Category: READING

I’m a very ordered person and a bit of a collector so when I read a particular author’s novels I like to do so in the correct sequence. Consequently, I was mortified (well perhaps that’s a bit of an overstatement) when I discovered recently that my gradual sequential reading of Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels was not quite as sequential as I thought it was. It turned out that four or five Rebus novels ago I missed a chunk of the series out – I don’t know why or how, but now I have to fill in that gap, and that meant going back to Mortal Causes. It was classic Rebus, centred on the sectarian issues that divide Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland cropping up in the context of Scottish Nationalism. So there is a gruesome punishment killing at the start and then a series of bomb threats relating to Edinburgh Festival venues, a particularly nasty villain and the usual mix of curious characters. Was it good? Well it’s Ian Rankin and Rebus so, of course, the answer is yes although I wouldn’t class it as one of the more gripping or intriguing stories in the series.

I’ve just completed the third novel, Seaflower, in Julian Stockwin‘s Kydd series. This one is set in the Caribbean and involves Kydd leading a band of sailors on a land-based assault through a sugar plantation, spending time working ashore in a dockyard and then taking on gradually more and more responsibility on the cutter Seaflower until being shipwrecked on a remote island. Kydd’s increasingly visible leadership qualities eventually get him the responsibility of taking an important diplomatic figure off the island on long-boat – thereby consolidating his growing reputation and, presumably, leading to further advancement in the next book.

These books are pretty light reading and whilst they attempt to give lots of detail on the seamanship involved, in this respect they are not a patch on Patrick O’Brian’s Captain Aubrey series. That’s not to say that the book wasn’t an enjoyable read – sometimes it’s good just to read a story without too much complication around the edges.

Earlier in the year I read and thoroughly enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” so as a follow up I have just read Gladwell’s first book “The Tipping Point“. This explores the way in which ideas and products sometimes spread in the same way as epidemics and why many ideas and products don’t catch on. According to Gladwell’s hypothesis there are three “laws” that are critical to such an epidemic spread and can lead to a tipping point being reached – the involvement of various key types of people (Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen), the stickiness of the idea/product and the context in which the idea/product is spread.

I enjoyed the book but I didn’t find the case that Gladwell makes particularly novel or convincing although this could partly be because the book is now 10 years old and so I have picked up on some of the ideas in other books etc. (they’ve already tipped!). It has had may consider how I go about trying to put across ideas and I suspect that some of the thinking will stay with me in the future.

My Christmas/New Year reading this year was Bernard Cornwell’s “Azincourt” – a typical Cornwell historical novel set in Henry V’s military campaign in northern France which culminated in the famous battle of Agincourt (Azincourt in French and in Cornwell’s title). The battle itself is a relatively small part of the book which focusses on the siege of Harfleur (modern day Le Harve) and the English (and Welsh) army’s subsequent march across France towards Calais. As usual, Cornwell tells the story through a rather heroic regular soldier (this time an archer called Nicholas Hook) who, of course, rescues and becomes romantically involved with a young woman and faces great danger from within his own ranks (an old family feud) but everything works out well in the end. Cornwell’s attention to historical detail is always excellent and he does write a good battle.

I’ve just read Martin Lindstrom’s book on branding “Buy-ology”. I had picked is up in the local Oxfam shop and thought it looked like it might be interesting (along the lines of Freakonomics) and the title triggered a vague memory that I had read a good review of it somewhere. Anyway, I have to say that I found it to be poorly structured and not particularly interesting. Lindstrom claims to have applied science to marketing/branding and cites various studies which have used various brain scanning and imaging techniques to show which parts of the brain light up when we are exposed to different kinds of marketing images, sounds and smells. It claims to reveal fresh secrets about how we are persuaded to part with our money but pretty much everything that he said seemed like common sense to me, even the revelations about how things like Nokia’s ring-tone actually damage the Nokia brand. So, all in all, this was a bit of an irritating book – you can get an idea of this irritation from Martin Lindstrom‘s website – fire it up and then wait for the annoying little videos of Lindstrom dispensing branding advice to pop-up…

