In praise of book reviews

I have to own that, in the three weeks since my surgery, thus far not able to sustain the attention to read proper books, I’ve lived mostly on book reviews.

In truth, reviews have been a staple part of my reading diet for 45 years. The reality is that if you want to have a passing understanding of most (or at least many) things, you can’t possibly read books on them all.

But good reviews always give you a précis of the content, together with (less interesting to me) a view on the excellence or otherwise of the tome in question.

So, over the years, at about twenty per week, I must have read something like 45,000 reviews – on an astonishing range of subjects.

Just in the past two days, I’ve read about the origins of AIDS, the problems of translation, the artist John Craxton, the Opium Wars in China, Ernest Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War, the castrato Tenducci, the world post-9/11, scapegoats, the Roman boy-Emperor Elagabalus and much besides. All these in the excellent Literary Review.

The books that I actually do read are nearly always ones at the heart of whatever I’m studying at the time.

Fact is, I’ll have a conversation with you about just about anything. And in my career in innovation, covering most subjects under the sun, it’s been an amazing foundation.

Recommended!

“Gradually, then suddenly”

I came across this phrase from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in Narelle Hanratty’s blog. And it occurs to me that so many discoveries and inventions happen this way - gradually, then suddenly.

A good example is the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in the early 1950s. I wrote about the way that they battled with this fundamental problem (20 December 2009), together with Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins and others, over a long period of time, and how quite suddenly one day the sun rose - and the answer was clear.

“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” wrote Watson, describing the Eureka moment in his exciting book, The Double Helix.

Of course an analogy in animal life is the gestation of foetuses followed by the birth of the young.

Have you noticed examples of this in your innovation work and elsewhere?