Published by: Bramley Books, 1998

This is unquestionably the shoddiest, most hastily thrown-together heap of festering ineptitude I have come across in the six decades I've been reading about UFOs, and I've read a lot of stinkers in my time.

I could tell this was going to be a mess as soon as I spotted the tired old cliché of the "TOP SECRET" stamp on the front cover which had the "R" in "secret" backwards—hey, it's because it's supposed to be using the Cyrillic alphabet, geddit? Let's quietly ignore the fact that any genuine Russian speaker (which the author, who was born in Ukraine, undoubtedly is) knows that the letter "Я" is actually pronounced "ya" and just get on with it, shall we?

Even though I knew I was going to be wading through some truly execrable dross, the quality of the text was so bad it took my breath away. If this book was a Wikipedia page, there would be at least one <Citation Needed> flag in every paragraph. Each case is presented third-hand with the barest of details, only very occasional references to the sources used, and absolutely no useful context. Any reflection on a sighting's significance by the author reads as meaningless word salad:

"Officially, KGB researchers reported such objects as unknown space radiation with oscillatory mass, but unofficially they were thought to be something far more imposing."

Thought? By whom? What were they thought to be? Why were they regarded as imposing? It's hard to believe that someone was actually paid real money to write this junk. There's a heavily embroidered, two-page spread describing the Dyatlov Pass Incident (which adds a lot of spurious detail, such as claiming that all of the bodies found had "an unnatural, orange colour") but most of the other accounts in the book are Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) tales. As David Clarke likes to point out, the evidence presented is on the same level as folklore. "Some researchers think that..." Really? <Citation Needed>!

Most of the "UFO" photos used here are of rocket launch plumes or lenticular clouds. The cloud photo is not captioned at all when it first appears on the contents page, then it's described as a picture "sent anonymously to a researcher" showing an "ominous looking craft" on page 53. Many of the other photographs showing lights in the sky are clearly the aurora borealis, or fireworks going off. The approach seemed to be that if the picture researcher couldn't find a photo of the thing that was referred to in the text, it was absolutely fine to just caption any old flying saucer image with text like "the object in this picture looked very similar to..." They actually do this on page 35, and the photo they used is a very dodgy one taken by the American Daniel Fry following his notorious alleged close encounter with the alien entity "A-Lan" (yes, really) at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico—which is not in Russia.

The designer wasn't beyond using photos from known hoaxes, either. Evidently resorting to fakery is no big deal in UFOlogy; just add a comment of "Although this was proved to be faked, the existence of alien craft remains a very real threat" and Bob's your uncle! See page 65 for that particular gem, and then check page 95 for a photo that was clearly taken in the tacky tourist trap we know and love as the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico (still not in Russia, by the way) but which is captioned as a genuine photo from the aftermath of the alleged 1947 saucer crash itself—even though you can see the reflection of other museum exhibits reflected in the glass that the photo was taken through. Several images are used more than once, making me think that the graphic designer must have reached the point where they'd given up completely. I don't blame them.

This is garbage. It's laughably, embarrassingly bad. It's also a perfect example of why the field of UFOlogy is commonly regarded as junk science these days.

Published by: Penguin, 2000

Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye in 1953 and in a letter to a friend he described it as his best book. Once again, it features the private investigator Philip Marlowe who once again is drawn into a complicated plot involving several seemingly unconnected narrative threads which will, of course, turn out to be much more than they first appear. Marlowe is now in his forties, is still in love with Los Angeles and its architecture, but is still as unimpressed with the human condition as he ever was.

The novel has more autobiographical detail in it than any of Chandler's other work that I've read. There are frequent allusions to British mores and culture (Chandler grew up in London, gained British citizenship, and worked in the Admiralty for a year) to wartime trauma (he served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France during World War One) and there are several extended meditations on what it means to be both a writer and an alcoholic; The Long Goodbye is not a novel to treat as a drinking game. There's a profound darkness hanging over many of the book's principal characters—even the ones who somehow manage to survive to the end of the book (not all of them do; this is a Raymond Chandler novel, remember). And yet Chandler obviously had a lot of fun writing it. There's an air of relish in the way he presents Marlowe's thoroughly jaundiced view of the world and there are frequent moments which are laugh-out-loud funny.

