One of the things I spend my time doing is reading. Sometimes I read dreadful thrillers with poor character development and many plot holes but, rather enjoyably, play like movies in my head. At other times I prefer 'highbrow' literature, and at other times I go for nonfiction.
Here I present a list of books I have read according to the year I read them, with and without comment. This list is not guaranteed to be complete, but I attempt to hide nothing about what I read:
Interesting book, most valuable for the context it provides for the professional cycling circuit at the turn of the century. The edition itself is not excellent; better attention should have been paid to repeated words and other typos.
Ellis's new book is a long one. It took me three months to read on and off and felt at times like a slog, mostly because when I read the text in my head it didn't flow quite the way Ellis intended, and that's just down to us having different voices. A slow burn that really picks up towards the end and it culminates in a real inferno. It was particularly worth reading because it reminds me strongly of being seventeen in American suburbia.
A hefty book and an excellent read; very grateful to one of my lovely housemates who found it for me last year.
Sadly, only three of the eight stories did anything for me. Those were great. The ones that didn't felt like a slog.
My surprise Christmas reading from Laura in the college library. Not one I'd have picked up myself but entertaining and fairly amusing.
Not sure this sequel was necessary.
Brilliant really. Some chapters provide insight into the history of polities with which I was not familiar, while others have a more direct historiographical point. Interesting to see the contrast between Davies's takes on Napoleonic puppet kingdoms compared to Colley's treatment in the last book I read.
A more prosaic title might have been The Rise and Fall of Norman England. However, naming the book after the White Ship puts that catastrophe front and centre. Indeed, the sinking comes halfway through the book. I appreciated learning about the internecine politics of the Normans in England and Normandy, something that slightly drier history books of an earlier era never seemed to convey.
An entertaining jaunt. There are some red herrings involving subplots, but I found the string of fake-outs involving the main plot a little tedious in the end. Format much the same as Foley's next novel, The Guest List.
Vivid imagery, at times poignant, brings to life the scenes of life in bygone geological periods, from the end of the last ice age back to the Ediacaran.
Some of the window dressing in this book reminded me of my own lovely trip to Paris in October. This novel has a new structure and so improves on The Guest List and The Hunting Party, which were more or less identikit myteries under the hood. It felt like lots of the developments were telegraphed or overwrought but there were a few surprises.
The back cover promises "past grudges" and there's a lot going on here. The book is interestingly structured: it is set in the aftermath of a gruesome discovery, but almost the entire story is told in flashbacks to the day before said discovery, so we don't even learn until the final twenty pages who the murder victim is. It makes you wonder whether you've picked the right suspect (there are about six) and motive (four or five) when you twig what those grudges are.
Fascinating and extremely dense. The quality of the edition is poor: originally published in 2011, this 2020 paperback includes 9 years of developments, including the agreement and abandonment of the Iran deal, and the American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, but the text itself is plagued by typographical, stylistic and even factual inconsistencies. Montefiore never settles on a single spelling of Benjamin Netanhayu's given name; words are hyphenated presumably for the hardback leaving strange in-line breaks in the text; the footnotes can't decide whether the second note is denoted by a cross or by two asterisks; and in the run-up to the Six Day War, the text says 'Syria' in place of 'Sinai' twice.
Very sad.
A work of horror, yes, but more than that a sad, sad story about growing up.
Once again I find myself wondering whether Bell has an editor.
Reading this book impressed on me the carbon savings that can be attained by eating local, in season produce, so I've been making more of an effort lately.
As glowing praise on the cover observes, this history is written almost like a novel. Darymple "attempted to study the relationship between commercial and imperial power" in service of his thesis that the East India Company "was the ultimate model and prototype for many of today's joint stock corporations". In the introduction and conclusion the author connects themes of the East India Company's rise to the actions of companies and states today, such as Exxon Mobil and Walmart, but within the text he slightly misses the mark. To be sure, the book is fascinating and well written, but the body of the work is somewhat old-fashioned: a retelling of key battles and maneuvers by Great Men akin to those you see inside Blenheim Palace or in old British history books. I think this is a constraint due to the sources available to Dalrymple: diaries and letters to and from British soldiers, politicians and merchants on the one hand, and official Mughal histories from the likes of Ghulam Hussain Khan and Khair ud-Din Illahabadi on the other.
