Random Acts of Mindlessness

Review: An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd

Rating: 8/10

The back-drop to this novel is the merry dance which Prussian lieutenant-colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck led the British forces in German East Africa during The Great (!!) War. Boyd grew up in West Africa and knows what colonial life was like. He is a Scot and perhaps this is why he enjoys making quite a mockery of the British officers.  (Think Captain Mannering of Dad’s Army).  Nonetheless, between guffaws, he brings us firmly back to earth with sudden unexpected explosions of violence, all the more powerful for their purposelessness.  I had the sense of reading about a cricket match where bodies get chalked up as runs.

One troubling point was the occasional references to ‘niggers’ and ‘coolies’ and my 21st century sensibility struggled with the conflict between respectfulness and authenticity.

Initially I found the book old-fashioned in presentation (comic-book cover) and writing style, reminding me of Boy’s Own yarns but this soon yielded to pleasure in a well-told story where much of the humour turned out to be a well-honed metaphor for the mindlessness and chaos which arises when politicians and generals send young men to pointless deaths. I began to dread the appearance of the very comic district officer Wheech-Browning which always presaged more dreadful deaths.

Following on a recent reading of The African Queen by C.S. Forester, I may be starting to build an African bookshelf.

Go West Young Man

 

We sometimes claim our reading matter is western-centric. It was mentioned last week when we talked about The Silk Roads. I’ve just finished reading The Modern Mind by Peter Watson and this rather shocking comment is taken from the concluding chapter.

Enlightenment

Review: Marsh’s Library at St. Patrick’s Close, Dublin 8

Rating: 8/10

Tony and Don paid a visit to Marsh’s library following a TV documentary which Tony had watched.  Their site invites us to step back into the 18th century to see an early-Enlightenment institution, barely changed in 300 years.

We learned that it was founded in 1707 and comprises essentially books from four private collections, the last arriving around 1770.  It was the first public library in Ireland and it required an Act of Parliament to found it.

We visited their exhibition called: Hunting Stolen Books which related the loss of books back in the 18th century and their occasional recovery even in recent years.  It appears that book-lifters had a particular penchant for books on antiquity.  To stem the tide of losses, the library eventually installed three reading-cages (still there) where readers were locked up while they consulted books.

Some more recent history comes in the form of a collection of machine-gun-riddled books in the original reading room, the victims of a British soldier several streets away who shot wildly during the Easter Rebellion.

Famous ‘clients’ of Marsh’s included Dean Swift, James Joyce and Bram Stoker.

A nice visit for anybody who gets a warm, fuzzy feeling near book history.

Bluff Your Way in Literature

Review: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

Rating: 8/10

This is a reader’s book.  Its very witty style disguises its very serious attempt to reconcile the huge gaps in our reading experience with our claim to be qualified to discuss literature.

There is a conceit that in order to be cultivated, we need to have read the vast canon of world literature (not to mention being an authority on music, science, etc.).

Actually, even staying abreast in one field is impossible.  Pierre Bayard has written a witty and practical book that is not at all the Bluff Your Way in Literature that you might expect.  He really gets across that you are not expected to have read everything and that neither have most of the others who you hold these conversations with. At the end, you’ll feel perfectly entitled to discuss books you haven’t read.

While writing this, it brought to mind another of my all-time favourite novels.  In The Sixty-Five Years of Washington by Juan José Saer, two friends discuss a birthday party that … neither of them actually attended!!

La Peste

Review: Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser

Rating: 9/10

This book went into my list because I remember it so fondly.  Sadly, I can say little about its contents as it is quite some time since I read it.

Published in 1934, it can hardly be claimed that it is a thorough history of plague and pestilence. What can be said of it is that it has been continuously in print since 1934 and that must be a tribute to its quality.  If revisionism is another form of plague, then clearly this book has survived it.

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

David Deutsch is a Professor of Physics at Oxford University, expert on Quantum Computation and proponent of the theory of the multiverse but his interests – and this book – go far outside the realm of physics and even science.

