Books read October

Slightly up from September, but there’s no way I’ll equal last years record of 150 books read.

Northern Shores — Alan Palmer
An attempt to write a comprehensive history of the Baltic, from prehistory to contemporary times. It didn’t entirely succeed, as some parts of the book lose the focus on the Baltic as a whole, instead telling the histories of the countries surrounding it in turn, losing the commonality.

Industrial Evolution — Through the Eighties with Cabaret Voltaire — Mick Fish
Is it just me, or did most of the more interesting music scenes in the late seventies, early eighties in the UK were in dying industrial towns? Liverpool with the Teardrops and Echo and the Bunnymen and such, Manchester with the whole Factory scene and Sheffield, with Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League. Mick Fish was a drug addled, boozed up hanger-on there, having a job in a London council garbage dump, spending his weekends in Sheffield, but he doesn’t half write funny and entertainingly.

Buried Treasure — Victoria Finlay
An interesting idea, to look at nine different sorts of jewels, ranked according to the Mohs scale, but unfortunately it’s all a bit shallow, more about Finlay’s travels to far, exotic places in search of these gems, rather than about the gems themselves.

The Constants of Nature — John D. Barrow
One of the greatest problems is astrophysics is the existence of various physical constants, like the speed of light, the gravitational constant and the fine structure constant, whose values have all been observed but which cannot be predicted from theory. They might just random properties of the universe we live in, something with which physicists are never comfortable with, or they may be something more our current science cannot explain yet. This book tries to explain this problem to a lay audience and did it well, though it is math heavy and sometimes neglects to explain its maths.

The Stars my Destination — Alfred Bester
After a series of disappointing science fiction books, I wanted to read something good. This was just the ticket.

Globalhead — Bruce Sterling
A collection of short stories, most written while the eighties turned into the nineties, the Cold War ended and nobody knew what would happen afterwards yet.

The Extravagant Universe — Robert P. Kirshner
An excellent overview of recent developments (well, 2002) in cosmology, for once written by an astronomer rather than an astrophysicist. The emphasis is on how supernovea have been used to drive research into whether or not we are living in an ever expanding universe, one that is going to rebound eventually or one that’s right on the edge.

Unseem Academicals — Terry Pratchett
The latest Discworld novel, the first one to be dictated, rather than written, after Terry was diagnosed with Alzheimers. It’s good as any of them: this time it’s all about football.

The Instrumentality of Mankind — Cordwainer Smith
Back in the seventies Ballantine/Del Rey collected all of Cordwainer Smith’s fiction in four volumes. This is the last one, collecting all the odds and ends that didn’t fit elsewhere. Luckily, Smith’s odds and ends are better than many a writer’s best stories.