Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

I actually originally encountered this because I wanted to do Harari’s course on the history of humankind on Coursera or one of the other MOOC sites, and I just didn’t have the time. I hoped the book would be a good substitute, picked it up, and was promptly daunted by the size of it. That’s unfair to the book, though: it’s actually immensely readable. It treats time as a progression from physics to chemistry to biology to history, through Agricultural and Cognitive Revolutions through to Industrial ones: the story of the universe is at first told in the terms of physics, and then eventually using human eye witness accounts and evidence. It’s a fairly anthropocentric view, narrowing it down to our perspective on the past, but Harari acknowledges that.

Harari manages to be fairly even handed in discussing capitalism, communism, ideology, religion, and all those difficult topics. While sometimes I thought I could tell what his opinion on each one was, he was generally fair about the appeal even of ideologies which have failed in practice. It’s a weird mix of pessimism and optimism, really, because Harari mentions the declining rates of violence, the increasing rates of health, but also the flat rate of happiness. The fact that, for all that we do, humans don’t seem to be any happier than they were eight to eight hundred years ago.

I enjoyed it, and thought it was a solid and interesting overview of human history, and the potentials for a human future. The readability and clarity of the prose is definitely in its favour.

Rating: 5/5

The Rights of the Reader, Daniel Pennac

Obviously, in many ways this book isn’t applicable to me because I’m not a parent, educator, or even involved much with children at all. I sometimes see them in the library when I’m on duty, but otherwise they have one world and I have mine, and never the twain meet (thankfully, since I’m dreadful with children). It also doesn’t apply to child-me: I read voraciously, exhaustively, incessantly, and my parents really did have to wonder not how to get me to read, but how to stop me. So it’s difficult for me to understand the kids he’s talking about who had to be cautiously reintroduced to books. I’ve always been passionate about my books!

Still, Pennac’s passion for books is obvious and endearing, and he could certainly turn a phrase; if the original French was half as elegant as the English translation, it must’ve been good. I think the enthusiasm and tips here might well help a parent or teacher reinvolve kids with reading. And quite apart from that, he makes some good points for readers of any age: suggesting rights that any reader should have to read what they want, where they want, as much as they want, and talking about the fact that reading is something you make time for, rather than have time for. “By making time to read, like making time for love, we expand our time for living.” Yes.

So not aimed at me, but nonetheless an interesting and lively read, helped by Quentin Blake’s illustrations. And the rules are pertinent no matter who you are…:

1. The right not to read
2. The right to skip
3. The right not to finish a book
4. The right to re-read
5. The right to read anything
6. The right to “Bovary-ism,” a textually transmitted disease (the right to mistake a book for real life)
7. The right to read anywhere
8. The right to dip in
9. The right to read out loud
10. The right to be silent

Perfect.

Rating: 5/5

The Hollow Crown, Dan Jones
Received to review via Netgalley

Raised in Yorkshire, I always feel like I should know more about the Wars of the Roses. I’m sure there were attempts to teach me, and I’ve even read Shakespeare’s history plays — and enjoyed them — and yet the information just doesn’t stick. Unfortunately for this book, it was much the same again. I can keep the basics in mind, even some anecdotes (especially if they were also referred to by Will), but the whole tangle of the family trees, the politics, the exact relation of this family to that… It just won’t stay clear in my head.

So I had the unfortunate experience with this book of reading it and taking time over it and nothing going in. And it’s not the author’s fault: the writing is clear, footnoted meticulously, follows a logical order, etc. It seems to be a perfectly fine book if you’re interested in the Wars of the Roses, and I even sort of enjoyed reading it. But alas, a casualty of my utter disinterest in most of the key players.

(An exception is Richard III. I don’t know why, but I’ve been able to assimilate more information about him that others. Which I suppose makes sense, since I grew up in Yorkshire, except that if you’d asked me the names of kings on either side before a few years ago, I’d have been blank.)

Rating: 2/5

Ring of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell

I wanted to read this after having a go at Miriam Darlington’s Otter Country, which in many ways revolved around this book and the landscape described by Gavin Maxwell. He got much closer to the animals than Darlington, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his account is more interesting and vital. Otters were, not quite pets, but definitely companions for him, in a way that Darlington had no opportunity to understand.

Maxwell takes such a delight in the landscape and the antics of the creatures within it, both the wild ones and those he tamed or half-tamed, that it’s impossible not to enjoy this, for me. He wasn’t ashamed of his love for the animals, and sometimes that just shines through so clearly.

