Tim O'Hare

After quite a gap from the second book in the series I finally got round to completing Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy – The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest. This one starts with the series’s ‘heroine’ Salander critically ill in hospital and Mikael Blomkvist having to show huge resourcefulness to continue his investigation into the secret group within the Swedish Intelligence Service including finding a way to enable Salander to be connected to her network of computer hackers. The ruthlessness of those trying to silence Salander soon becomes apparent and it is a case of everyone having to make careful judgements about who can be trusted and how to communicate with perceived allies. Blomkvist’s investigation reaches its peak just as Salander stands trial and the whole secret organisation tumbles to the ground as all of the loose ends within the trilogy are neatly tied together.

I think I enjoyed the first two books in the series more than this one, perhaps because there was only really one possible finish to the overall story although there was one point in this book when I it seemed that events would take spectacular turn in a direction I was expecting. But in the end, the central characters avoided death and came out on top and all the ‘baddies’ got their come-uppance.

Despite having come across a fair amount of the material before and it being perhaps a little too long, I really enjoyed reading Philip Ball’s book “Critical Mass – How One Thing Leads to Another”. This book ranges through a wide variety of topics, including economics, the spread of culture, social behaviour and traffic looking at how methods that are better known within traditional fields of physics are bringing new insights when deployed to explore these areas. The book has a strong basis in outlining the history of the development of statistical physics, phase transitions etc. which I found fascinating and made me wish that I was able to study physics now (with the benefit of experience) rather than over 25 years ago (when I knew almost nothing). It also covers a lot of interesting models that use individual agent-based models to capture the behaviour of the multiple interacting agents that make up many social systems (such as financial markets, traffic flows etc.) – just the kind of thing that I wish I could do…

Philip Ball is one of those writers who, when I read his work, I can sense a great command of English and a clarity of expression that makes the material flow off the page. As a bonus, one of the best things about discovering this book was the accompanying discovery that Ball has written quite a few more or topics that also interest me (Water, Patterns, Music) so I can tell that I’ll be working my way through his output over time.

Arctic Chill is, I think, the fifth of the Icelanic writer Arnaldur Indridason’s crime novels featuring Inspector Erlendur. I enjoy these novels but they tend to simply tell the story of a case investigation without having any particular subtlety or mystery. In this book, Erlendur is investigating the murder of a school-age boy who has an Icelandic father and a Thai mother. The focus of the novel is on the place of immigrants in Icelandic society, the potential for the murder to be racially motivated and the possibility that child abuse could be involved somewhere along the line. The story trundles along without twists and turns and in the end the case is resolved. It’s not one of the most gripping Indridason novel and I am finding that the further I get into the series of novels the less depth comes through. Having said this, Indridason’s detective and his assistants are good characters and there is something fascinating about the Icelandic setting.

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.