The Language Wars, Henry Hitchings

In theory, this is a subject I’m really fascinated by. The whole idea of ‘proper English’, all the classism and imperialism and prejudice caught up in it, and the way people’s attitudes to language have developed. However, turns out that either the minutiae of who wrote which grammar/dictionary/book about etiquette and when isn’t that interesting, or Henry Hitchings has a really boring prose style. Or, well, both of those things. I felt like there were a lot of facts, but not much analysis to go with it; some chapters felt like they were just lists of who wrote what about grammar and when.

I was hoping for other stuff about proper English, more about the imperialism — there’s lots of scope for that without even leaving the United Kingdom, with the suppression of the Welsh and Irish languages, and there’s hints about the struggle between US and UK English. Overall, though… if that was addressed, the deadened prose style made me miss it.

It’s still an interesting topic, but this particular book had a soporific effect on me.

Rating: 2/5

The Galápagos, Henry Nicholls

This isn’t a very substantial book, really: each chapter is fairly brief, and focused on a fairly broad swathe of the creatures living on the famous islands, often focusing on one or two representative examples when it’s a large family of critters. This works quite well for the layperson, avoiding going too in depth on any one subject that might become boring, while still offering an introduction to the wealth of variety and beauty in the Galápagos islands. A lot of it, of course, is related to Darwin and his theories, which are what have made the Galápagos so iconic for anyone with that kind of interest.

I did like the chapters which focus on the way humans have affected the islands. He seems fairly ambivalent about it, in a way: he hesitates to say that tourism is damaging the islands (probably because he’d be a hypocrite if he did!) but at the same time, he makes the impact quite clear.

Sometimes I do wonder about whether we can or should preserve species that are going extinct. In one sense, it’s often our own fault. We’re as much of a natural disaster as a massive meteorite strike. But maybe there should be a test applied first: if humans back off (after some captive breeding and releasing if necessary), can the population once again support itself? Or has the world just changed too fast for them? We can’t foresee all the ramifications, how and whether a species even can adapt. We could risk making a species that we value for its place in the wild into a species dependent on us, like the animals we’ve bred for food and convenience. If we do that, have we really saved the species after all? I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder; certainly I don’t think it’s unequivocally the right thing to do, and so some of the conservation aspects of this I disagreed with. Not the sentiment, but the practicality.

Rating: 4/5

If Walls Could Talk, Lucy Worsley

If Walls Could Talk isn’t exactly an academic, peer reviewed, footnoted piece of work, but it is kinda fun as a light read. Some of her etymological claims seem a bit spurious, some I’m sure I’ve heard debunked elsewhere, but it’s entertaining nonetheless. I think it could’ve been more interesting if she’d gone more into the things she experienced for herself like sleeping on a rope bed, blacking a range, etc, etc. That’s a perspective most of us don’t know anything about, and which she couldn’t have got wrong since it’s down to experience.

At least unlike some other popular non-fiction writers, she doesn’t get too giggly or avoidant about some of the topics that inevitably come up: sex, sanitation, death, childbirth, etc, etc.

Oh, and someone else quite rightly pointed out that she’s really talking about English houses. Not a single mention of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. I believe there were some significant differences…

Rating: 2/5

The Goldilocks Enigma, Paul Davies

I’m not sure that this book is entirely successful in answering, or even trying to address, the question posed on the cover — why is the universe just right for life? It talks a lot about how the universe may have formed, and what the laws of the universe are, and it seems like it does a lot of describing rather than explaining. Now, of course, that’s because we don’t really have an answer, but it does seem a little misleading.

Davies looks at a lot of different theories here, some of them more scientific than others — he includes the philosophical side of things too, including the religious point of view. He’s fairly even handed about this, so it’s hard to tell exactly where he’d put his money most of the time (except that he’s generally sceptical of the religion explanation, because it’s a non-explanation: it just shunts the question up a level). Most of the explanations are clear, though string theory remains utterly baffling to me (or at least, the rationale behind it does).

Oddly enough, I’m left feeling that The Goldilocks Enigma is much more positive about the idea that other intelligent life is out there than The Eerie Silence. I haven’t looked at publication order or anything, but it was a little strange, reading them one after the other.

