Review: Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet

Two memoirs in such a short period of time is unusual for me, and two dealing with brain disorders no less. The first, of course, was The Man who Forgot How to Read, which I reviewed about a month ago, but read around the same time as this, Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet. This book deals with the way Savant syndrome, a form of Asperger's syndrome, and Synaesthesia combined in Tammet, record holder of most digits of pi recited from memory (22 514) and learner of the Icelandic language in one week.

This memoir is a record of how Tammet grew up and learned to become independent as an adult in spite of the difficulties his various syndromes gave him. It's also an explanation of some of the many ways his brain works differently from yours and mine, from his general lack of empathy to his experience of numbers as colours, shapes, and movements.

Opening paragraph:

One of the things I struggle with in writing about this book (and the reason it's taken me nearly a month to finish writing this) is distinguishing between the quality of the writing and enjoyment I get from the information it offers. It's not an especially well-written book. Sometimes it rambles or describes things Tammet couldn't possibly know about. Sometimes he latches onto a subject like a dog with a bone and doesn't seem to understand how tedious the subject actually is, such as the many many paragraphs he devotes to his own variation on solitaire. (He is aware of that tendency in himself, but that doesn't make it any less boring to know that he knows he can occasionally be dull and repetitious.) There is a sort of cautious and considered tone to the book that probably reads to most people as being simplistic. (My impression is coloured by having seen Tammet speak on television, when I got the impression of a deeply shy person who thinks everything through and then presents it very carefully.)

I'd have liked to read more about what Tammet described in interviews as learning how to experience emotions – learning what love is, for example – but I did feel that the book focused more on the difficulties of understanding emotions rather than how he overcame those difficulties.

On the better side, I found the actual content to be quite fascinating. There is nearly always something very interesting about the ways that the brain can go "wrong." Not that Tammet's brain is wrong, it just makes different connections than most people's minds make. A lot of things I've read about Tammet talk about how remarkable he is for his ability to describe the way he sees things – many people with similar conditions are unable to articulate the differences so clearly. Here is one quotation on the way he experiences words:

Some words are perfect fits for the things they describe. A raspberry is both a red word and a red fruit, while 'grass' and 'glass' are both green words that describe green things… Conversely, some words do not seem to me to fit the things they describe: 'geese' is a green word, but describes white birds ('heese' would seem a better choice to me), the word 'white' is blue while 'orange' is clear and shiny like ice. 'Four' is a blue word but a pointy number, at least to me. The colour of wine (a blue word) is better described by the French word vin, which is purple.

Other sections when he talks about his ability to process mathematical equations or to learn languages are similarly interesting because they are so different from the average experience.

As I said, reading the book is a bit of a mixed experience. I think it's more interesting to think about than it is to read, if that makes sense. I liked to read about the way his brain works, and I think he described it well, but I wish the actual writing of it had been a bit tighter.


Daniel Tammet has written two books, Born on a Blue Day and more recently Embracing the Wide Sky, which tries to explain more about the Savant mind and how the average person's mind isn't so very different. He's appeared on several talk shows, including The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos, which you can see here, and The Late Show, and was the subject of the documentary, Brainman. His website can be found here, Optimnem.co.uk.


Tammet, Daniel. Born on a Blue Day. London: Hodder, 2007.
Finished: 02 July 2009
Rating: 4 of 5 sieves of Eratosthenes
This was my 1st book in July and my 23rd in 2009.



*Psst... my ratings are numbered 1-5, meaning something like 1=sucky, 2=meh, 3=okay, 4=good, 5=great.

Review: When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

When You are Engulfed in Flames is the 3rd book from David Sedaris that I've read. The first was Me Talk Pretty One Day, which had me laughing like a maniac in public places. It was a great experience and sing I'd come quite late to his books, I had several others to choose from to read next. Unfortunately, I picked up Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which was only so-so. I can't really remember what put me off about it, though I assume it just wasn't that funny. But I was a bit wary after that and hadn't picked up any of Sedaris' books since. When You are Engulfed in Flames had a great cover though and it was 40% off, so why not?

