Non-fiction

I am currently reading, and loving, Robert Macfarlane's Underland. On the basis of the first 100 pages it is going to be my favourite non-fiction book of all time. This got me wondering what my top five are, currently.

I think my criteria would be:

1. Something that adds to the sum of my knowledge in an area where I am already interested.

2. Something that persuades me to be interested in a subject about which I know nothing.

Here is my list. It nearly included some academic theology, sport and biography but, with apologies to Nick Hornby, Andrew Lincoln and Humphrey Carpenter, these made the cut:


Passage to Juneau
Jonathan Raban
Picador 1999

This came under category 2. I have never been at all interested in sailing although the sea had some attractiveness when viewed from a sturdy platform. I toyed with the idea of the navy but the navy successfully put me off during a course designed to put me on.

Then I read a newspaper review of this book. It caught my imagination, I think because the writing was praised as much as the subject matter. Quite rightly.

Recreating a 1000 mile sea voyage north from his home in Seattle, Raban speaks of the myths and truths of the sea as only an experienced mariner traveller can. During the voyage he explores ancient documents and his inner world, reaching some dramatic places and conclusions.



Prisoners of Geography
Tim Marshall
Elliott and Thompson 2015

I enjoyed many games of Risk as a child, quickly working out that the places that could be attacked from few sides were the most easily defended. Who knew that this would be the key to the dominance of the actual world as well? The winners were always going to be the people who populated North America. The Europeans are separated by so many mountain ranges and rivers they will never get on without some sort of union. The Russians need an ice-free port. The arbitrary way former empires carved up the territory of people who already didn't like each other very much was never going to be a recipe for peace. Why is the world like it is? Easy to understand if you have this book.


Mark Forsyth
The Elements of Eloquence
Icon 2013

I was given a good grounding in English by my two schools and owe the second one an apology for under-achieving. What my education gave me was an ear for a phrase which sounds right. When the writer hits a sweet-spot. And how to notice a dud.

What I failed to allow my education to give me is a knowledge of the science behind this. I didn't develop an interest until Junior did English Language A level and we chatted about how language works and both read David Crystal.

This book, a gift from a friend, added science to my natural ear. It answered questions I didn't know were worth asking, such as why we play ping pong and not pong ping, why Please Please Me is a good song title and why we say knives and forks when we mean cutlery (that's a merism, by the way).

Excuse the errors. It wasn't enallage it was clumsiness.


The Essential Difference
Simon Baron-Cohen
Allen Lane 2003

Men are from Mars Women are from Venus popularised the long-discussed idea that males and females see the world differently. Simon Baron-Cohen, interestingly, does an academic version of what his brother Sacha does through the medium of comedy. Sacha disguises himself as an unusual person in order to deconstruct mainstream thought. Simon analyses unusual people to find out what makes them different.

He does find differences between male and female brains - some because of nature and some nurture. One year old babies faced with videos of cars or people did divide on gender grounds. But not all men are better at stacking the dish-washer than all women. But, by and large, his research showed a male interest in systems over people and for women the opposite.

Reading this I understood myself better. It was sobering to read that people with my score, on his self-assessment paper, had, in the past, been given an autism statement.  I fell one step short of being an acute systematising male. Which makes me a cute, systematising male. You knew that.


Unapologetic
Francis Spufford
Faber and Faber 2012

The more biblical I get the more liberal I find myself. Which has always begged the question as to what speaker I might take people to hear, or what book I might give them, to explain why I am still able to own the insult 'Christian'.

When all has been deconstructed what is left? An ethics teacher once told me that when you deconstruct a light bulb you are left with everything but illumination. True. But there is no need to deconstruct a light-bulb if the manufacturer is still around to show you how it was made.

Spufford deconstructs nothing. He constructs an emotional defence (wrong word because he wasn't attacked) of hanging on to a dream, a story, a meta-narrative that there is some other. Not in the gaps that human understanding will one day bridge but so far so beyond and above that only the Christian story can pull it together and provide a base from which to explore.

First time I've read the story of someone who is emotionally content to be an ordinary Christian, although an extraordinary writer.