Category: READING

I picked up Tim Harford’s second book “The Logic of Life” in a local charity shop. His first book, “The Undercover Economist”, set out to show how the tools of economics could be usefully applied to many other data-rich subjects and TLOL basically covers similar territory. Every chapter has a different thematic area – the one on “rational racism” stood out for me – showing how very small and quite reasonable individual preferences could lead to strong separation of people based on different characteristics (for example, but not only, race).

I enjoyed this book but if I have a gripe it is that I don’t think it is really about the application of economics to the different subject areas at all, rather it’s about the application of mathematics. Economics is the study of the flow of capital (money and resources) through utilising maths surely. If you then use the same maths (e.g game theory) to study other things then that is just data analysis or modelling, not economics. So, if you read this book and are inspired to study economics, take care, you probably want to study maths!

A little while ago I read another of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels as I gradually work my way through the series. Sharpe’s Battle is one of the later Sharpe novels to be written but it fits into the series at a stage when the British army faces being trapped and defeated by the French at the Portuguese-Spanish border.

The story is somewhat different from most of the series because in this one Sharpe doesn’t get involved with the girl of the story (whoever she might be). But he does make a particularly vicious enemy and have to show heroism in battle to save his position in the army so there is plenty going on and if you like Sharpe and Cornwell than Sharpe’s Battle will hit the spot.

Over the latter part of the summer, and with a nice coincidence with watching the London 2012 Olympic Games, I read Matthew Syed’s book “Bounce” about how elite performance (in sport and elsewhere) comes about. Syed was a former international standard table-tennis player and now works as a journalist, so the book is an obvious amalgamation of those two strands of his activity. The book was given to me as a thank-you from one of my recently-completed students who had previously read it and thought it was something I would find interesting. I find it quite encouraging that at least one of my students read a non-fiction book that was nothing to do with their course last year and also that they were able to identify it as being up my street.

Bounce is an interesting read – the basic message is that elite performance arises mostly as a result of a lot of hard work. Genetic and other traits can act as thresholds to an area of development (e.g. a very tall person has one basic attribute to become a top basketball player) but they are not the factor(s) that define success in that area (not all tall people can become top basket-ball players obviously). It’s all about hard work – practice – but not just any old practice, rather it has to be meaningful, targetted practice designed to stretch skill levels and, importantly, to render much of the decision making required for top performance automatic. For example, a top tennis player does not wait for their opponent to serve, then process what they see, decide how to react and then carry out the movements required to return the ball. Rather, they respond automatically to the smallest nuances of the movements of their opponent prior to and during the process of the serve to put in place a response which their mind/body has learned is an appropriate one. So, the hard work makes the response natural.

I had read a lot of the material (or similar) in the book before – for example, in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow” – and Syed actually quotes from Gladwell quite a bit, which is surprising in a book of this type. But the “story” is still well told. I found the section on “choking” particularly interesting – this seems to occur when the performer loses the automatic/subconscious level of response and ends up trying to respond by reacting to the available cues. In effect, they become a beginner again even though they know how they should be performing, and are usually capable of doing so. Once the subconscious level of response is lost (for a spell), their game, or whatever, goes to pot and there is little that they can do to combat this.

Thanks for the book Kerry.

It has become a bit of a tradition that my summer holiday reading (or part of it) is one of Julian Stockwin’s Thomas Payne Kidd novels and this year was no exception. ‘Quarterdeck’ is the 5th (I think) Kydd novel and in this one Kydd has been promoted to Lieutenant and finds himself first crossing the Atlantic to North America and then having various adventures at sea and on land. This book is quite land based and seemed to be mostly trying to provide a bridge from seaman Kydd to officer Kydd. A lot of the book revolves around Kydd’s frustration that he is not a ‘gentleman’ and so unable to gain proper acceptance from his fellow officers.

These books are easy, fun reads – a kind of poor man’s Patrick O’Brian – but at times they do annoy me a bit. I find Kydd’s ‘particular friend’ – Nicholas Renzi – a particularly irritating character. In the earlier books his presence served a purpose of giving Kydd a connection to a higher thinking level that helped to develop a sense of his natural intelligence and his elevation through the ranks. In this book, Renzi is simply a bit of an oik (does anyone use that word anymore?). Still, I enjoyed the story and hopefully the next one in the series will be a bit more of a classic naval history novel.

I’ve just completed Death of Kings, the most recent novel in Bernard Cornwell’s series based around the birth of the English nation in the time of Alfred the Great and the Danish/Viking invasions. The hero of the stories is Uhtred of Bebbanburg (modern-day Bamburgh Castle in Northumbria). The plot of this novel essentially revolves around Uhtred marching around Wessex and Mercia fighting Danes and rebel Saxons and builds to a typical Bernard Cornwell conclusion of a massive, crunching battle in which quite a few key characters are killed off in bloody fashion.

