"Slide Rule", Nevil Shute

I got a bunch of beetroot with all their leaves still attached at the market, and immediately made a Постный борщ - a Lenten borshch recipe, though I had mine inauthentically with yoghurt (from the market last week; almost finished now, alas).

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I finished "Slide Rule", and continue to be very impressed. I think the book benefits from the subconscious tension of the reader's not knowing the outcome; most biographies of famous people lead up to the inevitable triumph of whatever it was that the person is well known for, but like C.S.Forester's "Long Before Forty", this is almost entirely the story of what the author did before he was a successful writer. And because we know (or are fairly sure) that he didn't end up as the director of a successful aircraft manufacturing concern, there's a certain air of impending disaster hanging over his account of the years he spent trying to keep afloat an innovative, constantly-impecunious company that nobody has ever heard of.( Read more... )