Category: READING

A couple of weeks ago I heard an interesting piece in the Nature podcast on the role sleep (or perhaps more accurately, lack of sleep) has to play in all kinds of health areas. It was an interview with Prof Russell Fraser a neuroscientist from Oxford University linked to the publication of his jointly authored book on Sleep in the “A Very Short Introduction Series” (written with Stephen Lockley). The key point being made was that problems with sleep can have huge impacts which are not currently fully appreciated, or acknowledged by society. Obvious examples are traffic accidents, but evidence actually suggests that many illnesses and conditions are more likely for individuals with poor sleep patterns. Prof Fraser argues that we should think of sleep as one part of a triad of factors influencing or health together with diet and exercise. Things like night-work, shift-work and becoming a teenager/young adult all play absolute havoc with sleep and can have big consequences for health (or concentration in the latter case).

With my interest piqued by the interview, and also having spent the last 7 or so years regularly having broken sleep due to environmental noise (early morning rubbish collections, drunken passer-by conversations, students…) before moving house recently, I thought I would buy the book and read it for myself. It was actually a lot more academic/technical than I thought it was going to be but some key points that I extracted and have been following are to really try to ensure that I have the possibility of 8 hours sleep per night (I pretty much did this anyway) and also not to drink tea of coffee after about 5.30pm (because cafeinne acts to maintain and enhance wakefulness and it takes 5 hours for a cafeinne dose to reduce by 50%). Funnily enough, in the week or so that I have not been drinking tea in the evenings I think I have slept better and there is other evidence for this outcome in the fact that apparently I have not created as much night-time disturbance for my wife (ooh-err perhaps I should have re-phrased that) and so she has reported sleeping better. Such a simple change, but it seems to be a powerful one.

I’m not an inefficient person; I get a lot done and I’ve never been accused of being lazy, but I’ve known for a long time that I am pretty good at wasting time when I’ve got more important tasks to do. So when I recently popped into the local bookshop and saw a book called The Procrastination Equation on the shelf and when I read the blurb and discovered that it wasn’t a self-help book but rather a serious summary of research on this topic I had to buy it. After all, I needed something to be looking at whilst I should have been doing something more important…

The book is written by Dr Piers Steel who, according to his own words, is an internationally leading expert on the topic having researched it (properly) from all kinds of different angles. And it was a good read with some really interesting findings and a nice simple basic premise – the equation of the title which I am not going to outline here because if you are interested you should read it yourself.

I particularly liked the destruction of modern technologies such as the internet and electronic mail because their time draining properties are well known to me. Apparently, research shows that on average it takes 15 minutes to “recover” from the interruption of an email and this is then equated to 2 hours wasted per normal working day. This is very nicely quantified by expressing this as being like starting work each year on 1st April (i.e. wasting one quarter of the year). Obviously that analogy isn’t exactly right but it makes you think.

The sections on simplifying your working environment, removing extraneous piles of materials and having prominent reminders of why you work (what you work for), also resonated with me and I will be looking to throw out a huge amount of “stuff” ahead of an office move this summer.

The bottom line message, of course, is really just another example of something that has been in my head for a while now, in relation to responding to climate change and keeping fit and healthy, namely: we know what we have to do, so we just have to get on and do it…

I’ve just finished reading Hanning Mankell’s second Wallander novel, The Dogs of Riga, which takes Wallander away from Sweden into a corrupt underworld of the Latvian capital. Having seen quite a few of the BBC TV Wallander adaptations, I was quite surprised to be reading what seemed to be a very untypical storyline so early on in the series of novels, but as I continued my way through the book I became aware that the story it contained, and the way Wallander’s character is developed through it, helps to explain a lot of the traits he displays in the BBC portrayal (that are presumably based on how he appears in later books). Anyway, in The Dogs of Riga, Wallander is challenged to his very core by ruthless killers, corrupt police and the necessity of operating under-cover and unofficially in a country that he simply doesn’t know or understand, driven largely by a sense of duty and an inexplicable attraction to the widow of a newly-found (and lost) Latvian colleague. In the end, putting it in the simplest possible terms, he gets lucky.

A while back I read and thoroughly recommended a book called Freakonomics that presents a whole series of ideas about the analysis of interesting problems and data sets using approaches from economics. I really enjoyed thw wide-ranging ideas in the book and the journeys into topics I hadn’t given much thought to before. So I was looking forward to reading Super Freakonomics – a follow-up book by the same pair of authors.

SF started off quite well. There’s a really interesting and eye-opening chapter on the economics of prostitution. But I felt like I had read quite a lort of the book before, not least because there IS some duplication with Malclom Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” both in content and style. Towards the end, SF focuses in on actiosn that can be taken to counter-act climate change and here I felt that it rather looses the plot and becomes a bit of a rant about geoengineering and an advert for a few particular ideas. The critical analysis that characterised Freakonomics and the earlier parts of SF seems to get lost which is a pity.

