Peter F Hamilton - Judas Unchained Not as good as Part One. MorningLightMountain was a great creation and was given a motivation to be totally ruthless and, well, monstrous. The ending was a bit weak too as it was all too easy. Surely, in a battle for the survival of the human race more of the main characters should have been killed off during random acts of heroism.
Neal Stephenson - The Big U One for Stephenson completists, I think. This book is a bit of a mess but in odd ways. Often earlier books by authors have poor characterisation or poor plotting. This just has peculiar characterisation and plotting. It's not that they are bad as such, although you could probably argue that peculiar means bad, it's that the book does have a plot and does have characters that are well drawn and recognizable but the structure is strange. For example, the book is written in the first person but most of the action happens to other people and so the "writer" is forced to reconstruct the dialogue and action. So, why not just have a multi-character book? Especially so, since the "writer" undergoes no major change nor commits any great deeds. Odd.
It is hard to see how this one got published, but I guess any publisher good see that the guy had potential to do better. Read Cryptonomicon or one of the Baroque Cycle books like Quicksilver. Much better.
Derren Brown - Tricks of the Mind. Interesting stuff from the beardy mind-reader. Lots of it has appeared before in other places (by different authors) but he presents it well. He also gives some insight into how he approaches mind-reading. Well written and funny. He obviously regrets his earlier life as a god botherer...
Thomas Blass - The man who shocked the world : The life and legacy of Stanley Milgram Milgram was responsible for the most thought provoking experiment of the 20th Century (in any discipline). He attempted to find out how far people would go in administering electric shocks to others merely because an authority figure demands it. A good read, yet the book is a bit depressing as he died in his early fifties lacking the recognition he deserved.
Robert Sapolsky - Monkeluv I'm a fan of his work. This is a collection of articles from various sources. There is an interesting one on dreams and a funny one on beauty. Like most collections it has good bits and bad bits. Buy a Primate's Memoir or one of his other books.
Steve Jones - The Single Helix Another collection of articles. This time from Jones' column work for the national press. Lots of very short articles which, as they come from newspaper columns, are a bit like bite-size snacks - they don't always hit the spot!
Maurice Mashaal - Bourbaki, A Secret Society of Mathematicians Who on earth is this book aimed at? If you are interested in Bourbaki, then you are probably a mathematician. The author seems to assume that you are not, for example explaining what a group is. Yet he also feels that is important that the reader know what a filter is so we get about 7 pages going through first year analysis, i.e., limits and continuity - the epsilon-delta form!, topological spaces, metric spaces, etc. All in 7 pages! (That really calls for a double exclamation mark.) I wish it was that simple to explain analysis to my first year students.
The book is laid out in an almost scrapbook form, with copious photographs and cuttings of Bourbaki text. Sometimes the photographs and text don't match up - Rene Thom's picture appears 5 pages before he is mentioned in the text. Despite all these gripes, the book does contain a good discussion of the Bourbaki philosophy and it shortcomings. A full list of Bourbaki members might have been a useful addition.
I never knew Bernard Teissier was a Bourbakist...
Stanislaw Ulam - Adventures of a Mathematician Jeez, what a big-head.
Jeffrey R. Weeks - The Shape of Space I tried to read this book back when I was fresh-faced undergraduate but didn't manage to read all of it because it was too hard. So, I thought I would have another go now that I'm a stale-faced lecturer. I was heartened to see that my earlier failure was more due to the book than to my lack of intelligence. There are a few bits which are confusing, mainly because the author is trying to give an impression of the subject rather than a water-tight mathematical exposition. Of course, now I know what he is trying to explain and so I can see what he meant.
Michael Lewis - Moneyball: The art of winning an unfair game I'm not a baseball fan so my interest in this book was the story of the use of statistical analysis to professional baseball. It's a great story - the manager of a "poor" baseball club looks at the statistics of players to buy a cheap team that performs far better than an expensive team. The point is that modern baseball managers look at the wrong aspects of a player. For example, does he look like an athlete or how fast can he throw? The latter is a good example, does it matter if the ball is pitched slowly, if the hitter can't predict where it is going?
I noticed parallels with what we do in academe, particularly in mathematics. We often employ people who are top quality mathematicians. Yet what use are they? They don't publish, they don't get grants, they can't teach, etc. (Obviously, this doesn't happen at Leeds - I'm talking generally...) They are, in effect, a drain on resources
I had to look up plenty of jargon on the internet to really understand what was going on. Still, a very good book!
Chuck Palahnuik - Invisible Monsters Another one from the writer who will always be known as the guy who wrote "Fight Club". Unfortunately, this book isn't as good (all Palahnuik reviews say this in some form or other). The problem is that the same character/voice is used in all his books. This time the protagonist is a female model yet speaks exactly like the tough guys in Fight Club / Choke / Survivor. There's some inventive stuff but not so much as in those three books and it certainly isn't as funny as the first two mentioned.