In one scene, Marlowe is standing in the street talking to a shady contact by the name of Chick Agostino when

The door of a car banged open and a man about seven feet high and four feet wide jumped out of it, took one look at Agostino, then one long stride, and grabbed him by the throat with one hand.
"How many times I gotta tell you cheap hoods not to hang around where I eat?" he roared.
He shook Agostino against the wall. Chick crumpled up, coughing.

So far, it's all meat-and-potatoes gangsterism. But as Chandler is writing Marlowe here, we get this unexpected little exchange as dessert:

I watched Chick straighten himself out and regain some of his composure. "Who's your buddy?" I asked him.
"Big Willie Magoon," he said thickly. "A vice squad bimbo. He thinks he's tough."
"You mean he isn't sure?" I asked him politely.

If you're not at the point where you're telling yourself that you need to read some of this stuff for yourself by now, you have my sympathies.

Published by: Penguin, 2000

And so I head straight on to the second of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, Farewell, My Lovely. It was written in 1940 but the most famous film adaptation, which starred a much-too-old Robert Mitchum as Marlowe (Mitchum was 57 at the time; Marlowe is supposed to be 30-something) was a remake filmed in 1975. It's a long time since I watched it. I should really dig out my DVD copy and give it another spin.

At first glance, the plot appears to be going in multiple directions at once. That's because it is—Chandler assembled Farewell, My Lovely from three short stories he'd already written about a gangster looking for a former squeeze, a jewel theft mixed up with a blackmailer, and the hunt for a missing girl and her dog that ends up on a gambling boat anchored off the California coast (but not before the detective has been sapped with a blackjack and pumped full of narcotics that he spends almost a whole chapter shaking off). But the three threads are woven together with a slow and gentle inevitability that is so subtle you don't realise it's happening until our narrator remarks on things that happened dozens of chapters earlier and you realise that they weren't just Marlowe indulging his talent for vivid description but also him noticing a vital clue.

Chandler was an impeccable stylist and for Marlowe's return he turned things up to eleven. The opening paragraphs, which introduce us to a gigantic hoodlum by the name of Moose Malloy, have a better cold open than any drama series I've seen on television in the last twenty years. Marlowe's fatalistic, what-can-you-do approach to life is as evident as ever and Chandler's regular themes of corruption and social decay are all present and correct. The action takes place around a version of Los Angeles (and a thinly disguised Santa Monica) that Marlowe describes with such a keen eye for detail it's obvious that while he professes deep contempt for its inhabitants, he clearly loves the physical place and its architecture, both good and bad. His turn of phrase when he introduces each new member of the cast and sets the scene for us as they interact with Marlowe is a delight and you can't help but tag along for the ride. I could fill this review with one memorable line after another, but that would be unfair. You really need to read the book and encounter them for yourself in their natural habitat.

Published by: Penguin, 2000

After savouring the work of John Kennedy Toole, my appetite for more Michelin-star-quality writing kicked in strongly so I went back to an old favourite of mine: Raymond Chandler (1888–1959). And what else was I going to start with but The Big Sleep? It's probably the one book of his that pretty much everyone knows. He wrote it in 1939 but like most other people these days it was the 1946 movie starring Humphrey Bogart that was my first encounter with the tale. And what an encounter that is; if you've not seen the film, you need to do something about that, sharpish.

The hero (who became Bogart's most famous role) is Philip Marlowe, a private investigator based in Los Angeles. He's perceptive, smart, and clearly much too honourable for his own good to make a decent living at what he does. The book opens with him being called in by the elderly General Sternwood to investigate a blackmail plot involving the younger of the General's daughters, Carmen. But that's just the start of the proceedings. The cast of characters (all of them described in vivid, memorable, and perceptive detail by Chandler) expands rapidly; things take increasingly darker turns, the stakes get higher, and through it all Marlowe takes nobody's word for anything. He gets beaten up, shot at, threatened, choked into unconsciousness, shot at and threatened again, and then shot at even more and yet he maintains his sense of honour and chivalry to the last. We could do with a lot more people like Marlowe around these days.

