The month in books

May is an in-between month. Summer isn’t here yet and could easily be postponed. But there’s a promise in the air that makes you start thinking about something other than just getting by. The books published this month reflect this transitional moment—with entertaining non-fiction books sitting alongside ambitious speculative fiction.

First, the non-fiction. Andrew Martin’s Underground, Overground (Profile) is a deeply pleasurable history of the London Tube. Martin has all the history at his fingertips—from the internecine squabbles of the early railway companies to the new developments in place for the Olympics. But where Martin’s account really excels is in the way he splices this semi-official narrative with personal arcana assembled from thirty-plus years spent rattling round the Circle Line. Ever wondered why most of the stations on the Central Line are white-tiled? Or how they get the trains to run so smoothly, ahem, every 90 seconds during rush hour? Underground, Overground is the book to take with you to while away those stomach-churning minutes the next time you find yourself stuck in a deep tunnel with 1,000 strangers and no way out.

While you’re down there, willing the train to start moving again, you may feel the urge to reach for a snack. John S Allen’s The Omnivorous Mind (Harvard) is a clever and original take on how we think about food. Allen is a research scientist, which means that he’s less interested in the cultural history of food—how the pickle migrated from Eastern Europe to New York, for example—than he is in hard appetite. Allen’s approach involves the intriguing, if inconclusive, results that come from peering at brain scans and noticing which bits light up when we’re asked to think about different foods. Some of his best conclusions involve mapping current food preferences onto the long march of evolutionary biology. For instance, the reason why most of us like crisps is apparently down to the fact that our ape ancestors used to snack on hard-shelled locusts.

Let’s say now that your Tube train has started to move and light is in sight. Now it may be time to turn one’s mind to fiction. Two of the best novels this month are concerned with the ineffable. Alan Lightman’s Mr G (Corsair) is a smart and droll account of how God, or god, or simply Mr G, came upon the idea of creating the universe. So far so cute. Lightman, though, is much more than an accomplished comic novelist with a good eye for a plot. He is also a MIT physicist who deals every day with the vexed business of why matter matters. Lightman’s earlier attempt to blend hard science and light literature was the hugely successful Einstein’s Dreams. Here he does the same thing with the Almighty and manages rather marvelously.

Tim Parks’s The Server (Harvill Secker), meanwhile, looks at what happens when we try to shrug off our insistently mundane selves. Beth Marriott is a vibrant young woman who has voluntarily gone to live as a “server” in a strict Buddhist community in India. