Frank Dikötter (2010)

A hard book to read, detailing the effects of the Great Leap Forward on the people of China, especially in the countryside. The parallels with other Communist states are striking: the bureaucracy, the persistent raising of production targets, and the ubiquitous lying as to how those targets have been exceeded everywhere despite the obvious facts on the ground. But there are unique features too. Two stand out in particular. Firstly, the use of particular countries as targets to exceed in particular commodities (i.e., beat Britain in iron production) for no readily apparent reason. Secondly, the very fact that amid the desire to increase food production, and the famine that resulted as this campaign was mis-managed, several other campaigns were instituted such as backyard iron smelting and water conservation that all interfered so as to guarantee their mutual total failure. It’s hard to place yourself into the mindset of any government being able to distance itself so completely from reality as to imagine this approach could work even in theory, and then to further be able to ignore the facts so comprehensively.

Dikötter’s book on the takeover of power (The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957) forms a trilogy with this and his next work on the Cultural Revolution. When finished the three will be indispensable as a guide to this period.

5/5. Finished Sunday 9 February, 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Aldous Huxley (1958)

4/5. Finished Wednesday 29 January, 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Keith Houston (2013)

An interesting romp through the lesser-known areas of typography, literature, and language. The author manages to touch on an impressive breadth of content in a book ostensibly about punctuation, perhaps illustrating how language really does affect more of human activity than we might think.

I especially enjoyed the digressions into the emergence of pounds, shillings, and pence (as well as the pound sign). Many characters are treated in enormous detail: the history of the ampersand, for example, which walks the reader through a couple of millennia of language evolution. The hash sign and the interrobang also get star treatment, while the humble dash turns out to have more complexity than even this dedicated LaTeX user was expecting.

4/5. Finished Sunday 26 January, 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Chris Culver (2013)

The blurb on the cover describes the protagonist as “the most fascinating detective in the history of crime fiction,” which is itself an overstatement of almost criminal proportions.

The story revolves around a criminal case with problematic evidence. So far, so ordinary. The characters however are without exception stereotypes. Even though the main character, Ash Rashid, is given colour by being a Muslim in the American mid-West, he’s a stereotypical Muslim: struggling with drink, worrying about missed prayers, staunchly supported by a more observant wife, and so forth. Along the way we meet the decent-but-too-hard prosecutor, the scheming crime boss who helps justice while pursuing his own agenda, the self-interested politician — should I go on?

1/5. Finished Sunday 26 January, 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Sinclair McKay (2010)

I may be being a bit harsh on this book, which makes a decent attempt at filling in the social history of one of the greatest contributors to wartime victory: but it felt like it missed almost all the excitement and significance of Bletchley Park and failed to really dig into the characters of those involved, despite extensive interviews. At the very least it might motivate one to read Alan Turing: The Enigma or one of the other histories or memoires that have come out in the past few years.

2/5. Finished Sunday 12 January, 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)