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So it’s August in London; hot, humid, wet, busy with tourists and grumpy commuters, and it’s nine weeks today until my holiday. What is a girl to do to cheer herself up, I hear you ask, with no Dr Who on TV, Criminal Minds finishing this week, and not many Without a Traces left to divert her from the long haul through what remains of the summer?
The answer is clearly to plunge into my large tbr pile of crime fiction. There is nothing like murder, mayhem and failing to guess the culprit to bring a smile to the Bride’s face, so all my reading in August will have crime as a theme; even the stuff I am reading for challenges.
And as if to endorse this plan, Thursday’s podcast from Simon Mayo’s book panel on Radio 5 Live reviewed new books by Mark Billingham and Karin Slaughter, so this is clearly a sign that I’m on the right track!
R M Dashwood is the daughter of E M Delafield who wrote The Diary of a Provincial Lady, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed many years ago. In Provincial Daughter, Rosmund Dashwood has written not exactly a sequel to her mother’s books, but a new take on a similar situation, that of a middle class woman and the trials and tribulations of bringing up a family with not enough money to quite meet the social expectations of her class. Which makes it all sound a bit pompous, but this is a very funny novel.
The story is set in the 1950s and covers three months where the narrator (never named) decides to keep a diary of her goings-on just to demonstrate to herself that she isn’t wasting her fine mind and expensive education. So we find out about her husband the doctor, her three sons, her friends and neighbours, her German au pair and her writing career.
I found it fascinating; I was born in the early 1960s so this world had largely gone by the tme I would have been old enough to recognise it, although I suspect this is a very English take on things and it might have been a bit different where I grew up. I liked the narrator very much, which always helps, and it’s a shame that there don’t seem to be any further adventures; I would have liked to know whether they moved to Scotland as seemed to be on the horizon at the end of the book, and what that might have meant.
This is good fun, and I loved the cover – what a frock! – and the illustrations by Gordon Davies are excellent. Recommended.
Regular readers will know that one of my main interests is history, and so when looking for books to read for the non fiction challenge I picked several that were about the past, and this one, Ubiquity, which is about the science of history, an idea that I have always found intriguing. Mark Buchanan is using this book to describe what the blurb calls a new law of nature which can be applied to anything.
I found this a difficult read largely because it is perhaps inevitably more about the science than the history, but the ideas the author discusses were sufficiently interesting to make me persevere, though I did find it hard going at times. If I have understood the book correctly (and that might be a big if) there is evidence of “ubiquitous patterns of change” that run through everything on earth (and presumably beyond). Things that look very different may actually be extremely similar in the way that they are organised. Buchanan uses earthquakes, forest fires and mass extinctions among others as examples of how this might all work.
There is a lot of discussion about power laws which I think means that the bigger something is the less likely it is to happen – the example that stuck with me was research into wars and the size of each conflict as a fraction of the world’s population at the time, which demonstrates that wars become 2.62 time less frequent every time the number of deaths doubles.
One of the key ideas behind this book is probably best described by the author himself: if
chaos teaches physicists that the truly simple can nevertheless look complicated, the critical state teaches them that the truly complicated can behave in ways that are remarkably simple
Buchanan does deal with how this all applies to human society by facing up to the objection that I suspect would be made by many people, that is what about our free will. He uses a number of examples to show that although we do indeed have free will, we also have tendencies and often follow the line of least resistance, so that though we deal with each other on the basis of our own opinions and decisions, there almost always emerges a regular pattern of behaviour.
I’m sure I haven’t done justice to the complexities of this book, and although it wasn’t quite as I expected I found it thought-provoking.
This is my fourth read for the Non Fiction Five challenge.
This week’s topic is:
Are there any particular worlds in books where you’d like to live?
Or where you certainly would NOT want to live?
What about authors? If you were a character, who would you trust to write your life?
Well……..
I’ve always been very attracted to The Culture, the society in which a number of Iain M Banks’ sci-fi books are set, especially if I could have my own drone, and travel around on a Mind called Comfortable With Ambiguity (named after the strapline of this blog) (btw if you’ve never read any of his books the Minds control starships amongst other things and have absolutely fantastic names, like No More Mr Nice Guy….)
No dystopias, no post-apocalyptic worlds where things are really harsh and difficult, nor a world invented by Stephen King, nor (again much as it fascinates me) the sixteenth century (unless I can be Queen while retaining my head)
Ooh, difficult, Terry Pratchett? Neil Gaiman? Joyce Carol Oates? Charles De Lint? Can’t decide.
I have to confess from the outset that handling numbers has never come easily to me and I have to work really hard at it (which is a pity as it does figure fairly prominently in my job). And although I know that economics is as much about concepts as it is about figures I suppose I have been reluctant to investigate something which on this read has proved to be really fascinating.
In the The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford is trying to get non-economists to think about the world in the way that he does. I will admit that I was sucked into the book simply because his first example was about something I walk past every day, which is the coffee kiosk next to the main entrance/exit at Waterloo Station in London; according to Harford some 74 million commuters use this station every year (and it feels some mornings as if they’re all there at once!) and this kiosk is positioned on the most efficient route out of the station, which is one of the reasons it does so well. The other is that there isn’t another kiosk next door selling coffee more cheaply, and so location means everything to the economic success of that particular business.
Harford talks a lot about the price of coffee and why it is so expensive in large cities like London. It’s not as simple as saying the coffee prices are high because the rents are high; he demonstrates that landlords can only really get away with charging high rents if people are willing to pay high prices for the goods sold in those shops. And commuters tend to be “price blind” because they don’t have the time or the inclination to walk a bit further to find a cheaper coffee.
Last coffee thing: he translates the Starbucks price list from their shop on The Strand in London (as it was when he wrote the book a few years ago) and it really tickled me:
Capuccino = no frills = £1.85
Hot chocolate = no frills = £1.85
Caffe Mocha = mix them together, I feel special =£2.05
White chocolate mocha = use different powder, I feel very special = £2.49
Venti white chocolate mocha = make it huge, I feel greedy = £3.09
This is how we signal that price isn’t important; we are willing to pay more for not very much difference.
Harford touches on economics and the environment, talking about carbon neutrality and how it often doesn’t make sense, and suggests that just because goods are moved within countries or even very locally, that doesn’t mean the environmental costs of transporting them are small.
He gives a simple definition of economics, which makes a lot of sense to me: the economy is about who gets what and why.
I really enjoyed reading this book, it’s well written and engaging, and for a few days it made me look differently at how I spend my money and what signals I give to shopkeepers. It hasn’t changed my habits but perhaps I do recognise a bit more how my behaviour can be interpreted.
This is my third read for the Non Fiction Five challenge.
It’s that time of the month again……
Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots: The Perils of Marriage by Anka Muhlstein – haven’t bought any history books for a while, hadn’t heard of this one and simply couldn’t resist it;
The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler – the new Bryant and May mystery which I didn’t even know was out yet, so it was a lovely surprise to find this;
Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders by Gyles Brandreth – this just sounded like really good fun.
Bride of the Book God 