Fortunately, there are overtures to social history when we hear about Maratha raids in Bengal and the effects of the famine, and we do come closer to the stated theme of the book when we read commentary from Edmund Burke and others on the 1773 bailout and the impeachment of Warren Hastings, former Governor General of India. Although he doesn't hammer it home, Dalrymple leaves enough context for us to draw our own parallels between the rise of the East India Company and the actions of corporations and governments in more recent history.
The antagonist is truly frightening. References to King's relationship with his readers can be on the nose: see "Constant Reader" and "friends and neighbors". It just reminds me I have certain expectations when I come to one of King's novels.
Must say the synopsis on the edition I got is a little misleading, and so the actual text subverted some of the expectations that led me to pick it off the shelf. That subversion made the book even more frightening.
The Casual Vacancy starts as a farce about local politics, but quickly turns into something much deeper and much sadder. Unfortunately, we do not have a sense that Rowling's world is populated by anyone in addition to her cast of characters; for example, it seems that nobody but Krystal and her family is affected by the Council's deliberations, and hence the issue of the council estate seems somehow unreal. Despite all the characterization and human moments experienced by each person, they still feel like pawns pushed around on the page.
I think it's worth mentioning that this book is not a history of quantum physics; it's a history of the idea of entanglement, which the author presents as the most fundamentally quantum phenomenon, and what it means about ontology and epistemology. That said, the first part of the book is indeed a history of quantum physics, up to about 1935 and EPR. The second part discusses the mid-century evolution of EPR amidst the background of the Manhattan Project and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the third part relates the story of John Bell and various experiments that tested his theorem, ending with the transition of entanglement from philosophical curiosity to concept applicable in computing. Though the book's purpose is not to explain QM in contrast with classical mechanics, this difference appears often enough that it's a shame the author did not explain Feynman's path integrals, since they help to elucidate that distinction (especially since we were treated to a chapter about Feynman playing percussion in Brazil). It's a decent book; I enjoyed it.
A good read but mildly underwhelming since it doesn't go into as much detail in the physics as I would have liked.
I think a couple of dates didn't add up and it was tedious when Horowitz whinged about journalists, but the story was entertaining.
Almost uniquely among the mass-market thrillers I like to read, the details of the plot here were predictable.
There's a character in this book called Fairbrother, which reminded me of The Casual Vacancy and helped me realize why I enjoy these two books so much: they exude the pathos of living pathetic, dead-end lives. The procedural elements in Persons Unknown play second fiddle to the melodrama, and the end brings a modicum of catharsis. Very enjoyable.
A good and fresh perspective, especially after reading two of Frank Wilczek's books!
I read this to see what the hype is about. It's OK, I guess. The bulk of the text is a deliberately pretentious academic text, framed by another pompous narrator, Johnny. Maybe this colours my perception of Danielewski, but it seems he tries far too hard. The word "house" is printed in blue, and so is the German "Haus", even in words like "zuhause" - so had I edited the book, I would also have turned the English "home" blue too, but that didn't happen. Nor did the Greek οίκος, which in the footnotes is even mentioned to mean "house". Also, portions of the inner academic work are described as having holes in the pages, indicated by square brackets (e.g. "more and more of [ ] personality") and in the footnotes Johnny claims not to pretend to reconstruct the missing letters and words. Yet "[]ou[]e" is turned blue.
I was put off, too, by the inclusion of one verse of Homer in five languages, with English translation in the footnotes - even though this is from Johnny's papers. I didn't like that Danielewski, through the academic narrator and Johnny, felt he had to put a lampshade on every subtle typo that changes the meaning of a sentence in a surprising or profound way, such as changing "parenthetical" for "parentethical" in a passage about childhood. We don't need a footnote pointing out the error and explaining the meaning: we're clever enough to do that by ourselves.
Maybe I thought House of Leaves was tedious because at some fundamental level I didn't get it. Maybe it is a brilliant satire of academic writing - but the fact the pomposity is artificial doesn't make it any less tiresome to read.
After reading so many books about particle physics, it was interesting to read a book about the history and development of GR. I read for the first time of the importance of radio astronomy and the development of theory through the 60s and 70s, so while some content was familiar, other parts were new. In addition, Ferreira made me think for the first time whether the ΛCDM model is correct or whether our theory of gravity needs changing.
