One Month of Reading

I don't make New Years Resolutions. I just don't: maybe because I know that I won't keep them, but more probably because I'm never too sure about what exactly I want to resolve.

One of the blogs that I follow (I forget whose) posted about reading 24 books last year. I can't remember whether it was two per month or just 24, but I thought that 2 per month would be a reasonable goal. It would not be a resolution because I thought of it sometime after New Year and also because it's a loose goal and not a prescription.

I also thought that it would be nice if one of the books were to be non-fiction.

In January, I got on a bit of a kick and read all six novels of Colin Dexter's, Morse series that they have at the local library. I think there are seven more in the series, but a town library can't stock everything for everyone. However, I quite enjoyed the volumes that I did read because I could picture the characters very well, having also just watched the the whole Morse series on Britbox, I could also picture many of the specific scenes because some of the programs are quite close to the books.

Did I also manage to read a non-fiction work? Yes, I did: Longitude, by Dava Sobel. This traces the story, mostly of John Harrison, the English clockmaker who solved the problem of tracking longitude. Shipwrecks had resulted from the lack of a way to track longitude on a voyage, and at this point the English were sailing all around the globe, so the need for a solution became important. It was so important that they created a Board of Longitude that could award a substantial prize for someone who could solve the longitude problem.

Longitude could have been tracked a ship having two clocks. One would be set to Greenwich time and the other clock to local time by observing the sun. If your local clock told you it was 12 noon where you were, but the Greenwich clock read 3PM, you'd know that you were at 45° West. You would be at 45° because the sun move 15° in one hour, and you would know that you were west of England because your local time is earlier than Greenwich.

It's very simple really, but no one could make it work because there were no clocks that could keep accurate time, especially on a rolling sea. John Harrison pretty much spent his life perfecting a clock that could keep accurate time; eventually, he succeeded and was able to claim a significant prize for doing so. But the endeavour pretty much took his whole life.

One can't summarize a book in three paragraphs, but I have tried to give you the barest outline. I am not always keen to read these kinds of non-fiction books, but this one wasn't overly long, and I managed. I am not sure if I will find a subject that can motivate me every month, however.

Note: Unlike longitude, ascertaining latitude was never a problem because the Equator is very real in  a sense, and there is only one equator. Similarly, the two tropics and the two other circles (Arctic and Antarctic) are also marked by the sun. But with longitude, every line is the same as any other. In fact, I used to tell my students that latitude is real, but in a sense longitude isn't, it being more of a contrived thing. In addition there is not a very good way to track longitude by sky observations. Eventually, star charts that necessitated tables and detailed calculations could be used fairly accurately, but the clocks were an easier and more reliable method and brought Harrison the prize.

This short video briefly goes over some of the same material.

Many other videos are available from this Google search, one of which is a three-hour movie if you are so inclined, which I am not.