Chandler's style is still influential today; there are whole passages in The Big Sleep that trigger memories of later books and more recent films and you realise how extensively other writers and film directors have borrowed from his work. Going right back to the unadulterated, unfiltered source material is an intoxicating experience. There's no doubt that I'm going to have to follow on by rereading the other Chandler books in my collection. They're addictive.

Published by: Penguin, 2016

Before I sat down to read A Confederacy of Dunces the only thing I knew about it was its title, which is taken from an epigram by Jonathan Swift. I didn't know its author had taken his own life after suffering from mental illness which was exacerbated by failing to find a willing publisher for the book. I didn't know that it was the author's mother who first recognised the value of the work or that it was she who was responsible for getting it published posthumously. I didn't know that it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize or that it was held in quite such high regard as it is. I didn't know that the central character of the book was based on a fellow Professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana where the author worked for a year.

But now I do. And I keep asking myself how it has taken me so long to get round to reading one of the most monstrously funny classics of modern literature that I have ever encountered.

Ignatius J. Reilly is one of the most memorable fictional creations you are ever likely to encounter. All the way through the book, the reader follows his actions and inner dialogue with a sense of mounting horror and revulsion punctuated by repeated thoughts of "Oh no, he's not going to..." followed soon after by guffaws of laughter when of course that's exactly what he does do. The plot consists of a chain of events precipitated by Mr Reilly that start as merely improbable but which escalate with the addition of a menswear factory, an undercover cop, a hot dog stand, a cockatoo, and some wild parties. Somehow Toole brings the whole confection to its inevitable and satisfying conclusion with no apparent effort at all.

So much fun.

Published by: Yale University Press, 2006

I set about reading this, Thoreau's most famous work, because it is referred to several times in Anthony Storr's wonderful book, Solitude (Thoreau wrote an entire chapter on the subject in Walden). How disappointed I was to discover then that Thoreau only played with the notion; isolation for him was only tolerable provided that the comforts of modern living remained in comfortable striking distance (but preferably without having to put oneself out and interact with the people who were so kindly providing them for him). He was far too much of a snob to actually try leading a life in the genuine wilderness. The mythology, the fantasy of the idea was far more important to him than the practice.

His first chapter, Economy, shows him at his most fantastical, claiming to eschew the trappings of modern life because he finds them to be a distraction from his journey of self discovery and the construction of his personal myth. In doing so, he reveals a streak of narcissistic elitism that's a mile wide.

He rejects the idea of having a job as being beneath him, yet the way he maintained his existence relied on mooching off other people—he was effectively living for free on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land. Emerson even lent him the tools to clear an area of woodland there and build a shack for himself (and Thoreau makes a point of telling us that when he returned the axe he'd borrowed to cut down the trees that were his building materials, it was sharper than it was when he'd acquired it, because to him that's a more important point to focus on than who lent it to him—presumably Emerson—or their trust and generosity in doing so.) Despite bold claims of a life of ascetic solitude, it's been suggested that he would also walk to his mother's house several times a week where he would wait while she did his laundry and baked him cookies and this really upsets his hagiographers.

The fact that Thoreau was blind to his own privilege is difficult to deny, however. If he can live in so pleasant a manner, he reasons, then if anyone ends up unable to do so by virtue of being poor, it must have been their own fault for being part of the vast civilisation from which he believes he has distanced himself. He looks down his nose at such people with misanthropic, smug contempt.

He was puritanical to a fanatical degree. In the first chapter, we find him boldly asserting that all he would really need in life to get by is a roughly coffin-shaped box he could steal from the local rail yard and sleep in every night. After drilling breathing holes in it first, he assures us; although where the drill comes from is left as an exercise for the reader. He tells us that he never had the means to feed guests at the occasional gatherings which took place at Walden, because he had never bothered to prepare himself for entertaining company. He only had three chairs, so if more than a couple of people visited him they all had to be content with standing around outside. Thoreau even refused to equip his shack with anything so humbly self-indulgent as a doormat: "preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil." He regarded any day that was started with a cup of tea—or, worse, coffee— as "dashing the hopes of a morning" and quite frankly any man who thinks like that is clearly not to be trusted. Parties at Thoreau's place must have been an absolute riot.