It's a shame this book was published in 2014, predating the direct detection of gravitational waves and the image of M87*, even though these are developments Ferreira anticipates in the final chapter, "Something is going to happen". Many familiar names, from Penrose and Peebles to Sean Carroll and Martin Rees, provided quotations recommending this book, which are printed on the back cover. A fun read.
Does this book count as magical realism? The prospect that it might be drew me to it in the first place, but I enjoyed Choo's portrayal of Malaysian culture and folklore along the way. The synopsis inside the cover introduces one of the plot's threads, Ren's quest, and I expected that story to be the book's main focus. Initially it is: the first chapter of The Night Tiger is almost a prequel to the book, clearly setting out Ren's goal. However, this plotline is resolved about five sixths of the way through the book, and those final 70-ish pages seem to linger aimlessly.
Yes, it's a short story, but it was bound into a volume by itself so it counts. I enjoy Flynn's descriptive writing and punchy characterization, both of which are on display here, but it was a bit of a let-down that the last ten pages or so amounted to a monologue.
Leonardo's work is inspiring because of his curiosity and dogged attention to detail, qualities that Isaacson repeatedly links to Einstein and, sometimes, Steve Jobs, but I found the best reading in this book to be two of the final three chapters, "Pointing the Way" and "France", which discuss Leonardo grappling with his mortality and legacy, and reveal some touchingly human moments at the end of his life.
Throughout the book, I felt that Tegmark had a credibility problem; sure, he's an MIT professor of physics, but why should I believe what he says about AI? The epilogue, in which he explains the origins and activities of the Future of Life Institute, which he founded and that focuses on AI-safety issues, gave him that credibility, so I wish I had read that before everything else in the book!
I have always been curious about the history of science, and of physics in particular, so this straightforward read about the history of radioactivity was enjoyable, and filled in many of the details that I was unaware of. As a student in high school chemistry, I was taught about the evolution of the thinking on the structure of atoms, from JJ Thomson's plum pudding to the Bohr model. Aside from brief mentions of experiments such as the Geiger-Müller (gold foil) experiment, there was little motivation. Malley's discussion of the evolving understanding of radioactivity put the corresponding contemporary thought about atoms into context, and for that I am thankful.
String theory is a thread within physics that I did not have a chance to follow at Oxford, so I was curious to learn a bit about the subject. I picked this up because it seemed to be the string theory counterpart to Carlo Rovelli's book Reality Is Not What It Seems, which discusses the loop quantum formulation of gravity. It is similar, yes, but there are differences. While Rovelli slowly follows the history of paradigm shifts within physics and near the end describes his pet theory of quantum gravity and draws connections from it to what went before, Gubser focuses primarily on the nature of string theory and connects to its precursors in physics practically by assertion. He spends three chapters discussing in an almost cursory fashion energy, quantum mechanics and general relativity, then dives into string theory in almost whiplash-inducing detail. Indeed, after that, seeing Feynman diagrams on the page describing the similarities and differences of photons' and gluons' interactions was startling. But I appreciate Gubser's discussion, which is detailed yet vague enough for an audience of people (including me) who know next to nothing about string theory. The author achieves this balance through frequent appeal to physical intuition, but he also throws in occasionally specious analogies that keep the tone personable, as if the book is a conversation.
I was excited to learn about some of the experimental possibilities related to string theory, such as looking for supersymmetry and probing the quark-gluon plasma in particle colliders. Similarly, it amused me that Gubser couches all discussion of the Higgs boson in hypothetical statements, since this book, published in 2010, predates the boson's momentous discovery at the Large Hadron Collider. In the end, I feel Gubser's discussion of string theory, has warmed me to the topic, and I am curious to learn more.
As an undergraduate, I was told that physics is more or less the process of writing down a Lagrangian, figuring out all the details, then seeing if what you get describes anything in the real world. This is a little simplistic, since the process of inventing Lagrangians isn't totally guesswork: you use physical intuition and lean on principles such as covariance to constrain the forms of terms that can appear, but Wilczek has made me think about the process slightly differently. In my lectures, I had seen theories written down and then having it pointed out that each theory respects some sort of symmetry. Just as Einstein's goal with general relativity was to write down field equations that obey covariance, Wilczek turns it around and asks, for instance, "What theory can we write down that respects SO(3) symmetry?" The "what?" of symmetry, our various field theories, have turned out well and given us the Standard Model, but the "why?" of symmetry is a different question altogether. The author borrows from Plato and calls the creator of the Universe "the Artisan" - this might as well be God or Nature or anything else you call it, but that's beside the point - and he asks, given the existence of the Universe, why does it obey symmetries and why should we look for a unified theory with even more symmetry?
Part of the answer is that it would be a bit of a shame if the Universe weren't nice and concise and symmetric, and how awfully jumbled together our current Standard Model plus General Relativity framework is. This train of thought starts with Pythagoras, who belived that all things are (whole) number, then picks up speed with the atomic theory of Platonic solids. Wilczek points out that Plato's two worlds, those of the Real and the Ideal, used not to be connected, and that Plato himself cared more about the Ideal than the Real. This continued up through Kepler's time, but finally Newton developed calculus and mechanics and so was able to join the Real and Ideal in a perfect correspondence between reality and the mathematical perfection on his page. We know now that Newton's mechanics, while adequate, isn't the entire story, and physicists have invoked symmetric field theories that maintain the connection of Real and Ideal, while describing the Universe in ever more detail. Would it not be a shame if whatever lies underneath our current physics were not yet more symmetric, yet more Ideal?
But Wilczek gives another answer that to me is more satisfactory. As an undergraduate, another thing I learned is that complicated and chaotic behavior can fall out of very simple rules. We get fractals like fern fronds, whose DNA only knows how far to grow before sprouting new leaves, and at what angle to sprout them. Snails' DNA only knows at what angle to turn the growth of the shell as it gets larger. Wilczek points out that viruses, with their tiny capsids, have but a tiny space for RNA or DNA so the more concise, the better. This makes them build protein shells out of identical parts, so that they are a physical embodiemnt of the Platonic solids. The author calls this the Economy of Means. Is it unreasonable to think that Nature might also be as economical as viruses, snails and ferns? If one highly symmetric theory described the Universe, then Nature wouldn't have to know anything more. And just as we know that processes like spontaneous symmetry breaking occur to give particles mass, we know that symmetry in the early Universe was broken and from that broken symmetry grew stars and galaxies. What if the very early Universe truly was the Ideal, with a perfectly symmetric field theory, that broke down into the strong, weak, E&M and gravitational fields? Wilczek's argument from economy seems more plausible than imposing a human aesthetic standard on the Universe at large.
This is a fine and inspiring book, but it is sullied to an extent by the inane prattle of Deepak Chopra on the back cover. He says, "It took considerable courage... to declare that such questions [of truth, beauty and transcendence] are within the framework of 'hard' science.... Wilczek has caught the winds of change, and his thinking breaks through some sacred boundaries...." I, for one, got into and returned to physics precisely because it gives us insight into truths, and to understand the Universe is a beautiful thing. Questions about meaning, about truth, and about beauty have never been unwelcome in physics and, as Wilczek points out, scientists such as Kepler and Newton studied the subject precisely to glorify the Creation of their God. Chopra is correct that "Anyone who wansts to see how science and transcendence can be compatible must read this book", but for him, with all his feel-good nonsense that explains nothing about the Universe as whole, to laud physics for breaking "sacred boundaries" to ask existential questions is supremely arrogant.
In terms of its pantheon of beings who are shaped by and informed by the cultures they live in, Rivers of London is an 'American Gods-lite'. Whereas Gaiman relishes words, cultures and places in his book, to Aaronovitch, London is more a stage set than a real place. Swap London for Chicago and nothing changes. When the time comes to figure out whodunit, the mystery is resolved in roughly one page but thirty-odd remain in the book, time enough for a climax of heightened emotions that singularly fail to pull at my heartstrings.
I enjoy Aaronovitch's descriptions of how Father Thames, Mama Thames and their children have changed over time. Clearly the magicians in the story have a form of magic that they can control, and clearly the river spirits have another, more visceral magic, but it is not clear how or whether those forms are linked, or where magic comes from at all. Who creates magic as a supernatural resource? What separates humans from the spirits? I think too much is left unanswered to set up the many sequels to this book, but it was all right for a little light reading.
I was in Waterstones looking for a hefty book on history to read when I found this nestled between the likes of Shirer and the Venerable Bede. Having spent a few days in Berlin, I had recently been to the Neues Museum and marveled at the nice things, but appreciated almost none of the context. What I knew about Ancient Egypt was mostly confined to grade school memories of Anubis, canopic jars and the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten.
