(Book names are hyperlinks that take you to GoodReads)
Earl Stanley Gardener - The Case Of The Mythical Monkeys
Perry Mason! I used to love reading his cases as a child. The original bad-ass lawyer, well before Johnny-come-lately Mr. Grisham. Rereading them, and man does it ever hold up. The sleaze is just as obvious, the twists are more in the writing than in the plot, and it's corny as hell, but I love it. In this one, a seductive author sends her even-more-seductive full-time secretary to a ski resort, and she finds murder in a shack near there when she takes a shortcut. A classic.
Earl Stanley Gardener - The Case Of The Howling Dog
I got into Perry Mason after I'd exhausted my school's library off of Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton. I pushed my luck to get them, it would seem, because on one ocassion the librarian was scandalised when I asked her where I might find more of Perry Mason's novels. "But Perry Mason is too grown up for you!". This book is clearly of its time, full of slightly uncomfortable race references, and with weird turns of phrases ("I'm commencing to think so"). The plot is certainly nothing worthy of Hercule Poirot, but I read it quickly, and it was a nice page-turner.
John Edward Huth - The Lost Art Of Finding Our Way
The book I'd been waiting for all my life. How does a nincompoop with no sense of direction begin to learn about navigation? He finds a CERN physicist obsessed with navigation and reads his book. This book is lovely. It's a 'grab bag of tricks', said one review, interspersed with history lessons, the author's own experiences, and some actual tips on how to implement all of it. So it's both an instruction manual and a history lesson. Simply lovely.
David Eagleman - Livewired
This is a terrible book. This is a great book. But this is mostly a terrible book. David Eagleman is a better writer than most scientists, but his ego also seems much more inflated than most scientists. The book is so grating in its techno-optimism and hopes of a bionic future that it is difficult to appreciate the illumination buried within. It is replete with scary thoughts about how we should have a Bluetooth chip embedded in our skulls so that we may control a robot in Japan (?!).
It's an uncomfortable realisation that there are people who are this confidently on the opposite spectrum to me in terms of our role as earthlings. My preferred mantra is "Leave No Trace". My favourite quote is "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished". But here exists a highly influential scientist suggesting we shall all soon be cutting off our wrists to replace them with bionic ones that have 360° rotation. As if the law of Unintended Consequences didn't exist. To quote Maciej Ceglowski, we as a species are yet to solve Male Pattern Baldness. Where does this hubris come from? A second sin is that the book is repetitive and padded, with page after page of terrible analogies in service of that repetition and padding. Eagleman, when he's strictly describing a scientific concept (the plug-and-play model of the brain, neuroplasticity etc.) is a glittering writer with infectious ethusiasm. But it's so annoying as a whole that I cannot recommend it.
Agatha Christie - The Best of Hercule Poirot
Reading stopped being a habit, so I thought the best thing to do would be to read something that I would look forward to. Make It Attractive as James Clear puts it. Enter M. Poirot.
Hercule Poirot is the best detective in fiction, full stop. Sherlock Holmes and Perry Mason have nothing on him. All his little Eh bien's, the imperious moustache, the square chairs and the extreme neatness. Agatha Christie filled Poirot with so much personality and life. His obsession with the little grey cells, with sitting and contemplating, his enormous Working Memory. These things were aspirational for me as a child.
Murder on the Orient Express
Now a movie. And now a second movie. This book is justifiably famous.
Cards on the Table
The book that made me believe as a child that everyone in Europe played Bridge. Rereading it today, it's clear that this is the book that Glass Onion is mocking. Shaitana (Hindi for 'Devil', and a little on the nose) is an experience-collector who invites four murderers and four sleuths to a Bridge game. He gets murdered. Whodunnit? No matter what you think, the twist will hold a surprise
Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Simon Lee, old and rich beyond measure, invites his good-for-nothing family over for a reconciliation Christmas. But, guess what, gets murdered before he can change his will. Knives Out screenwriters took note I think.
Five Little Pigs
Another one where the twist, the big reveal, is just so satisfying. A famous and temperamental artist gets murderised. The only people present in the big country house were people dear to him. Whodunnit?
The Labours of Hercules
12 stories for the price of 1 (in a book that gives you five books for the price of 1). The short stories are sometimes amusing, sometimes make your eyes roll, but they always progress at a quick clip.
All in all, a very very satisfying read.
Basil Mahon - The Man Who Changed Everything
The life of James Clerk Maxwell. I've been petrified of Maxwell all my life. I found his equations on electromagnetism difficult to grasp. Their succinctness seemed to mock my stupidity. "Oh, you don't understand this? You simpleton! Why, it's simplicity itself! See, they even fit on an index card". In my head, Maxwell was a severe, strict sort of scientist who scolded his students. This book, though, reveals a person with a radiant soul.