Regardless, this was written before the Large Hadron Collider swung into action, so no doubt it’s out of date in some ways. Still a good background in the various theories, particularly the more philosophical ones like the anthropic principles that aren’t likely to change. (To his credit, I now understand the anthropic principle a lot better than I did after GCSE/A Level Religious Studies. Sorry, Mr B.)

Rating: 3/5

The Eerie Silence, Paul Davies

Paul Davies does a really good job here of illustrating the issues of SETI’s lack of success, and Fermi’s Paradox. He goes into the science and philosophy of it in depth, explaining all the terms and generally making it crystal clear. What amazes me is that he’s still somewhat optimistic about finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, given all the things he says in this book — I’m now almost completely sure that even if intelligent life has arisen elsewhere (and that’s still a big if) that we’ll have trouble finding it because of the issue of the sheer amount of time and space involved.

Not that I don’t think the search is worth doing. Even if we’ll never manage to communicate with intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, we might find signs of it, and understand more about how life begins. There’s so much we can learn along the way, and maybe the idea that we may not be unique will keep us a little bit more humble.

Or not.

Rating: 4/5

What Matters in Jane Austen?, John Mullan

I’m not a big fan of Jane — through I’ve come round somewhat on the subject since I couldn’t resist the urge to fling Pride and Prejudice out of a window — so you might think I was the wrong audience for this book anyway. But I am a big fan of close reading, and I find value in digging into what’s important in an author’s works in a way that I think the author of this would agree with, and I enjoy history, literary history, and all kinds of random facts. So I was hoping that though I’m no obsessive Austen fan, I’d still find this book of interest.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be quite sure where it’s aimed at. As a non-fan, I don’t know the books well enough for all the little details he references without fully contextualising to be exactly revelatory to me; as an MA in literature, I thought it was still a pretty simplistic level of analysis — is anyone really surprised that yes, Austen was saying that Lydia Bennet had sex outside of marriage? — and as a general reader, I didn’t find the stuff that interesting on its own merits either. It startles me more that apparently there was a fuss kicked up about ~Was Jane Austen Gay?~ because of her intimacy with her sister than that sisterly conversation or the lack thereof is centrally important in her work.

Overall, whatever the target audience was meant to be, I’m not it.

Rating: 1/5

Drunk Tank Pink, Adam Alter

Drunk Tank Pink is one of those pop psychology books that’s fairly slight, doesn’t provide citations in-text, and presents a lot of experimental and theoretical thought as if it’s a fact. Taking it for what it is, it’s an enjoyable little survey of interesting facts, written well enough to keep the interest, and not getting into technical details which might bog down and confuse the interested but uninformed reader.

For me, since I’ve read a fair amount of pop psychology already, some of it rather higher standard, this had some anecdotes I hadn’t heard, but mostly referenced research I already knew about, or had read about in a lot greater depth. (For example, for discussions on colour, skip this and go for Through the Language Glass, by Guy Deutscher, which has a much more thorough approach to the issues of language, labels and how we perceive colour.)

All in all, it was okay, but probably (for me) not worth the admission fee.

Rating: 2/5

The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane

The Old Ways was, for me, a bit like reading Richard Fortey’s work. Non-fiction that I’m not necessarily very interested in, but which is beautifully written, lyrical, literate. It wasn’t boring at all — meditative, perhaps. Sometimes Macfarlane’s a little too airy and mystical for me, too caught up in his imagination, but sometimes he comes round to something like Fortey, like the book I read recently on meditation, like Francis Pryor’s book about Seahenge and the ritual landscape.

I’m not particularly a walker myself, not now. As a kid I walked quite a lot with my grandfather, who would never have been nearly as poetic about walking as Macfarlane. It’s walking in the mountains in Wales that speaks to me, the hot still space at a ford where you could turn down toward home or go on toward a blackberry field, flies swarming on the evidence that a horse had come through earlier that day. Not a trek across chalk or snow or fen land: not this quasi-mystical experience of the landscape-as-self, just a walk on a warm day with blackberries in the middle and a scolding for getting so dusty/muddy at the end. If we went further afield, a hand-drawn map with “Grandma fell here” or some such comment to immortalise the trip.

Still, I can appreciate the sentiment behind this, and the lyrical writing. It just gets a bit too caught up in itself for me.

Rating: 3/5