In this case, of course, I got the book with an obligation to review it, and here is what I wrote:Because the book does depend on things being disclosed at the right time, in the right order (it is a mystery after all) the review is necessarily circumspect about the story itself.

This book is well outside my comfort zone as I tend not to read mystery books much, but I found it to be extremely readable.

Reflecting afterwards I realise that the main characters were not particularly fleshed-out, but at the time of reading it that was not a problem because I really, really wanted to see what happened next. Once a book gets me wanting to do that I can be very forgiving of it.

As a mystery it is very low-key and domestic, not resorting to anything spectacular to attract attention. The focus of the story is a fifty-something retired teacher who fills her days with swimming and the badminton club which in itself is a little unusual and perhaps quite modern. In my own visualisation of it I pictured Helen Mirren playing Kate in the contemporary sections.

The most impressive aspect of the book for me is the structure of it. The chapters more or less alternate between the current day and an early 70’s summer and both strands run sequentially. Both strands have their own mysteries. In the current thread you want to know whether Kate’s almost-mother-in-law does know anything about her secret, and why she seems to have a hobby as a part-time stalker. In the 70’s story you more or less know what is going to happen, we are already told in chapter one that Danny dies and that Trudie was murdered, even before knowing who they are, but the mystery is about how, when and why these deaths occur.

In this respect the book really teases the reader by giving away the main plot point early on and letting you speculate on the exact circumstances, although even then it manages to spring a few little surprises. There are smaller teases too – when the book looks like it might slip into the supernatural or when Katy (as she called herself back in the 70’s) flicks through Trudie’s diary, reads one very significant entry and has the strength to resist the temptation to read any more. How could she do that? I found myself trying to urge Katy to read the later entries because I wanted to know what was in them.

In practical terms, the book is split into chapter that are mostly around ten pages long, making it very suitable for reading on the train or bus, or perhaps on the beach.

The title, cover, and blurb on the back all made me suspect I wouldn’t enjoy this book and made me put off starting it, but by the third chapter I was hooked.

Another reason why this book was outside my comfor zone, is one I didn’t want to mention on Amazon because it sounds a bit bad without some qualification: it is by a female author.  For some reason, and it is not a deliberate misogynistic policy of mine or anything, I realised a few years ago that out of the many hundreds of fiction books I have, only a handful were by women.

This probably just because I had read most widely in a few genres dominated by male authors and didn’t go near a couple of genres where women authors dominate and seem to concentrate, but it could just me chance.  Or maybe I am being subconsciously sexist?

The strange thing is that in the last couple of years I have probably read more books by female authors that in the thirty years before – but again there was no conscious decision to do that.  A lot of those female-written books have been via Vine.

To my shame, I have still not got round to reading any Austen or Bronte novels.  If I ever hanker for a period piece I still drift towards Dickens and Conan Doyle.

Somewhere in the middle I started to get worried.  I had been hoping to find out the reasons behind some of the things that had been introduced but instead just got more new things coming along: I started to worry that I would never be able to work out what everything meant.

At the end I was left feeling a bit cheated that so many things were unexplained, and also that the end was a bit rushed.  That was not too much of a problem as I was rushing the reading a bit as well to find out what happened next.

While I was in that frame of mind I did not want to be too negative about a book that gave me so much pleasure throughout most of it, hence the pause to let it all settle in.

I ended up writing this:

This book fits into the ’steampunk’ genre, which is a science ficion not of the future but of an alternate past where technology was developed differently or at a different pace. Having read one or two similar novels in the past I knew I had to willingly suspend disbelief more than normal.

This particular book has some great ideas in it, many of them similar to other stories of the genre: Babbage computers and airships being used in Victorian times, radios called Tesla sets being in use, and so on. It also contains a few more bizarre ideas like the royal family having been replaced by alien lizards, and whales living in the Thaems.

I think I would have preferred fewer high concepts, giving the story room to properly explain some of them because although I really enjoyed reading the book I did feel towards the end a bit like I do when watching Lost on TV – wishing for a few answers rather than yet more questions.

I think the author gets away with it, but only just. The entertaining writing style helps and so do the little touches like having the sinister government black airships, or a character noticing a Hugo Rune book in a bookcase.