While he denigrates modern society, technology, and regular employment he is quite happy to avail himself of their benefits. One moment we find him rejecting outright the utility of university education and fine literature; the next, he's extolling their virtues. He loves complaining about his alma mater but makes very sure we know where he was educated and he clearly took great delight in demonstrating what he thought of as erudition. But contributing to the production and maintenance of civilization, though? Ugh. That's beneath him. Let the plebs sort out the details, the financing, and the tedious requirements of keeping everything running. At one point in Walden, Thoreau even mentions how he had recently been jailed for refusing to pay taxes.

Even though he bitches about it, that Harvard education meant that he was unusually well-educated; Walden contains flashes of decent writing (there's an evocative chapter on sound, in particular). But too much of the book reads like the puerile efforts of an overindulged and grotesquely arrogant teenager suffering from a bit of schooling and a hefty dose of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. I've met people like this. The personality type is instantly recognisable and painfully familiar to me. How such a grandly self-obsessed, narcissistic asshole could become such a cornerstone of American culture speaks volumes about American culture. And nearly two centuries later, nothing has really changed in that regard, has it?

Published by: Prion, 2000

When I said William Zinsser had sent me scurrying back to my bookshelves to read White and Perelman again, this was the first book I alighted on. Sidney Joseph Perelman (1904–1979) was an American humorist and screenwriter (he won the Oscar in 1956 for Around the World in 80 Days and was also a writer on the Marx Brothers comedies Horse Feathers and Monkey Business) who was probably best known for the many articles he wrote for The New Yorker over the years.

This is a "greatest hits" collection of such pieces and even though some of the tales are now getting on for a hundred years old, they can still raise the occasional wry smile—but the multiple riffs on adverts he'd seen in other magazines, groan-inducing puns (particularly in his choice of names for the dramatis personae with which he populates his stories) and the general aura of misanthropy which pervades the book meant that it's taken me quite a while to get through it. It's a book of shaggy dog stories, told in as sour-faced a manner as it's possible to get and still be considered funny. At the time, at least—the laughs come much more slowly today. The choice of subject matter is, quite frankly, frequently lazy and more than once I was given the distinct impression that S. J. was just phoning it in.

Perelman hated the Marx Brothers and loathed Groucho in particular (they are not shown in a particularly flattering light in the one tale about Perelman's encounters with them that made its way into this collection). But they shouldn't be left feeling singled out; I get the impression that Perelman despised everybody in his world.

Published by: Harper Collins, 2006

More than one of my writer friends has recommended Zinsser's On Writing Well to me at some point, usually once they've seen the collection of similar works I've built up over the years: Williams's Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace; Hart's Rules; Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style; and my favourite, Eric Partridge's English Usage and Abusage.

Zinsser's book has been in print for more than thirty years and has sold more than a million copies. The advice he offers is intended for the writer of non-fiction but while Zinsser taught the subject at Yale it's not pitched here at an academic level. Instead, this 30th anniversary edition has a new chapter on how to write family memoirs and another advising would-be authors not to write with specific publishing markets in mind. This suggests that the book is intended more for the amateur who tells himself or herself "I should get around to writing that book I've been thinking about..." more than once or twice a year.

It's also more American than the other books I mentioned above. Not a little bit American; it's emphatically American—even if the world-view presented is that of the folksy intellectual who has actually done some travelling abroad. The many references to baseball get tiring when you're neither a native or an aficionado. And when Zinsser gives a list of politicians who were talented speechwriters, only one of them—Churchill—was not a President of the United States.

