This Missy Elliot song is very good.

Also the Pharrell bit is very good in its rhythms, once it's got past the obligatory bit about sperm. (What is it with male rappers and their sperm?) "Hermès Trismegistus" is an excellent lyric. I think it's saying that the fashion industry or consumerism in general is all made-up alchemy. So I have reluctantly decided that Pharrell is quite talented. But I am not going to change my mind about Pitbull.

I've been reading some stuff about Jung. He was very keen on alchemy -- he saw all that soror mystica stuff as a sort of mythologisation of something inside the human soul. I used to think that if I had loads of money I would undergo Jungian analysis, because it's charmingly crazy. Partly this was because in Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy when the alcoholic son has Jungian analysis he's told that every single character he meets in his dreams, without exception, is just an aspect of himself. That idea is very appealing from a self-importance point of view. For example, the other day I had a dream where I worried about the strain on my mother of looking after my very elderly grandmother. If everyone in that dream was me then I can spend some time feeling sorry for myself about the inevitability of aging and mortality. But unfortunately it turns out that's not a Jungian thing at all, so I'm forced to think about other people instead of just myself. Heigh ho.

Internet, you have pleased me

I don't know if this is real, but apparently rumblr is like grindr but for fights. You can taunt each other online first to get into the mood.

These people will put a tweet into cuneiform (Persian from circa 500 BC), bake it onto clay, and post it to you. This is some consolation for the fact that it looks like you can no longer get one of Kanye's tweets hand embroidered to order.

I tried singing this song to my cat. She immediately left the room. I respect her for that.

Asian Mike Lavin And His Cat from Andy C on Vimeo.

Things I have considered calling my cat

So I have a cat now. She came from a rescue shelter, where she had been for four of the six years of her life. We had a difficult start, but we seem to be getting on better. It's not her fault that really I wanted a dog, but couldn't afford the daycare. But it is her fault that I have big red scars on my legs. So, swings and roundabouts. I have no idea what's going on in her head, not even a smidgeon of a jot of an idea. It might be nothing, or it might be something really really complex.

Minxie
This is actually her name, and I'm sticking with it. It's a fine name. If she'd been called Snookums I might have had to change it but Minxie captures her pretty well. She's quite nice but not reliable. She went to the shelter because she took against her owner's new husband and baby. I totally would not trust her with a baby.

Bella
I once decided that if I got a dog I would call her Bella, so I could shout 'Chow Bella' at dinner time. Minxie is not a dog though. If she were a dog I think I'd know how to communicate with her. Also Bella just isn't a very good name.

Victoria Regina
She's really not amused. She is not prepared to play. I've mostly given up trying to get her to. Also even if she does make a leap for a toy, if I twitch it out of the way at the last minute in a playful manner she gets embarrassed and has to pretend she was actually leaping at something else -- or if she puts her paw up to pat it but isn't quick enough she has to pretend she was stretching her foreleg out to lick it instead. I don't understand this. There's only me and her here, and she's missed the boat on dignity where I'm concerned, I clean up her poo.
Apparently Queen Victoria was often amused, but I still bet she wouldn't leap after a mouse on a piece of elastic.

Snarlygoggs
I was reading some seventeenth-century will inventories with notes and came across the word 'snarlygoggs', which apparently is a Devon dialect word for the rough stuff left in the dregs when cider is made, which was often in turn used to make illegal cider brandy. Minxie does snarl at me -- not so much now as before. I came up with a policy which was that if she snarled and hissed I would hiss back and not look away, though I was actually a bit scared of her for a while. I think that at first she was hoping that she could be boss. She's welcome to manipulate me, but I won't be bullied. I don't think I could live with a pet that frightened me.

Kasparov
She's a lazy cat, which is great, but unfortunately she turns out to be quite intelligent, which is not so good. She gets bored. I've got her some cat puzzles, most successfully this treat maze. She has to push the treats down the holes to make them fall out at the bottom. Since I got it our interactions have improved, and she asks for treats to be put in it -- she seems to prefer them like that rather than just given to her. Once I have put the treats in she sits and studies it intently like a chess player planning her first move. She also has a ball which intermittently dispenses treats as it's rolled around. Once it's empty she likes to dribble it to me like a footballer and repeatedly roll it against my feet. I like it when I know what she wants. (Obviously in this case her name would have to be Kaspurrov.)