It’s not some adventure story, not such a battle of wills as, for instance, H is for Hawk chronicles. Mostly, it’s worth reading for that delight in nature, described with love and attention to detail. If you’re not interested in autobiography and nature writing, it’s probably not for you.

Rating: 5/5

Ladies of the Grand Tour, Brian Dolan

This is an interesting and worthy subject for study: the enlightenment and freedom women found (or didn’t find) while on the ‘Grand Tour’, a round of Continental travel that naturally only the rich could pull off. This is a time where women were just beginning to consider that they might have rights, when the French Revolution was still rumbling on. It’s well researched and while sometimes dry, usually interesting enough to read, if a bit offputting when it focuses on ‘extra-marital affairs and bastard children’, as another reviewer put it. I didn’t find it quite as single-minded as they did, but yes, it does discuss the way women began to pull free of social restrictions on their behaviour.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of Glamour in Glass or A Natural History of Dragons and the female characters there who push against the boundaries of society and make discoveries, become equal partners with men, etc. Some of that spirit is here, too, in the real women Dolan studies.

Rating: 3/5

Homo Britannicus, Chris Stringer

I only had the chance to skim through this, because the library was tired of renewing it for me (not really, they’re excellent to me), but it’s an amazing resource. Limited, of course, in that it examines the development of humans in Britain, which doesn’t allow for taking into account other parts of the story. And indeed, it was written in 2008, so I’m not sure if some of the vital parts of the human story were available then — when were the Denisovan caves discovered and published about? It’s also pretty obviously for the layman (which would normally include me! but I’ve done so much reading on the subject, going over the basics again doesn’t work for me).

It’s a well-presented book, with plenty of photography, illustrations, etc. It links in the story of humans in Britain with the issue of climate change, which is on the one hand understandable — occupation of Britain fluctuated over and over again as Ice Ages came and went, and once hippos lived in the wild in Britain! — and a little disingenuous. Obviously, I’m not looking for a lecture on climate change when I want to read about humans.

(Not to mention: the choir? You’re preaching to it. I’m well aware of the cycles of climate change on Earth, and their potential effects on all species and countries. And to me, it doesn’t matter whether we’re driving climate change or not. We’re using an unsustainable fuel supply to do so, and in many other ways it measurably damages our world. Let’s fix that and then wrangle about whether or not it’s fixed the climate too.)

Rating: 3/5

Joan of Arc, Helen Castor

I originally requested this as an ARC from Netgalley, because I enjoyed Helen Castor’s She-Wolves, but I never got round to it in time and ended up buying the book recently. This is a bit too dry to be a story, but Castor certainly “pick[ed her] way through the evidence, choosing what to weave into a seamless story”. It doesn’t spend much time in the narrative on talking about conflicting testimony, apocryphal stories, etc — I’m left not quite sure how sure Castor is about some of the events she describes. The notes are pretty extensive though, with plenty of references for anyone with the patience to follow up on it.

As with She-Wolves, this is a pretty readable book, and Castor manages to bring across Joan’s indomitable spirit, her conviction, and, yeah, her sassiness. From the records we have, it seems that we have a pretty consistent picture of Joan as a pious girl who believed wholly in what she was doing, and that she was heaven-sent to fulfil her mission.

One thing I wondered, though — would we treat her any better today? People talk about how badly she was treated, particularly when in Anglo-French custody but also in the endless requests to prove herself and her virginity. But we’d treat her as mad today, not venerate her. Mind you don’t take Joan the hero and act ‘holier than thou’ about the medieval people who condemned her. You likely would too, though for different reasons, however pretty and sassy and self-confident she was.

Rating: 4/5

The Deadly Sisterhood, Leonie Frieda

I’ve been wanting to read this one for a while, given how epic Caterina Sforza is in the Assassin’s Creed games. I have read a biography of Caterina herself (Tigress of Forli, by Elizabeth Lev), so I didn’t read this so much for her as for the other women in its pages. I found it a little disorganised, really; it isn’t neatly divided into eight sections, and it’s sometimes hard to see exactly which woman is the key player. And Frieda is claiming to deal with women as key players in Renaissance Italy, and yet Clarice Orsini is exactly what the back blurb says these women are not, a “passive bystander”.

In fact, there’s a whole section that’s primarily about Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Pazzi Conspiracy. Which, shrug. Not what I’m here for, actually.

It’s a readable enough book, but there’s oddly judgemental bits about the women’s weight or appearance, or indeed intelligence if they’re not one of the precious women we’re supposed to view as a sisterhood, and it’s not very well proofread at all. Without looking for it, I found four typos in casual reading. Gah.

Rating: 3/5