Stanley Redgrove - Johannes Baptista Van Helmont (William Rider & Son, 1922)

Jan Van Helmont was a Flemish alchemist, physicist and philosopher, as the subtitle of this biography explains. He lived in the 17th Century, not far from where I live.

He termed the word 'gas', as he discovered that there were more gaseous substance apart from air. He was a true experimentalist, which was very new at that time. He not only observed things that were happening, but he set up experiments to check and double-check whether his intuitions were right or what would happen if he mixed certain things. The fact that he was also an alchemist and believed in the existence of the Elixir of Life, may have helped him in his endeavours.

He also understood the importance of other agents to help digestion, such as enzymes, even if he did not know about how this actually worked.

Interesting how science and ignorance and superstition look from a distance. In some centuries people will look back at us in the same way, and wonder why we could not see what is so obvious.

David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into A Bar (Penguin, 2016) ***

This one of those books which gives very mixed feelings. It is painful, irritating, ridiculous ... but that's how it's meant to be. The story's main character, Dovaleh G, is an older stand-up comedian whose humour goes beyond sarcasm and cynicism even, it goes beyond the acceptable, exposing his own's life story on stage in a way that both intellectually, emotionally, and even physically results in rejecting by his own audience. There is no fun anymore, no humour, no smiles are generated, not even sympathy. How do you react when the story's main character only creates antipathy? You put the book aside, and go on with your life, or you keep reading, regardless, taking the unpleasantness with you. I did, even if I hesitated more than once. And that's exactly the effect Grossman intended: as a reader, you are part of the audience. Do you stay on to be insulted and morally aggressed by the unrelentless political incorrectness? Do you keep listening to someone whose obsessions are immoral and rejectable?

The main character has summoned the narrator to join one conference, as an older friend who once also participated in summer camp. The little history that binds them will become clear as the 'novel' develops, as is the actual reason why the narrator has been invited to attend. It's the kind of mystery that kept me going: you want to understand ...

It's a book about life, about the limits of divulging your own personal obsessions and fears with the outside world, about the cruelty of emotions that keep dominating people's lives for decades, about what is attractive and repulsive about it, about moral limits of emotions, thoughts and even physical integrity.

It's not fun too read.

Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty Horses (Picador, 1992) ****

One of the classics of modern American literature, it had to be read, and I can highly recommend it to anyone who likes good prose, real characters and narratives that question the current world.

Two young men, John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins, leave their hometown in Texas, and decide to move south to Mexico to find jobs as horsemen, which is their only skill. Both friends are 'true' characters, and the voice they receive from McCarthy is one of the real pleasures of the book. They are naive and experts, boys and already men, real friends but with questions for each other.

They meet a third, even younger man, skilled at shooting, out there on his own, needing help in a way, but without clear intentions or history. They travel together and encounter people, visit towns, come across natural challenges like rivers and storms, they get drunk, they find work, they get robbed, ... But below the surface, something more ominous is taking place: a world is changing. We are in 1949. We enter a new era. The old world is disappearing and a new world is opening up: the old western cowboy world with the new one, but also geographically, between the north and the south, between the local and the global.

A rich Mexican farmer expands: "They went to France for their education. He and Gustavo. And others. All these young people. They all returned full of ideas. Full of ideas, and yet there seemed to be no agreement among them. How do you account for that? Their parents sent them for these ideas, no? And they went there are received them. Yet when they returned they opened their valises, so to speak, no two contained the same thing. ... People of my generation are more cautious. I think we dont believe that people can be improved in their character by reason. That seems a very french idea". The solid foundations of simple community ideas seem to be shaken. What was taken for granted suddenly becomes shaken.

And then at an even deeper level below the narrative, other forces are at work.

When the boys drink to much and are vomiting their hearts out: "In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool".

When lying in pain at night in the desert "He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits".

Describing nature after a storm: "The horses stepped archly among the shadows that fell over the road, the bracken steamed. Bye and bye they passed a stand of roadside cholla against which small birds had been driven by the storm and there impaled. Gray nameless birds espaliered in attitudes of stillborn flight or hanging loosely in their feathers. Some of them were still alive and they twisted on their spines as the horses passed and raised their heads and cried out but the horsemen rode on. The sun rose up in the sky and the country took on a new color, green fire in the acacia and paloverde and green in the roadside run-off grass and fire in the ocotillo. As if the rain were electric, had grounded circuits that the electric might be".