As you might guess from the title, books do play a large part in the story. The backstory of the lizards is tied up with Shakespeare’s Tempest and also the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the society depicted is one where poetry has a more central importance.

As ever in this type of book, various famous figures play a part: Tom Thumb, Oscar Wilde, Byron (sort of), Mrs. Beeton, Karl Marx, Jules Verne and others all get a mention, but some fictional characters are also there – Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, along with Moriarty and even Irene Adler as a police inspector. I always find it unlikely that if history turned out totally different the same people would get born, let alone become famous for the same things, but that is where the suspension of disbelief comes in: it is much more fun to ignore logic and just enjoy all the cameos.

This book is certainly worth reading. I enjoyed it while reading it, only getting disappointed in the final section where everything moved a bit too quickly towards a resolution that I found unsatisfying – a bit more focus could have made it an instant cult classic.

I wasn’t sure if there was supposed to be some overarching allegorical message or theme about literature and I missed it.  There were certainly lots of literary allusions.

What little I have read of steampunk before has all limited itself to being an extended exploration of what would happen if certain technologies had been developed ahead of time.  It took a theoretical starting point like Babbage inventing a proper computer instead of his analytical engine and then followed plausible steps from there, trying to be as realistic as possible.

The difference in this book is the idea of lizards controlling the royal family.  I was a little uneasy about such a science fiction element intruding into a genre that normally prides itself on plausibility.  As the story progressed it became clear that the lizards were aliens who had crashed on Earth in the past,  and that they were the stimulus for the premature technological advances.  That helped me a lot – instead of the book being an awkward clash of two genres it was really science fiction causing the appearance of steampunk.

I’m still miffed to have never found out why the whales were in london though.

I thought Blink was interesting enough, but not as gripping a concept as tipping points.  I’ll be honest and confess that I haven’t read Outliers yet, partly because I read several reviews and descriptions and it didn’t sound that great a concept to me, although I think it got more publicity and got talked about more than Blink, so perhaps the cover should have said “Author of The Tipping Point and Outliers” instead.

It is a trivial thing to get wound up about I know, but it is like promoting a Steve Coogan show by saying “The man behind Tommy Saxondale and Pauline Calf” and totally ignoring Alan Partridge,¹  describing Midge Ure as “a former member of Slik and the Rich Kids”, or having posters of Avatar proudly boasting “from the director of True Lies and The Abyss”.

1. A-Ha!

In this case it didn’t work.  I was distinctly underwhelmed by the book, although I’ll admit I am probably not the target audience for it anyway.

Having said that, the premise for the book is a little flaky.  It is very much an art book, well bound and beautifully printed on good quality, thick paper.  The short introduction/biography makes much of how Hardy started as a more general art student, became a  well-regarded tattoo artist and then moved into designs for clothing and ceramics and into painting.  The gist of it seemed to be that he is a ‘respectable artist’ because of that, justifying a serious book – and yet surely most people who are interested in him are interested because of the more counter-culural tattoo work.

I can appreciate that Hardy has more artistic talent in his lttle finger than I have in my whole body, but a lot of the designs in the book don’t really do much for me.  Personally I prefer the more geometric tattoo designs, but that is all subjective.  Unless you already know about Hardy and are a fan, a better book for anybody interested in tattoos would be one of the Taschen books.

It only took me about 15 minutes to digest the whole thing, so I spent a similarly short amount of time reviewing it:

For somebody like me who knew nothing about Ed Hardy, this book does not contain enough to fill me in on the subject: just seven pages of biography and lots of pictures.  I imagine that for those in the know it does not contain anywhere near enough pictures.

The book is packaged and presented like a fine art book, and much is made of Hardy’s diversification into areas like ceramics and paintings, but most of the illustrations are of body art.

As an outsider maybe I would have found it useful to have some context to the illustrations, like examples of the work that was supposed to have influenced Hardy so I could see how he took elements of traditional and contemporary Japanese tattoos and other pictures and what he added to it.

To be fair, this is probably aimed at a niche market which I am not part of. It didn’t make me want to rush out and get another tattoo.

