felt that Rowling’s writing could perhaps do with a good dose of editing… [hark at me, calling out one of the most successful, if not the most successful, writers of modern times.]

Rowling’s tendency for bloated writing is something that I think is particularly apparent in the Strike novels. I do enjoy reading them, but I can’t help but wonder whether it is really necessary to drape Strike and Robin’s relationship across quite so many pages. I think it’a all a bit tedious, and find myself almost screaming at the pair of them to just get on with it. [For balance here, I should say that both my wife and my elder daughter completely disagree with me on this point!] There is also a lot of description of minute details of events that have no bearing on the plot, which is fine if you like that sort of thing (i.e. not being allowed to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as you would like), but stretches my patience close to breaking point. I suspect that The Ink Black Heart could probably be half its present length and still be a great read (and obviously a better read in my opinion).

Perhaps, in the future, Rowling/Galbraith could write two separate books that can be read in parallel – one housing all of the crime/sleuthing-related action and then for those that can be bothered to read it, a second volume that takes a microscopic look at the trials and torments of the relationship between Strike and Robin. At the end of each chapter of the first volume the text could read something like this:

Reader:
If you want to get straight on with the exciting action to discover just how the shocking realization that Strike and Robin have just made takes them one step closer to uncovering the identity of the killer that lives in their midst, then turn the page and read on.
But if, instead, you’d like to lose the thread of the story and forget exactly who said what to whom as you read another account of Robin’s misapprehension of Strike’s words to her in their last conversation and Strike’s desperate attempts to convince himself that getting closer to Robin can’t possibly be the obvious conclusion of them spending almost every waking hour together, then switch over to the companion volume where things might eventually get ever-so-slightly slushy.

Sizzling sleuthing or risky romance? You decide…

Language of the Spirit – Jan Swafford #reading

I started reading Jan Swafford’s Language of the Spirit – An Introduction to Classical Music back in June 2023 and finally completed just a fortnight ago. It would be tempting to conclude from this that it was a book that I struggled through but, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

I grew up in a household that was full of classical music, from the long, purpose-made shelf unit in the living room that was stuffed full of vinyl records, to the assortment of musical instruments that my father acquired and dabbled with (flute, trumpet, clarinet, mandolin, violin). Apparently, when my brother and sister and I were very young, we would be accompanied on our way to bed by our personal favourite pieces of music, presumably each one being some piece that we had reacted to positively at some point. I don’t recall what my sister’s piece was, but I do know that my (older) brother’s piece was a movement from Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet and mine was the rather stirring ‘March Slav’ by Tchaikovsky (so it is probably no coincidence that Tchaikovsky later became one of my absolute favourites).

I had piano lessons from the age of about six and then at around nine years old I began to learn the ‘cello (because apparently I had shown an interest in learning it, although I can’t say that I remember that and I suspect it was more because it was an instrument that my father wished he had been able to learn). I was never that great at the piano, and stopped after passing my Grade 6 exam, but playing the ‘cello certainly became a big part of my life all the way through my teens and well into my 20s. Over the years, I played in various ensembles and orchestras, in particular leading the ‘cello section in the Somerset Youth Orchestra, the Somerset County Orchestra, Oxford Sinfonietta and Bangor University Orchestra and being on the first desk of the ‘cello section for the annual summer gatherings of the Somerset Chamber Ensemble/Orchestra. It’s fair to say that I was a pretty good ‘cellist – although better known, I think, for my expressive playing than for a robust technique (or any kind of technique at all really – practice and I have never really been comfortable bedfellows in any area of activity…).

I always enjoyed orchestral music the most, especially music composed from around 1850 through to perhaps 1930 – the romantic and late-romantic periods – music full of emotion, passion and angst. My mother used to call the kind of music I liked best ‘troubled music’, which I guess is fair: Brahms, Tchaikovsky (and assorted other Russian composers of that time), Wagner, Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Mahler – that kind of thing. Unlike a lot of musicians, I never went much for some of the classical greats like Bach and Mozart, especially the latter, whose music (am I allowed to write this?) I tend to find rather boring.

