Tower and Town, April 2024 (view the full edition)A Good ReadIt's natural, if unattractive, to enjoy feeling superior. I used to work in a university library, where I could observe some of the world's leading minds demonstrate both massive academic muscle and astonishing day-to-day ineptness. "Clever is as clever does" I'd mutter, smugly, while Professor McIntellect put his notes in the photocopier upside down and back to front for the third time in a week. So imagine how much I enjoyed The Limits of Genius by Kate Spalding, all about the spectacular dimness of some well-known geniuses. Deeply weird and frankly astonishingly idiotic, some of history's best known scientific achievers have done some really, really silly things. Spalding is a mathematician and science journalist, and a sharp and entertaining writer. Irreverent and slightly sweary, if you're still determined to buy a book for a reading-refusenik teenage boy this might be just the thing. I'm only half-way through, but happy to recommend The Night in Question by Susan Fletcher (who won the Whitbread First Novel award twenty years ago,and seems to keep getting better and better). Florrie, aged and disabled but positive and maintaining as much independence as she can in residential care, believes that she's had her share of life's surprises. Then the death of another resident - and friend - strikes her as strange and unexpected enough to arouse suspicion. Setting out to discover the truth she finds herself reflecting on her own adventurous life and its secrets. So it's a who (and why) dunnit and a reflection on life and love and inspiration, well constructed and expressively written, warm and wise and amusing. If, like me, you have a Whalebone Theatre shaped gap in your reading life, this might go some way to filling it. What else? I'm ploughing on with Trollope ('ploughing' makes it sound like a chore, which it isn't, but there is a lot of him to get through). Can You Forgive Her? he asks. Well, I'm sure I will once I've read enough to work out why forgiveness is required. She seems like a nice enough girl... and it's Richard Jefferies Prize Shortlist reading time, so I'm vicariously walking across hill-tops and through forests and listening to birdsong and crashing waves. Honestly, with all this reading it's a miracle I find time to come to work every day. I'm a wonder, me. Debby Guest |