Or deep insights into the nature of horses: "Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were".

Or ranchers' truths: "There were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to man".

Talking about the very poor Mexican children: "Their intelligence was frightening. And they had a freedom which we envied. There were so few restraints upon them. So few expectations. Then at the age of eleven or twelve they would cease being children. They lost their childhood overnight and they had no youth. They became very serious. As if some terrible truth had been visited upon them. Some terrible vision. At a certain points in their lives they were sobered in an instant and I was puzzled by this but of course I could not know what it was they saw. What it was they knew".

It is a western, with cowboys and horses, with a simple narrative that you read like a real page-turner, but don't go too fast. Cherish McCarthy's wonderful characters, and appreciate that below his style a whole world is lurking, poking holes in the surface fabric.

Tim Harford - Messy - How To Be Creative and Resilient In A Tidy-Minded World (Abacus, 2016) **

Financial Times journalis Tim Harford explains why "being messy" is an integral part of the creative process, and also helps in generating unexpected business results. On the other hand, he also gives examples of how mechanical thinking can lead to catastrophes.

Of course he is right on both accounts, but also possibly wrong. It seems critical to me to allow for lateral thinking and hence to break through the mechanistic concepts of thought, but at the same time you should also allow for some systematic approaches, and be very selective in which level of messiness you can endure. His elaboration on the dangers of automated systems without human intervention to avoid incidents, has in fact nothing to do with 'messiness', but it operates on a totally different plane.

There's a lot of name-dropping in the book, either of people Harford visited (such as Brian Eno), or whose works he read. Unfortunately, many of those quotes are only relevant at surface level. They don't add to the argument, but just serve as illustrative purposes.

In his endeavour to merge many different thoughts of sociology, business, art and psychology, he also tends to mix things up at the same time.

What you would have expected to find the right balance between messiness and order, not only that the former is important, because that's too obvious.

On the positive side, the book offers a lot of interesting anecdotes and stories. I only wish they were linked with a more rigid logic, instead of just beying a messy heap of unrelated events.

Neel Mukherjee - A State Of Freedom (Penguin, 2017) **

There is a lot of interesting and great literature coming from India, but this book is not part of it, despite the general acclaim. It's a book with five 'sections' or stories, talking about the challenges of life in rural villages and cities in India.

One of Mukherjee's stories is about the world of difference between the "americanised" young Indian visiting his parents in Mumbai and the servants working in the same house, one about a father visiting India with his six-year old son who was born in the US, one about a man training a bear to earn a living, despite the new law that forbids this kind of animal exploitation.

I read halfway through the book, then stopped because it's a waste of time. The writing is average, the stories not really gripping, the tensions between the worlds do not come to life, and since the book did not show any evidence of improving, my decision was made.

Leïla Slimani - Chanson Douce (Gallimard, 2016) ****

"Chanson Douce" is nothing short of a modern tragedy. It starts with the startling sentence: "The baby is dead", and then describes in detail the suffering of the other child and the bloody crime scene. The rest of the novel explains how this came to be, and gradually the story unfolds of a young mother who decides to pick up her professional life again after having stayed with the children for some years. They look for a nanny and find the ideal one, Louise, who indeed initially appears to be perfect, but as we all know and suspect: that is not the case.

The book's geography is almost limited to the flat of the young couple. It describes the intimate relationships between the three adults and the children, and the changing nature of those relationships and of the characters themselves. They all circle around each other with changing perceptions, intentions and moods, all asking questions about their place in life, to the level of being suffocated in their limited space. In a way, the end was inescapable. The space in the novel as well as the possibilities of each individual to grow and expand, slowly contracts as the story evolves, and the moments of trust, and joy, and personal development, are inexorably reduced to a small point in space, not because of some grand happenings, but rather to a multitude of little things that keep tightening the plot to its inevitable end.

Leïla Slimani is both highly acclaimed and denounced. For this novel she received the prestigious "Prix Goncourt", and several other literary prizes, and rightly so. On the other hand, her first novel "Dans Le Jardin de L'Ogre" received lots of negative reaction from the conservative (Moroccan) community because of its open sexual nature, including female sexual desire, which was then even exacerbated by her book " Sexe et Mensonges: La Vie Sexuelle Au Maroc" ("sex and lies: sex life in Morocco).

"Chanson Douce" is not very uplifting as far as the story goes, but it's uplifting to read a new voice in French literature.