At any rate, this 515-page monster of a read was very enjoyable, and I feel I am much more au fait with the ins and outs of ancient Egypt. I am ready to revel in the context next time I go to the Neues Museum.
A book with such anonymous characters and dialogue that Baldacci forgets a character's name halfway through a scene.
It wouldn't be a real Ted Bell novel without an incoherent plot and a weird obsession with Vladimir Putin.
An internet search told me that Harlan Coben is known for novels with "many plot twists", and this book certainly doesn't disappoint. It was a very entertaining read that kept me engaged all the way through. The only complaint is that the final twist, a secret the protagonist kept for years, is not such a twist at all. You see it coming and you can't believe, given the circumstances around the twist, that it could have been a secret in the first place. Nevertheless, a decent thriller.
The narrative is a bit disjointed and the symbolism is a bit obvious, but Steinbeck does an acceptable job of retelling the story of Cain and Abel (twice!). His thesis, expounded in the course of two bible-study scenes, is that the battle of good and evil is the oldest story in the world. He does not clarify why the battle of good and evil has to follow the plot of Cain and Abel, but he follows that outline almost to the letter. I had hoped Steinbeck would subvert it the second time around, but he doesn't. Because he hews so closely to the Biblical story, the plot in East of Eden is fairly predictable and, even when he tells ancillary stories, those are predictable too. Not nearly as good as The Grapes of Wrath or The Red Pony.
I adore the character of Josephine.
Dark Places is a disturbing, affecting read. I'm pleased with myself that I guessed half of the solution about halfway through the book. Flynn seems to lose the Darkplace conceit, then picks it up again towards the end of the book. I wish it had been treated more consistently, but I enjoyed reading it the whole way through.
Having read Stevens's Those Girls, with a heavy and serious tone, the first half of That Night threw me for a loop. Whereas Those Girls is written for adults, the first half of That Night seems to target teenage girls, a much different audience. This part of the book, consisting of flashbacks to high school (as well as a prison storyline), features memories within flashbacks while telling the protagonist's overwrought tale of woe and bullying. While structurally complicated, the simple and vague narration invites the reader to insert herself as the protagonist. I think this is a weakness resulting from the inclusion of too many episodes from Toni's home and school life. The plot is more compact in the last half of the book and Stevens shows, rather than tells, the characters' feelings. This section is much stronger and hard-hitting than the first, and in tone much more closely resembles Those Girls. Stevens also ties a very neat bow on the prison story without that resolution feeling contrived. I like it.
Magpie Murders is principally a piece of genre fiction and a pastiche thereof. This is what Horowitz does well, and I particularly enjoyed the way he wrote out the character of James Taylor.
The framing of the story is less effective. In the prologue, the narrator expresses a seething animosity towards the character of Alan Conway, and in the epilogue she suggests he deserved what he got. However, this antipathy is inadequately demonstrated within the story, rendering these bookends confusing at best and stupid at worst. I think Horowitz wants to end his novel with a subversive Aesop, but it just doesn't work.
I found understanding some of the later chapters easier when I had a better grasp of general relativity and quantum field theory, but knowledge is by no means a prerequisite to reading this book. Rovelli takes the reader on a journey through the "big picture" of physics from Ancient Greece to the present day. I thought it was an excellent complement to my studies, but the book is primarily written for the general public and succeeds in its accessibility.
This ticked a number of boxes for me. I have a soft spot for the history of science, and I have another soft spot for anything Humboldt because of my brief summer at Humbold-Universität. Wolf's chapter about the Humboldt brothers, Schiller and Goethe was particularly engaging for me because I am fond of Weimar, but the entire book is a masterwork. The author writes an excellent biography of Alexander von Humboldt but also ties his story into what should be more familiar lives, such as those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin and John Muir. It was remarkable learning just how much Humboldt's influence spread, and just how concepts that are familiar today were so revolutionary in the past.
I do like the theme of people staying in the place where they grew up and not really doing very much, holding on to old times because that's all they really have. That theme crops up in between chapters in which Baldacci lays out a murder mystery that becomes plain as day when an FBI agent relates his knowledge about a suspected serial killer, last active "four years ago". The human moments in this book are to an extent touching but done much better by Steinbeck (surprise, surprise) in Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat.
