After a busy couple of weeks, I'm back on the blog; if you like, you could even say, 'hi' at us... (Groan.)

Dispossession by Chaz Brenchley (1996)

One of the reasons I decided to include books by my LiveJournal friends in my reading for the 50 Book Challenge was that they coincided with some books I had meant to read for quite a while. I was thinking especially of this one by desperance, which I bought eight years ago and is actually my first Brenchley novel (though I have also thoroughly enjoyed his short fiction). Another reason for choosing to blog about books by my LJ friends is that I was pretty confident I'd enjoy them unreservedly; and now that decision may come back to bite me, because I like the beginning of Dispossession more than I like the ending.

And the beginning is very good indeed. Jonty Marks is a solicitor who wakes up in a hospital bed having been in a car crash, but with no memory of the event -- or of the previous three months. What's more, in that period, he apparently left his girlfriend and met and married another woman, who is now a complete stranger to him. And Jonty, who prides himself on his honesty, now seems to be working for a major local criminal.

I love this sort of mystery (yes, I'm the kind of person who enjoys all the plot twists in programmes like Lost), and the situation only gets stranger as Jonty looks further into it. Couple that with the enthusiasm for language evident in Brenchley's prose, and Dispossession was shaping up to be a treat. And then Brenchley drops in an angel, an angel named Luke: not a 'friend' of Jonty's -- Luke isn't that kind of being -- but someone he can go to for sanctuary. Brenchley treats Luke's existence in a very matter-of-fact way: Jonty's wife knows about him, and nothing feels contrived about the way he's introduced. I had to smile at such a delightfully casual use of the imagination.

As I said, a great start to the book as far as I'm concerned. But I don't think the rest quite matches it. Essentially, I found the solution to the mystery less interesting than the mystery itself (which may be why I've written so much much more here about the latter). But I'll still be investigating Chaz Brenchley's other novels.

About the Size of It by Warwick Cairns (2007)

Subtitled 'The Common Sense Approach to Measuring Things', I found this book in the library and thought it sounded interesting. Cairns introduces himself as a man who spent ten years researching what people in Britain thought about changing to the metric system; in general, he found, they didn't like the idea. He then poses the question of why this should be, when we embrace changes in areas like technology and fashion quite readily. What follows is a tour of measurements, where they come from, and where they might be heading.

We have a complex relationship to weights and measures in this country. The metric system is what's taught in schools, and has been for... actually, I don't know how long. Yet, if you ask a Brit how tall he or she is, you will most likely get an answer in feet and inches; beer is sold in pubs by the pint; and road signs use miles. On a personal level, I'd use metric units to measure the length of something; but I could no more judge a metre 'by eye' than I could a foot. I think it's a fascinating subject for a book.

And I learnt a lot from About the Size of It: I didn't know how traditional measurements were arrived at; I never realised that litres and centimetres weren't 'official' (under the SI) metric units. Now I do. I also find that Cairns makes his central argument -- that metric units are good when you need to be precise (such as when measuring for scientific experiments), but traditional measurements are well suited to other occasions -- persuasively.

On the downside: although Cairns is a pretty good writer, his conversational style can grate over the course of a whole book; asides are fine, but sometimes it feels as though the author didn't check how the rhythms of it worked it writing. He also doesn't really get into looking at what makes measurements such a special (or, indeed, not-so-special) case when it comes to attitudes towards change. Overall, then, this is indeed an interesting book, but not as interesting as I'd hoped it would be.