I hate multiplication when one of the multiplicand or multiplier heads into double digits and beyond.  I’d rather shoot myself when both parts become larger numbers.

Fortunately, Russian peasants and the Ancient Egyptians were kind enough to impart the knowledge of how to handle these numbers and come up with an answer with very little effort involved.

Thanks to a book that I’m reading from 1955 I’ve now discovered an even easier way, however large the numbers involved happen to be, which was used by the Mesopotamians.

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Radio has been making me laugh over the last six months.  In the middle of conversations she’ll drop in the line “Sounds onimous.”

I initially pointed out to her that she’d mispronounced the word, only to get back “That’s what I said: Onimous.”

“Yes, but the word is ‘ominous’.”

“‘Onimous.’  That’s what I said.  ‘Onimous.’”

Well this went on for months, every time Radio brought up the word.

She argued that if she had it wrong, a teacher would’ve corrected her.  They hadn’t, ergo she was correct.  It seemed to escape her notice that my teachers, by that logic, would also have corrected my long-time use of ‘ominous’ in that case, and that these are the same teachers who never corrected her use of ‘could of’.

Six months later things came to a head when we were walking through Biedenkopf in Germany.  The regular discussion arose when she again said that something ‘sounds onimous’.

I happened to have an English-Esperanto dictionary back at the base, so I proposed that we bet over the result.  The loser was to buy a book for the winner.

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Sometime earlier this year I bought Sharpe’s Eagle, a book by Bernard Cornwell. I’m not exactly sure why, but I then started to buy not only the other books in the series, but also books by Bernard Cornwell that I’d have no interest in, other than the author being the same.

For the last eight months or so the three books which comprise Cornwell’s Grail Quest have sat on the bookshelf. I also have his Warlord saga looking out at me, and I decided I wanted to polish off at least one of his trilogies before 2009 arrived. Owing to the extremely alluring cover of Harlequin, the first in the series, the Grail Quest got the nod to go first.

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1) Maths is a fantastic subject.  You ought to learn it.

I was never particularly good at maths.  I still recall never being able to get my head around adding (or was it multiplying?) fractions, and having to go up to Mrs Moody to have her explain it to me.  This was a particularly unusual circumstance for ten- or eleven-year-old me, since I *never* asked for help with anything to do with schoolwork.

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I’ve surprised people over the years with my knowledge of football. I’m a language geek, a wrestling nerd, not cool, a follower of football, a deifier of people earning plaudits and millions for kicking around a bag of air.

Admittedly I know nothing about nor care a jot about football from the 90s and onward, but this wasn’t always the case.

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I’ve been hit twice today by the majesty of numbers, by their capacity to throw up surprising results that fly in the face of all expectations.

The first time was when I was working through some simultaneous equations earlier. Nothing special there, until something happened that made me very nervous about pursuing any future career in economics, illustrating to me what a disaster could ensue by the very smallest slip-up in my modelling.

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Well, of course it isn’t, but it may as well be.

I’ve just realised that I have read about a dozen books since I last updated my blog.  That’s a lot of writing to do if I’m going to comment on them all.

And that’s where this title comes from.  It seems that I find reading pretty easy.  One of the books that I read goes over 500 pages, yet it was polished off in about three days.

Yet I’ll be damned if I can write about all these books.  It seems to me that I don’t have time.  The illusion is that reading seems to be less consumptive of my time than writing about the books would be.  Utter trash, of course, but that’s how it feels.

To get around the problem, I thought I’d write about the books in a single post, add a comment, and that could be it.

I’ll write about them in order of preference, seeing as it would be unfortunate to put potential readers off by inflicting on them a line on the dull book that is Waterloo, by Andrew Uffindell and Michael Corum.

So, here I, eventually, go …

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By C. J. Sansom

The fourth book in the series sees Shardlake far removed from politics, following his request to Archbishop Cranmer at the end of the previous book, Sovereign.

The year is 1543. Henry VIII’s tyrannical reign is in a state of flux. He’s now giving up on his new religion and is reverting to Catholic traditions, minus the bit about the Pope being the head.

The streets are an unsettling place, as people no longer know what to believe. Two whales wash up in the Thames, yet another sign from above that the world is going to end.

Shardlake, once a reformer, has seen enough over the years to make him agnostic. Would that everyone else could be like that. Unfortunately, such is not the case, especially as one villain, who has taken it upon himself to murder people who have lost their convictions in gruesome ways which mirror the prophecies in the book of Revelations. The final target may even be Catherine Parr, recently widowed, and desired by the king.

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By David Crystal

Proscribe Prescription. A memorable, straightforward tagline if ever I saw one, and this is the premise of this book, yet another on the conveyor from the eminent professor in the fields of language and linguistics.

This is a reaction to the best-selling book on punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves, written by Lynne Truss. Crystal’s aim is to encourage people to break the shackles imposed by centuries of pedants, such that many people are afraid of language, unsure whether what they are saying is ‘correct’.

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By David Crystal

I’m a language fan. I speak a few to relatively high levels.

If you factor in that I’m not a native, you could call my French near fluent and my Esperanto advanced. My Italian, though rusty, is not so bad that I can’t pick up a magazine and read it. My understanding of Spanish, relatively untried and certainly untaught, is passive enough that I used documentation from the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe in my MSc dissertation, and I successfully translated an excerpt from a novel to Radio the other day.

I have knowledge of other languages that is functional for tourism reasons but not for conversation. I’m thinking of German and Swedish here, both of which I have used to limited degrees on my travels, and the grammars of which I have read.

You can factor in the historical aspect of language too. I’m very well versed on the history of English and its progression over last 1500 years, and was just this morning reading a grammar of Old and Middle English.

I’ve also read a few books on linguistics over the years, including breakdowns of a couple hundred diverse languages from all over the world. I’ll be doing it again soon after purchasing Nicholas Ostler’s Empires Of The Word, nearly 700 pages dedicated to language from the first moment that they were written down.

Add all these factors together and you’ll likely reach a seemingly obvious conclusion:

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