Merricat
Not that she's merry, but I read Shirley Jackson's American Gothic classic 'We have always lived in the castle', and this is the name for her if what's going on in her head is lots and lots of things. (Also although I've never read any of her books, Edwidge Danticat is a brilliant name.)

Emma Bovary
I think this fits her character quite well. She really really wants, but I don't know what she wants, and I'm not sure she does. She wants to be inside and outside at the same time. She wants me to do something but whatever I try is not that thing. She wants me to open the door so she can go outside, but not that outside, an outside where it's not raining. But I've gone off giving tragic names to pets since when I was fourteen I called our new puppy Tess after Tess of the D'Urbervilles and she died young and horribly. We then got another puppy from Tess's mother's next litter and I called her Eliza-Louisa after 'Liza-Lou, Tess's younger sister whom Angel marries in the book. My family humoured me about all these names, though we actually called her Elly day-to-day, and she lived to a very good dog age. (And anyway the cat's name would clearly have to be something like Emmew Bovary or Emma Bofurry.)

Mini me
She's grumpy, overweight and lazy, doesn't like men or children, gets bored easily and makes herself miserable by over-thinking things. If she could type she'd probably be blogging about me right now. Alternatively, she's a space so blank I can see anything reflected in it...

Snookums
I have occasionally called her Snookums when she curls up on my lap and purrs loudly. I think we'll get on ok in the long term. She keeps making my kitchen smell awful, but if I learnt one thing from the sitcom Friends it's that that's not her fault.

Ow my mind

Our new super computer will have a quarter of a million cores.

A quarter of a million cores!

This just blew my mind so much that I had to post it, even though I'm at work and shouldn't really be writing a blog post. EDIT: turns out that's just the next phase. When it's finished it will have 480 000 cores!!! !1!!!

Videos on the internet

1. How creepy is this? Know your place, women!


2. On the other hand, this evasive dog is very excellent.


3. Hurray for John Oliver! Unfortunately his thing about online harassment is not available in the UK, but this one is quite good:

Politics

My local polling station is at the church up the road. I went on my way home from work. There was a long line of people outside, but it turned out they weren't waiting to vote, but queueing for the Thursday evening soup kitchen. That's politics for you.

Books

1. Soon after writing my blog entry on Exclusion and 'In the Light of What We Know' I read Joyce Carol Oates' 'The Accursed'. Stephen King said of it that it "may be the world's first postmodern Gothic novel", overlooking that Oates herself has already written several postmodern Gothic novels, but you can't really blame him for not being familiar with her oeuvre because she is scarily prolific, and produces a new book about twice a year. Anyway I enjoyed 'The Accursed' hugely, but I did wonder how African American readers would find it. The narrator, unreliable to the extent that he even appears in his own narrative as a baby possibly sired by the devil, tells of terrible hauntings and supernatural crimes in early twentieth-century Princeton, starting when no one will speak out against the lynching of a young black man and his sister. The book concerns itself entirely with the white and variously privileged members of the Princeton community, and I wondered whether it might be offensive to a black reader that the black people in this book are there only to be transgressed against. On the other hand Oates does make it clear that the refusal of the WASPs to engage with the African Americans as human beings is the terrible flaw that destroys their ordered society, and there didn't seem to be any such awareness in 'In the Light of What We Know'. Heigh ho. I expect everyone has different reactions.

2. I'm rereading Neal Stephenson's 'Baroque Trilogy', a series which comes to the conclusion that the continued existence of slavery will undermine even something as fine as Hanoverian England. It's hard from this perspective of now to see Hanoverian England as such a great thing, but I suppose it was better than having the Jameses back. I love these books but have not so far managed to persuade anyone else how great they are.

3. It turns out that K.J. Parker is a man. I feel a bit disappointed by this, though I know that's sexist of me. On the plus side he chose 'Parker' because it's a pen name... The books are great, especially the Engineer Trilogy, which starts with 'Devices and Desires'. Not many people convey the amazingness of precision engineering -- I suppose he has a lot in common with Neal Stephenson in that regard.

Deja vuuu-uuu

Who can sing like Sia? Very few people. Is there a 74-year-old more groovy than Giorgio Moroder? I sincerely doubt it! (Though my mum has 11 years to catch up.)

