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.

6. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2005). Not sure how I feel about this one. It kept me reading all the way through its considerable length, yet I can't drum up any particular enthusiasm for it. It's the story of Liesel Meminger, a young girl taken to live with an adoptive family in a small German town in 1939, and who (as the title suggests) develops a habit of stealing books. The novel follows the lives of Liesel, her new parents (who come to hide a Jew in their basement) and other people in her street; until, several years and a few hundred pages later, the war catches up.

Certainly The Book Thief has its moments, and Zusak makes his central points (that human beings have an equal capacity for 'beauty and brutality', and both could be found in Nazi Germany) effectively enough. But I'm not convinced that some of the novel's 'quirks' -- such as being narrated by death, and having little 'asides' printed in bold -- really add all that much. This is one of the books for my reading group next month, and I'll be interested to hear what other people make of it; as for me, I'm still unsure whether reading it is worth the necessary investment of time.

7. History Today, February 2008. I've subscribed to History Today for several years, but it's rare that I manage to sit down and read an issue from cover to cover -- but, this month, I did. Oddly enough, it was some of the shorter pieces in between the main articles that I enjoyed most. Mark Knights from Warwick University writes about the possibilities that digital technology brings to the practice and study of history which, as a history graduate, I found interesting.



Elsewhere in the magazine, journalist Jason Burke reminded me of something which I think is very true: that whilst in the UK, we might view history as 'merely something to be studied', in other parts of the world, it can be 'heavily involved in defining personal identity'; and Janet Voke tells the fascinating story of how Norway's royal family and gold reserves were evacuated to Britain in 1940 (which, I never realised, is why Norway gives Britain a Christmas tree for Trafalgar Square every year).