The Network is Down

Long break there. Not as good as I had hoped it would be for many various reasons but being away from here is enough and I have had itchy typing fingers for days now. I could not sleep the night before last because of all the ideas I wanted to write down though these ideas were not for Blogging.

Reading log of Christmas presents :-

1. Dead Famous - Albert Einstein and His Inflatable Universe by Dr Mike Goldsmith.

I have a copy of Relativity for the Layman which I have read a couple of times and which I though gave a reasonable explantion of relativity. However, the dead famous book on Einstein manages to do the job better and still have time to detail Einstein's life as well. I knew what the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations actually resulted in but it was breathtaking to see them actually derived in what is essentially a children's book. The author does warn you before the difficult bits but nothing was that difficult. Maybe it was because the derivation of the equation for the contraction of length was actually so obvious that it was easy to understand. I was going to put a link to a page of derivations but they are so obscure compared with the elegant and simple way it is done in the book that I will not bother.

2. The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking

I have not started this yet but got it because it is half-price in the shops and even less at Amazon - not, I hope a sign of its lack of sales.

3. What the Tudors and Stuarts did for us by Adam Hart-Davis

Raced through this one. Unputdownable despite having seen the TV series only a few weeks ago. The endpapers are pictures of Adam Hart-Davis surrounded by scientific and tecnological accutriments of the time first in the style of a Tudor woodcut and then a Stuart engraving. The woodcut is expecially attractive and I have a copy on the partition here. An extract from this woodcut is in the masthead of this page.

4. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor

Half-way through this one in two days. I was a bit taken aback at first because of the frequent interruption of the standard Lake Wobegon style of story telling with the racy (deliberate understatement) if somewhat stylised extracts from High School Orgies but then I realised that it was simply the overlaying of real-life with the standard mind of a teenage boy, a very clever device. As goof as any other Lake Wobegon book. I left my original Lake Wobegon Days with one of the drivers in Bali as he asked me if I had any books I could let hime have. I am not sure what he would have made of it. I also left him The Third Policeman which must have caused an amount of beffudlement proportional to my own at least. Nice word beffudlement.

5. Trieste: And the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris

Not started this one yet but I have to as Jan Morris is a cousin of mine. This is her last book (she insists) and from reading the cover it seems to be a bit like her great fictional travel book - Last Letters from Hav but then again maybe that was the idea of 'Hav' - all her books have a thread of similarity because they are filtered through the same mind. It has just struck me that writing a fictional travel book is like the feeling you would get if you lost a leg, lose your ability to visit real places and your mind makes them up, a great idea. I am talking rubbish anyway - novelists make up places all the time.

6. A History of Britain Part I by Simon Schama.

7. A History of Scotland

That is all the books. You don't want me to list the socks, gloves, shirts, ties etc do you?