Reviews and Comments

This book definitely isn't for everyone but for those who it's for (word and history nerds) it is really really for.

A book about how America added to the English language doubles as a history of the country, something blindingly obvious in retrospect. Every stage of Americas history mapped out by the words created during that period. Depressions and gold rushes, slavery and emancipation, desperation and invention, modesty and arrogance, innocence and cruelty, social freedoms and economic losses, you see how all played out in America and set the benchmark for the modern world. This book perfectly captures the wild, heady, inspirational years of Americas growth into the behemoth it is today.

And so many words created or grown there! Even many foreign words that have entered English parlance (rendezvous, tsunami, kindergarten, glitch, guru) found their entry through Ellis Island. Honestly by the end of the book it's hard to imagine saying a single sentence without having some influence from the new world.

This book ain't great. There will be spoilers.

The writing is bad. And yes, I appreciate there's a cultural gap but the only thing worse than me completely ignoring cultural differences would be me saying "oh maybe stale dialogue, shallow characters, and messy structure are how all Chinese people write".

And to be honest I can forgive the writing, some sci fi authors are better at coming up with cool concepts than writing well (cough Phillip K Dick) so it's not necessarily the end of the world.

My number one issue with this book is that, for a book apparently all about hard science, it has such a profound disrespect for both science and scientists.

The entire crux of the plot - the sophons (which lets be honest, is straight up magic and raises more questions than it answers) stopping particle accelerators from working will cause scientists to just give up on researching things - is completely insulting. History is full of nothing but scientists working around handicaps, and often relishing the challenge. Instead this book treats scientists as close minded and lazy who give up as soon as there's a hurdle.

Don't get me wrong, I really loved reading a story by a Chinese author that is so informed by Chinese history and culture, but I can't forgive that mistreatment of an entire discipline.

I might still read book two though, the series is so popular I feel like I should give it a try.

A masterpiece.

I am sad I don't know anyone whose read any John Le Carré, let alone a whole bunch of them, so I can share with them the majesty that is this book. I wouldn't recommend this as the first book of his to read but it's probably his best. An experienced writer using the trappings of the genre he is famous for to tell a deeply personal story. It's not really a spy novel, it's literary fiction using a spy novel as cover.

John Le Carré is the Charles Dickens of the 20th Century. Writing popular stories populated with larger-than-life yet totally real characters, telling stories that hold a mirror up to society showing its worst parts, but done in a spirit of understanding and love.

And genuinely funny. Every time he talks about Americans it's brilliant, whenever he has Grant Lederer in the scene it's the perfect mixture of hilarious and brutal, capturing this smug buffoon whose technically right but you don't like him for it, he's too crass and clueless. There's definitely a theme there if you want, or you can just have a laugh.

That's part of what makes the books so great, they are entertaining in their own right, completely absorbing characters and plots, but they are also chock full of themes, the most obvious being a beautifully tragic meditation on the decline of empire.

It seems impossible to balance showing how meaningless the aspirations of a society are, why it has to change, but also why it's still a little sad to see it gone - somehow John Le Carré manages to pull it off in style.

Ok first off, my copy is titled ‘The Maths of Life and Death’, now technically as an Australian who speaks the kings English I should be pronouncing it ‘maths’ but you know what? ‘Math’ sounds better and also makes more sense etymologically, so I’m going to defensively stick to math.

Now to the book, it’s a series of standalone articles about how math (and numbers more broadly) influences real world events. This is anything from evidence in court, algorithms optimising your feed, news agents reporting “facts”, and a whole heap more.

Each article includes a fairly easy to read explanation of the different number principles being discussing (whether it’s statistics, probabilities, or even the concept of numbers themselves), so it’s a nice primer to understand the concepts and see how it applies to reality. Plus because it’s articles, it’s very easy to put down and pick up again when the mood strikes for some more math.

As a male comedian in his mid 30's whose attended the Edinburgh Fringe for almost a decade, whose career feels stalled, and is struggling with the most difficult breakup of his life, Dolly Alderton bringing out a book about a male comedian in his mid 30's whose attended the Edinburgh Fringe for almost a decade, whose career feels stalled, and is struggling with the most difficult breakup of his life, feels like the universe has given up on sending me subtle hints.

It's impossible to be objective about a book that has you saying things like "That's not what I did!"

But I'll try.

The book is funny with some good characters, you know exactly where the stories going but it's still fun getting there. Between both Andy and Jen's points of view, everyone whose gone through a breakup will be able to relate to something. Like technically, I was Jen (though also technically the exact opposite of Jen - a relationship confirmed all her opinions, a breakup made me sort out what I didn't know).

Dolly tries her best to be empathetic with the male experience, you can tell she's gone out of her way to do her research but, just like the standup comedy elements, it's very much written by someone on the outside looking in. While the comedian elements mostly work, the male emotional elements felt like cliches started creeping in.

The most glaring example of this is the way she describes the male friendship group dynamics after the breakup, which feel like the book was written in 1987. Sure in real life the group will go get drunk, that's a given, but they will definitely also have stories to share about the emotional difficulty of breakups, especially a group of guys in their mid 30's. You're going to have at least one guy wanting to talk about it too much, if anything.

What is lacking in the Andy POV narrative is actually taken too far in the other direction when Dolly writes from Jens perspective. I think Dolly made the mistake of being unable to separate herself from her character, she couldn't handle making Jen "the bad guy" or unaware in any way, and the point she was making suffered for it. From a narrative standpoint the choice Jen made should've been starker, like she was giving up something beautiful or betraying someone who didn't deserve it for the sake of what she really wanted, that way the choice has weight. As it stands its still nice to see this idea of being happy alone talked about, but the choice isn't exactly hard when it's not even a real relationship.

"You should choose to be happy alone rather than stay with a selfish whinger who slags off your entire family and doesn't support you emotionally, financially, or mentally" isn't quite the groundbreaking point it's made out to be.

Having said all that, the book helped me realise I've been floating in a limbo of impossible hopes for way too long, so whatever, 5 stars.

Tom Holland has written a very big and bold book on the entire history of Christianity to show how it relates to every facet of our modern culture, both good and bad. I have to wonder how cherry picked his events are, but even so it is a great read from a reputable historian who knows his stuff. Turns out I didn't know a lot, like what came before the Old Testament, or how much the Greeks influenced Christianity, or how Christian England is.

The core ideas of his thesis, that Christianity is genuinely unique for its focus on the weak and the downtrodden being worthy of praise, symbolised perfectly by the idea of venerating Christ for dying on the cross, and that Christianity is a movement/religion that has revolution built into it, are very convincing.

And I just love the boldness. The way Tom writes it, if you can think of a concept, Christianity created it. Atheism? Christian. Religion? Christian. The Enlightenment? So Christian. Homosexuality? Literally invented by Saint Paul.

A fun part of reading a sweeping tome like this is when it starts self-referencing, you get these satisfying little callbacks to councils/events/places from centuries or millennia before and how they are reinterpreted or referenced at later dates.

Can't wait to explain to everyone for the rest of my life how Christianity shaped everything in the modern world. And since it turns out Christianity is way more Greek than I ever realised, Greeks really did invent everything.

This book has made me at least 12% more annoying.