Category: READING

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.

Atomic Habits – James Clear #reading

The second book that I finished reading in 2025 was ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. I had previously listened to the audiobook version almost immediately after it was released in 2018 but I picked it up again because it was selected as the January title for an online book club that I am a member of within The Timecrafting Trust (Mike Vardy). I will admit that, as much as anything, this time round my interest in Atomic Habits was focused on why it has occupied the bestseller lists for pretty much the entire period of its existence, selling an astonishing 15 million copies in the process (the irony of the fact that I have contributed two of those sales over the years was not lost on me!).

As the subtitle suggests, Atomic Habits positions itself as a guide to building good habits and breaking bad ones. It certainly does start off with a strong focus on (daily) habits, but as I worked my way through the text I soon found myself thinking that it wasn’t really about habits, rather it was simply about how to get things done.

Early in the book I found myself railing against Clear’s argument that habits are such powerful things because they act like compound interest – if you adopt a daily habit to become 1% better in some respect then the power of that habit compounds each day. Clear suggests that if you get 1 percent better each day for one year then you will end up 37 times better by the time you are done and implies that such improvements in personal performance or skill can be achieved by repeatedly performing a 1% better habit each day (note: 37 times better, not 37% better – I checked the maths!). But this is surely not true. A habit that makes you 1% better on the first day continues to make you 1% better than you originally were on the second and subsequent days, but to get better and better (i.e. to grow or compound the percentage improvement) I think you would have to change your activity on each successive day. I accept that there might well be some additional gain to be had by repeating the same habit each day, but not to the extent suggested by the comparison with compound interest. For example, if you adopt a habit of running a mile each day then you will certainly get fitter over an extended period of time than if you just go for the run once, but after a while you will find that your fitness has reached a plateau and to gain further improvement you will have to start running two miles each day etc. In my opinion, if you have to constantly change what you are doing then you are not developing a habit, you are just carrying out an ongoing programme of self-improvement! [I suppose it could be argued that the habit is then repeatedly showing up to complete that ever-changing activity.]

Setting aside my reservations about whether the book is really about habits or, as I think, about setting up your life so that you are more likely to get things done in general, where Atomic Habits succeeds is in distilling the ideas covered into a very simple set of four principles or laws. Each of these laws is matched to one of the stages associated with taking action: cue, craving, response and reward. Clear states these laws as follows:

  • make it obvious
  • make it attractive
  • make it easy
  • make it satisfying

I think it is hard to argue with this framework. Clear considers each of these laws in some detail offering various suggestions to help in each case, but I think that much of this material is not that necessary because the four laws do most of the heavy-lifting on their own.

Put simply: if you want to increase the chances that you will perform a task or activity then you need to make it more obvious and/or more attractive and/or easier and/or more satisfying. Similarly, to combat a bad or unwanted habit, you need to make the cue that triggers it less visible and make the habit itself less attractive and/or more difficult to do and/or less satisfying. I think it is this simplicity of the core message in Atomic Habits that is the secret of its success and its astonishing sales figures. It’s a message that is obviously right (or at least feels obviously right), easy to remember and also easy to make use of.
Job done.

Orbital – Samantha Harvey #reading

‘Orbital’, the 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel by Samantha Harvey was the first book that I finished reading this year. I will admit that I am not usually a reader of what might be called ‘literary’ fiction but as this book was fairly short and has a science-based theme (the book recounts the thoughts of a group of astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) as it orbits the Earth over the period of one day), my wife thought it would probably interest me and gave it to me as a Christmas present.

I find books like this, that don’t really have a story as such, quite intriguing. It is interesting to ask the question: What it is that makes spending time with one set of fictional characters doing nothing in particular, apart from existing and thinking, interesting? (especially as it is easy to imagine many instances when it certainly wouldn’t be).

As it turned out, I did enjoy the day I spent with Harvey’s collections of imagined astronauts as they repeatedly observed their home planet (the ISS completes 16 orbits of Earth per day) and mused on their connections with the people, places and events down below. The writing challenges the reader to consider their own place in the world and the perspective from which they view both ordinary and extraordinary events. For me, the core themes that emerged from my reading of Orbital were the extent to which so much of human endeavour is bound up in the pursuit of progress, both the grand-scale technological progress shared only by a few such as the astronauts on the ISS, and the small-scale, day-to-day progress, shared by everyone of us, and the fragility of the world that all of this progress has created.

