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I finished my third book of the year at the bus stop this evening. It’s been a fun month of reading, but the French has taken a hit. I haven’t done a single lesson since 2004. So, before I switch back to silently practicing lanugages on the train, a look at the three that have gone by so far.

I started The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum last year - just after I received it, and the other three entries in the trilogy for my birthday in September, so it took a long time to read. It shouldn’t have done. The text isn’t all that small and it’s a fairly average 566 pages, but what with the moving, and going on holiday in the middle of it all, it got somewhat distracting.

It’s massively different to the film. Just about the only thing that matches is his name, and even that changes in the last couple of chapters. It takes place almost exclusively in Switzerland and Paris, and the woman who, in the film, he meets in the American embassy is actually a delegate from the Canadian government in the book.

It wasn’t particularly well read, but it was a good distraction, and having finished it for a few weeks now I’m keen to see what happens in the next two volumes, but if it had been trimmed by a healthy 50% it would have been a fast-paced, addictive read. At the length it is, it plods a little.

I have read The Hippopotamus perhaps more times than any other. I could probably quote chunks without too much effort, and it’s certainly my favourite Stephen Fry book. I hadn’t planned on reading it again so soon, but then Tuesday’s recording made it a necessity. I’m quite glad about that, really, as it gets better with each read. The dialogue, in particularly, is very well-written.

It’s very short. According to the introduction it’s just 94,536 words long, although having gone through the early years of the MacUser archive this morning searching for the pieces written by Stephen Fry when he was an occasional writer on the mag I’ve decided to take that that on faith. ‘And now to the thorny problem of word counts,’ he wrote in an issue back in August 1987. ‘A quick cross check between MacAuthor, ProCount and Word Count reveals I have so far written 497 words … or 698 … or 720.’

So perhaps the 94,536 could just as easily be 101,101.

Of the three books I’ve read so far this year it is the only one I would recommend without reservation. It can still make me laugh out loud.

And the book I finished today was A Short History of Almost Everything by Bill Bryson. No non-fiction book has ever aroused in me so many emotions. At times it was amusing. Most of the time it was fascinating. But overall, it is really quite depressing. It’s not the extended section in the middle that deals with the effects of a massive asteriod hitting our planet (near global extinction), or the volcano under Yellowstone Park erupting (near global extinction), which was absolutely riveting and a far more exciting read than almost any adventure story. Rather, it was the feeling of insignificance you take away with you once you’ve finished the last page.

If you stretched your arms out as wide as you can reach, he explains at one point, and imagine that the span between the end of the middle finger on your right hand and the end of the middle finger on your left hand represents the whole time that the earth has been in existence, then just lightly brushing a nail file across the end of one of those middle fingers would wipe out what represents the whole time the human species has existed.

Now imagine what a tiny part of that span of human existence represents the amount of time you will be alive, and consider what a tiny, microscopic, unbelievably, incomprehensibly small part of the whole span from one middle finger to the other that is… and you can see how this is an utterly compelling, totally fascinating, dreadfully depressing volume.

Would I recommend it to anyone else? No, probably not. Towards the end such a dreadful grey cloud settled over me every time I picked it up that I couldn’t wait to get to the end.

Instead, I’d recommend reading the first few chapters, so Bryson can boggle you with extraordinary facts about the size and complexity of our universe, skipping to chapters 13, 14 and 15 so you can see how easily we can be destroyed by asteroids, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and then quietly, swiftly slip it back onto the shelf before it spoils your day.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 3rd, 2005 at 10:31 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.