I just finished reading another of my bargain basement charity shop book purchases – A Brief History of The Circumnavigators by Derek Wilson. As the name suggests, the book tells the tale of the various mariners who led the most historically important ocean voyages around the globe (plus a few other less important but dor other reasons distinctive voyages). It begins with Magellan, or more correctly Sebastian D’El Cano because Magellan died part way round so contrary to popular opinion he was most certainly not the first person to circumnavigate the globe. Other notable mariners covered include Drake, Bouganville, Cavendish, Cook and, more recently, Chichester.

I’m not really sure why, but I have always enjoyed reading about marine history and the great voyages of exploration. My interest probably comes from my father who, if he had had more time would certainly have been quite obsessed by them, but I’m not aware of any reason why he had such an interest. Perhaps some research on his family tree might discovery an interesting maritime link.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book more than I thought I would – I had put off starting it a few times because the text looked perhaps a little dense, but it was actually an easy read packed full of quirky incident and interesting personalities.

I just finished reading “Homo Brittanicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain” by Chris Stringer. This was a book that I decided to read after hearing Chris Stringer interviewed on the Scientific American podcast a few weeks ago. He came across as a really enthusiastic, knowledgeable and skilled story teller and so I thought his book would probably be an interesting read. The book tells the story of a recent research project called the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) that set out to bring together a whole range of experts from different fields to integrate, extend and better understand the evidence for early human occupation of the British Isles. It takes the reader into the worlds of Neanderthals, early Homo variants, archaeology, anthropology, paleaoclimates and paleaontology and explores what the evidence can tell us and what it can’t tell us.

I did enjoy the book but not as much as I had expected to from listening to the podcast. It’s a little heavy going in places and I got a bit lost sometimes working out which inter-glacial period or ice age was being referred to because the overall time-line of the story isn’t that strongly put across. Still, the book took me into a world that I don’t normally encounter or think about thich is always a good thing I think. One of the key elements of the events surrounding early human occupation of Britain was the dramatic changes in sea level that accompanied changes in ice volume associated with ice ages, and there’s a lot of emphasis placed on the fact that the British Isles used to be much more connected to (what is now) mainland Europe across the North Sea. An important region of this land bridge is called Doggerland (now submerged). So, it was interesting to pick up this week’s New Scientist, Issue 2735 [21 November 2009] and read an article all about how archaeologists are turning to evidence from the seafloor (from places like Doggerland) to unlock further secrets of early human history in Europe.

I recently finished reading “The World According To Bertie”, the fourth book in Alexander McCall Smith’s “44 Scotland Street” series. These books are interesting for the way that they are constructed – McCall Smith wrote the first one (I’m not sure about the subsequent ones) as a serial in The Scotsman newspaper, with each short chapter appearing in print on successive days. So, the books are made up a lots of short chapters about four pages at a time which build through the book to tell the stories of a whole series of individual characters who sometimes interact but are often only loosely inter-related. Bertie, of this book’s title is a highly intelligent six year old boy with an insufferable “new age” mother and a put-upon father but although the book carries his name he features no more than the other half dozen or so characters that McCall Smith has introduced through the series.

I enjoyed this book less than the others in the series – perhaps the format and the character is getting a little tired – but I do think it is a clever way of putting together a book that has wide appeal. It’s inevitable that each reader will have one or two characters who they are more interested in and with a wide range of characters its hard not to be drawn to someone in the story. I think that in this particular case one or two of the less interesting and more irritating (to me) characters get more “page-time” which is probably why I didn’t enjoy it so much. It’ll be interesting to see whether McCall Smith does a fifth one in the series or whether he too is getting tired of the format – some of the plot twists and resolutions did seem a bit forced as if this might be the last one.