Category: Books

Summer Detective Novels

You know summer is in full swing when the rapidly diminishing pile of books to read gives you a case of abibliophobia (fear of having nothing to read). Most recently I’ve finished Morality for Beautiful Girls and The Kalahari Typing School for Men, books 3 and 4 in Alexander McCall Smith’s series of detective novels.

If you haven’t discovered these books yet, summer is the perfect time. The main character - Precious Ramotswe - is sort of a fat and jolly version of Miss Marple who lives in Gaborone, Botswana. In the first book - The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency - she goes against any conventional notion of what an unmarried woman should do, spending the money she got from selling her late father’s cattle to set up a Ladies’ Detective Agency.

Although the books are technically mysteries, plot is not the main thing. Interlocking events provide mild tension and suspense. What keeps you reading is the wonderful writing: pure, economical, funny, utterly lacking in condescension. The evocation of Botswana is often lyrical (its quiet roads, its ubiquitous cattle). Sometimes the stories seem fable-like, as if McCall Smith is telling them around a campfire in the deep African night.

It is one of the many ironies of these wonderful books that Mma Ramotswe and her cohorts, despite their professed yearning for traditional values, are actually the smartest, most progressive people around. Because they are authentic and honest and guided by common sense rather than greed or pride, they make phony modernists look like idiots.

Summer Reading

I didn’t exactly sleep my way through high school and college science classes, but it’s safe to say I don’t remember a lot of the specific details of what I was taught. From primordial nothingness to this very moment, Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything aims is to help people like me, who tired of stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space.

What Bryson’s explanations and descriptions lack in sophisitication, they more than make up in wit and style. I’ve described it on occasion as Carl Sagan meets Robin Williams.

There are definitely some mistakes, and any scientist reading this would be embarressed on occasion for Bryson. On the other hand I have to absolutely recommend the book if you’d like to brush up on your history of the natural world for Trivial Pursuit and have a good chuckle in the process.

Bryson’s next job should be training high school science teachers.

Photoshop Filters

I’m finally leaving the digital image dark age and learning a bit about Photoshop. I bought a tutorial and have started slowly with Elements instead of the full blown program.

The above image is was a picture of tea at Swinton Place in England with a “cutout” filter applied.

Flying Scotsman

I finished Graeme Obree's autobiography - Flying Scotsman - this morning over breakfast. It's a fairly interesting account of a Scottish cyclist who is primarily known for breaking Francisco Moser's world hour record and holding several world championship titles on the track. He invented two new riding styles that were outlawed by the UCI shortly after proving enormously fast. And he did it all, largely without big-name sponsorship. While I'm always interested in what drives top athletes, I thought this account was particularly interesting because Obree not only talks about his cycling but also his battle with manic depression and alcoholism. He also talks about how he measured himself by what he was about to achieve - the next race, the next business venture, the next whatever. He never raced simply for the passion of the sport alone.

Final verdict: Honest, heartbreaking, and at times pretty funny - I'd recommend Flying Scotsman for anyone tired of reading about Lance Armstrong.

P.S. Nick picked this book up on our vacation in England. Unfortunately, I can't find it anywhere on this side of the Atlantic. It's not listed on Amazon or on the publisher's web site. If you find it somewhere, drop me a line and let me know. Otherwise, talk to Nick about borrowing the book!