In Language of the Spirit, Jan Swafford, a US-composer and music academic, provides a wonderful journey through the classical music canon, from early single-line chants, through all of the great names, and right up to the present day and the post-modernists. The book is mostly written on a one-composer-per-chapter basis, with most chapters being perhaps six to eight pages in length. In each case, Swafford outlines what makes each composer’s work distinctive, and provides a little detail of about their life, their influences and their major works, which brings me to the reason why it has taken me the best part of two years to finish the book…

Just for fun, I decided at the outset that I would listen to every piece of music that Swafford had picked out as being important or a good example of some aspect of a composer’s works. This meant that for each chapter I created a playlist with something like 8-15 pieces requiring multiple (many in some cases) hours of listening – Spotify was my friend! In the end, I managed to listen to every single piece that was highlighted or recommended (including several full operas) except for one piece by Stockhausen that I couldn’t find (but based on the Stockhausen works that I did listen to I can’t say I am too upset about that).

I listened to lots of music that I already knew well, lots of music that I thought that I knew well, and even more music that I didn’t know at all, some of it major works by major composers. I had a few surprises, particularly enjoying the music of Schumann (who I have never paid that much attention to in the past) and Grieg (who I always thought was a bit lightweight), and despite not really enjoying most of the noise that was described as atonal and/or post-modern, there was something about the work of Philip Glass that I enjoyed more than I feel I should have done.

Having now finished reading the book, and having listened to the last piece (John Adams’ Shaker Loops), I was spurred on to re-arrange the furniture in the small bedroom that I use as a kind of home office/personal den so that I could fit in some nice wooden CD shelves that we have struggled to find a good home for recently, and I unboxed all of the CDs (not just classical) that have sat out of sight since we packed them up last summer before having our kitchen re-modeled.

If you don’t know much about classical music but want to know more then I thoroughly recommend Swafford’s book. It is written for a general reader and gives a lot of interesting background and insight into a huge range of music. Alternatively, if you are like me, and know (or think you know) a lot about classical music already, then Language of the Spirit is a great stimulus to rediscovering old favourites and discovering new ones (and also discovering ‘music’ that you will never want to hear again for that matter – but each to their own of course!). Reading Language of the Spirit didn’t convert me into a Mozart-lover – I’m still very much in the ‘troubled music’ camp – but it did broaden my knowledge and has given me a number of composers to explore further. I also discovered that rather than being the somewhat over-sentimental ‘slush-fest’, that I recalled it being from when I played it with the Somerset Youth Orchestra over 40 years ago, Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto is indeed a rather special piece of music.

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius #reading

Meditations is essentially a collection of journal entries written by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor (161-180) and well-known adherent to the principles of Stoic philosophy. Most of the entries are short notes, written by Marcus as he unpacked his thoughts on the events of a day just passed or noted down some reminder to himself about the way that he wanted to live his life. These entries were never set down with a view to them being read by anyone other than the author, but they now constitute one of the most commonly cited sources of Stoic wisdom, to the extent that Marcus Aurelius is now generally regarded as one of the big three Stoic philosophers (along with Seneca and Epictetus).

I have read and listened to multiple books on Stoic philosophy and the Stoic approach to live that draw heavily on Meditations, most notably the works of Ryan Holiday – in particular The Daily Stoic and the first three books in his series on the four Stoic virtues: Courage is Calling (Courage), Discipline is Destiny (Temperance) and Right Thing, Right Now (Justice) [the fourth and final book in the series: Wisdom Takes Work (Wisdom) is scheduled for publication later in 2025] – and I have dipped into Meditations on and off over the years. But I had not actually read Meditations in its entirety for myself. With that in mind, at the start of this year, I decided to include Meditations as a component of my ‘morning reading’ sequence.

My initial plan was to read one entry of Meditations each morning, but I soon found that the entries are so variable that this approach was frequently not particularly satisfying, and so I switched to reading 5 or 10 entries at a time (depending on how they fell on the page). This meant that it ended up taking me 2.5 months to complete the whole volume.

I had quite high hopes for my reading of Meditations – I was familiar with it as a source of many great quotes – but, in fact, I found it something of a slog to get through. Every now and again a sentence would leap out at me and I would rush to note it down, but around those golden nuggets there was quite a lot of dull rock. I think that most readers would get a lot more out of reading material that draws from Meditations, such as the aforementioned works by Ryan Holiday, than working their way through the original source material. It can obviously be argued that the former approach is lazy and relinquishes control over what wisdom one might gain from the material, but my feeling is that in this case, the ‘tour’ is much enhanced by the commentary provided by a skillful guide.

