Madeline Miller (2011)

Another example of a well-known tale told from an unusual perspective, this time Patroclus’ view of his relationship with Achilles. It’s an excellent accomplishment, very believable, and compare favourably with Circe, Miller’s other work in the same theme.

It’s frustrating for the reader that Patroclus just doesn’t get it: even when he’s referred to as “the best of the Acheans”, he still feels he’ll outlive Achilles. And there are some anachronisms that frustrate slightly too: the Greeks didn’t have the same notion of homosexuality as we do, so many of the concerns and tensions that the book explores (and which are familiar to the modern reader) would have been less serious (and perhaps incomprehensible) at the time. But those are minor quibbles in what is by any measure a great achievement of re-centring a story.

5/5. Finished Tuesday 17 December, 2019.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Ben Macintyre (2018)

Without doubt a true story that’s stranger than fiction – to the point that many people involved in the intelligence world refused to believe it was possible, and to believe that the whole thing was a complicated disinformation exercise. It’s the tale of Oleg Gordievsky and how he became a spy for MI6 – and how he was caught, released, and then ultimately escaped in an almost comical operation that no-one outside those immediately planning it thought had the slightest chance of success. But succeed it did, taking a man through the Iron Curtain in the boot of a car, and with him details of Soviet defence planning and intelligence operations covering decades.

4/5. Finished Tuesday 17 December, 2019.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

John Mandeville (1357)

A book it’s hard to know what to make of. It starts as a fairly standard mediaeval travelogue before morphing into something more akin to a bestiary or morality tale – all told in the same voice, as though both plausible and fantastical events were equally well-observed. It’s been a source of controversy ever since.

I read The Travels after reading Riddle And The Knight, one of the recent attempts to make sense of it. I suspect that’s the right way round: reading The Travels first might incline one to dismiss it as nonsense, whereas in facts there are (or may be) deeper things at work. One can’t help but want to follow Mandeville to Sinai and St Catherine’s monastery.

3/5. Finished Tuesday 17 December, 2019.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

David Wallace-Wells (2019)

A view of the climate crisis that clearly aims to instill fear – and succeeds – but which clearly also aims to be a call for action, in which it’s a lot less successful.

The author is precise about his goals and limitations, presenting the science and implications of global heating without himself being a scientist. He does an excellent job of doing so, in all the terrifying glory. But beyond that it’s hard to see what the book is for. It tries to be motivational, but can’t help ending up characterising all the efforts as doomed either on technical or political grounds. That may in fact be true. But by making all action seem futile, it risks either inducing a state of learned helplessness or invoking a spirit of “eat, drink, and be merry”, neither of which is helpful especially if the specific claims or predictions of the science are wrong.

And that’s a vitally important point. The science all points in the direction of human-caused climate heating with disastrous consequences. But the mechanisms, rates, feedback loops, and other factors are all filled with uncertainty. That’s not an excuse for inaction: far from it, it’s potentially a huge motivation, because – unlike the impression one might get from books like this – the endpoint isn’t certain and it’s still completely possible for action on a large enough scale to tilt the balance in positive directions, at least towards lesser or shorter-duration consequences.

2/5. Finished Tuesday 17 December, 2019.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Andrew Blum (2019)

Weather forecasting is one of the triumphs of modern technology – and especially computing technology. This book stretches across the technology stack, from the sensors that are collecting the raw data (and how they evolved from earlier systems) all the way to the modelling and processing of that data into usable forecasts, with some very interesting diversions into the sociology and politics of global weather forecasting, and how the rise of privately-owned data streams may improve the lives of many but disadvantage some of the areas of the world most in need of better forecasting as the climate warms.

But Blum manages to do all this without ever really getting to grips with the technology or the science, and that’s rather disappointing. It’s made worse by side-references to some ideas that could have formed the basis for discussion, for example Edward Witten’s discovery of the chaotic dynamics of weather which is what drives a lot of model design. To me that suggests reading this book alongside Chaos: Making a New Science, where the science is more central and the technology therefore more understandable.

3/5. Finished Saturday 12 October, 2019.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)