Category: READING

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.

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.