Tim O'Hare

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.

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.