But Zinsser knows good writing when he sees it. Quotations from works by E. B. White and S. J. Perelman had me scurrying back to my bookshelves so that I could enjoy more of their writing first-hand. This is a book that makes you aware of the craft involved in writing and perhaps in the process of doing so, it will encourage you to improve your own work. It had that effect on me, at least. All the same, Zinsser's own writing style left me feeling surprisingly flat. Perhaps I'm being unfair in trying to compare like for like, but he has none of the fizz or flair that Natalie Haynes demonstrates in such abundance (see below).

Published by: Self-published, 2018

This compact little book (my second-hand copy is a typically wonky Amazon print-on-demand job with inner margins that stray considerably away from the vertical) covers much of the same ground as Paul White's basic Mixing Techniques which I read last year, but with an important difference in that Mr Clarke actually knows what he's writing about.

Despite the very informal writing style, this isn't a book for beginners and a lot of items of studio equipment are mentioned without explanation of how they do what they do (so, for example, we're advised that the 21st reason that our mix might suck, "Excessive Vocal Sibilance" is usually fixed by using a de-esser plugin to tame the esses. This is the correct thing to do, but perhaps it would have been helpful for the author to explain that the basic approach of a de-esser is to apply compression to sounds just at the specific frequencies created when a singer says or sings something beginning with the letter S so that, if they're louder than the threshold which the plug-in deems acceptable, they will be made quieter, thus reducing the nasty hissing noise which would otherwise be heard in the mix without otherwise distorting the recorded sound.)

Some of the reasons and their proposed solutions feel like they're going to be rather out of the mix engineer's control. Not every engineer is a songwriter, but even if they were it seems unlikely that most bands would take particularly kindly to being told the mix sucks because of reason 37, "There's no hook!" by the guy they're (hopefully) paying to ride the faders...

Published by: Picador, 2024

I really enjoyed Natalie's Pandora's Jar (2020) and I've been lucky enough to see her talks at several Cosmic Shambles events over the past few years. In fact, I picked up this signed copy of Divine Might at the Nine Lessons show at Kings Place last December, where she entertained us with the tale of Aphrodite's pursuit of the mortal Anchises (that particular story features in this book, and you ought to go into it spoiler-free, because Natalie's rendition of it is hilarious so I'm not going to go into details).

The book casts a critical and extremely well-informed eye over the legends of Aphrodite as well as other goddesses from Greek history (so we meet Hera and Athene as well as the Muses and the Furies) examining them from a modern perspective and placing them in a context that takes in witty nods to everything from Father Ted to the Internet Movie Database. Look, any author who includes a nod to Ray Harryhausen is going to be very much in my wheelhouse. I was in nerd heaven, and found myself chuckling from start to finish.

When I wasn't gasping in outrage, that is; if reading about the woeful behaviour of the male gods of the time back then doesn't instil in you a strong desire to smash the Patriarchy, then you and I probably aren't going to be friends. This book is a treasure.

Published by: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986

I first read Lyall Watson's classic work about parapsychology and fringe science Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural when I was a teenager (and I still have the Coronet paperback I bought back then). I've collected a fair few books of his over the years, and when I saw this one in a charity shop and didn't recognise the title, I grabbed it—even though the cover has a nauseatingly twee painting on it which features a unicorn, butterflies, and what appears to be a badly rendered Star Trek villain (I think it's supposed to be an example of Boskop Man but he has been portrayed as a Caucasian male, which seems improbable, to say the least). I should have checked the contents page; as soon as I started reading it, I realised that I already had a copy. The book was reissued several years later as Dreams of Dragons. And the copy I already have of that book has a much better cover, with a dragon on it. Ah well.

But the improbable artwork is a useful metaphor for what's in the book. I loved Supernature when I was a teenager because Watson could spin an engaging tale, but now that I'm older I recognise his strong tendency to embellish and distort his accounts in order to make them more lyrical and satisfying (and hey, it totally worked on teenage me). The most polite way of describing many of the things that Watson writes about in this book would be to say that they are ignored by mainstream academics (explicitly so in the case of the aquatic ape theory or Rupert Sheldrake's formative causation theory, both of which get their own chapters). Other chapters seem to be at odds with current knowledge (such as Watson's bucolic description of Papua's Asmat people, for example; Watson might extol cannibalism as being an environmentally sound strategy in isolated, resource-poor communities, but he omits any mention of major drawbacks to the practice such as kuru, the prion disease which afflicts members of the Fore tribe on Papua to this day).