This is available on YouTube but in a slightly less 'up' version, so I'm going to have a go at embedding a gadget I stole off of popjustice:

I heart pop, I really do. This on repeat is going to be the soundtrack to a long weekend trying to make Nasa's WorldWind work on a borrowed MacBook.

Exclusion

I recently finished one of the most disappointing books I've ever read, and I can't quite put it out of my mind. The book is In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman, and I'm about to give spoilers for it, so consider this an alert.

The first spoiler is that it is very well-written and compelling. It is readable, and provocative of thought. Obviously, it wouldn't have disappointed me so much if it had been bad. The narrator is a London banker at the time of the 2008 crash, the expensively-educated son of academics from Pakistan. One day an old friend from his Oxford student days turns up at his house and starts telling him a long story centred around a trip to Afghanistan when it was newly under US occupation in 2002. This friend, Zafar, was born in Bangladesh and is from a much poorer background than the narrator.* He's the cleverer of the two, though not as clever as he thinks he is. A lot of the novel is about class and race, and particularly Zafar's feelings of exclusion by the posh people at Oxford, who stand for him as the English in general. Reading this made me remember my own experience at Cambridge -- for large parts of my first term there I felt surreally out of place, with the "I don't belong here" parts of Radiohead's Creep stuck in my head, and I'm as middle class as it's possible to be without falling over. I think most people feel out of place in Cambridge, and I've had a tendency to feel a sort of exasperated scorn for fully-grown adults who think the way to deal with that is to try really really hard to fit in, by emposhening their voice and dressing like a mannequin in a Savile Row window. For a brief period of time this novel made me think I should be more tolerant of those people, on the grounds that I'm failing to check my privilege as a member of the middle-classes. So it probably briefly did some good there. That's because this novel very convincingly portrays Zafar's feelings of exclusion and frustration, particularly at the hands of his on-and-off girlfriend, whose name is Emily and then something improbably hyphenated, and who is very posh, and plays the violin impeccably but without feeling like someone out of an E.M. Forster novel. At one point she tells Zafar how to pronounce Beauchamp, which makes him feel discomfited although clearly the correct way to deal with that is to pronounce it Byoo-champ loudly and often thereafter. Emily becomes more and more central to the plot -- it's because of her that he's in Afghanistan in 2002, and it's quite clear that what happens in Afghanistan is going to be the main point of the book -- and part of my relish for the book was looking forward to finding out what was going on with her, in the filling in of her story by this clearly very accomplished and intelligent writer.

And this is where the disappointment comes in. Because by the end of the book it becomes clear that Emily, who had some intriguing possibilities, is not in fact a person at all. Emily is a McGuffin. She has no existence to her as a person and is just a way of moving the plot along. The whole book falls apart when you realise this, and start to think about the other women in it. The narrator is married, in a way that reminds me of how when I was about three or four and my imaginary friend Elizabeth and I played at being grown-ups we always had anonymous husbands somewhere off-stage. Zafar fell in love with Emily because of her daftly posh surname before he even met her, and her brother went to Eton with the narrator. (Emily, of course, could not have gone there.) For both of these men, women just do not count. They would be able to express their social yearnings and webs of connection much less indirectly if they were homosexual, but they aren't the sort of men who have enough imagination to be unexpected. Both men are so clueless that Zafar actually tells the narrator about the cause of menstruation as if this were a little-known and interesting fact, and he has only found out because the bio-mechanics of fertility impinge on his personal life. Their real communications are with other men.

The problem is that this too reminds me of my time at Cambridge, and a different sort of exclusion, less common and more upsetting (to me) than class exclusion. When people don't see me because of my gender somehow that riles me in a way I can't rise above. It makes me feel suffocated, and furious and ineffectual at the same time. I felt the same way when I came to the end of this book -- I felt dismissed as self-evidently not counting. Zafar in the book has got so used to seeing himself as the victim, the highly-intelligent victim of others' stupid prejudice, that his own ugly prejudices don't occur to him. The question is whether they occurred to the author. His potted biography is sufficiently similar to Zafar's to make it hard not to guess that Zafar is a loosely based on himself.

I don't know why this affected me so personally. I finished the book a week or two ago now, and it's still bothering me. I suppose it's because I was enjoying the book so much, and it let me down so badly. (And I'm not complaining about what happens at the end, but at how it's portrayed.) The lesson from the whole thing really is that if you are feeling excluded, and prejudged, then stop and look around you for the people you might be accidentally excluding by being so preoccupied in your own exclusion.

