OK, I’ve been meaning to get down to a review of my summer reading for ages so here goes. I finished the MSc in June and I think (besides getting more time with my little princess) the thing that I was most looking forward to getting back to was reading.
Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
So I dove straight in to the HHGTTG. I intended to read just the first book of the trilogy but ended up getting through four of them. It was just as the film was launched, which I haven’t yet seen, but the TV show was also broadcast this summer and I caught a couple of bits of episodes. I remembered it well from my childhood in Southampton, the blonde chick who plays Trillian is so familiar to me from way back.
I didn’t expect to like them as much as I did. I became interested in Douglas Adams because of an amazing speech that I came across online that he had made in Cambridge. There’s also a webcast of a talk from UC Santa Barbara over here which touches on some of the similar issues of atheism. The Guide is a great book, and it is like one really, rather than four. The reason I kept reading the next book was because I figured I’d probably forget the plot and characters if I left it a while, and because the story just went straight through. I have a friend who reckons that it’s actually a computer code, the whole book, which I can’t quite figure out myself. One of the things that I loved about it was that it made sense of a whole world of references that I’ve come across in my years – like the ‘don’t panic’ that comes with some software installations. I can’t think of any others now but I did spend the book going ‘ah, now I get it’. I think my fvaourite was the last one, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish - I was glad to see Arthur get back to earth. Oops, that’s a bit of a spoiler. And it’s the only one that was written as an original, without being an adaptation of the radio shows. I think you can tell. Or maybe the second one though, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Ah, they’re all great.
Code Book
Ok, not dwindling too long on any books, I’ve a few to get through. Next up was The Code Book, by Simon Singh, the first of two of his books I’ve tackled this summer. I enjoyed HHG, but I do still have the feeling that I’m wasting my time reading fiction when there’s so much to learn from non-fiction. Douglas Adams is slightly different because his writing is more satire through the medium of science fiction.
Anyway, Code Book was brilliant, really really great. He has a fantastic style of writing which makes it easy to digest material that I would otherwise be daunted by. The Code Book is about the history of cryptography – code-making and code-breaking, touching on the areas of history that have been affected by this art: Mary Queen of Scots and her execution; the Rosetta Stone; Enigma; the contributions of Navajo Indians in world war two as a human form of indecipherable code; the evolution of the computer, and then a fascinating chapter on the future of cryptography, in the shape of a quantum leap. Mindbending stuff. And the introduction into cryptography and how codes are compiled and broken from the very basics, is fascinating. It really makes you want to tackle one yourself.
Tipping Point
I was looking forward more to reading Malcolm Gladwell’s second book, Blink, but I was advised that he builds on some of the concepts from the first book so I decided to give the very popular The Tipping Point a whirl. It started well, I really liked the first ‘law’ he describes - the law of the few. The people he describes are in all of our lives; the connectors, mavens and salespeople that help to start and crucially spread these epidemics are people we know from work, from social circles, from our families - the character of each of them is so well described that it is hard not to believe his thesis.
But as the book went on, it became more and more about sheer marketing. He continues to use examples from different areas - sociological situations as well as corporate, but the ideas of the book seem to lean more toward sales and markets. Which I’ve no time for. He says in his site that he wants people to learn how to start their own positive epidemics, but the only people that I would recommend this to for that purpose are friends of mine in marketing and advertising.
I’m Not Scared
I was scared. Very scared. Of Niccolo Ammaniti’s I’m Not Scared. I didn’t like this book at all, finding it only disturbing and not at all enjoyable. I’m intolerant of fiction at the best of times but I also hate horror / thriller type movies or books. And this is just not a nice story. My Dad used to say when we were kids:
Why would you make a story that is so horrible, about such horrible things? There’s enough horror in the world without making more up.
When you create fiction, you have the chance to make it something that can touch people positively. So why would anyone choose to dream up and write such a horrible message. I know that’s not a very popular opinion, but it’s mine.
I did manage to get one positive thing out of it. The little boy in the book is having nightmares and he has a coping mechanism to deal with them. All the bad witches and ghouls and monsters are loaded on to a bus in his dream and once he sees them drive over the hill he knows they’re gone. The only reason he tells us about it is because it no longer works after the trauma he’s gone through. But anyway, my own little darling has nightmares regularly and I introduced the bus concept to her. I made it pink and purple, her favourite colours, and I told her to use it at night. And lo and behold, it worked. She even reckoned it worked before she went to sleep, when she was just thinking about the bad lady, who she’s never been able to forget, and the monsters.
Big Bang
The Big Bang is about a topic that I’ve always wanted to know about but I’ve never had the energy to try and get my head around the massive numbers that people use to describe the universe. I understand that they kind of have to but I had faith that somehow, Simon Singh would be able to explain it to me without dazzling me with zeroes. Many people enjoyed Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything but I found that it was far too much. I may try and read it now that I have a basis of understanding, but I just think the way Singh can explain a concept without dumbing it down or patronizing, is a unique gift. I didn’t understand all of it. And I don’t remember a lot of it even though I’m just finished, because, I assume, there was so much new information. But I can definitely get my head around it now, and appreciate things like the recent news of a massive jump in the record of the most distant exploding star from earth, just approximately 1 billion years after the big bang. See, a few weeks ago, that sentence would have made fustratingly little sense to me, but now I actually can understand what it means.
One concept I found fascinating, but that I really can’t get my head around is the anthropic principle. It seems to be a bit of a Descartesian concept:
I think, therefore I am
But using it somehow enabled Fred Hoyle to make the massive leap that was needed in discovering how the excited form of the carbon nucleus could bridge the gap from the lighter elements such as helium and hydrogen to the heavier iron and platinum ones. Wow, even writing that sentence gives me a buzz to think that I can grasp the concept of the creation of our universe. I’m definitely adding a telescope to my wish list.
So top of the list were the two Simon Singh books, I really don’t know which one. And then the Guide, followed by Tipping Point, and my token piece of fiction last. Perhaps my book club ladies can get me back into some decent literature again?
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