I guess the real issue with Meditations is that, as already noted, it is not a book that was written by the author to be read. It’s much more suitable for the ‘open at a random page and read an entry whenever the mood takes you’ approach than a cover-to-cover examination (unless your intention is to actually study it). But either way, the little nuggets of wisdom should emerge, and can serve as useful reminders. Here are a few that stood out for me…

Be like the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest.

Just as drifting sands constantly overlay the previous sand, so in our lives what we once did is very quickly covered over by subsequent layers.

Perfection of character is this – to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.

When you have done good and another has benefited, why do you still look, as fools do, for a third thing besides – credit for good works, or a return.

Universal nature delights in change, and all that flows from nature happens for the good.

Now It All Makes Sense – Alex Partridge #reading

A few weeks ago, I completed my seventh book of the year: ‘Now It All Makes Sense’ by Alex Partridge. This was one that I consumed in audiobook format, narrated by the author.

I decided to listen to this book after my wife drew my attention to it. I’m not sure where she came across it being mentioned, but it’s clear that Partridge currently has a pretty massive media presence with social media channels (with millions of followers), a podcast called ADHD Chatter (with 500,000 listeners) and now this book (an ‘instant Sunday Times bestseller’ apparently). From a bit of searching online, it seems that, in the world of new media he is viewed as one of the experts on adult ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). His background is in social media content creation – he founded UNILAD and LADBible at the age of just 21, two social news and entertainment companies that, according to his biography, were followed by 300 million people. I guess it is not surprising then that after being diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 34, he has come to be a dominant figure in the online adult ADHD media space but I’d never heard of him.

You might think that as a fellow late-diagnosed ADHDer (albeit more than 20 years later in life than Partridge), I would have found plenty in ‘Now It All Makes Sense’ that resonated with me, but that wasn’t the case at all.

I’ll come straight to it… I didn’t much like this book. Partridge clearly writes from his own experience, which is, obviously, a sensible thing for him to do… except that throughout the book he refers to ADHD only in terms of his own particular expression of it. He writes/says things like “Those of us with ADHD will be familiar with…” and “As anyone with ADHD will know…”, and then he describes how he is forgetful, how he loses things, how he is completely disorganized, how he is entrepreneurial etc. Well, I have ADHD and I am not (generally) forgetful, I don’t (generally) lose things, I am probably one of the most organized people around and would hardly describe myself as entrepreneurialanything…, so no, actually, I am not “familiar with” and don’t really “know” the ADHD that is described by Partridge, not in myself at least. And if I am not familiar with it then I am sure that there are plenty of others in the same boat. ‘It’ might now all make sense to Alex Partridge, and I am sure that ‘it’ will now also make more sense to some readers of his book, but if I had read or listened to the book a few years ago it would simply have reinforced the inaccurate understanding of ADHD that I then held… and who knows, that might have prevented or delayed me from being able to make sense of my own ‘it’ in the way that I have been able to since my diagnosis.

There’s nothing wrong with Partridge’s account of his ADHD, the impacts it has had, and is having, on his life, and the advice and tips that he provides in the book… provided, that is, that you have an ADHD presentation that is similar to his (or are seeking to understand ADHD in relation to someone you know who is like him). But many people don’t have that ADHD presentation like his and so are not that much like him… that’s one of the peculiarly frustrating but also, dare I say it, interesting, things about ADHD – the challenges it creates can be very different for different individuals. What is wrong… no, perhaps ‘wrong’ is too strong a word here, let’s say ‘potentially unhelpful’ is that Partridge doesn’t really seem to recognize this variation in the diverse challenges that ADHD presents for different people enough. In this way, I think that Partridge misses the opportunity to really broaden out his readers’ understandings of the challenges of living with ADHD, and given his huge online audience and social media status, I think that’s rather disappointing, Maybe instead of ‘Now It All Makes Sense’ the title of the book ought to have been ‘Now I All Make Sense’ (forgive the mangled grammar) to reflect the rather personal nature of Partridge’s narrative.

The Wisdom of Groundhog Day – Paul Hannam #reading

I first read Paul Hannam’s ‘The Wisdom of Groundhog Day’ (TWoGD) back in October 2022. It was one of a number of occasions when I have listened to an episode of a podcast on my walk home from work and been so taken with the content being discussed that I placed an order for the book as I walked along and before I had even arrived home. In this case, the podcast episode was an interview with the author about his book from the ever excellent ‘Art of Manliness’ podcast (Episode 828: The Groundhog Day Roadmap for Changing Your Life).

