Five by five

I haven’t done a book review in a while. So here are the last five books I read that scored “5”. (These aren’t the last five books I’ve read – I’ve read many more than that. However, these are the ones I enjoyed most, enough to score 5/5.)

Hothouse Earth

By Bill McGuire. A readable, if depressing, guide to what life will be like if we don’t get climate change sorted. (TLDR; not good.)

In many ways, this is a little like a focused (and updated) version of Mark Lynas’ Six Degrees (published in 2008). Where Six Degrees explained what each degree would be like going up to six degrees (and six degrees of warming is truly cataclysmic), Hothouse Earth concentrates on what will happen between now and 2100. (Also, the science is more up-to-date.)

There are no answers in Hothouse Earth. Instead, McGuire accepts that we have failed to control global heating and predicts heatwaves, droughts, crop failures, rising sea levels and wars. Assuming we do nothing else.

(If you’re looking for answers, recycling, cutting down your meat consumption and switching off phone chargers when they aren’t in use won’t cut it. Governments must coordinate and act–decarbonising society is a colossal challenge beyond any one individual. Bill Gates has ideas in his How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.)

Can games help? I’m not sure, but Matt Leacock (Pandemic designer) and Matteo Menapace have developed Daybreak, a cooperative game about solving climate change. It’s not out yet, but I’ve ordered a copy.

Joe Country and Slough House

By Mick Herron. Books 6 and 7 in the Slow Horses / Jackson Lamb series. Slough House is where disgraced MI5 agents go to die. MI5 won’t kick you out; instead, they demote you to Slough House where you work for the worst boss ever – the gloriously foul Jackson Lamb, ex-cold war spook. While everyone in Slough House harbours ambitions of making it back, nobody has.

I can’t imagine reading these out of order, so start with Slow Horses. (Or the excellent Apple TV series starring Gary Oldman and Kristen Scott-Thomas.)

I’m not going to describe the plots, except that, as always, the slow horses are dragged into a complicated plot that’s as likely to result from an earlier MI5 operation gone wrong as it is enemy action. As usual, Jackson Lamb is three steps ahead of everyone else, and Herron comes from the same school of writing as George RR Martin: don’t get too fond of the characters. (Slough House has a real cliffhanger in that regard.)

Occasionally I’m annoyed by the plot – some coincidences strike me as unnecessary, but everything else is so good that I’m prepared to forgive them.

Once I got into the series, I found them hard to put down. Recommended.

The Bullet that Missed 

By Richard Osman. The third book in Osman’s very cosy Thursday Murder Club series is like being wrapped in a warm blanket. I forget the plot now, but that’s not really the point. The joy is in the Osman’s characters – even the criminals have a touch of warmth about them. I’m not surprised it’s a bestseller.

Why we eat (too much)

By Dr Andrew Jenkinson. I am fascinated by diet, obesity, and health. I am lucky because I don’t have a weight problem. I was a skinny kid, and while I put on weight around my middle in my thirties, I’ve since lost that (partly through 5:2 fasting). I’ve read (or listened to) many diet/health books, including The Diet Myth and Spoon-Fed by Tim Spector, The Truth About Fat and The Angry Chef by Anthony Warner, The Clever Guts Diet by Dr Michael Mosley, The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and so on. There are many commonalities and a realisation that obesity and poor health aren’t choices but are symptoms of our western society and diet. (The other change is the importance of gut health.)

Anyway, Why we eat (too much) is written by a bariatric surgeon who wanted to know why something seemingly simple (losing weight) was so hard for so many. I enjoyed it and learned a few things. The book is wide-ranging, but my key takeaways are:

• Being overweight is 70% genetics, 20% diet and 10% willpower. If you are genetically disposed to obesity, it’s hard to get out of it.
• Your body tries to maintain a set weight. If you eat more calories than your set weight suggests, your body will raise your metabolic rate to burn them off without you doing any exercise. And if you diet, your body will slow your metabolic rate – it thinks food is scarce.
• Your body takes cues from what it thinks is happening – in autumn, it gets heavier as it puts on weight for winter. This is because it senses the approach of autumn thanks to a diet of nuts and seeds (high in omega-6). In summer, it loses weight because of plentiful leafy greens (high in omega-3). 
• Unfortunately, the Western diet mimics autumn all year round. The Western diet is awful: too much omega-6 (vegetable oils (in everything), nuts, seeds (including wheat) and not enough omega-3 (fresh fruit and veg, and things that eat fresh fruit and veg like grass-fed beef and oily fish). Obesity rates started climbing in the 1980s when governments introduced dietary guidelines (which recommended grains and less saturated fat).
• Vegetable oil is not “natural” and not as good for you as olive oil. Unlike olive oil, which can be pressed, vegetable oil requires industrial processing, which I hadn’t realised.
• Food that doesn’t go off, or has a long use-by date, probably isn’t very good for you. 

Dr Jenkinson’s suggestion is to eat natural food as much as possible. Cut out wheat (it’s a seed) and anything processed. So cook mostly from scratch, and don’t eat too much junk food.

I haven’t eliminated nuts and seeds, but I’m not putting on weight. So maybe the important thing is a diet rich in leafy greens. Or perhaps I’m lucky with my genes. Or both. Or maybe it’s something else – our bodies are extraordinarily complicated. But the overall advice (cook from scratch, don’t each much junk food) is good – although for many, that presents its own challenges.

Nearly fives

And some near fives – books I scored 4. Still very good, and I’d be happy if I enjoyed all the books I read as much as these:

SAS Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre. Story of the founding of the SAS and its exploits in WW2. I read this following the excellent BBC dramatisation. Very good, if different in surprising places to the dramatisation.

Why we get the wrong politicians by Isobel Hardman. As I've got older, I have found myself more interested in politics. Anyway, this is a fascinating look at what politicians really do, why it’s such a crappy job, and why we don’t get many good politicians. It made me glad I chose a different path.