Watson was at his best when he toned down the pseudoscience and focused more on plausibility. The chapter that was subsequently chosen for the book's new title, about his encounters with the giant monitor lizards known as Komodo dragons, is proper boy's-own-adventure stuff (if rather grisly). Then again, I'd pick the account of such things by Sir David Attenborough over Watson's on any day of the week.

Published by: Headline Publishing Group, 2014

This is a history of the Large Hadron Collider up to the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 (and its immediate aftermath) which is written by someone who was deeply involved in what was going on. Professor Jon Butterworth is based at University College London but—as he describes in this fascinating account—he commutes to Geneva every week to work on leading-edge research into particle physics. Not just atoms, but all the less-familiar things which exist inside them—and which fly out of them, if you smash things in to them fast enough. At 27 km in diameter, the LHC is the largest experiment ever built on Earth in order to do just this (although out there in the rest of the universe, there are things going on at much higher energies, and particles from such events slam into Earth's atmosphere every day. Jon explains that this is one reason why physicists weren't worried that their machine was going to cause the end of the world when it was first powered up back in 2008). In this book, he gives his account of taking part in the search for the "massive scalar boson" that Peter Higgs realised should exist if the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism (which was first proposed back in 1964) actually existed.

As you might have already gathered, this history is described in a very nuts-and-bolts fashion and there are plenty of clear explanations of the science involved. It's also entertainingly funny (full disclosure: I've met Jon at science events organized by Robin Ince, and can confirm that he is like that in real life, too). He's also a passionate campaigner against government science funding cuts, and presents plenty of economic benefits which result from such seemingly exotic research. There's even an explanation of the deeper significance of CERN's adoption of the comic sans typeface in communications with the media several times during the course of the project.

The book expertly conveys the thrill of the chase as hints that the elusive particle actually existed became stronger and stronger. Jon also managed to make me understand a little bit about why the Higgs's existence is such a big deal for physics. It's a great read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Published by: Icon Books, 2012

Lacking in etymological fun but crammed full of bad dad jokes and casual racism. It might be cool for the Daily Mail crowd, but I'm out. I'll be dropping off all three of the books by Mr Forsyth which I bought recently at the local charity shop, soonest.

Published by: Icon Books, 2011

This is an amiable romp through the origins of some of the more eclectic words which have become part of the English language. In deciding which words are worthy of note, the author focuses on whether a word has a good story behind it or not and this serves him well for the most part—although I found myself thinking, "Well, maybe, but..." more than once, and that's not really a reaction you want to get from readers of your non-fiction book, even if it did get into the Christmas bestseller lists. I was disappointed to discover that Mr Forsyth skipped an opportunity to include one of my favourite anecdotes from the history of computing when he discusses the modern usage of the word bug (but as Mr Forsyth points out, the word was being used in that context back in the 19th Century, long before computers were invented).

My inner pedant was rubbing his hands with glee to learn that one does not keep to the "straight and narrow" but to the "strait and narrow" but that's about the only thing that has stuck in my memory, despite only finishing the book half an hour ago. Despite its title, the book is actually pretty thin when it comes to discussing the actual etymology of the words being discussed, which I found intensely frustrating.

And the structure of the book, where the author's final comment on each tale leads him on to the next word he wishes to examine, often feels painfully contrived. As a result, much of the book reads like a collection of segues from a not particularly funny stand-up comedian. It's an okay effort, but that's all. It would have been better to skip the lame jokes and just let the ludicrous histories of the words themselves get all the laughs.

