Month: November 2019

American geologist Marcia Bjornerud is on a mission to educate us, to the extent we need it, about our planet and the swathes of its four and a half billion years of history. “Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World” is a beguiling mix of artful lecturing, personal narrative, and purposeful reflection. The “timefulness” of the book’s title is a term she conjures up to highlight the admixture of ancient and recent geological and related aspects of Earth that are, in her view, the important features we need to consider when saving ourselves from within our new geological era, the Anthropocene. Bjornerud is an elegant, personal writer and this book carries out its mandate fully and to great effect. Read it and learn, friends.

“Rewind” is an intricately plotted mystery involving spooky holiday cottages, hidden cameras, a missing social media star, and a social media journo who aims to conquer the crime beat. Dodging back and forth in time, in and out of different characters’ viewpoints (including a malevolent player), the author choreographs a Hitchcockian mystery cum thriller. The locales shine, the dialogue crackles, and I enjoyed the ride, although it must be said a shadow of manipulation hangs around the edges of the reading experience. Clever and well done.

Irish writer Kevin Barry is all about drama and poetic immersion in settings and the inner lives of characters. His “Beatlebone” was one of my favorite novels from a few years back, although it’s fair to add that a number of readers who read it on my recommendation found it baffling. “Night Boat to Tangier” might well engender the same spectrum of reactions. Two gabby Irish drug crims gather at the seedy port of Algeciras, searching for Moss Hearn’s daughter, reported to be coming in from Tangier. He and Charlie Redmond, one with a limp, the other with one eye, brood, Irish raconteurs the pair of them, while the novel dives back and back into their violent past in Ireland, Spain and Morocco. The author has an extraordinary style, unfurling savage humor and storming lyricism with poetic rhythm. A tale of ambition, lust, madness, and love, this novel is one of 2019’s standouts. Read it and weep, as I did, for these unlikeable but oh so human heroes.

You might think a book titled “Semicolon: How a Misunderstood Punctuation Mark Can Improve Your Writing, Enrich Your Reading and Even Change Your Life” is too obscure, but I’m always fascinated by how many people I know have opinions on all manner of grammar. The semicolon arouses fandom or rage, it seems to me, and Cecilia Watson energetically and stylishly plunges into that maelstrom of opinions. Riding this secondary punctuation mark’s controversial history from its ancient beginnings, she offers a wonderful set of judgements on its usefulness and usage. I especially enjoyed the chapter where she riffs on the very different semicolon deployments of Raymond Chandler, Irvine Welsh, and Rebecca Solnit. In the end, this concise book is an appeal for scribes to use their imagination: “We will never find THE rules, unshiftable, unchangeable, and incorruptible.” Overall, this is a leftfield intellectual pleasure.

“Recursion” adds a thriller’s pace and many wormholes worth of complexity to all those time travel novels you’ve enjoyed since the Heinlein and Asimov era. A policeman investigates something dubbed the False Memory Syndrome while we watch a neuroscientist, funded by a tycoon, build a technology to store the depths of memories. By the time they meet, the plot spirals into mind-bending time trips that had me gasping with admiration. Crouch is a dab stylist and the hijinks are laced with recurring and building love stories that achieve genuine traction. A winner in both conception and execution.

Iconoclast Malcolm Gladwell is one of those writers I’ll always read or listen to (his podcasts are exceptional) because his oblique nerdy insights into the ordinary could come from no one else. “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know” addresses what happens when we talk to or examine strangers, defined as those we don’t know inside out. Gladwell’s curiosity has him exploring spies who fool everybody, innocents accused of crimes because of their demeanour, con artists even smart people trust, confrontations that spiral out of control, and so on and so on. Drawing on a recent more academic book by an expert on the subject of drawing others, he comes up with underlying reasons why our confidence in our ability to “read” others is misplaced. Reading Gladwell means going on a journey of wonderment, and for the first three quarters of “Talking to Strangers,” I was fully absorbed, but the final quarter petered out for one simple reason: his conclusions intrigue but don’t thunder. A quick brain-tease of a book that remains modest in intent, something we see rarely these days.

A most unusual and compelling thriller, “Launch Code” centers on one of those nuclear submarine “near miss” situations that fill us with dread – a 1983 order to release missiles at the Soviet Union, beginning the nuclear winter. The calamity is averted but a crew member is dead and 36 years later, ex-submarine Lieutenant Bill Guth and his family, gathered in England, are embroiled in a related murder. Ridpath is a wonderful plotter and fine stylist and the story rockets towards its multiple-twist ending. All the characters come alive and the rural countryside setting leaps off the pages. I remember Michael Ridpath fondly from his considerably older financial mysteries; he has lost none of his timeliness and flair.