Maxwell transformed everything he touched, and he touched a lot. I cannot overstate just how much the man accomplished in a life that was less than half a century long. Here is an incomplete list:
Colour theory
Optics
Electromagnetism
Statistical Mechanics
Thermodynamics
Vector algebra
Maxwell's Demon that changed Information Theory
Control Theory (he designed the first governor)
And to top it off, his was the only submission for a contest on the analysis of what Saturn's rings were composed off. He showed (by elimination no less), that they could only be made of particles. It would not be a single, continuous solid, nor liquid. He designed a whole apparatus for it. It would be another 35 years before spectral analysis would confirm his theory.
The man was brilliant. And yet, he was jovial. He would take the mick out of his friends and colleagues, by writing silly poems about them. He pursued these fields purely out of intellectual curiosity, and he pursued them all with vigour. The world should be grateful that men like him ever existed. This book has been transformative to me.
Tom Shachtman - Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold
Oh what a great book. I seem to be in a phase of life where I'm finding scientific history books appealing. This idea that all these things we take for granted today were someone's inventions or discoveries. And I don't just mean things like the telephone or the rocket. I mean things like Vectors and Tensors too. In the case of this book, we take an abridged tour through the history of going cold. We hear of Drebbel (a man known more for his submarines), doing theatrical air conditioning in Westminster Abbey in the 17th century. We hear of Boyle and his law. We encounter Carnot, Clausius, Kelvin and Joule. But also Dewar and Kamerlingh Onnes, and Rayleigh. The chapter describing Onnes' liquefication of Helium is a delight. We investigate how the very presence of ice making machines, and later refrigerators, changed how we ate, how big our cities could get, and how far they could be from farms.
I feel a strange sense of frisson in thinking of these scientists/engineers/technicians/natural philosophers hunting around in the dark, trying to uncover the Map of Frigor. It's really no different to the Fog of War in video games. The Pressure-Enthalpy diagram is essential for thermofluid engineers. I use it every single day (if not more often than that). And yet, it is entirely mundane, a tool no more remarkable than a ruler. My software will generate it in a millisecond. But the idea that the path to it was laced with hundreds of years of explosions, singed eyebrows, lost eyes, escaped gases, confused chin stroking, frustrations, striving and sheer dedication moves me deeply. Hell, they didn't even know how to define temperature for the longest time.
The book is a treat to read for a thermodynamic engineer. My only lament is the absence of equations and figures. I would have loved to have gone deeper into so many of the chapters. And yet, what it did do is whet my appetite to go out seeking those equations and figures for myself. Very well done Mr. Shachtman.
Gary Taubes - Nobel Dreams
I've been working at CERN for more than 8 years now (best part of 9 if you count the internship), but I knew not a lick about its history until I read this book. CERN's library is full of history books about CERN, but their abundance was the reason I never really bothered with them. I imagined rows of turgid, poorly-written, jargon-heavy history books that were overly self-congratulatory and much more concerned with stuffing everything inside rather than crafting a story.
Well, this book is none of those things. It's a page-turner. The main subject of the story, Rubbia, apparently had his office only two doors down from the office I used to have before and this gives me a cheap thrill. It catalogues his ruthless hunt for glory, the need to have every major discovery go through him, the need to salvage his reputation for a trifecta of own-goals he scored early in his career (the cross-section of pp, the famous "Alternating Neutral Currents", and the high-y). Rubbia and the UA1 collaboration are brought to life in a manner worthy of the best fiction novels. And to think that the book stops short of the invention of the world wide web, and decades before the discovery of the Higgs!
The whole idea of the golden days of a research lab, of their being this mystique in the hallways, this poignant sense of history to a place, I felt all of it as I got deeper and deeper into the book. Badging my ID card at the entrance started to feel more sacred. The Gargamelle detector that discovered the Neutral Currents, I walk past it daily, but never gave it even the most cursory of cursory looks. Now, I feel reverence gazing into its hollow cavity. Hundreds of people have sacrificed their weekends, suffered in their relationships, given up years of work and years off of their life expectancy to get us where we are today. I don't find it worth the effort to try to summarise the plot because it would carry none of the punch. But you should read it if you work at CERN (and even if you don't).
Robert Caro - Working
A man with the courage of his convictions. A living example of someone willing to be patient, to practice a slow life. A man who spent his life in the pursuit of just two stories. But, oh, what stories!
ChatGPT told me about his book when I asked it to tell me how to learn about writing biographies. I'd never heard of him, nor of Robert Moses. And I didn't even know it was LBJ who escalated Vietnam. But Caro knows. He took seven years to write a biography of Robert Moses, a man who shaped much of New York, in ways both good and bad. And he's spent about forty years working on his biography of Lyndon Johnson. It's a five volume book. He quotes Churchill amusingly "I'm working on the fourth of a projected three volumes [on Lord Marlborough]" in making the point that he can't help himself but research. Turn Every Stone as his Editor counsels him to do. And that's the bit I really love about this book. Caro never chose to live like this. To spend years in a library (hand in glove with his wife Ina) poring over books, interviews, magazine articles, communiques. He just had to get to the story. I've always loved people like this, people who know the value of researching. Michener is another one like this. This book has many, many lessons to give to a wannabe writer of non-fiction. It is an inspiration. I'm going to go out and buy all of his books now.