I’m always a little sad each time I finished reading a book by one of my favourite authors because it means that there is one less title in that particular series waiting for me at some point in the future. A few days ago I finished off another of the Ian Rankin Rebus novels and I’m steadily working my way through the crime series of Arnaldur Indridason and Andrea Camilleri. On the historical fiction side I’m about halfway through George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, well advanced with Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series and also recently finished the latter author’s most recent Uhtred novel. I’ve read all of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels and the first three of Julian Stockwin’s Kydd series but every single one of Forrester’s Hornblower books are still ahead of me so there’s still plenty of naval fiction to go.

So, I was absolutely delighted when, on completion of the latest Rankin book, I picked up the first Wallander novel by Swedish author Henning Mankel. I’ve watched some of the BBC TV Wallander adaptations and read great things about the original Swedish TV ones but this didn’t necessarily mean that I would enjoy reading the books. I should not have worried; Mankel’s novel had me gripped right from the start and I am cracking on through it at a great pace. It’s a story that I have watched the TV adaptation of but it’s really interesting to observe how different the two treatments are and how certain elements of the story were mucked about with for TV. Best of all, it’s a pleasure to know that I now have another great series of books stretching out before me.

The premise of psychologist Richard Wiseman‘s book “:59 seconds” is that he sets out to review published (scientific) literature on a range of topics that are normally the fare of self-help books in the hope that he can reveal what has been proven to be correct and then distill this down into a few very quick actions that people can take. I’ve been reading it on and off for a few months now and, finding myself in between books, I’ve just polished off the last few sections (decision making, parenting, personality). I found the book a bit frustrating – it’s like a quick glimpse at topics which might be more interesting if looked at in a bit more detail – but some of the material covered is quite neat and some of the findings a little surprising given conventional wisdom (e.g. group brainstorming does not produce a bigger range of ideas). Wiseman finishes the book by presenting 10 quick pieces of “advice” all of which are pretty obvious but there’s no harm in being reminded of them – time to get a pot plant for my office I think.

Years ago I read James Gleick‘s first and most famous book “Chaos” which is the classic outcount of the discovery of the concept of Chaos is science. More recently, in his third book “Faster” (which I picked up in the local Oxfam shop), Gleick has turned his hand to an exploration of time and, in particular, how our concepts of time have changed in the modern age with everything becoming faster, more hurried, more vital and more rushed. This book is written in quite short sections, each one an essay on some aspect of our perception or interaction with time. I enjoyed reading this book, especially as many of Gleick’s ideas chime with thoughts I have myself about how complexity, choice and urgency are together disrupting our lives and creating an unnecessarily rushed world. The chapter on waiting (or not waiting) for lifts was particularly challenging to me, partly because it came early in the book and partly because it provided me with an immediate opportuity to challenge my behaviour and slow down (while waiting for lifts at work). So, all in all, I enjoyed this book and got something out of reading it – a desire to slow down and a sense of purpose to do so.

No, this isnt an entry to report that I have been hearing strange voices in my head… rather it’s an entry to record that I recently completed the third novel by Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason which is titled “Voices”. Indridason’s novels are what are called “police procedurals” in that they basically follow in a fair amount of detail the police process of investigating a murder from the point of the discovery of the body to the final resolution of the case. In Indridason’s books the main character is a detective called Erlendur who has a failed marriage, two drug addict children and a whole host of personal pyschological difficulties. This particular novel follows a murder commited in a tourist hotel just before the busy Christmas period and I found the whole set-up and the plot to be rather grim and populated by rather sordid characters. Erlendur doesn’t really do that much and he doesn’t have any great flashes of inspiration to unlock a startling twist in the plot but the story gradually unfolds and Erlendur gets the job done. I really liked the first of Indridason’s novels (“Tainted Blood”) but although I enjoyed reading this one I’m not convinced that this series is quite as good as the general acclaim it seems to get.

One of the best books I have read in recent year’s was Atul Gawande’s “Better” – a book which I found both useful and inspiring. Consequently, as soon as I saw that Gawande had written a new book “The Checklist Manifesto” I rushed to get hold of a copy and moved it up to the top of pile of books to read – I wasn’t disappointed. In this book Gawande recounts his investigations into how the use of simple checklists can be used to minimise errors in surgery in hospitals all around the world (part of a World Health Organization initiative). Gawande explores the use of checklists by pilots in both routine and emergency situations and within huge construction projects and describes his attempts to design simple checklists for use before and after surgery and the difficulties of persuading surgical teams that their use was worthwhile (it most certainly was). One of the more interesting facets uncovered by Gawande is that the best checklists don’t simply list tasks that have to be done (they can do this) but they also incorporate checkpoints that require people to share certain information or discuss situations and produce agreed decisions.

As a surgeon, Gawande writes openly about surgical procedures and at times you need to have a pretty strong stomach to take in what is being written (at one point he describes accidentally cutting a patient’s vena cava and the resulting blood loss as “terrifying”).

So, another great read from an inspiring author. More please.