More books I have read recently

'Where the Crawdads Sing' by Delia Owens

This book has rather a ‘Written For Book Groups’ stamp all over it. Or possibly I’m just being cynical – it was a book that Mum’s book group read a few years ago and one of our members more recently put it on our list.

From the age of ten, Catherine ‘Kya’ Clark has lived all by herself in a shack out in the marshlands by the North Carolina coast, following the departures of successively her mother, four older siblings and finally her drunk and abusive father. In the nearby town of Barkley Cove, she’s referred to as a ‘swamp rat’ and then later as the Marsh Girl. Aged six and fetched by the truant officer to be taken to school, she attends school for a single day, is mocked by some of the other children and never attends again, hiding in the marshes from the truant officers until they stop calling.

Aged fourteen, she’s befriended by Tate Walker, an older boy who lives in Barkley Cove with his widowed fisherman father. Tate shares Kya’s interest in the marsh and its wildlife, and teaches Kya to read. Inside her shack, Kya has built up a large and meticulously labelled and illustrated collection of feathers, shells, bones and other things she has found out on the marshes. When Tate goes to college to study to be a research biologist, he promises to come back soon to visit her, but finds himself becoming immersed in a different world into which he cannot see Kya fitting, and hating himself for it, breaks off contact with her.

Desperate for company, and concurrently having blossomed into a tall attractive young girl, Kya catches the eye of local high school alpha Chase Andrews, and they begin a relationship, though Chase is careful to keep his relationship with Kya entirely separate from his life in town. Musing: I thought there was some inconsistency in how Chase’s character was drawn. When Kya first meets him, although good-looking and socially blessed he doesn’t seem a particularly bad young man. He appreciates the shell necklace that Kya gifts him, and after initial over-enthusiasm he promises to wait until she’s ready before jumping her. However, we have already learned, right at the beginning of the book, that Chase is dead, his body discovered out in the marsh, and one strand of the story, set in the late 1960s, follows the Barkley Cove police as they try to solve the crime. The other strand of the story traces Kya’s life from when we meet her in 1952, aged six, through to adulthood.

Owens’ writing about nature and the marshlands is quite evocative. The story itself was a bit too stuffed with formulaic trauma – partway through reading it, I thought: right, now we’ve had domestic violence and some racism, how about an attempted rape to form a hat trick? Hop a few chapters on, and bingo. But having said all that, I did quite enjoy the book, and the ending packs a reasonable twist.

‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ was published in 2018. Delia Owens apparently grew up near rural wilderness of a similar type to the one she describes in the novel, and was formerly a zoologist.

What are crawdads, anyway? The word isn’t mentioned until page 111 – turns out it’s part of an expression meaning a remote part of the marsh, as in “way out there where the crawdads sing”. From skim-reading a few interviews, it’s evidently an expression that Owens’ mother used to use to her.

'The Power of Habit' by Charles Duhigg

I started reading this a while ago but didn’t get further than the first couple of chapters. Decided to give it another go. It’s about understanding how habits work, as a step to being able to change them. Which sounded quite useful, though like a lot of books of this type, particularly American ones (which most of them are), it does Go On A Bit. Even on this second go I didn’t find it exactly a page-turner.

The Prologue introduces the idea that habits show up in the brain as neurological patterns, and that it is possible to overlay these with new patterns. The book is then divided into three parts: habit formation within individuals; within companies, and within societies.

The first chapter talks about the basal ganglia, apparently an old, central, area of the brain that are key to habit formation. Duhigg relates the story of a man who lost his memory due to viral encephalitis, but was still able to form new habits as his basal ganglia were intact. In the chapter ‘The Craving Brain’, the book discusses the idea that habit formation is dependent on the establishment of a craving for some sort of reward. In the chapter ‘The Golden Rule of Habit Change’, this idea is developed into a claim that the key is to keep the same cue and the same reward, but insert a new routine. Duhigg illustrates this both in relation to the approach taken by the American football coach Tony Dungy, and the philosophy behind Alcoholics Anonymous.

I was initially less interested in the chapters about organizational habits, until Duhigg discusses the 1987 King’s Cross fire in the 'The Power of a Crisis', specifically the culture and working practices in the London Underground of the time which led to the fire being much more of a disaster than it potentially needed to be. Later in the book there’s some stuff about habits influencing shopping decisions, and how getting people to accept something new is easier if it’s dressed up as though it’s familiar. In the Appendix, Duhigg says that there isn’t a one size fits all formula for changing habits, as everyone’s habits are driven by different cravings. Which was a bit disappointing, as most readers would be picking up the book in the hope that it would give them a formula for changing habits.

I did find the idea of ‘keystone’ habits quite useful – habits that have the power to start a chain reaction. (Duhigg reckons that for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.) I’m not sure the book is one I’ll be referring back to though.

