Gloom, Gloomy, Gloomier, Gloomiest

I've never really though of Alain de Botton as a pessimist - after all as some sort of Swiss Trustafarian he does not have to work and seemingly doesn't giving him the freedom to be like a medieval polymath - simply thinking about thinking - oh - that's philosophy isn't it? Anyway after reading this characteristically-deep piece by him I am wondering whether it could be labelled "pessimism - the new optimism. As a supposed card-carrying depressive I now find that my view of the future lumps me in with the secular optimists who foresee a paradise on earth brought about by growth, science and benevolent dictatorships. And yet all my worrying about the complexity of things in the west being just too much for the human hive mind to contemplate seems to be the other side of the cusp of catastrophe in this Cognitive Dissonance. Anyway I don't have the intellectual equipment to process many things by AdB so you will have to make your mind up for yourself.

However, another thinker also brought to mind by a BBC article is the supremely-readable and also very clever Atul Gawande, an American Doctor and the author of the book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, which I picked up randomly from the library. Hence I was stopped from my normal breeze through the BBC news site by this article about Gawande's last book - The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right which was of course dutifully reserved and retrieved from the library to be pushed onto the top of the reading stack (above Conference at Cold-Comfort Farm). I leave you to puzzle out examples of Simple, Complicated and Complex systems. Clue; some of this might well be Rocket Science.

Gamine Ultra

Adventures in Numberland has been pushed to the stack as this has arrived hot off the library man's van and despite the whinging over the supposed inaccuracy about the derivation of the phrase "Sleep Tight", it is a moreish and informative book stuffed with much more than the already-generous content of the BBC 4 programme which it accompanies. It appears that the BBC is far more prudish than Lucy Worsley in that she not only seems to delight in the juicier delights of home life but devotes whole chapters to them, though of course Pepys and friends have already alerted us to the historical predilections for rumpy-pumpy. The book manages to cover all classes though for obvious reasons, royalty and celebrity elbow their way in by virtue of being more recorded. From the show, it is obvious that the author enjoys joining in reconstructions but manages to avoid seeming like just another extension of the heritage industry.


And what else goes on? Well I still have a hole in my head .. which is nice, though it's doing it's best to become an ex-hole and I don't need to go back to see Mr Consultant for a couple of months. However along with the hole I have a dinge as well though I was warned.

No Flies on the Roman

This pair need their own series. I'd watch it. Then again, nearly all the characters in this episode need their own series. There were maybe a few too many threads in A Good Man Goes to War but that is no matter - it kept us interested and laughing. All back to mine in a couple of months for Let's Kill Hitler. Yes - lets - despite what happened in the book by that nice Mr Fry. Oh well I know technically they didn't kill him did they.

Anyway as you may have guessed from previous posts I have had a lot of time on my hands and of course none of this has been filled with me actually creating anything but I have managed to read quite a lot. I'm currently just about to finish Paradoxical Undressing by Kristin Hersh - the eloquent diary of a year in her life at the age of around nineteen. Next up is Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos.

Don't Tell Him Schmeike!

Again courtesy of Sefton Library Services, I have saved some money. I have started on The Closed Circle which is the follow-up to The Rotters' Club. It begins with a long and passionate missive from Claire to her missing sister Miriam, which does a great job of filling in the years between the end of TRC and the beginning of TCC, though timelines are slightly flaky in any properly constructed modern novel. I am slightly concerned that Paul, one of the minor characters from the first book seems from reviews to have turned into something like Harry Enfield's Tory Boy - surely he can't be that cartoonish. Pandora from The Adrian Mole Diaries was always very believable as an MP for me but maybe I was blinded by the early adoration which Adrian professed for her.

Overload!

It's all gone a bit cultural here. For the first time ever (probably) I have finished all three of a 342 from Waterstones, Having read The Lovely Bones and Life Class in quick succession I finally got around to The Rotters' Club which I whistled through in a week. I watched the BBC adaptation of this a few years ago so I was slightly worried that this reading would be redundant but I was wrong - the show managed to keep enough detail to be a good try but the book contains levels of thought and description that show why books will always better visual drama no matter what doodads and gee-whizzery they put out. The novel has varied elements of narrative - diaries - uncategorisable creative writing, articles from the school magazine all of which reminds me of the various style changes in David Lodge books, but without the self-conscious cleverness. I did at times think this made the whole thing a bit scrappy but at the end you realise that instead of lessening the believability, it instead suggests reality far better than any mess of colloquialism or street-lingo. It is noticeable in a book about Birmingham which mentions that fact a lot - indeed dwells on it - that there is no descent into "Depressed Brummy". It manages to cover the ludicrous acts that teenage boys are forced into through love and lust, the more grown-up behaviour that adults display because of same and deadly-serious games that people play when power is at stake. And despite these wild variations in mood it never seems inappropriate because it reflects what we all go through, the sudden lurch from bereavement to love, from betrayal to loyalty and all the other emotions that humans are capable of displaying.

And on top of this we have the unmissable, breathtaking switchback ride of Sherlock, which brings together many pillars of British dramatic ability and creates a delicate, finely-balanced 90 minutes of brilliance. It manages to maintain not only the structure of the original ACD stories but many of the details as well. Its high point yesterday - a dramatic and strangely-soundtracked fight in a planetarium, underpinned one of the more famous factoids about Sherlock Holmes; that he does not know or care that the Earth Travels around the sun. Not remembering this from the original story, I cannot say whether this confession by Holmes is meant in reality or just as an illustration of how he manages to keep focused. The implication yesterday was that it was the latter. We are all now of course in limbo far more delicate that that between penultimate and final episodes of Doctor Who in that we do not know a) how the cliff-hanger ends or indeed b) that the series will be recommissioned. As some of the reviewers have suggested, it might be a brave step to not produce any more episodes and leave us all with this delicious pleasure at something so right and beautiful. However, I am not sure that commercial pressures will allow that. We can only hope that Moffat and Gatiss have a long game in their heads and that the running start can be maintained.

Trust the Plastic

So - reading logs

I read a very short book called Doctor in the Navy which did exactly what it says on the dust jacket being a James-Herriot-style account of a .. err ... Doctor in the Navy in what I think is the late fifties. I'm not sure why I took it out of the library - it just seemed to fall off the shelf. It was OK as a palate-cleanser after the Kate Bush book. I'm also not sure whether it's true - I mean was the Wrens' accommodation in Portsmouth really called HMS Impregnable

Next up was A Gate at the Stairs - by Lorrie Moore who is better known for her short stories - this fact is the biggest complaint in the Amazon reviews; there is too much descriptive stuff in the novel for a lot of her fans and indeed the actual story is not that substantial being padded out with long and often unconnected musings by the narrator. This must not put you off because it turns a sentimental pulp story into a deep reflection on one's own existence. Never do these diversions seem anything other than entirely pertinent to the atmosphere and ambiance which is the real reason for the book - the real meat. This makes the events so much more affecting. The narrator is supposed to be only twenty but has the wisdom of a woman twice her age which upset another subset of the reviewers. Again do not be put off by this. I can think of plenty of twenty-year olds I have known with the sophistication of people twice their age. Maybe at that age, we just lack the eloquence to voice the feelings we have. A novel is always a triumph of remembered detail over the fuzziness of any reality on which it based and therefore making a narrator analyse the situations in which they are placed is no more than detailing a conversation to make a point. The only true capturing of reality comes from recording devices with a far higher veracity than that of the human memory. As one reviewer said this book can stand a whole raft of spoilers for it is not the story that matters - it is the writing and with writing this good, the details of the plot matter only when you get to them.

And for Fathers' Day we have The Wavewatcher's Companion from the Idler Gavin Pretor-Pinney - he of the Cloud Appreciation Society. I'm still only on the second chapter of this but the initial dipping I did shows it to be a deep and funny investigation into all-things wavy.