In the foreword, Bell informs us that this book is the result of a year's study at the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a concurrent writer-in-residence position at Sidney Sussex College. With this in mind, I was expecting a nuanced, well-researched swashbuckling adventure of the sort Michael Crichton wrote. Instead, like the rest of Bell's oeuvre, this book is as subtle as a punch to the face. The extent of his research seems to be "China is building islands in the South China Sea" and "North Korea has prison camps", things you can learn by reading the news rather than by sequestering yourself in a library for a year.
To be sure, I read his novels for the action rather than the realism. As ususal, Bell's teaboo tendencies make him fawn over his protagonist, a forever-young, former-SAS, current-MI6 aristocrat who drives a Bentley named (as the author reminds us almost every other chapter) "the Locomotive". When I read Bell's novels, I just have to roll with the fantasy, but parts of this book beggar belief. An evil Chinese general with two daughters named Jet and Li, and a third daughter (a professor at Cambridge) called Chyna? Sunset in Cornwall at the start of June is around 17:30? A character who on one page is nursing a pipe, then on the next is relighting his cigar? Really?
If you want to slog through 500+ pages of drivel for a very weak payout, by all means read this book.
What is American Gods about? It's a weird book, and Gaiman's accompanying writings make clear that it isn't really meant to sit inside one genre. It's a story about stories, about a murder a mystery, about a con artist at work. It's a book about America, a book about how people hold on to certain things and let other things go. It's about a road trip and about Americana. While I was reading it, I thought to myself "this is America." At some points, even, it's about gods.
Gaiman writes a pantheon of old and new gods. Halfway through, I was concerned that some of the characters he had introduced to us were written for the sake of it, but pretty much everything in the book has a purpose. Hundreds of pages later, you find out it was worth it. You don't have to be familiar with mythology to read the book, because it's not really about mythology, but a little background knowledge goes a long way in figuring things out faster than Shadow, the protagonist, does.
At times I wonder how much of himself Gaiman writes into his characters. For instance, when Wednesday talks about myths and stories, I think he is speaking Gamian's words. The postscript, in which Shadow goes travelling, is written in a markedly different style than the rest of the book, and that tipped me off that it is an autobiographical chapter. What else is there that I haven't noticed?
A weird read, certainly, but an adventure.
Interesting and thought-provoking reading, particularly about how colleges such as Caltech eschew legacy, development and sports admission preferences. Golden clearly grinds his axe on some examples more than others. What surpised me most was not that there are some egregious cases of parents (or others) squeezing their wholly inadequate children into top universities, but that in so many cases, being a member of a preferred class of applicants (alumni children, donor children, etc.) makes an admission officer more likely to decide to take a chance on a student. It seems that students don't get so many breaks when they don't have these additional factors on their applications.
This book made me think a bit about some of the privileges I've enjoyed during my education, and how admissions processes I've experienced have been different. The first one is definitely that I've only had to focus on my education; this is something that Golden only really mentions in the context of the University of California (and other schools) taking into account "life experiences" during admissions, but it's a big one. I haven't had to work, haven't had to support my family. I have had a couple of odd jobs during term, but I took those on out of choice, not necessity.
I grew up in a very high-quality school district and attended one of the best high schools in the United States. It's a magnet school I had to apply to to attend, and I insisted on doing my application entirely by myself. I didn't get my way, since my parents decided if I was going to apply, I was going to have to attend a prep class for the admission exam. My first plan was to attend a free class held at my middle school but somehow or another that fell through and I found myself on Saturday mornings practising maths problems and writing short essays with twenty or so other hopefuls. As Golden so frequently points out in his book, a refrain of privileged students is "I'd like to think I got here on my own, but I can't be sure" — the same definitely holds true for me, here. I can't know how much my prep class helped me, but I know hours of practising exam problems certainly helped. The second round of the admissions process, though, consisted of take-home essays about my interests, and I made sure I completed that entirely on my own; I didn't even let my parents or teachers read my writing. Although the school's policy was that there should be no help in this portion, in practise this was not the case and they've since had to revamp this part of the admissions procedure.
When I applied to Oxford I wrote my personal statement myself but had a watchful eye critique what I had written and suggest ways of better conveying what I wanted to say. Famous authors do not simply write everything alone and publish what's left at the end; I feel like I'd have been a fool not to get input into my writing. And of course the three letters of recommendation I needed helped, but the key here was that the professors reading my application only cared about my ability and passion for physics; they didn't care if I was a well-rounded person the way that undergraduate institutions in America do. My undergraduate applications worked very differently from this, and even my high school's, admissions process.