'The Hacker's Handbook' by Hugo Cornwall

Renewing my mandatory Data Protection and Information Security Awareness training for work recently got me wondering about the Computer Misuse Act 1990, as a message about not contravening this pops up every time I boot up my OU laptop. That led to reading about the 1980s hack of BT’s ‘Prestel’ service (and Prince Philip’s mailbox) by the journalists Stephen Gold and Robert Schifreen, which led to the Act being formed. (Gold & Schifreen themselves had to be charged under the Forgery & Counterfeiting Act 1981, because at that time there were no laws prohibiting computer hacking – and according to the link below that was partly why their prosecution didn’t stick as it was deemed that the “forgery” they were being charged with barely justified the name.) There’s lots online about the Gold and Schifreen hack e.g. this piece, which refers to it as a ‘historic techno romp’.

One of the sources referred to Hugo Cornwall’s book as writing about this hack as one of a number of examples of real-life hacks. I don’t know if THH has been updated over the years but the secondhand copy I bought appears to be an original 1985 copy, which doesn’t mention G and S by name but does refer to a ‘sensational’ hack of the BT Prestel service that happened in late 1984, which I would infer, from reading about it elsewhere, was the same one.

Cornwall’s book was written at an interesting historical point where high-speed (relatively speaking) data networks were taking over from the traditional telecommunications sytems of telegraphy and the telephone. (Never realized that the ‘telex’ was a direct successor of 19th-century telegraphic methods. Don’t think I ever used one – by the time I started work in the early 1990s they had been superseded by the fax.) I was fascinated to learn about “phone phreaking”, apparently a type of techno-romping involving telephone lines that preceded the age when home computers were a thing. Cornwall’s book doesn’t go into much detail about it but there’s information online and on YouTube. Because of its age the book refers to home PCs as “micros” throughout i.e. to contrast with mini-computers (what even were these?) and mainframes. I assume the latter was along the lines of what we had at my first job at ICI in The Computer Room, a hive of massive electronic chuggery managed by a specially dedicated chap. I was only required to type away at the little terminal on my desk so was never required to actually understand what happened within TCR.

I hadn’t realized that modems were even available to home users in the 1980s, but evidently they were though I’ve no idea what the relative cost would have been (Cornwall advises budding hackers to make use of the secondhand market). Cornwall runs through an overview of what you might need to configure on your home PC to enable easier reading of whatever info you might receive from your chosen host PC. The book references a number of pieces of intriguing-sounding kit that I’d certainly never heard of e.g. acoustic coupler, terminal emulator, baud-rate generator. Also, ‘viewdata’ is referred to a lot – I wasn’t sure what this was but wondered if it was something like a Ceefax page. BT’s Prestel service was evidently a viewdata service, allowing home users to access pages of data via adapted TV sets and incorporated an electronic mail service plus the telebanking service Homelink. Cornwall spends quite a bit of time discussing Prestel, in part because it was evidently a bit of an open goal for hackers.

I enjoyed this little book as a piece of computing history, though the technicalities went over my head. It includes seven appendices aimed at providing assistance and tips for those doing a spot of hacking. In his final chapter, Cornwall opines that "we are on the threshold of a new age of opportunities for the hacker". I wondered whether these had been a bit curtailed by the Computer Misuse Act kicking in five years after this book was written - this made it illegal to gain unauthorized access to a computer, presumably ending the days of fear-free rummaging around organisations’ computer systems.

'Yong Kee of Korea' by Paul Anderson

Mum added this to a small pile of children’s books that she wanted me to look over on a recent visit. I don’t remember how our family came by this book and had no memory of ever reading it – I don’t think it can have been actually brought back from Korea as it’s got a stamp in the front to say that it was donated by the PTA of Oatlands County First School in Weybridge. Probably bought at a jumble sale or fête at some point.

It's a sweet story about a nine-year-old boy who lives in a village with his (nice) parents, and longs to be considered grown up enough to accompany his father up the nearby mountain to help him cut grass to sell/trade at market. In the meantime he has to help his mother do the laundry at a nearby stream, and occasionally gets teased by local girls. Yong Kee is sagely advised by a teacher at his school that wishing for something isn’t enough by itself, and that he has to take action to make it happen.

After pondering for a bit, Yong Kee helps out his father by tying up the grass he’s gathered into bundles. This results in his father making a boy-sized ‘jiggy’ for him from forked branches and, in due course, taking Yong Kee up the mountain to work with him.

(On ‘jiggies’: there’s a piece here on these traditional Korean carrying frames. I think Mum and Dad have a small model of a man with one on his back.)

The other thing I'd either forgotten about or never knew about was the traditional Korean system of birthdays whereby everyone becomes one year older on New Year’s Day, irrespective of what month they were actually born in. (Yong Kee is looking forward to turning nine on New Year's Day, even though he was actually born in May.) The system is explained here. The internet seems to suggest that this traditional system was only abandoned for official and legal documents in June of this year, which seems amazingly recent. Anyway, my calculated Korean age is 56 so I think I’ll be sticking with the Western system.

'Yong Kee of Korea' was first published in 1959. The copy I've got is from 1974.