Wednesday 1 June 2022

Bibliography, May 2022

BOTM: S. Ritchie, Science Fictions: the epidemic of fraud, bias, negligence and hype (2020)

R. Adams, A Woman of the Horseclans (1983)
Arnold Bennett, The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902)
J. Crowden, Cider country (2021)
Jilly and Leo Cooper, On cricket (1986) 
U., C. & A. Frith, Two Heads: Where Two Neuroscientists Explore How Our Brains Work with Other Brains (2022)
D. Galgut, In a strange room (2010)
B. Jacques, Redwall (1986)*
J.N. Johnson, My Monticello (2021)
J.M. Le Clezio, The Mexican Dream, Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations (1965)
E. Thompson, Why I am not a Buddhist (2020)
B. Tsui, Why we swim (2020)
A. Verghese, Cutting for stone (2009)

High volume month in May, and mostly good quality too. Even some of the weaker ones were ones that I'm pretty glad I read. It was close at the top between Bryan Jacques' brilliant epic about mice, Ritchie's quickfire rant on science methodology, and Verghese's Ethiopian saga.

They all were very good, though with some minor issues. Redwall is ultimately a children's book with the requisite plot, though I do love it. Cutting for stone was engrossing, though it dragged a little in the middle and I did keep expecting it to be about something more than it was.

Ritchie's book I'm sure has some data flaws and it is polemical so I suspect is overdone. But for me did work really well for me a) as a primer on some of the issues I'd never thought about - replicability vs reproducibility for example - and a string of key examples that allowed me as a non-scientist to get some insight into the issues that science is grappling with. It's well structured and very well done.

Of course, as soon as I write this, I can't help but think of the best description of the struggles that scientists and non-scientists have in taking to each other. This does not come up in the book, which is a shame: