13 Books I Read This Summer

Why Does E=MC2 by Brian Cox
I never understood Maths at school.  That’s not strictly true.  I sort of understood it up until about the middle of 2ndyear of secondary school but then the subject lost me.  It wasn’t just the complexity of the maths involved,it was the seeming lack of practical application.  Calculus, coordinate geometry and all the rest of it seemed so alien, so lacking in any intrinsic worth or relevance to everyday life that it left me cold.  If my maths teachers – the last of whom in particular I have every respect for – had demonstrated to me how a certain abstract equation involving x, y, dx=2, lots of (), / and ∑, ∝etc resulted in a bridge standing up, or an engine working, or even the difference between equally and well tempered klaviers, well, maybe I would have got it.   Sadly the exam system didn’t allow for “why” only “how”.  One drunken night after too much Newcastle Brown, I read A Brief History of Timefrom cover to cover at a scientist friend’s house.  I understood every word.  It was beautiful, it made sense on every level both aesthetic and scientific and I felt I understood my place in the universe and the sheer joy of its complexity.  When I woke up the next day I had forgotten everything other than that I had felt enlightened some hours previously.  Interestingly, that same evening I explained sonata form to my scientist friend and he got it with Brown goggles on but was none the wiser the next morning too.  Since then I’ve read many “popular science” books, starting with Fermat’s Last Theorem whichwas published just after Andrew Wiles claimed to have solved this mathematical riddle of riddles.  I read David Boudanis’ book E=MC2 and enjoyed it.  At the start of this summer I bought Brian Cox’s offering on the same subject.  Despite the blurb offering a layman’s guide to this most famous equation going, and many exhortations that a few pages of maths could be skipped if you didn’t understand it, I was back to the morning after A Brief History of Time or, more likely, 2ndyear Maths (“I’ve got a sore tummy, Mam, I can’t go to school…”).  Just like with 2ndyear maths, I gave up half way through.  I don’t usually give up books I’ve started, I usually persevere through to the very end but,I’m afraid I failed.  Just like my Extra Maths O level.

Pandaemonium by Christopher Brookmyre
I’ve read several of Brookmyre’s novels over the years and have found them hugely entertaining if rather gory.  The ones I’ve read have tended to be blood spattered, a bit rude, fastpaced and very funny in parts.  Pandaemoniumwas all of these things.  The best way of describing it is like a mixture of Trainspotting and The X-Files, with a bit of Angels and Demons and Wallender mixed in for fun. Despite the jolly romp of murder, sex, swearing and religious iconography, the novel did raise some important moral issues such as do the means sometimes justify the ends of a certain dogma and the perennial “don’t judge a book by its cover”.

Transition by Iain Banks
I tried reading Banks in his “Iain M Banks” guise some years ago and unfortunately chose Fearsum Endjinn whichis written in phonetics when a certain character is narrating.  I found this very irritating.  I managed to read Trainspotting and the scripts of Rab C Nesbiteven, despite their Scots-phonetic spelling as, having lived in Scotland for some time, I’d learned a bit of the vernacular.  Fearsum Endjinndid my head in and thus put me off both Iain and Iain M.  Until I bought this book at least.  Again the story was told from several viewpoints and it was interesting to see how each subplot evolved and developed between the various protagonist’ssnapshots.  The multiple universe idea is, of course, nothing new but having a being able to jump from universe to universe and inhabit an unknowing human who has no idea of what they were doing whilst “possessed” was new to me and an interesting conceit.  I’ve revised my opinion of Banks and will try him again, maybe starting with The Wasp Factory as it’s reckoned to be fairly decent.

Bluestockings by Jane Robinson
“Bluestockings”, it seems, was a term of abuse for young ladies in the late 19th and early 20thcentury who had the temerity to seek a university education.  In a patriarchal world where a woman’s role was clearly defined ie to look after the house of eitherher parents, husband or brothers if unmarried, an education was considered a waste of resources for even the most intelligent and articulate of girls.  The blue stockings were themselves a sort of stereotypical uniform of those woman who did make it into higher education. Bluestockings is an account of the earliest days of women at universities and the difficulties presented along the way – fathers refusing to let their child leave the family home, chaperones everywhere to ensure dignity and chastity, universities tolerating rather than welcoming ladies’ colleges and the refusal of universitiesto even award degrees to ladies who had completed the same exams as men – one very high profile name until not that very long ago (Cambridge, by the way…). The passion for learning of the women whose stories are told is undeniable.  It seems that most of them went on to marriage, motherhood and housewifery after the excitement of the forbidden fruit of an education but these pioneers opened the doors for later generations and the current crop of school leavers of either sex who see a university education as more of a right than a privilegewould do well to read this volume.  The main thing which struck me, however, was how much I identified with many of the young women who felt out of their depth, particularly socially, at many of the seats of learning, especially Oxbridge.  Obviously I’m a bloke so there are no sexist parallels between myself and these early female students but I found that I saw myself in many of the situations which arose eg the young lady not understanding the dress code for various functions (I didn’t know what “black tie” meant), those who found that the place seemed to be full of extremely confident and popular peers (oh boy, did I find 1styear difficult), and, most painfully, the subjects who felt that they had made the wrong choice but who battled on in order not to let anyone down.  For late 19th century women read late 20th century Merthyr boys.

