Tag Archives: book

Now #reading … (experiencing?)

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Silent History

This is not just a book — audio and pictures as well. I have only just downloaded it, so am still exploring.

It is a medical thriller / science fiction story that takes place thirty or so years in the future, and documents a growing number of young children who are born starting around 2011 and grow up never speaking.

Looks good so far.

Alan Turing as a young student

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What do young geniuses read, anyway?

I cannot resist a good math article, or a good computer science tidbit, or a good history of math article, and I seem to have found all three of them in one place, Alex Bellos’s blog, in (as of this reading) in two entries about Alan Turing’s reading and study habits while at Sherborne School which he attended for what we in America would call high school.

Book list

First up is a list of the books that Turing borrowed from the school library.

The books are almost all ones about physics and mathematics, with two exceptions. One is The Escaping Club by A. J. Evans, which is about the author’s escape from an inescapable German prison camp in WWI, and the other the works of Lewis Carroll, which would seem out of place to someone who didn’t know that Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, was a professor of mathematical logic at Oxford.

School reports

Then we have Alan Turing’s school reports, wherein we find out tidbits like the fact that he did not do very well in Latin.

As for math class, in Michaelmas term of 1926, his teacher writes: Works well. He is still very untidy. He must try to improve in this respect. I can only comment that tidiness isn’t everything.

By 1930, he is improved enough in math that he gets this comment: A really able mathematician. His trouble is his untidiness & poor style, but he has tried hard to improve in this. He sometimes fails over a simple problem by trying to do it by complicated methods, instead of by an elementary one.

So there we have the first sign of genius: the simple methods of problem solving are too easy for Turing, and he has to try to find the harder methods — don’t just look at a clock to see what time it is, but take the clock apart to see how it works and see why it says the time that it does.

The books themselves

As for the books that Turing read, most are, of course, out of copyright by now, and can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg. This link is to a list of the available books.

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Reading the Forsytes

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I don’t know why I have left it to my advanced stage in life to discover Galsworthy and his attendant Forsyte Saga, but there it is — chief right now among that near-infinite gathering of things I should have done long ago. But at least I have started the saga: three volumes, three books per. They go fast.

We start at the beginning with a collection of the Forsyte family at a party to celebrate the engagement of one of its youngest members, June, to a penniless architect of whom nobody in the family knows anything. The ten siblings, none under 70, who make up the senior layer of the clan are introduced. The rest of the first book’s actions follow two of the clan: Soames, who succumbs to jealousy of his wife’s attentions, and Jolyon Sr. who attempts reconciliation with a son whom he had disowned years before. Galsworthy does not bog down these books with the heaps of atmosphere and description that can slow me down when I read Dickens, but I still have to pause in the reading of it every once in a while and revive myself: too much of this book reminds me of my own family members (many of them, at least). I keep a couple of other novels handy in which to escape from my escape into Galsworthy.

Right now, one of them is The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. It was preceded by Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife which just came out two weeks ago and is very wonderful.

Now I shall quit typing and read.

Done with Lit. Next, This Boy’s Life

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Tobias Wolff at an event at Kepler's in Menlo ...

Image via Wikipedia

I have finished Mary Karr‘s Lit, minutes before Sally and Other Patti came over for our usual Movie Night. I usually don’t use the word “harrowing” when talking about — well, anything — but that is an adequate adjective here. There is probably a better adjective, but I cannot come up with one on the spur of the moment.

I loved the book. It also exhausted me. Her dealing with her own demons got a few of mine to waken a small bit. However, I would read the book again in a second if I did not already have her first memoir, The Liar’s Club, winging its way to me from Amazon, and MK’s friend and mentor’s book — Tobias Wolff‘s This Boy’s Life — sitting on the table next to me, about to be pounced on in turn.

Much autobiographical introspection: what can drag you out of yourself better than that?

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