Benedict Wells - The End Of Loneliness (Sceptre, 2018) ***

It's already a best-seller, translated in ten languages, 200,000 copies sold in Germany alone, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, and more than 30 weeks in Der Spiegel's best-seller list. I don't need to add much to that. The original German title is "Vom Ende der Einsamkeit", and the author's name may sound English, but it is a nom-de-plume. The "Wells" is taken from the character of the orphan Homer Wells in John Irving's "The Cider House Rules". Benedict Wells was himself sent to boarding school when he was six years old, and spent his entire youth away from home, even though his parents were alive. Not so in this novel, where three children, two boys and a girl, are sent to boarding school after their parents died in a car crash. They have to find their way in school, and later in life. Even if all three lives bifurcate in different directions, at crucial points in life they meet again and help each other if needed. The narrator, the youngest of the three, recounts his story when meeting Alva again, a girl he was once in love with. The renew their friendship when adults.

The novel is of course partly based on true emotions and experiences: the loneliness of a child, the urge of the children to each get accepted as full individuals with their special character traits and personalities in the often hostile world of children and the ununderstanding world of adults. Even later in life, this craving to be loved remains one of the main driving forces of the narrator, as well as his biggest frustration.

It is sentimental. It is very emotional ... but to Wells's credit, he tries to stay on the right side of good taste, he does not overdo it.

Reza Aslan - God: A Human History Of Religion (Corgi, 2018) **

Reza Aslan is an Iranian writer, best know for his books on the life of Jezus, Islam, and fundamentalism. In "God", he gives an overview from early religions to today, obviously not in great detail, but with a grand sweep through history.

Aslan himself is a believer, switching from the Islam of his parents to the Christianity of his friends in the United States where he grew up, then abandoning official religion to currently believe in a 'dehumanized' god, a kind of spiritual presence, a pantheistic god.

You get the full history, from the depiction of gods in early caves dating back to 18,000 BCE, over the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians and Greeks, to our more 'modern' religions such as Islam and Christianity.

Aslan is not a historian, and also not a scholar, even if he presents himself as such. He makes a lot of claims in this book that are unsubstantiated and unreferenced.

For instance, I would be interested to know how many "villages (existed) with booming populations, building giant temples, creating great works of art, and sharing our technologies (with other villages), before it occurred to us to grow our food". This quote, without reference, should reinforce his claim that the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey was no exception but rather the rule. But who says that? Where is it written?

He also claims that people that "the ancients simply accepted the idea that the world of the dead is just a continuation of the world of the living". The "ancients"? As if they are all the same. Again, who wrote this, who demonstrated this, and where is it published? Having read a lot of the "invention of heaven", this is clearly not correct. Another example: "When we organized ourselves in small, wandering packs of hunter-gatherers united by blood and kinship, we envisioned the world beyond ours to be a dreamlike version of our own, bursting with hordes of tame animals, shepherded by the Lord of Beasts for our spirit ancestors to stalk with ease". What? Really? Says who? Claims such as this one - and there are many examples - are ok in fiction, but not in a book with a claim to scientific (even if popular) evidence.

On the positive side, there are some interesting and factual stories.

If you're interested in the history of religion, I recommend you to find more reliable and scientific sources.

Mario Livio - Brilliant Blunders (Simon & Schuster, 2013) ***

"Brilliant Blunders" is not about how blunders turned out to true, and the subtitle "Colossal Mistakes By Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding Of Life And The Universe" is clearly erroneous. It should actually read "Colossal Mistakes By Great Scientists Who Changed Our Understanding Of Life And The Universe", or in other words, the mistakes were mistakes and they didn't change our understanding of life and the universe.

Yet despite these semantics, the Mario Livio's book gives a deep insight into the theories of well-renowned scientists, and their emotional attachment to them, which often resulted in initial rejection when new theories were brought forward that went against the ones that made them so famous and renowned.

The scientists under review are not of the least: Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Linus Pauling and Albert Einstein. On top of the explanation of their core theories, the blunders look like blunders from our own current perspective, but could not in all truth be called 'blunders'. The stupidity of it only depends on clinging to one's own insights and intuitions, which in hindsight appeared to be wrong. More importantly, it shows that science is a journey with many bifurcations and dead ends, with theories exploring new possible explanations, only to be proved false by new evidence or more coherent theories.

An interesting book.