And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer
I read all the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxybooks as a teenager.  Apart from the ones which were published after I wasa teenager of course.  I seemto have missed one though as I had no idea that Arthur Dent and Trillian had a daughter called Random Dent.  However, I didn’t let this put me off.  I didn’t let the fact that Douglas Adams is dead put me off either.  It certainly didn’t put Eoin Colfer off as he sort of carried on where Adams had left off – I assume, at least, as the book I seem to have missed or forgotten came between So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and this one in a chronological order of publication – and his writing, for me at least, was sympathetic to Adams’ style and the plot development seemed to be fairly natural, or at least as natural as may be expected in the Hitchhiker’smode of operation.  One thing did strike me, however (and no, not a whale falling from the sky).  Isn’t the Hitchhiker’s Guideessentially mobile internet?   Douglas Adams saw it all coming….

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
…as did Ray Bradbury.  This is one of those books which I felt I should have read by now, like To Kill a Mockingbird and Catch 22but I’ve never got round to it.  I’m glad I read it now rather than in my teens as I wouldn’t have seen the relevance of it to modern society.  The wrap around, 4 wall tv screens spewing out non-stop, soundbite drivel?  Everyone plugged into their own little microuniverse watching and listening whilst ignoring those physically close?  The digital relations upon whose every word we hang?  Scary stuff.

Tragically I Was An Only Twin ed. William Cook
This book is part biography and part anthology of the life and work of Peter Cook.  Sad to say I saw it in the library, turned to the “Derek and Clive” chapter, tried not to laugh at the “Joan Crawford” sketch which had been transcribed, and thus borrowed this tome to peruse at home.  I found the biographical details of Cook’s life fascinating, from his early days entertaining friends at school to his final ruminations pretending to be a lovelorn Norwegian fisherman called Sven on a night-time phone in show on Radio Norfolk (or similar, maybe that was Alan Partridge).  I found the scripts – with the exception of the expletive strewn Derek and Clive offerings – less appealing than the biographical details.  Just seeing the largely improvised Derek and Clive in print was hilarious given the huge profanity involved.  I am one of the sad middle agedmen referred to who can almost recite “The Horn” from memory.  Cook’s relationship with Dudley Moore is central to the book of course and it is enlightening to see how Cook’s rants and rancour were directed at Moore both in Derek and Clive sketches (eg “Cancer|”” from Come Againwhich isn’t quoted in this book but which was recorded at about the time Moore’s father was either diagnosed with or died of cancer, I’m afraid I can’t remember) and in other writings such as newspaper columns.  Despite this nothing can take away from Cook’s.  Not only was Cook a master of comic characters and timing but he also used Moore’s character as a springboard for his flights of fancy.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
My tutor at university told us to read The Name of the Rose as we embarked on our studies of medieval music as a way of “getting into” the period.  That was 20 years ago.  I chanced upon Foucault’s Pendulum in the library, the same day that I found Tragically I Was and Only Twinand thought that it would keep the librarian’s guessing as to whether I am some sort of intellectual or merely a jumped up pleb (the latter, obviously).  The print is small and there are over 600 pages.  It took me a good 100 pages to start to enjoy the book but once I delved into this work I was hooked.  OK, some aspects I found annoying such as the quotes in various languages.  Prof. Eco and his usual demographic may be fluent in any number of languages but I found the quotes at the start of chapters and theslips into foreign tongues in conversation irritating in the extreme.  Presumably the original is not in English so why not translate it all into English for mere mortalslike myself?  My French consists of enough to order a beer but not to understand the reply telling me how much it costs. My Italian is based on musical terms such as allegro, andante, poco a poco crescendo and so on.  My Latin is exclusively the Ordinary of the mass, plus the texts of motets I’ve sung on several occasions.  However, I persevered and was glad I did.  Eco namechecks popular (or unpopular?) books such as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, any number of treatises on occult and esoteric subjects, deals with fairly early word processors – which really dates the story – and goes into great detail about self financing authors.  I read this book whilst away on holiday.  I don’t normally listen to Radio 4 but the radio in the house was tuned to this channel and I had it on in the background whilst doing some tidying (see, I have been domesticated).  The programme was debating self financingauthors.  How weird is that?  When I read books as a teenager, a bit of a pseudo-intellectual, introverted, artistically inclined, I read with a dictionary in hand so I could check and underline the new words I encountered.  If I’d done that with Foucault’s PendulumI’d still be on page 12.  That’s just the words in English.  Like many books of its length and complexity, the end was a bit of a let down but at least it didn’t suggest that they all lived happily ever after.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
It must be something about the summer holidays which draws me to dystopian visions of the future – or present – so I suppose it was inevitable that I came back to Brave New World.  I can’t remember when I first read it or my reaction to it but, just like with Fahrenheit 451, I think that my personal maturity and the way the world has developed in my lifetime has brought greater resonance to this work.  Everyone belongs to everyone else…how true these days when you can find yourself posted on youtube with anyone else able to comment.  Everyone belongs to everyone else…when I was young I kept a diary and the last thing I wanted was for anyone to read it.  I imagine the rest of the “Adrian Mole” generation did similarly.  Now we’d keep a blog – rather like this I suppose – and publish our thoughts and desires for all to see.  And who was the “Savage”?: John, wishing for peace to live out his life in solitude?; the press, like modern paparazzi, harassing and goading him?; or the Alphas and Betas who came to gawp and urged him to flagellate himself for their entertainment?  Huxley invented Big Brother in the 1930s.  I’ll probably dig out 1984 or Lord of the Fliesnext.  Or maybe re-read Will Self’s Book of Dave…