I'm still going to read his other books though!
HG Wells - Shape of Things to Come This is an odd book in that there are almost no characters in it and no real plot. It is just a history book from the future. It is also unlike the film made by Korda in 1936 (of which I have fond memories of watching it as a child on a Saturday morning).
To some extent this is Wells's vision not of how the future will be but how it should be. He has no truck with democracy, the future will belong to a self-selected technical elite. Basically scientists and engineers rule the world for the benefit of mankind. I guess it makes sense, after all if we assume that intelligence is normally distributed in the population, then 50% of people are below average intelligence. And we let them vote! It would only take a few people from the intelligent camp to be ill on voting day and the below average people could get their way. Think of the trouble we'd be in. (Please note, I'm not being serious here...)
Gambling and hence playing cards are banned, railways are abolished - it's funny to think what people considered a modern outlook. Price inflation has also been abolished. Wells' grasp of economics may look humorous to us today but one has to remember that he was writing before the Keynes's General Theory.
The book divides in two. The first part concerns the errors of the First World War, which he of course calls the Great War, and his discussion of how to avoid them. Unfortunately, he has little hope in mankind. Another war will come and in the second part of the book it does. From his vantage point of 1933 he did get the start of the Second World War correct, a fight between Germany and Poland in January 1940, ok so he was out by a few months.
His predicted war lasts a decade and involves weaponised gas on a large scale. The war peters out as disease takes hold. Then slowly humanity begins again - in Basra(!) in the 1960s the pilots begin to take over.
Well written and still worth reading even if the predictions are a bit odd. For example, London slips into the Thames in 1968!
Terry Pratchett - Monstrous Regiment I don't think this is one of Pratchett's best but it's quality is far above many competitors. How on earth does he do it? He makes it look all so easy. Damn these guys with their "effortless prose". Should be declared an "abomination unto Nuggan"!
David Britland and Gazzo - Phantoms of the Card Table This is the true story of a card cheater that fooled many magicians with his card work in the 1930s and then quickly vanished. He resurfaced a number of times and was rediscovered by Gazzo in the 80s. Debate still rages as to whether this guy really was a card cheat. Controversy still surrounds the man, was he really what he said he was. However his effect on magic is undeniable.
Warning: The book does use some technical card dealing jargon and does give away sleights.
I've been travelling a lot, so I've been reading a lot!
Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Yet another anti-drug tirade from Dick! Ho ho. Actually this book is packed with many interesting ideas. Written in 1965 it features a 21st Century where due to global warming it is too hot to go outside. It features pre-cognition (like the forthcoming Nicolas Cage film Next), evolution therapy, and the little dolls Perky Pat and her boyfriend Walt. Given that a main theme is reality versus unreality the ending is a bit weak. But hey, it's the journey, not the destination that is important.
D'Arcy Thompson - On Growth and Form I've been meaning to read this book for about 20 years - it was often referenced in the books I read on Catastrophe Theory way back in the 80s. Quite an interesting book but very hard to read as there are quotes in French, German, Latin and even Greek with Greek letters that are not translated. Damn my comprehensive school education! A good grounding in botany would have been an advantage too. Apart from that, I enjoyed it, it contains intriguing facts and theories, although the latter have probably been replaced by now, and is written in a style I don't think has been repeated. Maybe Rene Thom's classic on morphogenesis comes close.
James Lovelock - The Revenge of Gaia Lovelock's autobiography of a few years ago should be required reading for all scientists. It's brilliant. He is one of the few independent scientists in the world and has been described as being part Doctor Who. He is the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (crudely speaking, the Earth is a living organism) which has unfortunately been taken up by the hippy-dippy brigade and has tarnished his credentials in the eyes of some. But in case you are concerned about his credentials, this is the guy who invented the electron capture device which allowed him to measure small traces of CFCs in the atmosphere, leading to the hole-in-the-ozone industry. He is a self-described Green who believes that nuclear energy is the way to go to stop global warning. Read the book and you'll find out why. This book is not as good as his earlier ones, in particular, the Ages of Gaia, and does have a very inappropriate 50s disaster movie cover (which I suppose goes with the title) but apart from those minor quibbles I liked it.
Tim Harford - Undercover Economist Economics was my most useful A-level. Back when I were a lad, sciencey-type students took Maths, Physics and Chemistry. Unfortunately, my education in chemistry was ruined due to a shortage of chemistry teachers. My school decided that the top group in science should be taught by a biologist, the idea being that we were clever enough to get over any problems caused by this and so it wouldn't damage our education too much. But it did so I didn't take chemistry O-level and so couldn't do A-level. Instead I chose Economics. And a good thing too! Economics explains why the world is the way it is more than chemistry does.
