The final chapter of The Origin of Species — Darwin’s ‘Recapitulation and Conclusion’ — states the case for evolution as well as any short account I have ever read. It’s tightly written, it argues a case, it summarises all the different kinds of evidence and shows clearly why they are important. It’s pithy, confident: great stuff.
Which [...]
Posts tagged with ‘books’
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‘The Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin
27 August 2008 – 1:23 pm
‘Nature’s Engraver’ by Jenny Uglow
22 August 2008 – 3:05 pm
Jenny Uglow wrote the excellent The Lunar Men, about the Lunar Society that included Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and Matthew Boulton. Nature’s Engraver is a biography of the wood engraver Thomas Bewick who, born in 1753, was just about contemporary with those men. He worked in Newcastle at a time when it was just starting to turn from [...]
Read the world: a map
5 August 2008 – 3:10 pm
I’ve made an interactive map to show which countries I’ve read books from.
I’ve read books from the countries marked in green; yellow is for places where I have some ideas but haven’t read them yet; red means I haven’t even got that far.
The map is below the fold.
‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3 August 2008 – 8:40 am
Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel about the Biafran war, told from the perspective of three people on the Biafran side. It switches back and forth between their lives pre-war and the war years. Adichie is too young to have been part of the war herself, but I gather from the Author’s Note that her parents [...]
Reading is a way round the world
1 August 2008 – 8:48 am
I used to have a cookbook for kids — still do, come to think of it — called Cooking is a Way Round the World. Hence the post title. To quote Julie:
In one of my Goodreads groups, a clever person had the idea of each of us challenging ourselves to read a book by an [...]
‘Microcosm’ by Carl Zimmer
27 July 2008 – 11:31 am
Full title: Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life. The bacteria Escherichia coli is best known for occasionally causing food poisoning outbreaks, but most strains of it are harmless and indeed a normal part of our gut flora. It’s also one of the most-studied life forms on earth because, like fruit flies and [...]
‘The Stuff of Thought’ by Steven Pinker
22 July 2008 – 9:59 am
This is the latest of Pinker’s books on various aspects of language and psychology. Specifically, it looks at what language can tell us about the ways the human mind understands the world. For example, the various tenses available to us might tell us something about the human brain’s inherent models for understanding time. Or different [...]
Links
15 July 2008 – 10:00 am
Emperor of Ice-Cream Cakes: Poems Are Jokes: Brace Yourselves
'This is clearly an illustration from some alternate Anne of Green Gables, one in which Marilla sends her away to an institution instead of keeping her, and grief renders her into a transcendental halfwit.'
(del.icio.us tags: books funny illustrations )
The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters
13 July 2008 – 6:54 pm
The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley, is a selection of letters between the various Mitford sisters, who were an extraordinary bunch. From oldest to youngest: Nancy was the novelist who wrote Love In A Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love; Pamela was least remarkable; Diana married Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union [...]
Happy Bloomsday
16 June 2008 – 12:04 pm
June 16th is Bloomsday, the date that Leopold Bloom spends wandering the streets of Dublin in Ulysses.
The picture above is taken from Joyce Images, a site ’dedicated to illustrating Ulysses using period documents’. And here’s a bit of Sirens:
Bronze by gold, Miss Douce’s head by Miss Kennedy’s head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the [...]
‘The Invention of Tradition’
14 June 2008 – 12:32 pm
The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, is a selection of essays by different historians. To quote the blurb:
Many of the traditions which we think of as ancient in their origins were, in fact, invented comparatively recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention [...]
There’s a great quote in [...]
‘Going Dutch’ by Lisa Jardine
1 June 2008 – 9:55 am
Full, slightly overblown title: Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory. This is a book about the relationship between England and Holland in the C17th. It’s an interesting period, of course: the C17th was Holland’s ‘Golden Age’, when the country was not only a wealthy global power but at the intellectual and especially artistic forefront of Europe. For [...]
‘The Mabinogion’ trans. Sioned Davies
29 May 2008 – 11:19 am
I didn’t do my normal thing of looking for appropriate reading materials before going on holiday — I mean, I’d already read How Green Was My Valley and Under Milk Wood, so there didn’t seem to be much point in looking for anything else.*
But when I was running out of reading matter and went to [...]
‘The Transit of Venus’ by Shirley Hazzard
27 May 2008 – 4:39 pm
Like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, I bought this on the basis of a Bryan Appleyard article where he mentioned Hazzard as one of his contenders for greatest living novelist; in fact, he entertained the possibility that The Transit of Venus was ‘the most perfect novel written in the past 100 years’.
I was less taken by this one [...]
‘The Secret Agent’ by Joseph Conrad
27 May 2008 – 1:55 pm
This is one of the great novelistic portraits of London: a London full of smoke and fog, seedy backstreet pubs, horse-drawn cabs, and gaslights. That’s what I like best about it, really, the London it creates and the grotesque characters that inhabit it: Verloc himself, the secret agent and seller of pornography, his coterie of seedy, ageing [...]
‘Shakespeare: The Biography’ by Peter Ackroyd
27 May 2008 – 1:31 pm
The definite article in the title seems a little hubristic. I don’t know if this is the definitive biography of Shakespeare — haven’t read any of the hundreds of others — but I certainly enjoyed it.
I don’t know if I completely trust Ackroyd as a historian; it’s probably unfair, but I just get a nagging sense sometimes that [...]
‘Bones, Rocks and Stars’ by Chris Turney
5 May 2008 – 10:21 am
Or to give it its fuller, more informative title: Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened. It is what it sounds like: a brief (under 200 pages, including the index) overview of dating technologies for a general audience: radio isotope dating, dendrochronology, Antarctic ice cores and so on. And I enjoyed it; [...]
‘The Century of Revolution’ by Christopher Hill
28 April 2008 – 11:53 am
The full title is The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714; i.e. the century in question is the longish C17th from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Queen Anne. I guess most centuries are centuries of revolution somewhere, and in one way or another, but the C17th was the only time the English have had an actual [...]
1984 by George Orwell
19 March 2008 – 2:11 pm
I picked this up to read again because I’ve just read a biography of Stalin. I think I first read 1984 when I was really quite young — certainly no older than my teens; in fact I may have made a point of reading it in 1984, when I was nine or ten — and [...]