Reading on the rates

I have borrowed 100 books from the library this year – 10 more than last year.

I know, not because I have been diligently keeping track of every one, but because I found that the new on-line version of the catalogue can show me my loans history ever since I first acquired a ticket here in 2003. Although the display is very easy to read there is no way of analysing it other than manually, but I found that a librarian can arrange to download the information as an Excel spreadsheet, though sadly this is limited to the last two years of data.

It has been a good year for reading, of titles old & new, interesting, challenging & memorable. On the non-fiction side there is mostly science (last year was more history, politics, & biography & language). New books: James Gleick’s The Information & Thomas Wright’s Circulation are both superb at placing science in the wider culture; older works, Nature’s Imagination & Kuhn on paradigms stimulated my thinking about the nature & limits of science; Daniel Tammet’s Thinking in Numbers is so beautifully written; Nexus & Tubes taught me much about the physical internet & the mathematics of small world connectivity. Then John Gribbin’s Schrodinger biography cast some surprising light on the private life of physicists while Nevil Shute’s autobiographical memoir Slide Rule told much about the early years of the aeroplane industry & why lack of capital made it unlikely that British plane makers could ever compete on their own in the global mass marketplace of the C20th.

On the fiction side I stumbled across wonderful Uncle Petros, caught up with Penelope Lively & ‘discovered’ the works of Stanley Middleton – slightly old-fashioned tales of still waters running deeper than you might expect among middle-class middle-aged provincial suburbanites.

And I found that Cath Staincliffe had kept on with writing books – not, as I had assumed she must, drifted off into script writing. It was just that her books were not in the place I went looking for them – under crime fiction – but have migrated to what the library, in its innocence, calls Adult Fiction.