When I was applying to university, I insisted on doing things on my own. Like my application to high school, I didn't entirely get my way: my first SAT score was not what I had hoped for, so I wanted to take it again. My mother insisted that I attend a prep class before I took the SAT a second time, but we made a compromise: a student from my school (who got 2400 the first and only time he took the test) had written an SAT guide, so I read that and did problems on my own instead.
Coming from my school, I was at a slight disadvantage here because so many of my classmates were more qualified than I was, but I was at a huge advantage compared to students in my county overall. Overwhelming numbers of students to to UVA and William & Mary, Virginia's flagship universities, each year. Many students go to elite colleges; in my year alone, six went to Caltech. My high school is well known to admissions officers and the name confers a heavy weight, and this weighs on me a little bit.
I went to Northwestern, not because I particularly wanted to but because I felt I had to. Northwestern was my sister's dream university and, in fact, it only appeared on my radar because she attended a summer school there and fell in love with both the school and Evanston, the city it's in. My sister had amazing high school qualifications: great grades, section leader in marching band, captain of her high school softball team, top performer on another softball team, awesome relationships with her teachers, who no doubt were consequently able to write glittering letters of recommendation for her. But she went to the local high school rather than my famous one, and Northwestern put her on the waiting list. She was ultimately rejected and went to UVA, which she duly fell in love with. But I got into her dream university and she didn't, and how much of that is because of my high school's name?
This book is a roller coaster of lies, emotions and evidence. The protagonist's wife disappears. What happened? Is he guilty? If not, then who? Flynn structures the book in flashbacks, diary entries and the present day in order to investigate the nature of and emotions underpinning Nick's and Amy's marriage.
I had an inkling that things were not as they seemed but the book took the plot off the rails in ways I had not thought possible. The end, while heart-wrenching, seems to come at a ponderously slow pace while still giving the reader things to think about. I should give this book a rest and come back to it to see what else I can tease from it.
The inside dust jacket of this book sets the stage: an eponymous family-run alligator amusement park beginning to fail after the death of the matriarch, the youngest child having flown the nest, and maybe ghosts. All the alligators are called Seth. Everything is ripe for some magical realism, especially after the introduction of a Bird Man who might be Papageno or Thoth.
Russell's book plays as a coming-of-age for Ava, Osceloa, and Kiwi, the family's three children, which is sufficiently dark in all the right (wrong?) places to cast a depressing pallor over the otherwise fairly whimsical story. Among the worst is that, despite the wacky scene and characters, there is no magic after all. Rather than coming as a letdown, this revelation is just one in a series of whammies coming in the last 60 of 300 pages, the only ones in which anything actually seems to happen.
Swamplandia! is a tragedy you don't see coming, a tragedy you think is a comedy. You don't see the dramatic irony so the denoument comes as something of a surprise. In fact, Russell makes you, the reader, her tragic hero for the hubris of expecting everything to turn out all right in the end.
Doyle hides so many of the relevant data that I'm not sure how the reader can work out whodunit. I don't know why I like this book so much, but I do.
When I was eleven or twelve years old, I got into Star Wars in a big way and I bought this book. It sat on my shelf for years until I decided there was not much point in having a book but not reading it. A pretty decent read.
The stories I remember best from this collection are "The Chrysanthemums", "The Raid" and "The Red Pony". They're all painful to read in their own ways: the scorn the traveling salesman pours upon Elisa's flowers, the beating the unionists receive that echoes scenes in The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle, and various mysteries about "The Red Pony". It is a very trying and expensive experience that Jody's family goes through to get him his foal in "The Promise", but in "The Leader of the People", that hardship is forgotten. Was the mare's death all for nothing?
Gaiman's various writings are collected into several sections in this book, but I found his thoughts on storytelling particularly fascinating. This book put American Gods on my reading list.
He writes about playing with words, about how words can be poetry and how writing can evoke feelings in the reader. This isn't something I had thought about much since reading All the King's Men, and it certainly isn't something I had ever really put in or seen put into words until here.
Over the Christmas break in 2015, I was wondering what I wanted to do with myself after my bachelor's degree, and I discovered that Oxford had an MSc in physics. I had fallen out with physics in around 2012 I had come around to the subject again after a detour through computational neuroscience, and I was ready to learn more. Also, I wanted to get out into a new environment. I very quickly put together an application for the late-Januray deadline, in which I sincerely likened physics to magic. I didn't tell my parents I had applied in case things went south.
