With more deviation than is standard

The idea that I could do all this fishing and reading, plus my normal activities of daily living, and then blog in detail about every angling trip or book was always pretty unrealistic, and so it has proved. So, I think I'm just going to do an update blog post here covering several books and fishing trips in one go. Maybe I'll do a couple of in-depth book reviews later on if I can catch up. Here's the latest spreadsheet on the 2023 fishing challenge (10 species caught to date): click here and here's where the 2023 reading has reached (11 books read to date): click here For book 3, another Christmas pressie was sitting in the queue by the side of my bed, the first novel by a crime writer whose work I had never read before:  Craig Johnson . Johnson's addition to the jaded lawman genre is  Walt Longmire, sheriff of the fictional Absaroka County in Northern Wyoming.  The Cold Dish , a tale of revenge of course, is the first Longmire novel; Wikipedia tells  me that, as o...

After catching my first fish species of 2023 on Jan 5th (described here ) I was able to read book #2 of the 2023 fishing and reading challenge. Just as there was no doubt about which species I would fish for first, my second book of 2023 (and first novel) was a straightforward choice: Bournville by Jonathan Coe .  Coe is my favourite living British author and someone had bought me Bournville -- his latest novel -- for Christmas. For me (and most people I suspect), the test of a really good novel is a sense of compulsion: a force formed by a shifting mixture of anticipatory excitement and consummatory pleasure that makes you want to keep reading. Bournville passed that test; it was finished a couple of days later.  Coe and I are almost exact contemporaries: he is 9 days older than me. We went to the same small college at the same university as undergraduates, although never met as far as I recall. I think this close temporal overlap is a big part of the reason I love his novel...

This was the first book I read, very early in 2023, as part of my self-imposed, year-long challenge that I explained in an earlier blog . The page numbers I give below relate to the hardback version. As a psychologist who spent a lot of his career studying individual differences, I naturally have taken an interest in most offshoots of this broad field; including how, in some hands, interest in individual differences segued, via studying the inheritance of those differences, into a set of socio-political ideas which Francis Galton called " eugenics " (see Rutherford's  footnote, p.40, which quotes the passage where Galton's first used the term, in 1883).  Even if I hadn't had a special interest in this topic, then Rutherford's book would have been an enjoyable, informative and thought-provoking read. He writes with a fluid style that many scientists struggle to attain. He also tries to emulate J.B.S Haldane's use of the witty (and cutting) footnote, and he ...