Opening paragraph, from "It's Catching":

My friend Patsy was telling me a story. "So I'm at the movie theater," she said, "and I've got my coat all neatly laid out against the back of my seat, when this guy comes along –" And here I stopped her, because I've always wondered about this coat business. When I'm in a theater, I either fold mine in my lap or throw it over my armrest, but Patsy always spreads hers out, acting as if the seat back were cold, and she couldn't possibly enjoy herself while it was suffering.

I can't remember if Sedaris' other books had any sort of thematic element to tie the essays together. (I assume I was being a lazy reader and that there actually was.) This collection is mainly about death and endings. Very entertaining takes on these subjects, of course.

For the most part this book brought me back to the laughing-out-loud-on-the-bus mode. It makes me feel like a tit just to grin in public when doing something so private as reading, but it couldn't be helped. There were a few mediocre stories, but more were absolute gems, and most of the collection fell on the very enjoyable side of somewhere in between.

On the whole, I think I prefer Me Talk Pretty One Day, but it's been a long time since I read it, and I'm very happy with the experience of reading When You are Engulfed in Flames. It was worth every moment spent.


David Sedaris has written several books, beginning with Barrel Fever and Naked, neither of which I've read, and a handful of others (most of which I've also not read). He has co-written several plays I've neither seen nor read with his sister Amy Sedaris, and he's also been a contributor to Ira Glass' This American Life radio show. (Which I've never listened to, incidentally.)


Sedaris, David. When You Are Engulfed in Flames. New York: Back Bay Books, 2009.
Finished: 12 July 2009
Rating: 4 of 5 human skeletons
This was my 4th book in July and my 26th in 2009.



*Psst... my ratings are numbered 1-5, meaning something like 1=sucky, 2=meh, 3=okay, 4=good, 5=great.

Review: The Man Who Forgot How to Read by Howard Engel

I have occasional, passing bouts of interest in memoirs and auto/biographers, but generally only in cases where I'm already a fan of the author or subject. I quite loved Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, for example, but it's pretty unlikely that I'd have read it if I hadn't already read and loved his novels. A month ago, I'd never heard of Howard Engel, so The Man who Forgot How to Read would never have even been on my radar except that when I went to check the weather on the CBC website one day, they had a big link to their online book club, which read the memoir in May. I read a fair bit about the book at their site and was intrigued.

The Man who Forgot How to Read tells the story of how author Howard Engel woke up one morning, having unknowingly had a stroke, and discovers that he can no longer read. Having written an (apparently) well known series of novels about detective Benny Cooperman, the loss of Engel's reading skills was a blow not just to his sense of self (Engel is/was a voracious reader), but also to his career. He could still write, but couldn't read what he'd written; the letters on the page looked foreign, as if they'd been printed in Serbo-Croatian rather than English. How could he complete and edit a novel like that? Maybe it's better to say that this memoir is about how Engel came back to himself, both as a reader and a writer.

Opening paragraph:

My name is Howard Engel. I write detective stories. That's what I tell people when they ask me what I do. I could say I'm a writer or a novelist, but that raises a false echo in my brain, so I'm happier with the more modest claim of writing detective stories. I've written quite a few of them.

Although I can't speak to Engel's skills as a writer before his stroke – I've never read any of the Benny Cooperman novels – this particular bit of writing is simple and understated. It's very straightforward, feels honest, and unpretentious. I don't know how much of that is a result of Engel's style as a writer and how much is due to his stroke. There are occasional blurbs (particularly noticeable in the section about his childhood and the years leading up to the stroke) that felt unnecessary and repetitive sometimes in word choice and sometimes in subject (though of course I can't find any of them by skimming just now). There are bits that felt like unnecessary diversions, but again I don't know if Engel thought that there were important points to be made (that I obviously missed) or if they were also a result of the stroke.