In the 2.5 years that have passed since that reading, I have held a really positive memory of TWoGD. I was drawn to the way in which Hannam teases his message out of the story of the ‘Groundhog Day’ film – ostensibly just a routine comedy about a grouchy weatherman who gets stuck in a small town having to live the same day of his life again and again and again. The heart of the message is that to find happiness and fulfilment in life it is necessary to change yourself on the inside and this happiness can only arise when you are fully present and focused at all times on being true to yourself, open to experience, and appreciative of the world and the people around you. Based on this memory, I breifly mentioned TWoGD at the end of a meeting of the Book Club associated with Mike Vardy‘s Timecrafting Trust Community and with others intrigued by the idea of the book, it was chosen to be our February read.

So, I came back to TWoGD for a second reading with high hopes and also a little trepidation… What if everyone else hated the book? As I worked my way through it for a second time I found myself with very mixed feelings. I could still see, and appreciate, the cleverness that lay behind it, but I also couldn’t help feeling that it was all a bit forced – a neat idea stretched out to a length many times greater than necessary. I found that there were certain stylistic aspects about the writing that I really disliked – the way that it was written in what seemed to be a series of ‘sound bite’ paragraphs one after the other with not much flow when read together, and the fact that at every turn the example given for how such and such a principle idea had made an impact on someone was taken from Hannam’s personal experience.

As it turned out, most other members of the book club community had fairly similar issues with TWoGD as I did, but the message of the book was well received and we had a lively and interesting discussion nevertheless.

If I was going to sum up the message in TWoGD in one phrase then I think I would struggle to do better than to use the same quote that Hannam uses in the book’s conclusion, taken from the second volume of Marcel Proust’s epic ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ (1924):

‘We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.’

The Mind of a Bee – Lars Chittka #reading

At work, I am part of the supervisory team for a part-time PhD student who is trying to explain the relatively recent (2001) appearance of a tree bumblebee Bombus hypnorum in the U.K. My involvement in the project arose because one possibility for explaining how these bees made the hop across the English Channel from mainland Europe is that they might have been carried over be easterly or southeasterly winds. As the only person who teaches some meteorology in my department I was drawn into discussions at the outset of the project about 5 years ago, and my involvement has continued ever since.

What do I know about bees? Almost nothing… I completed an ‘O’ Level in Biology back in 1981 but I don’t recall bees ever being a topic that we learned about. Since then, although I have a general interest in natural history, I can’t say that I have thought about bees very much. But sometime around 2017 or 2018, the bird box in our garden was taken over by bees, I mentioned this to my the Head of School (who does know about bees), learned that most bumblebees nest in holes in the ground but that some, like my ones, were tree bumblebees, and from there I gradually became enmeshed in the ongoing attempt to explain why one type of these tree bumblebees had suddenly appeared in the U.K. Eventually, I decided I really should get to know a bit about more about bumblebees and that led me first to read Dave Goulson’s book ‘A Sting In The Tale’ (in June 2022) and then at the start of this year, Lars Chittka’s book ‘The Mind of a Bee’.

‘The Mind of A Bee’ was a fascinating book, covering bees’ sensory capabilities, instinctual behaviours, intelligence, communication systems, spatial memory and navigational capabilities, learning, brain structure, personality and consciousness. Packed with easily understandable summaries of a huge of scientific experiments and interesting background information about the scientists that conducted them, ‘The Mind of a Bee’ leaves no room for doubt that despite their small size, bees brains are capable of many astounding feats and that the bees themselves are highly complex animals with many sophisticated behaviours and skills.

The part of the book that interested and intrigued me most was the section early on about sensory capability and, in particular, bee vision. Bee vision is shifted to shorter wavelengths than human vision which means that bees can ‘see’ in the ultra-violet part of the electromagnetic spectrum and are effectively red-blind (which explains why red flowers are relatively rare in European fauna [research has also shown that flower colours have adapted to match insect vision and not the other way around as would perhaps seem more intuitive]). Bee vision is also trichromatic (UV, blue, green) and bee brains mix these three colours in the same way that human brains mix red, green and blue, ending up with a mixed colour that is indistinguishable from pure light at the relevant frequency. Apparently, this is unusual… and it is also very different from the way that we perceive sound, where we can perceive many frequencies at the same time so that we hear chords, harmony and dissonance. This difference arises because we have thousands of auditory receptors responding to different frequencies. I found it fascinating to think about what sound would be like if we could only sense three frequencies and mixed them to make a single note and what vision would be like if we saw objects as chords of different coloured lights. To be honest, my mind was a bit blown by thinking about all of this!

