As we already close in on the end of the second month of the year, I’ve just finished my fifth and sixth books of 2005. Something of a ready frenzy has come over me this year. I don’t know why. Or how. I suspect things are about to slow down, though, as I’ve just started An Ordinary Guy by Mona Simpson. She’s Steve Jobs’ biological sister, and it’s said to be a thinly veiled portrait of his life, so I feel it’s a bit of a call of duty read.

Very well written - I ploughed through the first 26 pages on the train this evening - but looks like it’s going to get hard going. I feel I really ought to persevere, though, as my last two reads were very light and flimsy and it took ages to track it down. I eventually got it second hand on Amazon for a bargain 10p. A price that was well outweighed by the cost of delivery.

Bill Bryson is always a rewarding read. This one, in particular, was full of extraordinary facts about the sheer size and scale of Australia. To a little islander like any UK reader, the distances involved are beyond comprehension. He really puts things into perspective in the first couple of chapters when he relates the widely-believed story that the same cult that released Sarin gas on the Tokyo subway had originally been plotting to use a nuclear weapon, and in fact exploded a test device in the middle of the Australian desert. So remote was that spot in the desert that nobody knew about the experiment for years.

He of course runs through the long list of lethal animals and plants - as everyone who has ever written about Australia seems to do - but then, of course, takes things further, as he is prone to do, and explains some of the nasty effects those lethal specimins can have on you. The most terrifying is the story of the swimmer stung by a particular kind of jellyfish. The pain was so great that even when they had knocked him out with anaesthetic he was still screaming, and screaming and screaming.

He died.

For anyone who plans on reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, Down Under (or In a Sunburned Country as it’s called in other countries) would be a good introduction, since it comes to an end in one of the key geographical spots of that more scientific history book. Still, though, I’m not sure I would necessarily recommend some of the weightier tracks of Short History to a general audience, as some of the bits you ‘need’ to read to get a fuller picture, are actually quite a chore.

World War II for Beginners was an attempt to get myself better educated about world history. I bought it in Borders, where the sales assistant smirked at the title and asked me if it was a self help book to help me start my own personal second world war. It all stemmed from a discussion we had in the office - not about the second world war, but the first - and I was surprised about how much I remembered from a book I’d read on the subject three or four years ago. I still have it, so went back and flicked through it again, and decided it was only right to read up on what went next.

Unfortunately, though, there seems to be something of a dearth of accessible and not over-long second world war books on the shelves, and this one seemed to offer the best balance of comprehensive information and brevity. On getting into it, though, I think it played too much on the brevity front, and so skipped through a lot of important stuff. The failed assassination of Hitler was dispensed with in little more than a page, when actually it was one of the most interesting points of the war.

To give it its credit, though, it does seem to be fairly balanced and gives equal time to the Allies and Axis forces, as well as explaining the motivations behind each side’s actions. It’s also refreshingly matter-of-fact when it comes to the American involvement.

So, one book to add to the recommend pile, I think, and one… perhaps not.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.