A reader is a device for turning coffee into narrative
So we're cataloguing our books on LibraryThing. It's hard deciding how to tag fiction: what you want when looking for something to read are the abstractions of the QI bookshop. What we settle for is setting, which is easy to pin down but not, perhaps, what the book is about.
One set I do collect for the setting is novels featuring mathematicians. Unfortunately, they're seldom much better than novels featuring librarians.
There's The Wild Numbers by Philibert Schogt. Isaac Swift is a mathematician in an unnamed, undescribed, but probably American university. He feels a failure professionally and in his relationships; this leads him to investigate a wild-goose chase, the Wild Number Problem. He wonders if this is driving him further into delusion, especially as one of his students already displaying erratic behaviour threatens him with accusations of plagiarism. The novel reads very easily but the characters other than Swift are sketchy, as is the description of 'what mathematicians do all day'. Mostly harmless. On similar lines is Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis, a slight but enjoyable piece about a mathematician who chooses to be a great failure, not merely good.
Finally, there's The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez. I found this after a BookCrosser had left it in a London Wetherspoon's where the upper floor was decorated with books-by-the-metre. (As an aside, tracing a book's travels doesn't just satisfy idle curiosity with a paperback, it's a significant part of my day job with centuries-old books whose owners and readers wrote their names and pasted their bookplates inside. I wonder if I am letting people down by keeping my books clean and should follow j4 by retaining the price stickers.)
Anyway, an Oxford mathematical mystery should have been my ideal read; perhaps that's why it was such a disappointment. I was interested to find that as a setting, Oxford seems more specific than London, as if the capital's streets are already shared with so many strangers that a few fictional characters don't intrude. But the characters barely live, it's all exposition, and that exposition is unconvincing: ironically, though the plot invokes logic and symbolism to make the murders seem ineluctable, their use seems completely arbitrary.
Elijah Wood has been seen in Oxford recently, being filmed as the nameless protagonist (at least, other characters can't pronounce his name). The setting does have one important function: the film should be pretty.
One set I do collect for the setting is novels featuring mathematicians. Unfortunately, they're seldom much better than novels featuring librarians.
There's The Wild Numbers by Philibert Schogt. Isaac Swift is a mathematician in an unnamed, undescribed, but probably American university. He feels a failure professionally and in his relationships; this leads him to investigate a wild-goose chase, the Wild Number Problem. He wonders if this is driving him further into delusion, especially as one of his students already displaying erratic behaviour threatens him with accusations of plagiarism. The novel reads very easily but the characters other than Swift are sketchy, as is the description of 'what mathematicians do all day'. Mostly harmless. On similar lines is Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis, a slight but enjoyable piece about a mathematician who chooses to be a great failure, not merely good.
Finally, there's The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez. I found this after a BookCrosser had left it in a London Wetherspoon's where the upper floor was decorated with books-by-the-metre. (As an aside, tracing a book's travels doesn't just satisfy idle curiosity with a paperback, it's a significant part of my day job with centuries-old books whose owners and readers wrote their names and pasted their bookplates inside. I wonder if I am letting people down by keeping my books clean and should follow j4 by retaining the price stickers.)
Anyway, an Oxford mathematical mystery should have been my ideal read; perhaps that's why it was such a disappointment. I was interested to find that as a setting, Oxford seems more specific than London, as if the capital's streets are already shared with so many strangers that a few fictional characters don't intrude. But the characters barely live, it's all exposition, and that exposition is unconvincing: ironically, though the plot invokes logic and symbolism to make the murders seem ineluctable, their use seems completely arbitrary.
Elijah Wood has been seen in Oxford recently, being filmed as the nameless protagonist (at least, other characters can't pronounce his name). The setting does have one important function: the film should be pretty.