Mike McCormack - Solar Bones (Canongate, 2016) **

In the span of one hour, engineer Marcus Conway reflects on his life, his work, his family, the joys and the tensions, presented as one long 'monologue intérieur' without punctuation, as one endless sentence. Conway's life is disintegrating, his wife left him, his son lives in Austrialia with an uncertain future, his daughter is close yet he does not understand her, and then he gets hit professionally too.

Reading the story with its good cadence and rhythm quickly turns it into a mesmerising experience, but of course a novel is too long to read in one session, so you have to break it up and get into it again, and unfortunately, the story itself and the main character did not really resonate with me, and as the narrative progresses, I did seem to care less and less about Conway's predicament.

Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains (Harvill Secker, 2018) ***

Like Henry David Thoreau in "Walden", Italian documentary maker Paolo Cognetti decided to leave his city life and move to the mountains in the north of Italy. The story in "The Eight Mountains" is partly autobiographic, and it describes the friendship of Pietro, a young Milanese boy who goes on holidays every year to the same place in the mountains, with Bruno, the only boy in the remote and half-deserted village. Even if they only meet once a year, their friendship becomes solid, not based on words or common interests, but at some deeper understanding of life. Their worlds could not be more different, including the relationships with their parents, although both boys, as can be expected do not understand the whims and strange character traits of their parents, for Pietro primarily his father, for Bruno his mother.

Efforts for both worlds to meet in a more structural way, and outside of the holidays, fail, as if there is a border that cannot or should not be crossed. Pietro's universe becomes the world, including frequent stays in Nepal, whereas Bruno never actually leaves his village. The mutual understanding of both boys and later as young men, is maintained despite the changes in their lives, both personal and professional.

Cognetti writes in a very accessible and balanced way, well integrating memories and reflections in the action, yet he's most convincing when describing nature and the ambiguity of relationships. It's a story about leaving the rat race, and about getting a deeper understanding about the beauty and harshness of nature. It is a little mellow at moments, but somehow that only emphasises the authenticity of the writing.

Hans Rosling - Factfulness (Flatiron, 2018) ****

If you don't know Swedish epidemiologist Hans Rosling, it's high time you find out about him on the internet, via his Gapminder Foundation, or through this book, which was published posthumously. 

Rosling is an incredible educator and big picture thinker, who managed to show the state of the world through very interesting visualisations of the evolution of poverty and wealth, of diseases and of demographic changes. 

"Factfulness" describes in a comprehensive way all his teaching, youtube presentations and TED Talks. 

This book should be mandatory reading in all schools across the world. It will bring both humility and hope for everybody. He demonstrates that most countries in the world are currently having the same living standards as the richest countries somewhere in the middle of last century. He shows how things improve for many people across the world, and how our categorisation of the world in "developed" and "developing" countries is completely outdated. 

One of the best things about his lectures, is that Rosling always submitted his audiences to a quiz before his presentation, only to show how most of us have completely wrong assumptions about the state of the world. And these audiences included politicians, journalists, WHO and IMF collaborators, who in general and with great majority gave the wrong answers. 

And that includes both you and me. So you'd better read this book too!

Steven Pinker - Enlightenment Now (Allen Lane, 2018) ****

We know Pinker, we love Pinker. "Enlightenment Now" is subtitled "The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress", and that's exactly what the book does. The good thing is that Pinker gives a very high level overview of the progress that's been made in the last centuries, thanks to the insights of the enlightenment philosophers, scientists and politicians who radically put evidence and democracy at the heart of society. This led to better science, better understanding, but also better justice and well-being to many.

This book is a kind of sequel to "The Better Angels of our Nature", in which he describes how society has become less violent over the millennia.

He tackles the big picture topics of wealth, equality, happiness, peace, safety, terrorism, democracy, equal rights, the environment, ... and he is right: based on all evidence, things are getting better, despite the growth of the population.

His appeal to reason and democracy are a deep cry from an entire intellectual community who sees populism on the rise across the world, with 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' increasingly dominating our news and social media.

As with so many books, this one will also be preaching to the converted. Its main advantage is that it give the converted a very strong overview of facts to support their arguments. Nothing new here, just very well presented and documented.

If I had his skills and knowledge, this is the book I would write.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Skin In The Game (Allen Lane, 2018) **

Ha! I couldn't keep thinking throughout the book that mathematician and stock broker Nassim Nicholas Taleb was contractually bound by his publisher to write a book yet had no idea what to write about. "Skin In The Game" is about people making choices that influence other people's lives without having 'skin in the game', and therefore are also not impacted by the choices they make. By itself this seems like a good angle to comment on today's society, but the book never delivers on its promise. Rather, it is a long and repititive tirade about how clever he is, and how dumb the rest of the world, especially the Intelligent Yet Idiots (IYI), which include people such as Stephen Pinker and Noble Prize winners for economy Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. He complains that his papers against the rhetoric of Thomas Pikkety on capitalism never got the attention they deserved.