* There seems to be a thing now for the sort of bildungsroman about two friends where the narrator is less clever but more fortunate. (Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels are just as good as people say they are, though also slightly terrifying in how completely they skewer that thing where when you're a teenager you love your best friend so fiercely you also hate her.)

Giorgio Moroder is 74

I've been feeling a bit on the old side recently, but according to Giorgio Moroder's analogy in this very excellent song I'm hardly even born yet:

74 is the new 24

Reading in 2014

I read too many books in 2014. I think next year I will try replacing every fourth book with a hearty walk or something. Here is a breakdown:

• Total number of books read: 217
• Gender of authors of each book: 107 male, 108 female, 2 not sure
• Number of non-fiction: 22 (10.1%)
• Number of re-reads: 66 (30.4%)
• Number read on Kindle: 89 (41%)

As usual, many of the best books I've read this year have been rereads, but I have read some good new stuff too. I think the most memorable books I've read are the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. They're set in the near future after something odd has happened somewhere on the American coast. It starts with a research expedition, the eleventh or twelfth, entering the affected area. Everyone on it is known just by their job title; one of them, the biologist, lost her husband to the previous expedition. When I read the books I thought they were good but not startling, but they stayed in my mind for ages.

My favourite new author of the year is probably Angela Thirkell. She's like a less snide E.F. Benson, or a softer version of P.G. Wodehouse, or a more middle-class (and less brilliant) Jane Austen. She wrote many gentle social comedies set in the 1930s or so. The Brandons is probably a good starting point. It's about an attractive and lovable widow, adored by everyone, with two grown-up children. Her deceased husband's dying aunt summons them all so she can decide who is to be her heir, and mild but interesting social problems ensue.

I loved Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and so did my mother. Karen Joy Fowler is a very good author and everything I've read by her has been great, including the odd sci-fi-ish Sarah Canary. Also loved by my mother, but more straightforwardly a fun book, is Bird Brain by Guy Kennaway, the story of a man who loves pheasant shooting and comes back as a pheasant after he dies. It has talking dogs in it without being sentimental. Also excellent are the Flavia de Luce books by Alan Bradley, a series of murder mysteries solved by a bratty upper-class neglected little girl. I also like Marie Brennan's Lady Trent memoir books. They are set in a Victorian-like world with dragons and are about a woman's struggle to be accepted as a serious naturalist in a very constricted world. Unusually they also deal with the problems of class.

Unsurprisingly Kate Atkinson's Life After Life is great. I quite liked Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries but I thought her The Rehearsal was really brilliant, conveying the strangeness of female adolescence.

In non-fiction, John Drury's biography of George Herbert was very good. But probably the most surprising book I enjoyed this year was Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel Von Grimmelshausen. This is a seventeenth-century picaresque novel set during the Thirty Years' War and was actually very readable and good. I found it on the Classics shelves of the excellent Waterstone's by the cathedral in Exeter. Apparently Thomas Mann said about it:

It is the rarest kind of monument to life and literature, for it has survived almost three centuries and will survive many more. It is a story of the most basic kind of grandeur - gaudy, wild, raw, amusing, rollicking and ragged, boiling with life, on intimate terms with death and evil - but in the end, contrite and fully tired of a world wasting itself in blood, pillage and lust, but immortal in the miserable splendour of its sins

though presumably he said it in German.

Good things

I love Dragonette:


Going home on the bus in the dark reminds me of when I started work as a developer two years ago, and the strange feeling of being old and young at the same time.

This bugs me

1. I keep hearing people say that Grace Hopper invented the term bug, and feeling unable for social reasons to point out that this is not true. There is a record of an actual bug (a moth) being removed from the computer she worked on (it had jammed something up) but the term 'bug' was used in engineering as early as Thomas Edison. Just wikipedia it! It has sources.

2. On the other hand, I love you xkcd. This one has a particularly good mouse-over tooltip.

Closing some tabs

1. I did a girls' career event the other day, in which I tried to explain why coding is sometimes beautiful, and probably just made them all think it's a career for loonies. (I don't mind that too much, there might be a young-me-type there who hears and understands.) Here are some links about the beauty of coding:
http://kottke.org/14/06/getting-high-on-programming
www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/06/coder_s_high_the_intense_feeling_of_absorption_exclusive_to_programmers.html

2. Of course the tech world has its own problems. Love that someone called "bingo" in this talk.

3. Life involves weird challenges sometimes. Watch this mini version of the hero's journey:



4. Watching these people move in medieval armour is seriously freaky. It reminded me of an Italo Calvino novella in which a famous knight is a suit of armour with nothing inside.


