Children of Ash and Elm

 

by Neil Price

I’m a gamer.  I play lots of video games, and one of my favourite series is Assassin’s Creed, a long and convoluted series of stories that are set in various historical time periods and places.  The games are meticulously researched: they go to great lengths to seek out the most recent scholarship on the people and places covered in a given game.  Previous games have covered medieval Rome, Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, Revolutionary America, Paris, and Industrial Age London.  Next up is the Viking Era, so I figured I’d try to learn a bit more which brought me to Children of Ash and Elm.

Vikings are most famous for being raiders.  Our popular images are of long ships filled with men wearing horned helmets wreaking havoc across northern Europe, pillaging their way through the villages of the Middle Ages. And yes, this is partly accurate: Vikings did raid.  They did kidnap people into slavery. Where they went, bloodshed followed. 

Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price argues that they were so much more than that.  There is a tendency to write them off as a simplistic people, but they lived in a time of change.  Christianity was being imported into the north, so they were in a confusing transition between the old Norse gods and the new faith. Men and women both fought and farmed, trying to keep their families alive and fed in a challenging environment.

Children breaks the usual routine of many history books by not telling the Viking’s story in a strict historical timeline.  Rather than going chronologically from 800 to 1000 AD, Price starts with describing the people as they were: the social structures, the family life, what kind of clothes they wore., as well as what they believed, and how they interacted with the rest of the world.  Even in the 900s they had access to luxuries from as far away as China, and they travelled themselves far south, all the way to what is now Istanbul, Turkey.

Part of my ancestry is Icelandic, so reading this book was interesting on an intellectual level, but also painted a picture of my long distant family history, going back a thousand years. Neil Price’s years of experience as an archaeologist and professor devoted to Vikings and Nordic history really comes through and he brings the Viking People to life, reminding us that behind every myth and legend is a real culture, full of the same nuances, the same wants and needs, as we have today.  

Humble Pi

by Matt Parker

I watch math videos on YouTube for fun.  For a lot of people that’s probably a strange concept.  Math has always been considered “hard”, and for the really advanced stuff, it is.  I’m not going to pretend that I understand a lot of it, but the idea that really strange things happen with math that we don’t ever notice because we aren’t mathematicians is fascinating to me.  After all, I work in a library: I chose words over numbers for a reason (and the Dewey Decimal System isn’t math).

Matt Parker is one of the best math YouTubers, and he has written several books for the layperson.  Easily accessible with very few equations to throw you off, he just uses regular plain English to show how much fun? Math can be.   

 

How does he pull it off?  He’s not just a math enthusiast and former teacher: he’s also a standup comedian. 

 

Humble Pi is his latest book, and it’s a tale of mathematical misery where math has gone wrong in the real world. Case in point: when Canada switched from Imperial to metric not every industry was prepared.  An Air Canada flight from Montreal intended for Edmonton never made it when the plane ran out of fuel mid-flight.  Fortunately the pilot was a skilled glider pilot as well and managed to find a runway to land on without power, but it was proof that a simple math problem can have potentially huge consequences. 

 

I realize that this doesn’t sound like the most appealing book if you just look at it on the surface, but I promise you that you’ll really look at the world in a new way when you realize how much these simple mistakes can affect you.  The stock markets can swing wildly based on a single typo in a spreadsheet. 

 

Humble Pi is a fun read.  There aren’t any complicated formulas or too many weird symbols.  Parker recognizes that the average reader probably isn’t too interested in a bunch symbols that we have probably never seen and never will see again unless we are doing a doctorate in theoretical physics.  He recognizes that not only do we not know, we don’t need to know to realize that math is more than just numbers: it’s ideas, and most of the time they are actually fairly simple ideas.  His enthusiasm shows, and it’s what makes me recommend Humble Pi  even for people who would rather never look at math again. 

 

Is That a Word?

by David Bukszpan

Scrabble is a fantastic way to spend the time with family.  I remember playing it as a kid on family vacations. I remember playing it with my (nerdy) friends on camping trips.  I know that since it was invented in the 30s and especially when it exploded in popularity in the ’50s it’s been a part of life all around the world, especially in countries that use the Latin alphabet.

One of the things I remember best, though, is arguing about whether a word is legitimate or not.  Sure, we can look it up, but can we all even agree on which language to use?  Do we use Oxford? Collins?  Merriam-Webster?  Most of them have the same words, but not all of them have all of the same ones, particularly not those that are short or obscure.   

 

This isn’t a recommendation for a dictionary, though.  I find dictionaries to be fascinating but I recognise they are not exactly compelling reading for everyone.  Is That a Word? by David Bukszpan is the history of the Scrabble lexicon.  What makes a word legal in Scrabble? Why are things like “za” (short for pizza) legal, but not proper names?  Who even decides what is acceptable? 

 

Is That a Word? is a surprisingly readable history of the game and a fun explanation of why the official word list (the “OWL”) used in tournaments is so odd.  The first few chapters discuss the invention of the game, many of the variants and spinoffs, as well as where the official word list came from. 

 

The bulk of the book is really just a list of the stranger words allowable in the game broken down into various categories.  Words that seem like they shouldn’t be allowable if you are used to thinking about them in the wrong context.  In theory, you shouldn’t be able to use people’s names such as John or Smith, but john (a toilet) and smith (a person who makes horseshoes) are perfectly acceptable. 

 

Of course, you could use the Official Scrabble Dictionary to learn all these words.  But that’s just a long list of words and meanings.  Is That a Word? is also a long list of words, but with more context and a lot more humour.  If you want to be able to dominate in Scrabble and be able to back up your boasting, this is a great way to learn.