In the middle of March, the winter quarter at Northwestern ended and I had finished my degree. I packed my things and my dad came out to Chicago to help me drive home to Virginia. On the first day I got home, I received an email saying that the folks at Oxford actually wanted me. I quickly switched gears from my job hunt to getting ready to study physics seriously: I had to learn classical mechanics and drill quantum mechanics into my head, which I achieved by doing all the problems in two textbooks I had.
For my birthday, my mother got me this book by John Betjeman, a 1970 facsimile of the 1938 original publication. I have no idea quite how she got it, but it used to belong to the Beverley Public Library in Yorkshire. Fear not—the title page is adorned with a "WITHDRAWN FROM STOCK" stamp. It is a charming little book; an entertaining review of the interwar Oxford life, both in the city and in the university. It has a fabulous appendix describing the architecture of the city: buildings, architects, people associated with them, and other interesting tidbits. And, much to my delight, I discovered the photographs in the book were taken by László Moholy-Nagy, of Bauhaus fame. It's a marvelous book and I learned rather a lot about the city by reading it.
One afternoon while I was in Berlin I went to Prenzlauer Berg to get my hair cut. As I walked from the tram stop along Prenzlauer Allee, I passed a comic book store and had a look in since I had some time to kill.
Tintin was one of my favourites when I was a kid, and I was delighted to find several volumes of Tim und Struppi, the German translation, in this shop. My German isn't particularly good and I thought that buying one or two albums would be a great way to improve my language skills: there isn't all that much to read in the books, the art helps with understanding the story, and I vaguely remember how they go anyway because of many afternoons in my childhood reading the English translations of Tintin.
It was fun to read and it helped me get in touch with my inner child. The other book I bought, Im Reiche des Schwarzen Goldes, remains on my bookshelf as of August 2017. It's going on my to-read list soon.
Tsar is probably the best of Ted Bell's novels. It's not too unbelievable and I feel something of a connection with the magical descriptions of Russian palaces in the winter. When I went to Saint Petersburg many years ago it was in November so I did not get the proper Russian winter experience, but I can easily imagine the Hermitage twinkling under a fresh snowfall.
The authors get a plus from me because, when I wondered something about their analysis of how the timings of substitutions can be used to best effect in a match, they actually responded to my email. I appreciated that.
I got up one morning, walked to the Starbucks on Sherman Avenue in Evanston for breakfast, and read this book in one sitting. It's tragic all the way through, but very worth reading.
The way my English Lit teacher introduced Robert Penn Warren, I thought about him primarily as a poet, though he did of course write prose (including this work) and criticism. The flow of his words across my mind as I read All the King's Men really is poetic, and I enjoy a novel where the words are poetry.
2012 was a year of milestones for my family: my 18th birthday, my mother's 50th, her father's 80th and his mother's 100th, and at the beginning of July that year I went over to England on my own and stayed with my dad's parents in Cumbria for a little while. Come Nana's centenary, however, I needed to be in Harrogate, so I went on the train on a route first to Manchester and then onward via Leeds (or was it York?).
The train across the Pennines was patently uncomfortable and my back ached miserably by the time I got to my destination. I needed a nap, so I went to bed in my mum's parents' guest room at five or six in the afternoon and slept until one or so the following day. My lengthy sleep gave my granny something of a fright.
It was in this context that I read The Riddle of the Sands: about half of it on the way to Yorkshire and the other half on the rather more direct train over the dales and to Cumbria via Carnforth. There is something special about WWI-era spy thrillers; they're a window into the history of both politics and writing. I can't describe why, but Childers's tale of a spy sailing boat prowling the Frisian Islands is much more engaging than it sounds at face value.
My dad's parents got me into David Baldacci's books, and they got into his work (particularly the Camel Club series) because they enjoyed reading stories set in places they know, having visited us outside Washington DC numerous times since we moved here in 2001.
One day, while I was on holiday after the end of high school, we went on a day trip to Liverpool to see the International Slavery Museum and the Turner Monet Twombly exhibition at the Tate. My granddad had a couple of ratty paperbacks on hand he thought I might enjoy reading, and this was one of them. I tore through it on the car journey: I got halfway through on the drive to Liverpool, and I finished it on the way back.
It's hardly highbrow, but reading these books is something I share with my grandparents and that is special to me.