5. Chart about US inequality. British poor pay more taxes. Even the Daily Telegraph thnks the middle classes should revolt (now the "officer class" are affected).

6. This modern setting of a medieval Icelandic hymn makes things feel better:

Some good things

All this week I've been remembering that we have gay marriage now, and feeling happy. There are all sorts of good things it seems like we can't have for stupid political reasons, and then every now and then something cuts through all that, and suddenly the US has a black president, and two people who love each other can get married in the UK regardless of whether they are both women, or both men, or one of each (what a past chief rabbi used to refer to as a "mixed marriage"). Hurray!

More trivially, there are also some good things on the internet. If you've not seen PBS's Idea Channel, here is quite a good one:


Baby on a horse!


Cat enters house:

Pair programming

I read a review in the Graun of a book about coding. I think the reviewer has taken over-seriously the talk about every child learning to code -- I think that computer programming is just one of those things, like physics or a foreign language, to which children should be exposed. Other forms of logical thinking, like the Sanskrit mentioned in that review, are probably going to have a similar effect on people's ability to think well and write well (in any language) as adults. I bet the same sort of kids would love both Sanskrit and programming, but at least the kids who hate programming can be convincingly told that there's a practical reason for learning it.

Writing programs is really excellent. I can't think of anything quite like it. I spent today "pair-programming", which is when two people work together to do a "code spike", which is when you get lots of rough code done in a short time. It's very immediately obvious when you do this that you can get further this way than by each working alone -- and I say this as someone who likes to work independently. It's exhausting on the brain but very satisfying; you can easily start a day with a problem you neither of you know how to handle, and end up the day with an unpolished but working solution.

In my previous life I don't think I ever did anything quite like this. I suppose the closest I came to it was in discussing things with intelligent colleagues, which alas is a less prominent part of academic life than people might imagine. I do know a few excellent people whom I would seek out to bounce ideas off. Sometimes at good conferences, the ones where genuine interest in the subject was unhampered by political currents and expressions of ego, you'd get excellent discussions which felt like a bit more than the sum of the previously-held opinions of the people there. So from time to time I might get the same sort of thing, a sense in a conversation between two or more people that although separately we might be quite intelligent, we are each of us more intelligent for being in conversation with the other. But the difference is that what we were talking about was not a thing we were making. It wasn't a thing where one of us could say "Well, we could just run it and see what happens", and then right-click on it and select "Run as Java program", and wait to see what the errors tell us about it. Ideas about Anglo-Saxon history or about manuscript production don't really do anything. Maybe they affect other people's ideas about things, but they take a long time to do it, and it's easy to suspect that there wouldn't be a complete correlation between the degree to which people are affected and the truth of the idea. But the recursive function we've just written either works or it doesn't; we can quickly find out that it's flawed, and use that to move us forwards.

I think that what makes writing code so compelling is that it has two complementary but different aspects. There is this baseline: it has to work. You give it to a computer, and if you've written it right the computer does what you want. But that's only the baseline: the code also needs to be well-written. Writing code that a computer can read is the (relatively) easy bit. Writing code that other humans can understand, maintain, improve, and reuse is the really difficult thing. That's where it becomes important to make your code elegant and simple. You can repeat code as much as you want for all a computer cares, it's the human beings who need it to be possible to alter a particular piece of functionality in just one place; a computer has no trouble using hideous labyrinths of interconnected methods with variables called things like "integer1", but the people who try to expand or reuse your work will curse you heartily, and probably do it badly, and it will be your fault. So making code that works is a bit like the satisfaction of making a practical physical object, and making code that is elegant is like making something beautiful. (It's a pity William Morris was born too early to join in.) Steven Poole in that review says

though some code in action can constitute art (eg certain videogames), the millions of lines of symbolic instructions themselves are not poetry

I have seen code that's beautiful in the same way as my favourite jug is beautiful (it was designed by Vera Wang). You need to know a bit about coding to see its appeal, but I think the same thing's true of football and certain complicated wines, and I take it on trust that there are things in those to appreciate. I might prefer to read that code than play the 'videogame'.

