"Fifty Mathematical Ideas you really need to know" by Tony Crilly

This book starts simple and interesting with stuff about zero and prime numbers and rapidly becomes challenging (Bayes theory) and then incomprehensible (the Riemann hypothesis). It left me with an appreciation of G. H. Hardy, the more or less utterly unknown mathematician who features in "The Indian Clerk" as the bloke who invited the fantastic mathematician Rananujan to England. In fact Hardy was a tremendous mathematician who work went from primes to genetics.

But the book was a disappointment. I suppose the problem was that the ideas, presented in their four page format, were either too easy or, if they were interesting and challenging, contained too little information for me to truly appreciate what they were about. It sort of skimmed the surface and left me either confused or wanted much more.

March 2010; 203 pages

"Found Wanting" by Robert Goddard

I love Robert Goddard books. I think I have read them all. His classic story revolves around a man whose life is somehow in crisis who is thrust into a mystery which harks back into the past and who finds a new life through the adventures he experiences on his quest. I love the historical aspect and his heroes are classic examples of shabby disenchantment.

But I was the disenchanted one with this book.

His hero is a foreign office bureaucrat who is neither convincingly shabby and fed up with life nor has he any particular FO skills or connections. He agrees to take a locked briefcase to Amsterdam to meet an old friend who used to be a drug dealer (without thinking of looking in the briefcase). From this unconvincing start he gradually becomes more and more the thriller hero, rescuing people, shooting guns, risking his life because he is too dogged to give up, and falling in love at first sight.

The mystery itself alternates between the obvious (the bloke who bleeds to death is obviously a haemophiliac and therefore descended from the last Tsar of Russia) and the downright stupid: why on Earth is the bloke in charge of a massively profitable organisation prepared to spend millions and kill many to retrieve some letters??? The explanation is far from satisfactory.

Cardboard characters and a formulaic plot: this is decidedly not one of Goddard's best. However, his best is very, very good and even this carries you along.

March 2010; 474 pages

"A most wanted man" by John le Carre

This book reminded me of another le Carre book The Mission Song because it so humanises the characters. Some of his Smiley books are games and the characters are pompous public school chessmasters. Yet in this book, with its background of the war against terror, the main protagonists all seem to be decent people. Even the spies have ideals and are trying to gently persuade people to cooperate with them whilst setting up their target. The cynicism of the old le Carre books seems to have disappeared. All the characters are human from the lawyer Annabel to the banker Tommy to the mysterious Christ figure Issa.

An easy read; probably not one of le Carre's best.

March 2010; 416 pages