It is just such an explanation, in lay person's terms, that Harford gives in his book. It is full of clear arguments and examples. For instance, why is "fair trade" coffee a lot more expensive than standard coffee. That extra ten pence on a cup doesn't go to an impoverished farmer in a developing country. (Why would you even suspect that was the case!) It comes from the simple fact that some people are willing to pay more to help someone out and so the coffee shop exploits that. It also explains why coffee farmers will always be poor: There is no scarcity of coffee beans and they are very easy to grow. If the coffee farmers round the world formed a cartel like OPEC does to keep oil prices high, then other countries would find it profitable to enter the market so supply would increase, lowering the price to pre-Cartel levels.
There were two chapters I particularly liked, one on China and one on funding a health service, the latter of which explains why the system of health insurance in the USA is rubbish. By the way, if any Americans try to convince you that it is a great system just point them to the shameful infant mortality rate figures. The UK isn't much better though...
Glen David Gold - Carter Beats the Devil Another book about magicians. Good old fashioned fun set in the 20s and 30s - the end of the golden age of stage magic. The Carter of the title was in fact a real magician and many of the characters that turn up are "real", for example, President Harding, Houdini and the Marx Brothers.
Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion Yet another publication from Dawkins trying to convince us of how great religion is. When will he stop and consider atheism for a change?
Jack Welch - Winning I picked this up while I was travelling - it is hard to find English language books sometimes. Welch was CEO for General Electric and is widely respected throughout the business world for his abilities - he does rather than analyzes. The book is full of anecdotes about how to be a manager and is often unintentionally funny. The latter because of Welch's straightforward-down-to-earth style. One advice list finished with the non-sequitor "Look at car wrecks". This puzzled me for some minutes. He meant look for bad situations and profit from them. Say a company goes bust then pick over the remains and look for bargains. Who cares if you are profitting from the misery of others? One example he gives is the collapse of Far East currencies led to American firms picking up cheap investments in places like Thailand. He seems to forget that those American firms were not innocent bystanders, that the Thai Baht was deliberately targetted as a currency so that investors could make some easy money has been well documented.
Michael Lewis - Liar's Poker The first book from the guy that brought us Moneyball (see above). Another book about business. This time Lewis' personal story about Wall Street trading in the 1980s. Well written and funny this is now an historical document, written at the end of the 1980s it ends with the shares meltdown on Black Monday and junk bond traders like Ivan Boesky in jail. However, there are interesting parallels with the current times. We now live in an even bigger bubble generated by debt and the housing market is overheating. Also music and fashion are the same. And they are remaking Hairspray...
Chuck Palahnuik - Lullaby Much better than Invisible Monsters (see above). He can only do one voice though. What this means for the multi-narrated new book, Rant, I shall have to wait and see.
Adrian Goldsworthy - In the Name of Rome: The Men Who Won the Roman Empire I began reading this book on Roman generals when I was in Lille. Unfortunately, I was not that interested so I have not finished it yet.
R.L. Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde As an adult I have been rereading some of Stevenson's books. I read this one as a teenager (or near teenager). My review at the time was "It was nothing like the film." And indeed, it is not anything like the film. Probably it is not like anything else. It is far darker and stranger than I could have realized as a child. The story has been done to death over the years in films and TV, and picked apart and analyzed. The original story still packs a punch. If you have never read it, then do so at once!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets Another one by a bond trader! This time the writer is still a trader and describes how he stays that way. He doesn't assume that his success in the bond market is determined by his talent but mostly by chance. He says many traders forget this element of luck so risk too much and finally "blow up" leaving the bonds business in disgrace.
George MacDonald Fraser - The Flashman (The Flashman Papers) I liked the idea of this book. It's set in the early Victorian era when the British Empire covered the globe and concerns a young man expelled from school, who joins the army and ends up in Afghanistan during the disastrous military campaign (how topical...). The central idea is that he is devious, cowardly and an all round bad egg, yet events fall his way and throughout the book he is mistaken for a hero. It's a good well-paced action adventure book in the Boys Own mould. However, it is decidedly unPC, (yes, Flashman fans, I know that is partly the point). The treatment of the non-english is probably accurate for the early Victorian era (and probably the late 60s when the book was written) but it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth. The book is part of a series. I don't think I'll read the rest. (Probably not as good anyway...)
John Buchan - The 39 Steps More Boy's Own adventure type stuff. This time a well-known story that Hitchcock liked so much he filmed it twice, once as The 39 Steps and once as North by Northwest. Of course neither film follows the book too closely.
The book itself is, as one might expect from a hastily written book, lacking in many finer details, the ending is rushed for example. I wish I had time to write a proper review but my own book is taking up a lot of my time!
Dale Carnegie - How to win Friends and Influence People
H. Rider Haggard - She Great - read this book!
Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives
Terry Pratchett - The Truth
As it is now February, obviously I haven't kept this as up-to-date as I would have liked. There are some more books I read before the end of the year. This is the only one I remember at the moment:
Chris Salewicz - Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer
And so there we are, a year of books. A snapshot of what I've been interested in. Of course, some people list all the books they have read since the 60s...