Also, when I retire I think I might learn Sanskrit. Life is good!

Information

1. I suppose it's a badge of honour to work for a place which the Daily Mail hates so much. I like this collection of gifs which tries to give the overall message of the recent Met Office report on this winter's weather, with the proviso that "the global weather system is insanely complex".

2. The NHS is selling off patient records. They'll be anonymous -- of course they'll be anonymous, everything is anonymous these days, and there is no way they could possibly be abused. But in case you still don't like the idea you can opt out. There's a useful Fax Your GP service here. My doctor's practice actually provides a model letter on its website for you to print off and post in, so I've already done that.

3. And if you're wondering about anonymity and uniqueness in another area, this website can tell you how unusual your computer is just by looking at the information that the browser gives it. Mine is unique among the nearly four million tested so far due to its combination of plugins and fonts. It's an EFF site so I sort of trust it not to abuse the information... Is that inconsistent of me? To be honest I don't really think there are many people who want to abuse my information, but there's not many people I trust to be intelligent with it.

Entertainment mostly

1. I was listening to Radio 1 this morning and a song came on which starts out as a setting of D. H. Lawrence's poem about the singing woman and the piano. Nick Mulvey, Cucurucu. I've always found that poem disconcerting; I don't think of D.H. Lawrence weeping like a child for the past. The song is OK.

2. I've been watching lots of The Good Wife -- damn you DVD box sets! -- which I rather like. It's about a woman whose husband is caught using prostitutes and possibly being corrupt in his role as District Attorney of Chicago. She stands by him at humiliating press conferences, he's jailed, and then she has to go back to work as a lawyer to keep the family going. It's pretty watchable and passes the Bechdel test in spades. The main role is played by Julianna Margulies, who has this excellent way of setting her jaw and saying nothing which I puzzled over for ages until I realise it's just like Frances McDormand in Fargo. Legal dramas are always a bit odd because they give the impression that going to court involves a lot of shouting like an argument at primary school, and I have no idea if that's true. The Good Wife makes references to this gap between real life and narrative drive in a way I don't completely get. The firm's partners are accused of taking decisions based on feelings and their drive to win rather than on business logic, which is surely a necessity for a TV drama; one of the main characters gets promoted in a narratively satisfying way, and later it's pointed out that the promotion was rather arbitrary. Maybe like in Sophie's World they will eventually get accused of being fictional characters. Anyway I'm enjoying it quite a lot.

3. The storms here have been pretty grim at times. These last two are apparently of a type that's quite interesting meteorologically -- something to do with how they form, and the way that they don't just go over straightforwardly but have a sort of sting in their tail. I went with my parents on an RSPB bird-watching cruise in the Exe estuary yesterday. We didn't go any closer to the sea than Exmouth and Dawlish Warren, and we went up as near Exeter as Topsham. We saw quite a lot of dunlin (also known as the "sea mouse") and huge flocks of godwits, as well as many other birds such as mergansers, curlews, shags, and a few of the avocets which are the ostensible purpose of the trip. The mud banks were markedly speckly, and apparently this was because so much water has come down the Exe that the top layer of mud has been washed away, exposing stones which are usually more deeply buried. The large flocks of avocets which I saw last year when I did the same trip with a friend were not in evidence. They must have gone somewhere with more food. I hope they'll be back. We went at low tide because it's the best time to see birds, but really far up the Exe you could see wave damage done in the recent storms. We did see a peregrine menacing some godwits, which was a pretty impressive sight.

4. In other news I have to do a Java exam in April. It's not a trivial one -- eight people did it from the office last year and two of them failed. I think I'll probably be OK if I can muster the energy to put the work in. I'm quite keen to get it over and done with. I feel like I've come a long way over the last year and a bit, and that I'm just beginning to know what I'm doing, but there's a lot more to learn.

Chickens and luxury cars

This advert makes me feel quite happy but also slightly helpless, like there are too many things I understand but can't explain.

Reading in 2013

So I read less in 2013 than in 2012 and less in 2012 than 2011. I've worked out that at this rate I will read nothing at all in 2019. Here is the breakdown in the same way I've done it for the past two years.

