@internrachel, @julia1
After a bunch of longer books, I decided it was time for some shorter stuff, and so I just finished a couple of short little books– A Mathematician’s Apology, by G.H. Hardy (153 pgs), and The Club of Angels, by Luis Fernando Verissimo (135 pgs).
First, A Mathematician’s Apology. Hardy was a mathematician at Cambridge and Oxford in the early 1900s, and this book is an apology not in the “I’m sorry for making you do math” sense, but in the sense of Plato’s Apology–that is, it’s an explanation and defense of math as professional mathematicians do it.
I know it sounds like I’m going for the “reading Kant for fun” award now, but this book is not at all hard, and really very enjoyable. In fact, this wasn’t the first time I’d read it.
For people who already love math, this book is great. For people who think they hate it, it’s even better. I used to hate math. When I was in high school, I thought it was boring and stupid and it frustrated me because I wasn’t anal enough to do simple algebra problems. Somehow, when I went to college, my opinions about math started to change; and towards the beginning of my transformation, I read this book. Hardy talks about the beauty of math, and what it means for a mathematical proof to be beautiful. He’s careful to distinguish between what he calls “school math,” or “trivial math,”–that horrible collection of long division and calculus and solving equations that I hated in school–and “real math,” which is what he does. Real math is what he loves, and that’s what’s serious and mysterious and aesthetically valuable. The blurb on the back of my copy, from Graham Greene, is actually very descriptive for once: he calls it “[one of] the best account[s] of what it is like to be a creative artist.” If you’re someone who hates math and can’t even picture how a mathematician could be like an artist, you should read this book– all you need is an open mind.
The book also has a very long forward by Hardy’s friend and colleague, C.P. Snow, which I wouldn’t skip. It’s a really lovely description of a friendship, and he has a lot of interesting anecdotes about life at Oxbridge in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s. He also touches, very briefly, on the fact that Hardy was gay, if that makes this book more relevant to your interests.
Then I read The Club of Angels, by Brazilian author Luis Fernando Verissimo. I don’t know, maybe I don’t know enough about Brazil to really appreciate it, but I kept feeling like there must be something I was missing with this book. The book is a kind of satire/ possible allegory about a group of very rich, privileged Brazilian men who get together once a month for what they call the Beef Stew Club–a club in which they make fantastic gourmet feasts and celebrate their appetites and good taste. When the book starts, the leader of their club, Ramos, has died of AIDS, and a mysterious stranger named Lucídio appears and starts cooking for their club. And then the men start dying one by one.
The book starts really interestingly, with the narrator saying that he’s responsible for his friend’s deaths, since this is fiction and he wrote it (though, interestingly, the narrator does not have the same name as the author). He says, “fiction is not an extenuating circumstance.” But, he says that if he can convince the reader that he didn’t invent Lucídio, then he can prove that he’s not solely responsible. Sounds interesting and fun, right? But then the whole premise of the story being fiction, of the narrator being an author, is completely ignored for the rest of the story. I don’t really know what to make of that.
The weird this is that this book seems to lose tension as it goes along. The first death has promise. But very early on, not only do you know who’s killing all the men, but they do, too– they know that Lucídio is poisoning them with their favorite meals. And they don’t do anything about it! They just resign themselves to dying. So what’s the point? These guys are being killed by their appetite for luxury? Ok… I guess I just thought it would be a little more interesting than that. It’s so obvious! And then at the end, there’s a weak sort of twist, that takes away most of the potential for allegory and leaves the story boringly literal.
Like I said, maybe I’m missing something–but I thought this book was a pretty big let down.