King Lear’s fool, Pocket, has very modest ambitions: he would happily settle for a monkey that he could dress in a waistcoat and call Jeff, but instead he has to deal with witches and ghosts, the prospect of two wars, and the fact that every nobleman in the country wants to see him hanged before breakfast.

The book is based on Shakespeare’s King Lear but only loosely, and incorporates elements from several of Shakespeare’s other plays as well. I think it works without a deep knowledge of those plays, although no doubt such knowledge will just make it even better for the reader. Personally it is over twenty years since I read King Lear and I can’t remember much of it, but that did not stop me really enjoying this book.

The surprise for me was just how English the book is considering it was written by an American. Even the swearing (and there is a LOT of swearing) is English rather than American. Even the very rare Americanism has been put in there deliberately as are other anachronisms. In an afterword the author does explain about the lack of historical accuracy and how it is all deliberate.

The language is very direct and down-to-earth and the whole thing is like a dictionary definition of ‘bawdy’. In that one respect it really is authentically Shakespearian.

Perhaps it flagged a bit at the end when plot took priority over description, but by that time I was turning pages at a fair rate to find out what happens next anyway.

Apparently Christopher Moore has written at least ten other books, but somehow I have managed to avoid hearing about him. If the other books are even half as good as this one I will be catching up with them soon.

One difficulty of reviewing the book for Amazon is that the reviews are censored or filtered for bad language  to a certain extent, so I couldn’t mention the running joke about how France is always refered to as “fucking France” as if that is its proper name.  Even the map at the front of the book has it labelled as such – a nice little touch I thought.

I also had to avoid giving any examples of the bad language and its Englishness which is such an integral part of the book.  The appeal, by the way, is not the language itself so much as the fact that it really demonstrates the licence given to fools to talk to the king or nobles in a way that would see anybody else summarily executed.  Knowing that the author was American I was quite surprised to see words like ’shag’, ‘bonk’, ‘git’ and ‘tosser’ used in a way that is natural to us but surely totally foreign to Americans.

For me the sure sign that I enjoyed it was how quickly I read it.  I normally have only a small amount of time every day put aside for reading, small enough that it could take me a couple of weeks to read a book.  In this case I got through it in a few days.

1. Andy
2. Steve
3. Paul
4. John
5. Dave
6. Christopher
7. and so on…

Now I am too lazy to do any research or anything for something as trivial as this, but I would not be surprised to find that Andy, Steve, Paul, John, Dave, and Christopher are amongst the most common names in the workforce so the fact that they call in sick the most (from the sample used) is not really something especially noteworthy.

Wouldn’t you need to find the percentage of people in the workforce with a specific name and then find the percentage of sick calls made by people with that same name to be able to draw any sort of conclusion?    You can’t just ignore the general population and draw conclusions.  It would be like seeing how many dentists died last year that were men and how many that were women and then concluding that male dentists are more likely to die because there were more of them, without taking into account the gender imbalance in the dental profession.

This is just a piece of fluff, regurgitating a press release from Viva entertainment channel, based on a survey, as so much news now seems to be, and nothing to worry about¹ but it is a worry that the same journalists who produce this sort of thing might also be producing headlines about more significant matters, relying on skewed data from special interest groups without giving it, or even being equipped to give it, any sort of validation or basic sanity check.

And this is from one of the serious newspapers. Imagine how much worse it is in the Daily Mail!

For a near-perfect example of the same fallacy being applied to more serious matters I can recommend Don Paskini’s thorough fisking of an ipsos-mori report on local authorities.  To summarise it enormously, a report found that although Labour only control about 10% of councils, various lists of the top-performing councils had over 20% of them (up to 35% for some lists) being Labour.  The summary of the report, which is what a lazy and/or innumerate journalist would print as a headline, was that Tory-controlled councils are better because there are more of them in the top ten, or twenty or whatever.

That is a bit like saying that the British are better long-distance runners than Kenyans because there are more British runners in the London Marathon.