• Total number of books read: 155
• Gender of authors of each book: 76 male, 79 female
• Fiction vs non-fiction: 134 to 21
• Number of re-reads: 63
• Number read on Kindle: 42 (27.1%)

I reread far more books than last year, and read far fewer on Kindle. This is probably because I've unpacked from boxes a lot of books I haven't seen in ages. And most of the really good stuff I read this year I have read before, which I suppose is also understandable, given that they've withstood multiple paperback culls by now.

It's been a bit of a disappointing reading year in terms of new things. I've read a lot of hyped stuff that I found very shallow. I'm not going to mention which, but at least Hilary Mantel and Michael Chabon did not let me down, with Bring Up the Bodies and Telegraph Avenue respectively. Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis and Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife are both very good, and also disconcerting -- the former because it's about a drugged up unfamiliar world and the latter because it points out the wierdness of normality. I enjoyed two books by Lynn Shepherd: Murder at Mansfield Park is set at a Mansfield Park where Fanny Price is much richer than her cousins rather than much poorer; and Tom All Alone's is based on Bleak House and brings out the uncanniness of Esther's narrative by replacing it with a very similar one by someone called Hester (though to be honest Esther's narrative has always been disconcerting). These are excellent examples of literary criticism as novel in the style of John Gardner's Grendel. Two odd but excellent sci-fi books are Leonard Richardson's Constellation Games and Eduardo Mendoza's No Word from Gurb. The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov is the sort of book I only come across on the tables in the Waterstone's by Exeter Cathedral, an interesting collection of strange stories by an obscure Russian author.

S by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst is the most unusual book I read all year. It comes in a slip-case, pretending to be a stolen library book called The Ship of Theseus by V. M. Straka, translated by one F. X. Caldeira, who has put in some rather odd footnotes. A English student and a disgraced post-grad who haunts the library where she works start having a conversation by adding notes to the margins of the book, trying to solve the question of the identity of V. M. Straka, an anarchist and possible murderer, perhaps part of a radical literary collective, whom even his translator never met. In the main novel a man with no memory emerges from the sea only to be shanghai-ed onto a strange boat where the silent crew do mysterious things in the orlop. In the margins the students argue, share stories, and flirt rather disfunctionally, and get caught up in something that could be simple academic rivalry but might be much more sinister. The really excellent thing is that the book is full of tucked-in replica postcards, newspaper clippings, even a scribbled map on a coffee shop napkin, and all in a variety of languages from Swedish to Czech (though provided with translations, naturally, since this is the subject of the post-grad's research). It's an excellent artefact, and very pleasing. I love that it so clearly draws on all sorts of high-brow things like Nabokov's Pale Fire or B. S. Johnson's pamphlet book, but it does it all entirely in aid of entertainment. It also reminds me of Corpus Christi College MS 41, often called a "book as archive" because of its marginal additions, and there are tons of other medieval manuscripts like this too. Apparently the manuscripts of Thomas Wyatt's poetry were like that too. Everything post-modern is really pre-modern.

In non-fiction, Carola Hicks' Girl in a Green Gown (about the Arnolfini Wedding) and Tom Reiss' The Black Count (about Dumas' father) were the best conventional history books I read. Tom Lubbock's English Graphic contains brilliant yet very readable writing on art. Soldaten freaked me out a bit. But perhaps a parallel to S, the most striking non-fiction book I read was Humphrey Jenning's Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers 1660-1886. Although this is apparently not to be called an anthology, really that's what it is -- a collection of excerpts from texts of the age of the Industrial Revolution. There are also some notes by Jennings, who seems to have been strongly of Blake and Ruskin's point of view. Apparently it inspired Boyle's Olympics opening ceremony thing, which I've never watched, so I don't know if it took the same line. This book is far more interesting than it sounds, and has all sorts of strange things in it (including the only bit of Smart's Jubilate Agno I've ever seen that isn't about his cat -- I must read that this year). I loved George Ticknor's 1835 description of going to see Babbage's calculating machine:

The first thing that struck me was its small size, being only about two feet wide, two feet deep, and two and a half high. The second very striking circumstance was the fact that the inventor himself does not profess to know all the powers of the machine; that he has sometimes been quite surprised at some of its capabilities; and that without previous calculation he cannot always tell whether it will, or will not work out a given table.

The idea of making a machine the powers of which you don't know is still pretty crazy today.