Reading ‘The Mind of a Bee’ certainly gave me a lot of insight into the brains, behaviours and learning capabilities of bees. It’s certainly a book that opens up the mind of the human that reads it and makes that mind think about just how different the game of life can be for different animals.

xGenius – James Tippett #reading

The fourth book I completed in 2025 was xGenius by James Tippett. This is Tippett’s second book about the application of data analytics to football – I read his first, The Expected Goals Philosophy, back in May 2022. xGenius follows up TEGP by digging deeper into the mathematical basis of a range of football statistics such as Expected Goals (xG), and the history of how these measures were developed by professional gamblers looking to get a edge over traditional bookmakers. It turns out that those gamblers were so successful that they pocketed large enough fortunes to become owners of football clubs (e.g. Brentford, Brighton and Hove Albion) and then proceeded to transform those clubs by basing all decisions about things such as player transfers and on-field tactics on those same statistical measures.

I found it interesting to read some more detail about the individual statistics and the various ways that they can be applied, but the most interesting parts of the book were when Tippett highlighted how the way that football is now being played has been transformed by coaches adjusting their tactics to reflect what the data/statistics reveal to be the most effective strategies, despite these often being counter-intuitive. For example, data analysis shows that the chances of scoring a goal from a shot taken from outside the penalty area is very low (around 2%), and so even when an opportunity to shoot from distance presents itself it is arguably better not to shoot but to try to work the ball into the golden zone within the central part of the penalty area – i.e. to take less shots but ones with a higher probability of being goal-scoring ones. Shoot less to score more! Similarly, goals from aerial crosses are rare, as are headed goals and goals scored direct from corners. So, the modern trend of the top teams to focus on retaining possession with lots of ‘tippy-tappy’ passes, whilst trying to get the ball into the perfect spot for a high-probability shot, is rooted in the message that comes out of data analytics, as is the preference for taking short corners rather than launching the ball straight into the box in the hope that a big striker will get his head onto the cross.

A lot of what I don’t particularly like about the way that many of the very ‘best’ teams now play, which I think can make a game really quite boring, can be blamed on the attention now paid to data analytics. This makes sense I think. If data analytics show that a certain approach to games is the most efficient way to win games, then the teams that adopt that approach best become ruthlessly efficient winning machines, and much of the drama in the game, aka the uncertainty, falls away. But I think there is some hope, because surely as more and more teams adopt the same, supposedly most effective tactics, there is increased scope for a team playing differently to surprise their opponents and gain an advantage in the process. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if, after a decade or so in which possession-based football, leading to opportunities to create near-perfect, almost unmissable, chances to score, more teams start to return to a more direct, and potentially more exciting, approach to the game.

One other thing that was very much on my mind while reading xGenius was that the whole field of sports data analytics has emerged in the last 10-15 years. At the time when I was thinking about what I would do with my life back in the early/mid-1980s, the idea that it would be possible to be a professional data analyst for a football team would have seemed laughable. I can’t help thinking that as a scientifically-minded and mathematically-capable teenager who was somewhat obsessed with football scores, facts and figures, if such a career avenue had been possible I would have been all over it. Patterns, trends, maths, numbers, tactics, strategy and football? What’s not to like!

Free To Focus – Michael Hyatt #reading

The third book I read (or in this case, listened to as an audiobook) was Michael Hyatt’s ‘Free to Focus’. I had listened to a podcast interview with the author one morning (an episode of A Productive Conversation with Mike Vardy) and, although much of Hyatt’s advice on productivity and getting things done was common fare, I liked one or two of the descriptions he gave to some of the ideas that were spoken about and thought I would follow up by listening to his book to see whether there was a bit more meat to put on the bones.

I found the book rather dry, with little content that was at all original, and little further depth on the elements that had piqued my interest in the podcast episode. I did like his way of thinking about areas of activity through an analogy with acting – that we do some of our work on the front-stage (the parts we do for public consumption, the locations of our performances and outputs), some on the back-stage (behind the scenes work preparing, rehearsing, grafting away in private) and some on the off-stage (the other activities in our life not directly linked to our main, professional work). Sadly, that’s nowhere near enough for me to suggest that this is a book that anyone else might benefit from reading/listening to.