Taleb's fascination with his own self is so omnipresent in the book that you start wondering which childhood trauma lies at the basis of it. He has to show off that he speaks and reads in several languages, that he is as comfortable in quoting Aristotle, the bible and quantum physics, that he understands all aspects of religion, history, philosophy, economy, psychology and finance better than anyone else. Taleb is able to judge everybody in every discipline of thought because clearly he is the cleverest of them all.

You find quotes like this on almost every page: "For it looks like you need a lot of intelligence to figure probabilistic things out when you don't have skin in the game. But for an overeducated nonpracticioner, these things are hard to figure out. Unless one is a genius, that is, has the clarity of mind to see through the mud, or has sufficiently profound command of probability theory to cut through the nonsense".

In contrast to "The Black Swan", which I can highly recommend, this book is more a collection of musings and unrelated ideas and accusations with no immediate use in daily life, and yes, his starting point is interesting and true, but not really elaborated upon in a systematic way.

That being said, many of his ideas are thought-provoking and give a different angle to many assumptions that are at least worth considering. Personally, I can agree with many of his ideas, including about Krugman and Stiglitz, but please, do something about your self-obsession.

Jim Crace - The Melody (Picador, 2018) **

The retired singer and widower Alfred Busi is attacked by a further undefined creature in his home. This brings him into contact with his deceased wife's sister and his son, a real estate agent, and the neighbours whose villa will be sold soon. Busi has become a lonely and sad figure, still performing as a singer, but now for smaller crowds of elderly people, and even if was once immediately recognised and famous, he is now reduced to a life on the edge, somewhat outside the bustle of society, outside of where the action is.

Jim Crace's stylistic lyricism is as good as ever, and most sentences are a real pleasure to read, the story itself is somewhat lacking in real tension. The theme is about solitude and of no longer being center-stage, about justice, both personal and political, about greed and compassion. Even if it is sad, it somehow lacks tension, or the captivating and compelling literary and memorable universes he created in "Quarantine" or "Harvest".

If you don't know Crace, I would recommend to start with these two novels.

Richard Flanagan - First Person (Chatto & Windus, 2017) ***

Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan can be highly recommended for his "Gould's Book Of Fish", and "The Narrow Road To The Deep North".

In "First Person" he tells the story of a young writer who sells his soul to a publishing company by willing to act as the ghost writer of a biography by a white collar criminal who is waiting for his trial. He is desparate for money, and accepts the deal to deliver the book in six weeks. Unfortunately, Siegfried Heidl, the book's subject, appears to be a very unpleasant, whimsical, erratic and uncooperative person ... and a liar. He creates quite some fog about his own history, leads the young writer in wrong directions, and with time pressing, the story becomes increasingly elusive.

Heidl is a con man, who fraudulently extracted $700 million from banks, and he keeps explaining to Kif Kehlmann, the ghost writer, how truth is nothing else than a story well told.

The story is extremely irritating. As it is to Kehlmann who does not make any progress. It is enervating, irritating, frustrating, discomforting, disheartening, ... Even if minor changes happen in the narrative, the core events are repetitive: meetings between Heidl and Kif where nothing is actually said, apart from clichés about truth and story-telling. And of course because of a lack of material, both protagonists' lives become to fuse on paper. Kif has no other choice than to fill in the blanks, creating a grey zone full of moral and personal confusion. Whose story is this in the end?

Is it recommended? Yes, if you have sufficient peace of mind for a narrative that keeps circling back to square one, if you are willing to go with the author and experience the narrative rather than just read it. No, if you are of the nervous type who want things to move forward, if you dislike being the victim of the author's cheap tricks to be played on you.

Dan Barker - God, The Most Unpleasant Character In All Fiction (Sterling, 2016)

I once made the effort to summarise all the atrocities of the Bible, both Old and New Testament, because if one thing is obvious, it's the high level of selectivity with which clergy cite from the bible, giving the impression of a benevolent and moral god. My manuscript - in Dutch - was rejected because deemed blasphemous, despite only offering passages from the bible.

