Barbara Reynolds. Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (1993)

     Barbara Reynolds. Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (1993) Published in the centenary of Sayers’ birth, this biography gives us a sense of Dorothy the person. This arises in part from Reynolds’ friendship with Dorothy, and in part from frequent quotations from her letters.
     Dorothy turns out to have been a social and fiscal conservative, but more importantly a woman with a great capacity for joy, fun, and delight. Reynolds believes that Dorothy’s defining characteristic was her great pleasure in intellectual work. This biography naturally supports this point of view, but I think that it’s a valid one, if the letters cited represent Sayer’s belief about and responses to life. I would have liked to know Sayers; and I can’t say that of most subjects of biographies. Also, this book sends me back to Sayers’ work. One thing I would like to know is whether Anthony Fleming, Sayers’ son, married and had children. It would be a kind of comfort to know that Sayers had descendants. *** (2002)

Dorothy Sayers. Hangman’s Holiday (1933)

 

    Dorothy Sayers. Hangman’s Holiday (1933) Several stories about Wimsey and Montague Egg, plus a couple of psychological crime stories. Very much of their period, neat puzzles, nicely told. Sayers puts her own twist on standard plots – locked room mysteries, mistaken identities, and so on. I like rereading her tales; they give reliable pleasure. In these stories, Wimsey is still a fatuous ass, a sort of intelligent Bertie Wooster (which I suppose was the point of the joke). I’d forgotten what a personable young man Monty Egg is; he would make a good series character. The psychological stories don’t succeed as well; one reading is enough for them. They are “railway reading”; railway reading figures in one of them, so Sayers would not be offended by this characterisation. Slight as these stories are, they take considerable skill to concoct, and even more to write convincingly. *** (2002)

Philip J. Davis. The Thread: A Mathematical Yarn (1989)

     Philip J. Davis The Thread: A Mathematical Yarn (1989) A charming book, telling how the author, a mathematician, became curious about Pafnuty, the first name of his hero, Pafnuty Lvovitch Tschebyscheff, a pioneer in the mathematics of approximation. Approximation has become a central motif of computing, since every computer can calculate only to some finite number of decimal places. It was the rounding off the 17th digit to display a 16-digit result that led to the discovery of chaos theory. That tiny difference of a few parts in 100 quadrillion made all the difference when the result was fed back into the equations for a second run of a weather prediction model.
     But I digress. Which is what Davis does. Some of his digressions are personal, some technical, some historical. But he leads us down these byways so gracefully that we hardly notice that we are moving further and further away from the ostensible theme of the book: whare does the name Pafnuty come from? Davis brings the thread of his narrative back to this question several times, and finally gives us the answer: it derives from an Egyptian god’s name.
     Along the way, Davis instructs us in all manner of interesting facts. He illustrates one of my dicta: There is no such thing as useless knowledge; at the very least, a fact will serve to link two others. I’ll now add another corollary: and usually, this linkage satisfies our thirst for order and meaning. For order and meaning are fancy words for linkages.
     This is the second time I've read the book, and I enjoyed it just as much as the first time. ****

John Updike. The Same Door (1964)

     John Updike. The Same Door (1964) Updike’s first collection, mostly from The New Yorker. The earlier stories have the feel of experiments, but his melancholy view of the world is there already, as is his acute awareness of social class. North Americans deny the existence and/or importance of social class; Updike is one of many writers who remind us how wrong we are to do so. But unlike, say, Joyce Carol Oates, who tends to look at lower class life from above, Updike merely shows us what’s there. These stories tell more of adolescence, while his later books tell of young married life and the onset of middle age. Updike chronicles our lives; he observes accurately but without rancour. But this book will be enough Updike for a while. The stories range from *-1/2 to ***. (2002)

John Updike. The Music School (1966)

     John Updike. The Music School (1966) A very sixties collection, in which we see Updike’s other great gift, the ability to show you the nature of the times. These people’s choices are circumscribed by self-generated limits, mostly unconscious, certainly unexamined. At the same time, the heroes and heroines of these stories break social conventions, not from any sense that these conventions need changing, but simply because they get in the way of the fulfilment of desire. A more uneven collection than Museums and Women; Updike is still trying out what he can do. **½

John Updike. Museums and Women (1972)

     John Updike. Museums and Women (1972) A collection of Updike’s stories from the 60s and 70s. Most of these were first published in the New Yorker, and it shows. These are New Yorker stories, and then some. All the same, Updike has a gift that transcends that genre. From time to time his sentences make you gasp. He felt her wonder, Who is this child? It was as if the roof of the house were torn off, displaying the depths of the night sky. (From “Solitaire”.)
     He is very good at delineating that vague melancholy that invades people who have nothing much to struggle for, and have found no compelling passion in their lives. They just go on doing what they do because they can think of nothing else that they would rather do. They want happiness, yet their search for it is undercut by a suspicion that they don’t know what happiness is. Updike’s people have everything they could desire, and nothing that they really want. A steady diet of Updike causes a kind of spiritual queasiness. One wonders whether anything has a any sort of point. *** (2002)

Stephen Jay Gould. The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2000)

     Stephen Jay Gould. The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2000) These essays are grouped, the first bunch telling the early history of palaeontology and evolutionary theory. The latter group are a mixed bag. In this collection Gould exhibits a vice that must grow with the awareness that one has made it as an author: he overwrites, rambling on with numerous digressions (and many that aren’t, like the one in this parenthesis), he repeats himself, he builds tangled sentences. In other words, his style gets in the way, which for him is some achievement. Nonetheless, the information is as sound as recourse to original sources can make it, and he does his usual job of debunking common misconceptions and clarifying and deepening common vaguenesses. A book worth reading, despite its flaws.
     He’s especially useful in reminding us that, given a stable environment, organisms will not change - that natural selection can work to stabilise as well as change an organism’s form. *** (2002)
     Update 2020 03 16: Natural slection will also not select against neutral mutations. Hence genetic drift can create subspecies. Also, organisms with insufficient genetic variability are likely to die out if and when habitat changes. That's why rapid habait change will cause extinctions. And because we humans cause rapid habitat change, we also cause extinctions.