Paul Murdin: Exoplanets: The Search for Earth’s Twin The discovery and initial characterisation of solar systems beyond our own has been one of the great scientific successes of the past thirty years. More than 6,400 so-called ‘exoplanets‘ are now known, orbiting more than 4,000 stars, and they form a fascinating zoo, from gas giants far exceeding in mass that of our own mighty Jupiter, but orbiting so close to their parent star that they practically graze it; to rocky ‘super Earths’; to ‘super puffs’ – planets as light as thistledown. The field is still growing fast and the definitive guide has yet to be written. This certainly isn’t it. The search for ‘Earth’s twin’ is a poor framing device. Part of the reason is that the methods of detection are not yet so advanced that one has a good, unbiased view of what’s out there, particularly for smallish rocky planets orbiting stars brighter than a 20-watt bulb. For good technical reasons, detection is biased towards planets that are very large, orbiting very close to small, dim parent stars, or both. We have as yet only a sketchy idea of exoplanetary atmospheres. And this book, as a book, is poor. It looks like a print-on-demand product, cheaply made, given the purchase price. The pictures are nice, but the lack of an index is startling and the absence of references, unforgivable.
Nick Hornby: High Fidelity Ah, nostalgia. If, in your youth, you used to haunt record shops, when there were still records (and shops), this will strike a (ahem) chord. The protagonist owns a scruffy and failing record shop in North London with two deadbeat friends, and their recreation is to compile charts of the three best this or that. I can’t really remember what happens after that, but suffice it to say that it’s a coming-of-age novel in which the characters are forced out of their state of arrested development. Charming.
Charles Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby Every so often I am driven to Dickens, mostly because I have to take a taxi to (and especially from) that kind of party, so I listened to an audiobook. The reader was marvellous, capturing all the many nuances and dialects of the novel’s vast cast of grotesques. Nicholas and Kate Nickleby and their airhead of a mother are left bereft by the death of Nickleby Sr. who, as a result of poor investment advice (prompted by his wife) has left virtually nothing, and the family is thrown on to the meagre mercy of Uncle Ralph (a prototype for Scrooge). The young Nicklebys are forced to seek employment. Nicholas travels to Yorkshire to become an assistant Master at Dotheboys Hall (Proprietor: Wackford Squeers), a kind of concentration camp where those of moderate means send their crippled, simple-minded and illegitimate offspring. (The novel threw light on the real-life scandal of these so-called ‘Yorkshire Schools‘). Kate becomes an assistant to a Mrs Mantellini, a milliner and dressmaker on the brink of ruin thanks to the gloriously spendthrift husband. And so the clockwork, once set, runs along: the good triumph, and the bad come to sticky ends. This cumbrous edifice of a novel skates just above the slough of despond thanks to the marvellous writing, the constant tone of sardonic humour, and the memorable characters such as Smike and Newman Noggs, especially those who try to rise above their natural and parlous state and so achieve some kind of redemption. These days one needs a certain amount of patience to enjoy Dickens, but people at the time lapped it up, presumably because there wasn’t much on TV and the internet hadn’t been invented.
Leigh Bardugo: Dead Beat This is the third in a trilogy. I have previously reviewed Ninth House and Hell Bent, and you really have had to have read the latter immediately before Dead Beat as it continues straight on, and without some reminder it’s hard to make much sense of what’s going on. The premise is this – where do all those promising witches and wizards go after Hogwarts? To Yale of course, where Lethe is a magical society whose task is to police the rituals of the other eight. We see the world through the eyes of Harry Potter Galaxy ‘Alex’ Stern, a feral Californian college dropout who has been recruited to Yale more for her magical powers and sheer cojones than for any academic merit. The Ninth House trilogy is very much in the Potter vein except that there’s a lot of sex, violence and violent sex, with or without drugs, and it’s much better written. In Dead Beat we find that Lethe itself is rotten to the core and, after our hero and heroine foil an attempt of the Demons of Hell to break into the waking world, go off into the sunset in search of more sequels. Or so I hope. Alex Stern is a well-rounded character, as is her beau, gentleman and New England blueblood Daniel Arlington V, and who wouldn’t want to fall in love with their housemate and helpmeet Pamela Dawes?
Buzz Baum: I: A Biography of the Biological Self A deeply personal account of how individual human beings are made of a myriad of fusions of smaller bodies, right back to archaea and bacteria at the dawn of life. DISCLAIMER: This book comes out in February 2027. I was sent a pre-publication copy.
Graham Farmelo: Hawking: His Life and Work This is the authorised biography of a truly remarkable person of whose existence I am sure you are both aware, and as I have written about it in extenso, and what’s more at length, I have posted my review separately.