While gazing down onto the planet’s surface, one of the astronauts muses on this theme of progress in connection with his relationship with his daughter and the passage in the text that captures the stream of his thoughts as he does so was one that resonated deeply for me:

‘But what he meant to say to his daughter – and what he will say when he returns – is that progress is not a thing but a feeling, it’s a feeling of adventure and expansion that starts in the belly and works up to the chest (and so often ends in the head where it tends to go wrong). It’s a feeling he has almost perpetually when here, in both the biggest and smallest of moments – this belly-chest knowing of the deep beauty of things, and of some improbable grace that has shot him up here in the thick of the stars. A beauty he feels while he vacuums the control panels and air vents, as they eat their lunch separately and then dinner together as they pile their waste into a cargo module to be launched towards earth where it’ll burn up in the atmosphere and be gone, as the spectrometer surveys the planet, as the day becomes night which quickly becomes day as the stars appear and disappear, as the continents pass beneath in infinite colour as he catches a glob of toothpaste mid-air on his brush, as he combs his hair and climbs tired at the end of each day into his untethered sleeping bag and hangs neither upside down nor the right way up, because there is no right way up, a fact the brain comes to accept without argument, as he prepares to sleep two hundred and fifty miles above any ground for their falsely imposed night while outside the sun rises and sets fitfully.‘

Madly, Deeply – The Alan Rickman Diaries

This morning I finally finished the weighty tome that is Madly Deeply – The Alan Rickman Diaries. I started it back in June 2023 and have been reading a section, usually 3-6 months of entries, most weekday mornings since then. So, it has been a long read and, to some extent, a bit of a slog.

I was attracted to reading Madly Deeply after reading a review article in a newspaper soon after it was released. The article made quite a big play of how wonderful Rickman’s actual diaries were to look at, often illustrated with really nice sketches and drawings relating to the themes he was writing about, so it was something of a let-down to find that the published book contained only five pages (of over 450 in total) that showed any of these illustrations (and two of those five pages were the inside front cover). But never mind, there would always be interesting insights to read about the Harry Potter films since he surely must have loved his involvement in those in his role as Severus Snape…

Alas, it turns out that Rickman clearly didn’t much like being such a major part of the HP film series to the extent that he almost bailed out part way through (imagine if that had happened…).

The first thing that hit me smack bang in the face when I started reading the diaries (they begin in 1993 and run through to his death at the age of 69 in 2015) was that his life was absolutely, completely, inexpicably busy. Hardly a day seemed to pass when he wasn’t flying somewhere, seeing a film or play, dining out with friends, rehearsing, discussing things with directors and producers and agents, fending off critics etc. In fact, it felt like he did most of these things on most days – one day in New York, then on to Paris, Prague, South Africa, Italy, California, London in an utter whirlwind of activity. Just reading about his life left me exhausted and I still cannot comprehend how anyone can cope with such a life and, apparently, have so much energy. [I wasn’t surprised when, quite far on in the diaries, he casually dropped in a reference to his ADHD… although his flavour ADHD was certainly not much like my flavour of ADHD!]

I can’t say that I particularly warmed to Alan Rickman as a person through his diary entries which surprised me a little, although on reflection there is really no reason why I might have expected to. His entries often paint a picture of a slightly bitter man, somewhat intolerant about the ‘failings’ of others (of which there seemed to be many), who seemed to feel a little under-valued and, perhaps, frustrated that he was not always understood as he felt he should be. But then there are also clear indications of loyalty, a desire for fairness and a love of his art and a quirky sense of humour.

Overall, it was interesting to get a little glimpse of a world that I was almost completely oblivious to prior to reading the book – an insane world of rushing about and pouring oneself into project after project – a world that truly must have been madly and deeply exhausting but, I guess, full of experience and excitement. I don’t want to rush about quite to the extent that Alan Rickman seemed able to but it’s perhaps useful to have received this glimpse of just how much a life fully lived can contain.

Stillness Is The Key (Ryan Holiday)

Stillness Is The Key was the third of author and modern-day purveyor of Stoic wisdom Ryan Holiday’s original set of books about the application of practicing Stoicism in everyday life. I read (actually listened to) the first two – Ego Is The Enemy and The Obstacle Is The Way – back in late 2017 soon after I started to become interested in Stoicism. Since then I have worked my way through the rest of his more recent output such that I would now probably have to label myself as a committed Ryan Holiday disciple. In 2018 I read The Daily Stoic one day at a time (something I am in the process of repeating this year) and then I listened to the first two volumes of his ongoing Stoic Virtues series – Courage Is Calling and Discipline Is Destiny – in 2021 and 2022 respectively. Last year I completed Lives of the Stoics and I have the third installment of the Stoic Virtues series (Right Thing, Right Now – Justice In An Unjust World) on pre-order for its release later this year. So with all of that in mind it is somewhat odd that it is only now that I have gone back to complete the original trilogy by listening to Stillness Is The Key.

With Ryan Holiday’s work I have always particularly enjoyed listening to the audiobook versions. Not all readers are the right person to narrate their own words but I find that Holiday’s narration brings the words to life and always keeps my attention (usually I am walking to or from work when I listen to audiobooks).

