I enjoyed Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell’s quick-read The Secret Lives of Numbers. It doesn’t pretend to be an academic work, although a little grade 12 math is helpful in understanding some of the systems they explore. The book covers math through the pre-historic era through breakthroughs as recently as the 1990s in providing proofs to some of history’s most stubborn problems. Along the way we meet the mathematicians and a little about their times in a light-hearted survey. There’s a special emphasis on the contributions to mathematics by women and the book is avowedly international in scope. Asian counting rods as an advanced form of arithmetic, for example, are given their due as a superior non-Western system that lasted centuries. There was a little sparkle, occasional sass and a lot of math. 3/5
Elif Shaffak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky is a two-continent, sometimes historical narrative sharing the stories of its three main characters and their relationship with colonialism and their connections through water and geography centred in its twin London/Nineveh poles. It’s good storytelling even if the writing is sometimes a little ham-fisted, and the plot feels a little kluged-together. That said, it’s an entertaining novel with quick pacing and I never felt the length of it. 3/5