This week’s book recommendation: A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos

1. Unless you are an Andrew who has not had a day off sick in three years who is being unfairly maligned here

I don’t know if the brother-in-law managed to ambush any more writers while he was at the TAM event in London.  I have resisted the temptation to flick through for any more signatures – if there are any more they will be a pleasant surprise when I find them.  Even if there are not any more, it was still a nice delayed bonus, but Charlie Brooker or AC Grayling would be nice…  not that I can imagine CB at the event.

Maybe I’ll get mr Wongablog to sign the ‘thank you’ page when I next see him

This is what I said about the book:

First of all, this is not quite what I was expecting: having not read the description properly I thought it was going to be about companies using viral marketing techniques to advertise their products.  It is actually about companies that that are themselves viral and which ’sell’ themselves as much as their products, and mostly through word-of-mouth rather than any normal advertising.

For the most part this is a series of case studies of what the author calls viral companies – mostly internet-based businesses, but it starts with the story of Tupperware to show that the concept can, and has, worked for traditional companies albeit at a slower pace.

The style is quite straightforward, verging on the folksy at times, but very readable.  After a while you feel that the stories fall into the same sort of structure: one or two people start a website for amusement or a niche activity, the userbase grows exponentially, the servers fall over with the weight of traffic, it gets fixed and gets bigger, then a few years after it all started the founders sell up for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Fortunately there are some exceptions, some notable failures are also covered and there are some theories about what a company needs to ‘go viral’ and take off. Nothing too specific of course – if the author knew how to create a website he could sell for millions in a year he wouldn’t be s[pending his time writing a book instead – but nonetheless the concepts seem sound.

So the book won’t make you rich, but for anybody who has used Flickr, eBay, PayPal, Ning or Facebook it puts a human face to the familiar websites, and the short history of the browser wars is a nice trip down memory lane.  It wasn’t that long ago really, but in internet terms it is delving into ancient history.

Certainly worth a read.

One thing the book didn’t do was dislodge the idea that the only sound business plan for an internet start-up is to grow it quickly and then cash in.  Some of the sites covered in the book are still being run by the creators, but in the majority of cases the sites were sold for unfeasibly large amounts – sometimes to subsequently die or get killed off by the new owners.

As such, the end of most of the case studies provide one of those why-didn’t-I-think-of-that moments.

It did make me think a bit more about the structures behind these household names, especially the bit about how it is almost inevitable that a successful site is going to reach a point where it cannot cope with demand – because you can’t afford to build scalability into something that, statistically, is unlikely to need it.

Quite light reading for a technology/business book.

Contrast this glitzy postmillennial lifestyle with the the premillennial, time-consuming trek your local newspaper makes each day.  It owes its analog existance to trees that are chopped down, trucked to a mill where they are mashed into pulp, flattened into paper, and transported to printing presses.  There the huge rolls of paper are sprayed with letters and numbers, photos, crossword puzzles, sudoku, and drawings, cut, stacked, bound, and stuffed into trucks.

These bundles are dropped off at news-stands opr distributed to people whose job entials flinging each copy, one at a time, house to house.  Later you step onto your porch, pick up the paper, scan the headlines, and realise everything in it is a day late.  You’ve already skimmed these articles on the web, were fed email links on your PDA or cell phone, or accessed RSS feeds, watched them on CNN, heard them on the radio, or caught a glimpse of them on a news ticker atop a taxi cab.

By the time you read the paper, the news has moved on and so have you.

I imagine the author is well aware of the irony that all this is written in a book that has been through a similar process.

Personally, I gave up reading a national newspaper in about February.  Instead I have several stored searches on Google News for topics of interest.   I added the stored searches’ RSS feeds to Google Reader along with the RSS feeds of parts of the BBC News site and some local papers.  The Guardian’s excellent twitterfeed flashes up with all the main stories from that paper.

It means I miss out on the analysis (but analysis is just another way of saying opinion in most cases) but have time to read other news sources as well now.  If there is anything particularly interesting that I may have missed it is sure to be mentioned in a post on one of the many blogs whose RSS feeds I also monitor on Google Reader with a link if I want to read more.

Not sure how long this can last though, and I hate to admit that Murdoch may have a point.  I can only do this because the newspapers have free-to-view websites and they can only really afford to do that  on the back of advertising revenues from their paper editions which other people buy.  If everybody did what I do then those news sources would dry up.