Cornwell is a master story-teller. He writes to a formula; as a reader, you know what you’re going to get and Cornwell delivers it brilliantly, every time.

I’ve just finished reading Simon Winchester’s excellent book “Atlantic”. It is subtitled “A vast ocean of a million stories” and this phrase gives a pretty good idea of the contents of the book, the stories involved being a huge variety of fact and real-life occurrences all linked in some way to the Atlantic Ocean. Winchester cleverly divides the book according to the ‘seven ages of man’ and there are stories about exploration, business, war, science etc.

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading every one of Simon Winchester’s books that I have picked up. His writing is really rich and every passage manages to interest and entertain. I’m no expert, but as I read his books I can tell that I am reading words set down by someone who really understands the writing process and the English language. For me, “Atlantic” was a particularly good read given it’s focus on a significant chunk of ocean and the atmosphere that sits above it. Top marks.

“Getting Things Done” by David Allen is a well-known book on productivity and self-organisation/management. I came across mention of it whilst exploring iPad apps designed to help you keep task lists and despite some rather mixed reviews I thought it sounded like its contents outlined the kind of self-organisation system that would appeal to me. I love a good system and I’m always on the look out for new ways to keep track of what I have to do. The basic idea of Getting Things Done, often abbreviated to gtd, is simply to store, off-memory, information on every single thing you have to do, the logic being that this then frees your mind so that it can decide what to do at any moment based on the context (e.g. whether you are a work, by a computer etc.), your physical and mental energy levels and your current evaluation of your goals.

I read the book quickly and unlike some reviewers, didn’t find it overly repetitive or annoyingly written. I could tell as I read it that the ideas ought to work and should be quite simple to implement and I managed to make a pretty good attempt at trying things out as I went along. The timing was good because I am in the middle of a big clear-out ahead of an office move. Particularly useful was that I had found an app that seemed (and still seems) to be well suited to the gtd approach, namely ‘Springpad’ and so now if have everything set up and running using my iPad as my gtd control centre. I think the idea of grouping tasks by the context in which they will be done is perhaps the most useful new element to add to what I already do.

So far, I’m not sure the results are as profound as the book likes to make out but I think that might, at least in part, be because, despite feeling a bit disorganised and inefficient at times, I was already part way along the route to gtd approach already.

I have just finished reading “The Hanging Garden”, a Rebus novel by Ian Rankin. This is one of the better Rebus novels so far in the series in my opinion, cleverly weaving together several plot strands and leaving you in no doubt as you work through the pages that a big finish was in store. The main plot line centres round a battle between rival “bad men” Tommy Telford (muscling into Edinburgh from Glasgow) and “Big Ger” Cafferty but the proceedings also involve a Newcastle based Chechen gangster, Japanese criminals and a separate (mostly) plot relating to a World War 2 atrocity. Along the way Rebus’s passion to take the criminals down is fuelled by his desire to extract revenge for his daughter being the victim of a hit-and-run incident.

If all of this sounds a little complex and far-fetched, that’s just me trying to lost the main elements of the plot because Ian Rankin is a master of keeping everything under control and the reader hooked into the unfolding story.

Having finished this Rebus novel I’ve now filled the gap in my sequence of these books as noted in my 2010 entry on “Mortal Causes”. So now some of the things I read in later books make a bit more sense… It also means though that the next time I pick up a Rebus novel I’m going to have to make a mental jump forwards in time to catch back up with the older Rebus again.

My daily reading tends to take me in a journey around various “old favourite” fiction authors regularly interspersed with non-fiction and with the occasional odd foray into something new on the fiction front. Obviously, I always enjoy the books by my favourite fiction writers otherwise I guess I’d stop reading them but I also find that before I pick up the latest title in a series I find myself thinking like “oh, not another one of those stories again”. Sometimes, that thought is so strong that I delay starting the next book and have a few non-reading days but in the end I always pick up the next selection, start reading and find that I am almost instantly reminded how much I enjoy that author’s work. So it was with the latest volume in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series which I completed recently. In “Flashman in the Great Game” Harry Flashman finds himself accidentally, unavoidably and, of course, unwilling, sucked into the world of undercover diplomacy at the time of the Indian Mutiny. The story is the usual mix of Flashy getting into (and with huge bundles of luck out of) various scrapes, being unjustifiably lauded for his bravery by those around him and, in inimitable style, finding an outlet for his, how can I put this, more physical charms. Flashman is a character that any reasonable person should detest but I suspect it is impossible to read these books without finding him highly likeable and without standing right behind him through all his adventures.