Nevertheless, this is quite an interesting book, at least if you're intrigued by the oddities of the human brain and just how amazing it is at finding ways of working around problems. (Engel spends a fair bit of time talking about the ways he's learned to trick his brain into working better for him.) I think it would be interesting to compare his writing now with his writing before, though that would probably require dredging up an interest in detective fiction that I'm not sure I've got.


Howard Engel wrote close to a dozen detective novels before the stroke, beginning with The Suicide Murders, and he's published one since, Memory Book and is at work on another. He's also written a few non-fiction books, including Lord High Executioner: An Unashamed Look at Hangmen, Headsmen, and Their Kind and Crimes of Passion: An Unblinking Look at Murderous Love.


Engel, Howard. The Man who Forgot How to Read. Toronto: Harper, 2008.
Finished: 19 June 2009
Rating: 3 of 5 Sero-Croation newspapers
This was my 4th book in June and my 21st in 2009.



*Psst... my ratings are numbered 1-5, meaning something like 1=sucky, 2=meh, 3=okay, 4=good, 5=great.

Review: god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

When I first started up this blog this year I knew that there would be certain books I'd find hard to write about, and I hoped that I'd just be able to get on with it anyway. This book - god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens – is not one of those hard-to-write-about books, but the six that I read between this book and the last one I wrote about… those ones were. With any luck I'll manage to write about them soon. But perhaps not.

In any case, this is the second book I've recently read about atheism and why it would be better for the world if religion was not a part of it. I'm not really sure what's lead me to reading about the subject because generally I don't think much about religion one way or another. I suppose in both cases, the titles just grabbed me: Dawkin's The God Delusion and now Hitchens' god is not Great.

Opening paragraph:

If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond disagreement with its author and try to identify the sins and deformities that animated him to write it (and I have certainly noticed that those who publicly affirm charity and compassion and forgiveness are often inclined to take this course), then he or she will not just be quarreling with the unknowable and ineffable creator who – presumably – opted to make me this way. They will be defiling the memory of a good, sincere, simple woman, of stable and decent faith, named Mrs Jean Watts.

It was Mrs. Watt's task, when I was a boy of about nine and attending a school on the edge of Dartmoor, in southwestern England, to instruct me in lessons about nature, and also about scripture…

The subtitle of Hitchens' book is "How Religion Poisons Everything, which is a rather massive blanket statement, but also a very succinct introduction to just what this book is about: some of the many ways that religion has hurt the world. (A quick note: he doesn't talk only about Christianity, but about all the major world religions.) A slightly less scathing explanation would be this one: "There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking" (4). The book goes on to discuss these and several other ways that religion has and continues to poison the world.

I think Hitchens found a pretty good balance between talking about the more general harms it's done – setting back science and thus progress, for instance – and the more specific harms. I think it would be too easy to fall entire on the specific examples, which are more immediate (for example, the rampant abuse of children by ministers in Catholic churches) and so more horrifying and easy to understand.

I would have liked if Hitchens had spent more time talking about the ways that deists refute these arguments. (The classic examples, I suppose, are that Hitler, Mao Zedong and Stalin were atheists and look what harm they did. I do know that some people argue that none of those three were actually atheists.) He did talk about it to some extent, but maybe not quite in those terms. (Or maybe I should read that chapter again.)

Anyway, I found this a very readable book on the subject. (Much more so than Dawkins' The God Delusion, which was somewhat hit and miss in the readability department and which I also found a bit… smug in an irritating way.) I both enjoyed it and fully recommend it, to the religious, the secular and those who fall somewhere in between.



Christopher Hitchens is the author of several books including The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practise and Thomas Jefferson: Author of America and the editor of The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. He has written for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic,and Slate amongst others. I didn't find an official website, but Hitchens Web has links to several of his articles. He does have a blog on politics, war and religion.