Anybody who has actually read the bible will confess that god is nothing less than a monster by today's standards, and I think Dan Barker's title is even a soft description of what the bible actually tells us.

In this book, Barker - a former evangelical preacher - enumerates all the atrocities in the bible, ordering the chapters by theme : the jealous and proud god, the unjust god, the unforgiving god, the misogynistic god, the ethnic cleanser, the genocidal, infanticidal, the vindictive, the bloodthirsty, the megalomaniac, ...

Most of us have no idea about this side of the bible, because it remains hidden in sermons and speeches. It also shows the hypocrisy of people who use the bible for reference to take moral positions against for instance gay people, but then not applying the good rules of the same bible to stone a girl to death because she was raped.

This book is not one to read, because it actually only lists passages from the bible according to the characterisations I described above.

It is 300 pages long. It is 300 pages of absolute horror. Not one person in his right mind would follow the moral guidance of its lead character. Unfortunately, too many do, which says a lot about their ignorance, irrationality and lack of intellectual curiosity.

I'm just afraid that only atheists will dare buy this book.

Alice Roberts - The Incredible Unlikeliness Of Being (Heron Books, 2015) ***

A interesting book, one that creates a wonderful parallel between biological evolution and the growth of a child after conception. The idea is of course obvious and simple. Somehow, we all go back to the same ancestors so many millions of years ago, and this ancestry is still clear in the splitting of cells, in the growth of the foetus and the embryo. Roberts show what parts of our bodies we have in common with all other living things and how the function of some of these changed over time.

Alice Roberts is a professor of anatomy and television documentary maker. She is specialised in paleopathology, the study of disease in ancient human remains, receiving the degree in 2008. She worked as Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol Centre for Comparative and Clinical Anatomy, where her main roles were teaching clinical anatomy, embryology, and physical anthropology, as well as researching osteoarchaeology and paleopathology.

 In a very methodical way, she takes the reader through all the organs of the body, explaining the common origins with other species, the comparative and different use these body parts evolved into over time: heads and brains, skulls and senses, speech and gills, spines and segments, ribs, lungs and heart, guts and yolk sacks, gonads, genitals and gestation, limbs, legs, shoulders and thumbs.

The earliest creatures, interestingly, evolved from simple cells to take in nutrients, process them and discard them: a mouth and an arse is all it needed to get us started. And the result is absolutely fascinating: well told, easy to understand for lay people and with many drawings to illustrate her points.

Colson Whitehead - The Underground Railroad (Fleet, 2017) ***

In "The Underground Railroad", American author Colson Whitehead describes the escape from slavery by Cora through the famous 'underground railroad', the escape route for slaves which linked various houses of volunteers as so many stations on a virtual track to freedom.

The 15-year old Cora escapes the plantation where she lives in Georgia, trying to follow her mother Mabel, who escaped before, deserting her child. This fact is what keeps tormenting the main character, wondering why she did this.

Whitehead is a great story-teller, with vivid scenes and strong characters. Especially the first chapters describing life in the plantation is strong, then gradually the narrative becomes thinner, possibly written faster than the first chapters, and expanding the narrative too much instead of keeping intense and concentrated density. Why the virtual 'underground railroad' becomes a real train underground in the novel remains a mystery to me, especially because it deflates the importance of the real efforts to move above ground from one shelter to the next. It somehow turns the gravity of the real events into something more fantasy-rich and hence lighthearted.

Be that as it may, the story is captivating, and any story that can describe the horrors of what people lived through in times of slavery is worth telling,

Jon McGregor - Reservoir 13 (4th Estate, 2017) **

As much as I enjoyed "If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things", "Reservoir 13" left me totally uninterested.

It's the story of a village in England where a girl went missing. She was never found, and life continues. People do what people do. Some leave, some stay. The original story remains in a kind of undercurrent flow in the lives of all the characters presented here. The problem is: none of them is interesting, and neither are their lives. You expect the story about the missing Rebecca to be resolved, and you can admire McGregor's twist to move away from the cliché thriller or police novel, but at the same time it takes away the sense of anticipation and tension.

McGregor uses a quite distant, almost reporting style to describe what's happening in the village, using a lot of passive sentences to put the reader in a kind of voyeur position, almost intruding in the intimacy of other people's lives. It's clearly not their story. They are observed, analysed, described. But despite all the good writing, and the interesting approach, there is no interest in what's happening at all. At least not for me. I was never drawn into the story, which is a quite essential thing for a novel.

Nice try. Next time better.