Reading Challenge update: Science and poetry

Three books I read recently…

In January I signed up to the Reading Challenge on Jera’s Jamboree (details here). Shaz was encouraging us to step outside our comfort zone and read books we might not have considered before.

I decided to read something from EVERY category listed and you can see how I am getting on by looking at my blog page here.

Occasionally I will do a review and this time I am making notes on a non-fiction book, a book of poetry and a book chosen for me.

Paul Strathern: Mendeleyev’s Dream – The Quest for the Elements (published 2000)

The modern periodic table of the elements – from an idea by Dmitri Mendeleyev

I picked up this hardback book from the freebies pile at work in the year 2000 and it has been on my shelf ever since. I had thought it a biography of the Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev (1834-1907), but in fact it is a history of the discovery of the chemical elements from ancient times, with chapters on Mendeleyev at the beginning and end.

I’m not sure if this is to everyone’s taste, but having done science A-levels and read a bit about the history of science on the way, I found it to be an entertaining and informative round-up of how our thinking has changed and how the periodic table, now containing 118 elements, came to exist.

Mendeleyev was professor of chemistry in St Petersburg and at that stage 63 chemical elements had been discovered, their atomic weights were known and some had interestingly similar properties. You could number them and you could group them and he thought there must be some link between the two patterns.

In February 1869 he was due to leave by train from Moscow for his country estate but had been racking his brains for three days over the elements. He seems to have slipped into a reverie and, a fan of the card game patience, he suddenly made a connection and an early version of the periodic table was born.

But this history of the elements begins in antiquity and there are some “funny” stories along the way.

Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus (c624-546 BC) saw seashell fossils in the hills, realised the world was once covered with water and said WATER must be the fundamental element from which everything derived. He either died of heat stroke while watching the Olympic Games or fell off a steep slope while observing the stars. Meanwhile Anaximenes of Miletus (c585-528 BC) believed the fundamental element was not water but AIR.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (c535-475 BC) was arrogant and misanthropic and believed the essential element was FIRE, or flux, which uncannily resembles energy in modern science. He made himself ill, wandering in the hills, eating grass and herbs, so went to a cowshed and buried himself in manure, thinking the warmth of the stuff would draw out the noxious fluid in his body. Instead he died from the fumes.

Empedocles (c490-430 BC) believed there were four elements – EARTH, WATER, AIR and FIRE. Although wide of the mark, it showed some insight if you consider the four as solid, liquid, gas and energy. In an attempt to prove to his followers that he was immortal, Empedocles jumped into the crater of Mount Etna. Says the author: “Opinion remained divided at the time, but over the years his lack of reappearance went against him.”

The first practical chemists were probably the women perfume-makers of Babylon, the ancient Egyptians knew of seven metallic elements and carbon and sulphur were also identified early. The Phoenicians knew lead and used it to weight their anchors – although when they found more silver than they could transport in Spain, they discarded the lead and weighted their anchors with silver! It’s these little stories that make the book.

When Alexander the Great founded Alexandria on the Nile in 331 BC, Greek thought encountered an older learning, khemeia, root of the word chemistry, and a combination of experimental practices and mystical beliefs led to the charlatan arts of alchemy, which tried to turn base metals into gold and distil an elixir of life.

Despite many misunderstandings over the centuries, by the 19th century several elements were being discovered every decade – but it was not until Mendeleyev’s periodic table that we began to understand how they are related, how the existence of “new” elements could be predicted and eventually how elemental atoms are not the end of the story, there are even more fundamental particles.

Understanding the subatomic structure of matter explains why families of elements have similar properties and it has led on to theories about the origins of the universe itself. So it’s a big subject!

Seamus Heaney: New Selected Poems 1966-1987 (published 1990)

Grauballe Man, a bog body that inspired one of Seamus Heaney’s poems

I was prompted to buy a book by Irish poet Seamus Heaney when he died in 2013 at the age of 74 but only now have I read it. A tribute on the radio at the time had him reading “Digging”, a poem about the process of writing.

You can hear it on this video or read the words yourself on this link.

Here are a few lines…

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging.

…
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
…

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

What I have learned from reading these collected poems is that poetry is not to be read like a novel. I did not enjoy the experience as much as I enjoyed my schoolroom analysis of individual poems by anyone from Wordsworth to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes. You need to go deep and analyse every line.

I found most of Heaney’s poems shallow, or repetitive, with themes of Northern Ireland, its politics and its landscape. The poems I liked best were about the bog bodies of Denmark. He related to them because of the peatlands of his home, while I can relate because of my studies of prehistoric archaeology.

This is the beginning of “The Grauballe Man” (read the rest of it here)…

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.

The book of poetry had its moments, and I know Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, but I’m afraid he has not earned a place on my list of favourites.

Lynne Truss: The Lunar Cats (published 2016)

A statue of the Lunar Men in Birmingham, inspiration for the Lunar Cats

My third book is another genuine hardback book, a rarity when I usually read on Kindle these days. I consider it was “chosen” for me because a friend of mine at work, another sub-editor, said she had a copy to review and didn’t want it, so gave it to me, as I had heard about it and was interested.

Obviously we were both familiar with the author’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but this is “a nail-biting tale of good versus evil involving one man, his dog and a group of 18th-century amateur scientific pioneers who just happen to be cats”.

I was intrigued, having heard of the real Lunar Men of Birmingham who met one evening every month to discuss science, engineering, philosophy and inventions. They were known as the Lunar Men as they met when the moon was full, so that they could walk safely home by moonlight.

This is a good yarn, clever and amusing as you would expect from Lynne Truss, and appealing if you like talking cats. Apparently the theme of evil talking cats and some of the characters in this book, such as narrator Alec the librarian and Roger the feline Sherlock Holmes, appeared in an earlier Truss book, Cat Out of Hell, but it was no obstacle to my enjoyment that I hadn’t read it. Maybe I will go back and look at that one, too.

This tale begins when Alec is attacked in Poundland by a woman who smells of stew and a cute kitten arrives on his doorstep. But the kitten is pure evil…

At the centre of the book is the diary of Mr Timkins, a cat who, after a meeting of the London Lunar Society, embarks on the 1768 voyage of exploration to the Pacific with Captain Cook on HMS Endeavour.

There’s also more than a touch of Hammer horror movie in the action scenes, but it’s a funny, light read if you are into cats and the history of scientific exploration…