Hitchens, Christopher. god is not Great. Toronto: Emblem, 2008.
Finished: 12 April 2009
Rating: 5 of 5 intelligent designs
This was my 2nd book in April and my 14th in 2009.


*Psst... my ratings are numbered 1-5, meaning something like 1=sucky, 2=meh, 3=okay, 4=good, 5=great.

Review: The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery

Several months ago one of the grocery stores near me had a discount bin of books for 84 cents each. Most of the books weren't worth even 84 cents to me, but I picked up three or four just to try them out. One was a book by Bill Bryson, which turned out pretty good if not fantastic, but which I read during my year long off-period when I didn't read much and didn't write anything about any of it. Another was The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery, which is a non-fiction book about climate change and global warming. It's not a subject that I know a lot about, so I thought this would be a good (and cheap!) introduction. It was.

Opening Paragraph:

Until a black mood takes her and she rages about our heads, most of us are unaware of our atmosphere. The 'atmosphere': what a dull name for such a wondrous thing. And it's hardly specific. I remember, as child, my great-aunt sitting with my mother at our kitchen table, a cup of tea in hand, saying meaningfully, 'You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.' If we took the same linguistic approach to things maritime we would use the catch-all word 'water' to replace 'sea' and 'ocean', leaving us with no way to indicate whether we meant a glassful or a half a planet's worth of hydrogen oxide, as H20 is properly know.

Not a really interesting opening paragraph, I'm afraid. It also needs to be said, it was an awfully depressing book to open the year.

This book is a pretty large overview of how the world's climate has gotten from where it was in pre-industrial times (and much further back) to what it is now to what it may become in the next fifty or hundred years. Flannery focuses quite a lot on the future, not just how we've gotten to this point (both the human forces at work, primarily through CO2, and the earth's forces as well), but what it'll mean to go on as we already are or if we make small changes or if we make sweeping changes.

I felt a little bit swamped, really, by the masses of information covered in this book, mainly because my understanding of science is often shaky at best. It wasn't that Flannery didn't explain the science, but I read the book spread out over several weeks and I'd often forget things by the time they were mentioned again or else I would understand the words but not really grasp how it worked.

What really stuck with me wasn't the science of how we've done it, but the anecdotes of how we've already changed the world – extinctions of various species, the break up of the Larsen B ice-shelf, the greater number of stronger weather events, and so on. I found, for me anyway, that the strongest parts of the book were those parts where he was giving evidence of change. I suppose that's maybe because even if I don't understand (or remember the meaning of) albedo or global dimming, I can and do understand what it means to say that golden frogs or gastric brooding frogs no longer exist. I can look at a picture of the polar ice cap and see how much smaller it has become and understand how that affects the plants and animals that live and hunt there.

I said before that I found this a depressing start to my year's reading. And it was because I was really left with this overwhelming sense that the politicians, businesses, people of the world won't get their heads out of their asses until it's too late to fix things. Flannery does talk about various ways to fight climate change on a personal level, but many of them are not practical for me (I don't make decisions on whether or not to purchase solar panels for electricity, since I rent) and others I'm already doing (like taking transit, rather than driving). But I do wonder how much change any one person can make, and that's what's depressing to me. I live in a province so heavily dependant on oil that I can't see things getting any better here, not for a long time. Anyway, a worthwhile read, even if it did leave me in a bit of despair about the state of things.


Tim Flannery has written a handful of other books including The Future Eaters and The Eternal Frontier (both ecological histories, the former of Australia and the latter of North America). You can read more about the book, including a much longer (and more interesting) excerpt from The Weather Makers' Introduction at The Weather Makers website.

Flannery, Tim. The Weather Makers: How we are changing the climate and what it means for life on earth. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2006.
Finished: 13 January 2009
Rating: 4 of 5* gastric brooding frogs
This was my 1st book in January, and thus my 1st in 2009.



*Psst... my ratings are numbered 1-5, meaning something like 1=sucky, 2=meh, 3=okay, 4=good, 5=great.