As with all of his other books I enjoyed this dose of Stoic wisdom. Holiday makes the simple wisdom contained in the ancient writings of Epictetus, Seneca and, of course, Marcus Aurelius relevant to life in the present day, treating them like mentors who we can lean upon for advice whenever we feel in need of a slight nudge or some help to become unstuck. The general theme of Stillness Is The Key is, naturally, one of slowing down a little, considering, maintaining a sense of balanced calm and, let’s face it, we could all do with some of that at times (or even often!).

I don’t think Stillness Is The Key is Holiday’s best work. In fact, I think his more recent Stoic Virtues series books are much better crafted than his earlier ones, but then that is surely to be expected as he has lived, practiced and absorbed Stoicism for longer and, I tentatively suggest, become a better writer too as the years have passed. But Stillness Is The Key is still worth reading (or listening to) because above all else it is important to remember that Stoicism is a more than a philosophy – it’s a way of approaching life and something that needs to be practiced, practiced and practiced, day in and day out. Anything that sets out Stoic ideas as clearly as Holiday’s writing and puts them in the front of my mind for a bit is going to help ensure that all of that practice helps to push me a little closer to that impossible to find place where practice makes perfect!

The Bigger Picture (Petrus Ursem)

Last November we popped up to Yelverton to visit a local event for artists and makers from the Tamar Valley. There were quite a few stalls with different types of artwork that I really liked, one such being the work of artist and writer Peter Ursem. As well as his wonderful lithograph prints of various locations in and around Dartmoor and the Tamar Valley he also had a few prints and cards of some poetry and copies of his books – a children’s adventure story trilogy that I really must read sometime and a small volume called ‘The Bigger Picture’ written under his pen-name Petrus Ursem. I got chatting with Peter about is work and immediately felt a strong mental connection – we talked about the process of writing and where ideas come from and he told me about how TBP was a collection of short fables written in similar form to those of the Master of Fables, Aesop, with a group of animals interacting to discuss and explore different pieces of wisdom and thought. I was immediately hooked by his description and purchased a copy of TBP which I have been reading on and off since then – one fable (of forty in total) each morning.

Many of the fables in The Bigger Picture take a word or short phrase and then have the different animals (a rather odd mix including a crocodile, an owl a peacock, a worm, a bull, a bee and others along with a few non-animal characters like Cloud) riffing on it as they meet up and go about their daily business, always uncovering some little nugget of wisdom along the way. To give an idea there are fables called ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’, ‘Point of View’ and ‘No Half Measures’. Talking with Peter I was interested to hear that partly this construction stemmed from him originally being from The Netherlands and so being intrigued by certain turns of phrase in English.

I finished the last fable ‘Being You’ last week and as I did so I found myself wishing that during my first readings I had made some notes to capture a few quotes and some of the glimpses of wisdom the fables contained. At first, I was a little disappointed to reflect that most of what I had read had slipped straight out of my head but then I realised that this was actually a bonus… because I have now promised myself that at some point in the not too distant future I will read The Bigger Picture through again, with pencil and notebook in hand, and be inspired and enchanted once more.

The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)

Way back in 2020 I started a ‘project’ of reading my way through an alphabet of author surnames using the wonderful book ‘1000 Books To Read Before You Die’ by James Mustich as my inspiration. The idea was to deliberately pick books and authors that I wouldn’t otherwise or normally read, selecting titles from those for which Mustich’s entries piqued my interest in some way. These weren’t the only books I read at the time but I made a point of moving quite swiftly through the alphabet and it took me just under 15 months to make it through from A as far as W but missing out Q because the only option suggested by Mustich was The Q’uran and whilst I would actually like to read that book I just didn’t want to have to devote so much of my reading time to that kind of challenge. The options for X, Y and Z were also really limited and so I decided not to force myself to complete those last three letters. It was a really interesting experience and one that introduced me to some really excellent books including one of my now all-time favourites, Jeanette Haien’s ‘The All Of It’.

In summer 2022 I decided I would repeat the challenge and started again on A, but this time I only got as far as C in the space of two months before my reading went off in other directions. I picked things up again last summer and made my way through D to G during the rest of 2023. Having gained a little momentum again I decided to keep going with my second author alphabet this year…

My first completed book of the year was ‘The Maltese Falcon’ by Dashiell Hammett – a 1930s thriller involving various rather odd and somewhat incompetent criminals and somewhat too invincible private eye who are all caught up in pursuit of a valuable old, bejeweled statuette of a bird. The action moved on quickly, rather too quickly for any significant plot or character development in my opinion which in the end left me having quite enjoyed the read but certainly not drawn to explore any of Hammett’s other work.