 

Why I Like it: Some books challenge your outlook – this one challenged mine more than most and in a very uplifting way.  Yes it’s a science book but also much more.  History, Philosophy, Ecology and Political Science.  Is man “A chemical scum on an average planet of a typical star on the fringes of a galaxy?” (Hawkins) – Deutsch argues convincingly that conscious beings are cosmically hugely significant.

It’s a very wide ranging book  –  some parts I’ve read with delight several time – others I’ve skimmed or not read at all.  Most of it is very accessible to the general reader – some a bit more difficult. Really interesting stuff on ecology, environmentalists, democracy, the scientific method, evolution, physics (of course), art

Above all,  this is a hugely positive book.  In fact he argues very convincingly that not only have we reason to take an optimistic approach to life but we have a duty to do so.

Really not your average science book

‘Tis Brillig

Review: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Rating: 10/10

If I could take only one book to the proverbial desert island, this would have to be it.

GEB, as it is affectionately known to thousands of fans, is hard to classify.  It is possibly a philosophy book, or maybe a primer on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem* or perhaps it’s a plaything. Gödel’s theorem represents to me one of the high intellectual achievements of the 20th century.  It was a devastating hammer-blow to mathematicians; imagine that you’ve given your life’s work to proving, say, Goldberg’s Conjecture.  Gödel says that not everything that is true is provable; so maybe you’ve wasted your life on one such unprovable conjecture!  (The very fine novel: Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis imagined just such an outcome and is well worth reading).

Using an intricate structure where each idea is presented first using very witty Plato-like dialogues which draw on the art-work of M. C. Escher and the fugues of J. S. Bach, Hofstadter introduces us to a range of topics from mathematics and meta-mathematics, computing and logic and (most fun for me) recursion, self-reference and self-representation which are found throughout the works of these two creative artists.  After every chapter you’ll find yourself with pen and jotter (or computer) playing about with his ideas.

An example of the delights to be found in GEB are the translations of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky into French and German.

*Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that no consistent system of [mathematics] is capable of proving all truths about the natural numbers. There will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system, and statements that are false, but not disprovable within the system. Furthermore the system will not be able to demonstrate its own consistency.

First Steps

The inaugural meeting of the Asynchronists convened today.  Present were David, Tony, Eugene, Richard and Don.  Michael sent his excuses: “shacked up in bed with a fever”, he claimed. The bar has been set high for future meetings.  Richard brought whiskey and Don made scones but David won universal acclaim for his “shampagne”.

The group is finding its feet and therefore much discussion concerned where each of us hopes the project will lead.  Books were central but there was clearly lots of appetite for other media (cinema, TV) and also excursions to cultural locations;  some of those mentioned included the Casino in Marino, Victor’s Way in Roundwood and Marsh’s Library (already visited by Tony and Don).  Future meetings (on the third Thursday of every month) will rotate through our homes or hopefully will involve outings to exotic locations.
In order to give a flavour of our respective tastes, everyone outlined the particular merits of a number of books they have enjoyed.  Hopefully a brief appreciation/critique of each will be added to this blog in the coming days.

Discussions were wide-ranging as they like to say after a typical Sinn Féin – DUP shindig.

Eugene liked:

• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilbur 
• In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak

Tony liked:

• Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922 by Ronan Fanning
• The Lunar Men: The Inventors of the Modern World 1730-1810 by Jenny Uglow

David liked:

• The War That Never Was by Duff Hart-Davis
• Defending the Rock: How Gibraltar Defeated Hitler by Nicholas Rankin
• Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State by Gotz Aly

Richard liked:

• Wolf Hall and its sequels by Hilary Mantel
• In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Don liked:

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
• How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard
• The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Peter Atkins
• Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser
• Birthright: The True Story That Inspired Kidnapped by A. Roger Ekirch

Michael phoned in to say he liked:

• The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Other books mentioned favourably included:

• The African Queen by C. S. Forester
• The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura 
• Fatherland by Robert Harris
• If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino 
• The Island that Dared – Journeys in Cuba by Dervla Murphy
• An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd