Second quarter reading

Another quarter ends, and it turns out I've managed to read a book or two.  In some ways, this is quite a surprise, because I've been busy in other ways this quarter.  I managed to meet my target for cycling distance over the quarter and I've been on holiday.

Connie Willis - To Say Nothing of the Dog

Warning: this book contains time travel.  I mention this because it is enough to guarantee that my wife won't look at it (although she did watch "It's About Time" with me and appeared to enjoy it).  Two time-travelling characters from the future accidentally alter the course of history by causing the wrong couples to fall in love, and must then arrange for them to reorganise themselves in their historical pairings.  It's rather like a week at a country house with Jeeves & Wooster except that if they fail, instead of Bertie having to marry Madeleine Bassett, the future will be altered and Bertie may no longer exist.

The book makes several references to Three Men in a Boat (including the title, of course), as well as Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which should attract knowing smiles from readers who recognise them.  I can't say how much of the enjoyment is lost if you haven't read those two books, but if you haven't I advise to drop whatever you're reading currently and read both of those two immediately.  The tone and language in the historical sections were well done, and it made for a fine holiday read.

I mention the language because this book contains the word "doffed", which sets my teeth on edge (since I am by nature an Edwardian out of time).  The verbs to don and to doff are contractions of to do on or to do off, dating from the 14th century.  These days we might take off an overcoat and put on a dressing gown, but back then they would do off the coat and do on the gown.  This was shortened to doff the coat and don the gown.  All fine, but if someone did off a coat before doing on a gown there would be no contraction to "doffed" or "donning".  I was taught this at school (in a different century).  These days "doffed" appears in Merriam-Webster but Tolkien used the older style in The Return of the King when Aragorn “did off the star of Elendil”.  This style may be obsolescent now, but would have been standard usage in 1888. See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/do_off and https://arnoldzwicky.org/2013/07/17/surprising-etymologies/

I don't think of myself as pedantic, but the more you learn the more it hurts to hear someone else get it wrong. And since that's my only complaint about the book, this can be considered a strong recommendation.

Bill Bryson - Shakespeare

It is unusual for non-fiction to be laugh-out-loud funny, but Bryson managed several solid laughs in this volume.  Perhaps he has an easy target, since so little is certain about Shakespeare and therefore so many wild theories have been produced with no supporting evidence.  We know almost nothing about Shakespeare's life (not even how he spelled his name), and the little that is properly documented, such as his will, raises more questions than it answers (such as why the only thing he left to his wife was their second-best bed).  Even our record of the plays is incomplete and contradictory between the different printed versions from an age when the typesetter might change a few words because he thought they looked wrong.  

Beside Shakespeare himself the book provides background on the theatre in his time and the political and religious turmoil through which he lived. Bryson also describes the suggestions that someone else wrote the plays and ridicules the lack of evidence for them.

At the end of the book we may not have learned much about Shakespeare, but we may understand that there is not much more to learn with any certainty.  Someone almost certainly called Shakespeare and from Stratford wrote a body of plays which is still admired today. The text was edited for each performance, for example to reduce Hamlet to the length of a feature film, and the version we have now may not be one that was ever staged; it may be like the special edition DVD with all the deleted scenes and bonus features.  But does that matter?

Bryson's other book "Mother Tongue" has a fascinating chapter on Shakespeare's legacy for the English language.  Here it is reduced to two pages, but still conveys the message of how many commonplace words and phrases in modern English were first seen in writing when Shakespeare used them.  Now I need to find an equivalent review of Milton's legacy, which looks to be almost as substantial.

Ali Hazelwood - Love on the Brain

I enjoyed The Love Hypothesis, the story of a female graduate student's awkward relationship with the most unfriendly man in the world, which turns out to be caused by mutual misunderstandings that resolve into romance.  So I read this next volume, which turns out not to be a sequel but a completely separate story about a female PHD researcher's awkward relationship with the most unfriendly man in the world, which turns out to be caused by mutual misunderstandings that resolve into romance.  There are differences between the two books, and on balance I prefer the other plot elements in this one than the first, so I recommend it as the one to read if you don't feel the need to read both.

Neal Stephenson - Anathem

And so we come to something of substance, weighing in at almost a thousand pages in paperback and using so many new words that it includes dictionary entries to let you read it.  Imagine a world where monasteries are isolated communities that preserve knowledge and advance study but with no religious connection, somewhere between a monastery and a university.  This is the story of a group of junior students, aged around 18. Like The Lord of the Rings, it begins with the little adventures of little people, being late for a lecture, getting into scrapes, dodging the authorities, and grows into a world-spanning adventure and beyond.

Along the way it has philosophical dialogues reminiscent of Plato, futuristic technology, very old technology, quantum mechanics and space travel.  It's difficult to say more without giving away the story line.  So much of what is happening does not become apparent until at least half-way through the book and some of the big themes are even later.

Unlike Stephenson's other big novels it barely mentions cryptography, and has no reference to Qwghlm, which is a plus for me.  Sadly there was a little bit of donning and doffing, but it is excusable in the context.  Like the almost-Latin or almost-Greek terminology for what happens inside the precinct of the monastery.

There is definitely some science fiction in there, but it's quite difficult to spot which items are speculative, unproven or just plain fantasy in such a rich mixture of real science, logic and philosophy.  The wikipedia article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem] explains, but is full of spoilers, so don't read it until after the book itself.