Why Won't My Teenager Talk to Me?

Why Won't My Teenager Talk to Me? by John Coleman is the first Parenting book that I manage to complete after a couple of false starts. My daughter is 12, so she's not quite there yet. The book is a very broad subject, it's difficult to take on board a lot of it, and I doubt many people will keep this by their bedside for when they have a problem to consult. In reality what I got from it was to listen and understand more. 5/10

Dead Simple

After months spent in non-fiction I returned to the fiction shelves for a book of short stories called Dead Simple. This crime selection was quite strong and of the 8 stories 5 were good, 2 were average and only 1 was bad. 7/10

Past the 100 mark

I passed the 100 mark with Medical Detectives: The Lives & Cases of Britain's Forensic Five by Robin Odell a book about forensic pathologists. This was about the "Big 5" British men who occupied the limelight up to about the 1970s when everything started to change once computers were introduced. It's a fairly rambling book which launches from case to case with no clear divide. Interesting enough. 5/10

Coping with dyspraxia by Daniel Goldberg is useful but mainly aimed at younger kids, and not a lot of use for 12-year-olds!

Dr Rosemary Leonard

Dr Rosemary Leonard used to be on TV and she has written a few books about her experiences as a GP. This book Doctor's Notes is the second in the series, and although I haven't read the first (every book I choose has to be by an unread author according to my own rules), I imagine this contains very much the second best set of tales. The book is very untechnical and much more on the human side, rather than portraying patients with complicated illnesses. Nearly every "illness" in this book is something silly the patient has done. There are one or two good stories, but a few duller ones. It's easy to read but nothing special. 6/10

How to Help Your Autistic Spectrum Child

I didn't find How to Help Your Autistic Spectrum Child of much use, partly because my daughter was not diagnosed until she was 12. Most of these books are aimed at parents of much younger children. There were a few bits for older kids, at least the good news seems to be that with helps autistic children in the main live normal (ish) adult lives.

My Secret Life Inside Scientology

Book 95, Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology by Jenna Miscavige Hill was a real eye-opener. I have  been interested in Scientology for many years after reading the Bare Faced Messiah book by Russell Miller. I thought that was hilarious at the time and that LRH was a brilliant con man.

This book reveals the human cost of his scam, and the fact that it is still going on after his death. Jenna grew up inside Scientology so it's all she knew, just like people living inside places like North Korea she was brainwashed. In the end she managed to escape but the attempts to control her were appalling. It's certainly a very interesting book. Rating: 8/10

Beyond Belief concludes Mind, Body and Spirit. It's now time for Health and Well Being.

Greed

Book 94, Greed by Richard Girling was a book with an almost limitless number of topics. Basically it's about humans and groups of humans like countries and races being intrinsically greedy. Richard Girling could go anywhere with this discussion and frankly he does. He moves from topic to topic like a butterfly, there is no coherent pattern to the book and its central premise is self-evident to a 10-year-old. Rating: 3/10

There are no Aliens!

Book 93, The Aliens Are Coming, is the first book in the Mind, Body and Spirit section. It doesn't belong there at all really, as it's in the UFO section. It's not about UFOs or even about aliens, because there aren't any that we know of. It's more about the search for life and how we might go about it. I have read numerous books that cover similar subject matters to this one, and it has no great insights. It covers the obvious subjects of the inevitability of intelligent life elsewhere, and the real blockers to multi-cellular organisms like ourselves taking hold. In the case of our planet it was the emergence of the eukaryotic cell that was the really unlikely event, but there's no real way of knowing how unique our situation is. It then discuses the problem of recognising life elsewhere as well as ever reaching it. It doesn't cover the subjects of genetic engineering or cyborgs to extend our lives, which will partly overcome the time and distance problem. Not does it cover colinisation of other planets or worlds. There are better books than this, I score it 5.0.

The Wild Within

The final sports book, Book 92, The Wild Within by Simon Yates, is a first hand account of various climbing expeditions, plus a loose diary of his life in between. I suppose it gives a few years in the life of a professional mountaineer, but in truth some of it was fairly tame and about as interesting as reading someone else's holiday diary. The mountains climbed were all in remote parts of the planet, but a few of them didn't sound that hard or noteworthy. If not much happens the story is: "We went up, reached the summit, then came down". The last mountain, which took six days to climb, was the most interesting account, and that did sound very difficult, and raised a few questions about how much gear to take and whether to take a satellite phone (I would!). All in all though, a rather lightweight book, which scores 5 out of 10.

Forever Young

In my previous entry, I said how much I hated Football biographies, then ironically decided to read one! However, Forever Young: The Story of Adrian Doherty, Football's Lost Genius by Oliver Kay is a variation on a theme as it deals with a footballer who never made it, not because of lack of ability, but due to injury. Adrian Doherty, who was tipped to go to the very top, was on the verge of making his debut for Man Utd when he got injured, and hardly played again.

Everyone thinks of footballers as well-paid superstars, but for every 100 Youth players, probably only a handful actually achieve that status, yet those are the ones you generally read about. Forever Young breaks the mould because it deals with someone who was a) not a typical footballer, b) never played a first team game, c) died young.

It's not a bad book, I am not convinced that Man Utd treated Adrian so terribly as to justify this book, but it's about a more interesting person than most footballers are.

Minecraft!

I moved into the Sport section after science, another subject dear to my heart. Football biographies bore me, they are all the same, and the people are generally unexceptional apart from their ability to kick a ball. However I picked up Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus 'Notch' Persson and the Game that Changed Everything by Daniel Goldberg. I wasn't expecting anything great from this book but it was one of the best I have read on the Library Challenge. I am a software developer myself and used to write games as a teenager and wanted to be games developer until my early 20s. Sadly I never made it, and long ago abandoned doing so. However I could relate immensely to this book. Persson was just a geeky developer who struck gold, it could in another universe be me. Rating 9/10.

Books 88 and 89: Science

Books 88 and 89 saw me on home territory in the science section. This would normally be one of the first bookcases I'd head for in the library and contains dozens of books I have already read. The first science book I read was The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth. This is a subject dear to my heart and one of the most important things going on in science at the moment with massive long-term consequences for out species. The Planet Factory was a good book, I felt the author was dying to explain things with Maths, but the rules of the popular science format forbid it. Consequently it was a little hard to truly follow for the simple reason that the real language of the subject is excluded. Rating 7/10.

Book 89, the final science book was a big disappointment. Virolution by Frank Ryan was supposedly a book on a par with The Selfish Gene, according to the cover. It was difficult to read, repetitive and rambling and I think I didn't grasp the central point of the whole book. Rating 3/10.

Books 86 and 87

Book 87, Natural World, Polar Bears by Ian Stirling, was the last of the nature book. It was a big "coffee table" book with lots of pictures of polar bears. It was interesting to read about how well these animals are studied in their natural envoironment, and how their future is threatended by climate change and human encroachment. 6/10

Book 88, Superstition and Science, 1450-1750: Mystics, sceptics, truth-seekers and charlatans by Derek Wilson, was the first of the science books, which is probably my most natual area in the library, having read hundreds of popular science books in the past. This book sadly was very vague, I couldn't decide what it was about really, it was very vague and waffly. 4/10

The Reading Challenge continues but against a backdrop of sustained reading in other areas. I read a record 100 books in 2017, and also listened to 10 complete audio books. 3 audio books were from Surrey Libraries. I also read 23 Surrey Library e-books. I only read 10 physical books from Surrey Libraries, 12 physical books for my own, and 11 physical books that Amazon gave me to review. The library provideds an excellent digital service, I also read about 6 magazines a month completely free!