The Importance of Being Trivial

The Importance of Being Trivial – Mark Mason ****

Have you ever wondered what it is about trivia that is so appealing? Ever since the success of Schott’s Miscellany, we have been inundated with books of fascinating factoids. Even science has not been spared, thanks to the huge success of the like of Why Don’t Penguin’s Feet Freeze? Author Mark Mason is someone who is fascinated by trivia. But for him it’s not enough to know that you can hear Big Ben chime on the radio slightly ahead of the real thing, because the signal is being transmitted (live) at the speed of light, while you only hear it coming down from the tower at the speed of sound – he has to take a radio to the foot of the Westminster clock tower to try it out.

In this book, Mason attempts to uncover just why a good factoid grabs the attention – what makes trivia anything but trivial. We see trivia cropping up in quizzes, in pub conversations, in the shows of stand up comics – in a series of interviews with academics and professional trivia users, Mason gradually builds up a picture of what makes one factoid fascinating while another is everyday and explores the reason why some kinds of brain – those with more ‘male brains’ in Simon Baron-Cohen’s terminology (not all men, though the majority are) – are particularly suited to the joy of trivia.

The only tiny reasons this book doesn’t get five stars are that there’s probably a bit too much anecdote (essential for trivia) and not enough science for this site, and also because I found the section about QI unnecessary. It’s probably just me, but I find the whole QI phenomenon smug and nausea-inducing. (And they get things wrong more often than I’d expect – I’ve twice heard them say, for instance, that Galileo invented the telescope.)

I think there’s still more subtlety in there than Mason has uncovered. For example, I love trivia, the sense of wonder and the joy of sharing it (sometimes to the irritation of others) – but I have no interest in sport, and can’t remember numbers or dates. I love trivia, but like jokes I rarely remember any of it more than a few minutes. This type of trivia enthusiast, I’d suggest, is just as common if not more so than those who can remember all the obscure stuff.

However, that’s a very small negative -the book is charming, very well written and works like the best of such titles, taking us on a personal excursion around the world of non-trivial trivia. This is no simple collection of facts, although you will be amazed by the stuff you find out – it’s is much more than that, it’s an explanation of a fundamental human behaviour. Recommended.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...

Search This Blog