Published by: PH Learning Co., 2023

This (self published) book is subtitled "Think, learn, and problem solve like a Nobel Prize-winning polymath" which is a bit strong, I reckon. We get to read a few pithy quotes from the great man and there are one or two entertaining anecdotes about Feynman's cognitive approach but the book is best described as a self-help manual for people wanting to develop their critical thinking skills. And it only does so at a very basic level. It's unlikely to teach you how to think or innovate like Feynman could. It omits several of the principal explanations that Feynman himself gave about the way he approached science (for example he once famously asked a biology class why they still bothered memorising the names of all the things inside an animal when someone else long ago had already produced, as Feynman put it, a "map of a cat"—thus demonstrating that for Feynman it was more important to be able to find something out when you needed to than it was to fill your head with a lot of information which you may never need to use again for the rest of your life). The author also recounts the beginning of Feynman's tale about noticing the Cornell crest rotating on a spinning plate thrown by someone in the cafeteria there one lunchtime, but he doesn't explain what was going on or that Feynman misremembered the ratios of wobble to rotation and then omits the punchline entirely: the chain of thought which led to the work which earned Feynman his Nobel Prize (Feynman describes this in his autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman?):

"I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was "playing"—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems."

It's that ability to chain apparently unrelated concepts together like this which was one of Feynman's greatest gifts. While it's an ability that might be acquired through diligent practice, Feynman evidently had an innate aptitude for it. Similarly, being able to clearly visualise a problem and intuitively see what is going on is frequently cited by renowned scientists as the principal reason for their insights (such a list of innovators includes not just Feynman, but also Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Edison, Tesla, Kekule, Einstein, and Steven Hawking). The book doesn't explain how we might learn to do this beyond recommending that we "remember the value of play." Instead there's a discussion of data representation as taught by the great Edward Tufte which is a different kettle of fish altogether. And while chapter four of Hollis's book relates Feynman's own account of being able to solve problems because he had ended up with a "different set of tools" to those used by his peers (such as less-frequently-taught approaches to calculus) it's rather sketchy on how you or I might go about building up our own cognitive skill sets in this way. Instead, the book pivots to a description of Feynman's four-step learning technique, but the author can't even settle on what the four steps are.

Hollins also regularly veers off into the weeds. While he accurately observes that Feynman loved to communicate things in the simplest language he could manage, here we're lectured about what is clearly one of the author's pet peeves and in criticising the use of impenetrable jargon he takes several pages to cover the basics of The Sokal Affair. Aside from the quoted slabs of text being meaningless (after all, that was the point of the paper) the point is largely irrelevant. One might have taken the opportunity to examine why it is that scientific papers are so frequently written in deliberately obtuse language (and yes, I'm looking right at you, Thomas Kuhn) but this is not done.

The book's a nice idea, but quite honestly you'd get much more out of reading Feynman's own books on the matter, Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman? and The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

Published by: Arkana, 1989

This is the first of a loose trilogy of books which Koestler wrote about the development of human thought. It was followed by The Ghost in the Machine and The Act of Creation but somehow I ended up reading them in reverse order. The Sleepwalkers was first published in 1959, and rather like me (I came along the following year), it's beginning to show its age.

Koestler's main thesis (which gives the book its title) is that the originators of some of science's grandest leaps forward came up with their ideas, not as the result of blinding flashes of inspiration, but through a long and muddled process during which they often failed to recognise the most important aspects of their discoveries and operated for the most part in a kind of somnambulant stupor. Indeed, after the death of Aristotle, the idea of evidence-based thinking was replaced by philosophising based on dogma and it took more than two thousand years before anyone took any interest in figuring out how the cosmos might actually work again.

Koestler covers the evolution of cosmology from Aristotle and Plato by way of Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton and his research goes into forensic levels of detail. As a result, he explodes many of the myths which are still prevalent in popular culture sixty-five years later (Galileo never spent a single day in a prison cell as a result of his arguments with the Church, nor did he remark "Eppur si muove" at any point in response to his interrogators from the Inquisition). Kepler's achievements are extraordinary because the errors which he made miraculously cancelled each other out and led him to the right answers by a largely spurious path. Galileo didn't get round to making the leaps of thought that changed physics for ever until he was in his seventies. The book also shows how the Catholic Church cracked down on challenges to the scriptures even though their own scientists knew that the theories which they proclaimed in public to be heretical were in fact correct. One is left marvelling that any scientific progress at all ever happened back then.

