**** Charles Dickens – Our Mutual Friend
** Dava Sobel – Longitude
**** Patrick O’Brian – Desolation Island

Our Mutual Friend was very good. Interestingly, compared to Bleak House, which we’d just seen in miniseries form (and which I read a long long time ago), this one felt a lot less exaggeratedly comical/tragic. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it realist though — there are still a lot of hidden identities, crazy plot twists, and mad passions. I’ve read only a smattering of Dickens over the years, but watching Bleak House and reading this have definitely decided me to read or reread more of him.

Longitude was kind of disappointing. The story, about the search for a solution to the longitude problem, and the competition between astronomical solutions and clock-based solutions was interesting. The guy who solved it and the watch he built are both fascinating. But Sobel spends way too much time focused on a sort of soap-opera view of things, where it’s all about how so-and-so tried to sabotage his efforts blah blah and gives precious little time to the actual engineering or science involved. I mean, she never really even explains how the amazing clock worked (she sort of states the solution to an engineering problem or two but without explaining why that solves the problem). She includes one picture of the clock with a description of one piece of the mechanism. It was incredibly lame, and what I’d really like to do is read a book about John Harrison and the longitude problem by someone who can understand and express complex scientific and engineering concepts, not someone who just wants to make a soap opera out of it.

Patrick O’Brian, as I always say, is great.