What I'm reading ...

I have started The Magic of Reality: How we know what's really true by Richard Dawkins. Time for some non-fiction. This was recommended by a friend. As I am a fan/follower of Dawkins, I thought I would give it a go.  Here's the blurb:

Magic takes many forms. The ancient Egyptians explained the night by suggesting that the goddess Nut swallowed the sun. The Vikings believed a rainbow was the gods' bridge to earth. These are magical, extraordinary tales. But there is another kind of magic, and it lies in the exhilaration of discovering the real answers to these questions. It is the magic of reality - science.
Packed with inspiring explanations of space, time and evolution, laced with humour and clever thought experiments, The Magic of Reality explores a stunningly wide range of natural phenomena. What is stuff made of? How old is the universe? What causes tsunamis? Who was the first man, or woman? This is a page-turning, inspirational detective story that not only mines all the sciences for its clues but primes the reader to think like a scientist too.

The Maltese Falcon - by Dashiell Hammett

I found this book rather hard work. It is very much of its time, having been written nearly a century ago. The behaviour of the characters seems very odd by today's standards. The story is reasonably coherent, but there does not seem to be very much to it. It is very much in the old-fashioned detective story style, where everything is explained at the end instead of the reader having the opportunity to glean understanding as they go along. It seemed to me that several opportunities were missed. Some more discussion of why the bird was considered so valuable would have been good. At the end of the story, there were several opportunities for nice twists [like the appearance of a non-fake falcon], but these were missed.

What I'm reading ...

I have started The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. This is my next book club selection. I was surprised to find that, although the title is very well known, I would not have been able to name the author. I was irritated to find that it was not available on Kindle, so bought a second hand paper copy. Then I found that I could download an electronic version that I could read on my iPad. Here's the blurb:

Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O¿Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him?

The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman by Sue Townsend

As expected, this was an enjoyable, undemanding read. Each chapter is a stand-alone essay, so it is easy to pick up and put down. Many of the pieces made me smile, but others were quite thought provoking. I had quite forgotten about the author's quality of writing. The material all dates back to the 1990s, so, in some ways it is dated, but I did not feel that this diminished it in any way - it is simply "of its time".