It all goes to pieces in the epilogue, though. Koestler downplays the importance of relativity or quantum theory to a surprising degree. The observed expansion of the Universe (now known to be a result of the Big Bang) is alluded to in a single, dismissive sentence. The concepts of forces and fields are just as important in modern thought as Kepler's and Newton's laws, but they are sidelined here because Koestler sees them as labels for things which we don't understand, but instead just nod wisely when they're discussed as if giving a concept a name equates to understanding what it is. Koestler is most definitely not okay with anyone trying that. As an example of such vague or indeed circular definitions he gives us "magnets work because they're magnetic" and I can see his point, even though that's how most school physics textbooks summarise the subject. "And what about ESP?" he then asks us (parapsychology was a lifelong interest for him and his will included an endowment for a research chair at Edinburgh University to ensure that exploration of the subject continues to this day. Koestler died in 1983). I offer no judgment on that particular point, but instead observe that this book may be one of the first ever places where the popular culture myth that we only use a few per cent of the brain's capacity (which is, as I hope you already know, utter bollocks) appeared in print. But the foundations of both The Ghost in the Machine and The Act of Creation are visible in his closing arguments here.

Published by: Quercus Editions, 2020

This is a rather lovely collection of essays on different things that Bill recommends as sources of happiness. And you can't argue with his choices, although some of them (such as climbing an active volcano) may involve a bit more effort than just doing a spot of birdwatching or popping down the road for a stroll in your local park.

Again, this is a book which was written during lockdown in the initial stages of the Covid pandemic. As a result, there's a certain wistfulness in the descriptions of his more wide-ranging adventures in Colombia and Indonesia, for example. Going out for a walk for an hour or so was one of the few nice things that we were encouraged to do back then, and it's a habit that a lot of people have stuck with. "Will we ever return to normal?" Bill muses. Nearly five years later, Covid is still out there; trying to stay mentally and physically fit is just as much of a challenge.

Published by: Titan Books, 2023

Straight on to book #2 of Gareth's Continuance series. This one is set some fifty years after the events of the first, and features a whole new cast of characters. The ensemble he introduces here really let him stretch out as a writer, as he has created a wildly disparate bunch of protagonists from many different species with many different world views. There's a fun framing device which explains how the diegetic nature of the tale has been brought about; this seems to be a theme of the series, as much the same thing is done in Stars and Bones. In each case, it's done smoothly and plausibly without ever throwing the reader out of the action. Kudos, too, for the layered meanings of the novel's title. Nice!

And without spoiling things, I should say that I have always been a big fan of science fiction novels which involve a Big Dumb Object (BDO). In Descendant Machine we don't just get one BDO, but several of them, and not only are they all splendidly inventive pieces of technology, each of them turns out to be a satisfyingly important plot element.

I was a little let down by the ending. The unavoidable existential threat that our heroes are facing gets subtly retconned into an ever so slightly less dangerous thing that one of them can figure out how to fix, because of course they can. This sort of thing has been done far too often in recent episodes of Doctor Who, and it bugs the hell out of me. And here, the idea that the "solution" would not have been discovered by a galaxy full of beings who are SPOILER REDACTED felt wildly implausible, to put it mildly. But I enjoyed the book all the same, and I read the whole thing in a couple of sittings; that's always a sign that a tale is worth reading as far as I'm concerned. More please, Gareth!

Published by: Titan Books, 2022

This is the first in a new series of books that are collectively known as the Continuance; saying more would constitute a spoiler, I reckon, so I'm not going to discuss the central premise of the novel at all. But the book was written during the pandemic, and it's very much a product of its times. The spectre of contagion is an inescapable, powerful presence which grounds the otherworldly aspects of the fiction in an uncomfortably familiar, real-life context. The growing horror as the body count rises (and it rises a lot, in a style that reminds me strongly of The Expanse) is expertly conveyed.

There are a couple of plot holes that you could drive a starship through but the book's central themes of family bonds and parenthood are deftly worked in to the story and the resolution is unexpected and satisfying.