Love in a Cold Climate is Nancy Mitford’s famous satire of the English aristocracy in the 1920s and 30s. Fanny is the narrator, a young woman who has spent her childhood with relatives, while her wealthy parents travelled and had love affairs. She watches as Lord and Lady Montdore of Hampton try to marry off their beautiful daughter Polly to someone suitable. Polly’s eventual choice of husband causes such shock and family turmoil, that the ageing Montdores disinherit her. For the purposes of the lavish Hampton legacy, they turn to a distant male cousin. Enter Cedric, dandy and aesthete, who quite turns Lady Montdore’s head.

It is interesting that Cedric modifies his dandified chit-chat to fit whatever audience he is seeking to entertain at any given moment. With Lady Montdore it’s all gossip and beauty tips. In the company of an Oxford don, it’s ‘burial custom in the High Yemen’. Love in a Cold Climate is a bit like that. You can read it as a fun soap opera, full of over the top characters. But if someone with intellectual presumptions were to accidentally pick it up, then the book can oblige there as well. After all, the title suggests a comparative study of love in different cultures. And in a strange sort of way that’s what Love in a Cold Climate is. Polly and her parents have recently returned from India where Lord Montdore was Viceroy. There is definitely a suggestion that love was freer under the topic sun. On the other hand when it comes to marriage, the cultural expectation in India was one of families tending to arrange unions to suit their interests. There is, of course, a similar tradition amongst the British upper classes. All the pressure of Polly’s situation comes from the fact that her parents want an alliance that will bring benefit to the Montdores, while Polly wants to follow her heart. She eventually succeeds in doing this but the consequences are less than happy. While arrangement can put two incompatible people together, a choice based on unpredictable human emotion hardly provides a reliable alternative.

This book certainly would not claim to be a comprehensive sociological study of love customs in the Home Counties – just as it can’t be considered a monograph on burial custom in the High Yemen. Nevertheless, when you’re dealing with something that involves deep emotions and superficial self-interest, hurt, joy, passion, easy companionship, hair primping and dressings-up, then maybe the unemotional academic approach is not the best way to understand the subject under consideration. Maybe you can learn something from a rom-com like Love in a Cold Climate.

Project Hail Mary is a science fiction novel by Andy Weir, shortlisted for the 2022 Hugo Award.

A bloom of space algae called astrophage, invades the solar system. Using sunlight for energy, astrophage causes the sun to start cooling, threatening disaster for Earth. A high school science teacher, and former hotshot scientist, Ryland Grace, is recruited to address this crisis. He is sent off in a space ship to investigate a nearby star that shows signs of astrophage infestation, but for some reason has not dimmed. Maybe an answer to the Sun’s problem lies with this star.

The main thing I enjoyed about Project Hail Mary was the relationship between Grace and an alien he meets on his travels. Their working together was fun, moving and interesting, in the sense of exploring the truths that might form the common ground for communication between humanity and alien life.

The main ‘truth’ in the book does not really involve the periodic table or scientific concepts, although there is plenty of all that. The truth that comes up repeatedly is the idea that problems contain their own solutions. Astrophage is both a really big problem and an equally big opportunity. This life form has evolved to store huge amounts of energy. Grace’s space ship actually uses astrophage for fuel, allowing him to get to the star where the answer to controlling astrophage might lie. This book really is one problem after another. The sequence was – problem, anxiety, solution, the answer typically deriving from the difficulty.

Did the idea that problems contain their own solutions come over as a universal truth, or as trite cliche? Maybe something can be a cliche because it is true. People are always looking for answers, but don’t find satisfaction with the same ones over and over again, even if they are correct. One way or another people want to keep moving on, and their favourite solutions are the ones that contain interesting new problems. So yes, I did feel the book explored something with a wide relevance. Maybe the repeated pattern of problem, anxiety, solution did get a little monotonous at times, but this was certainly an interesting story.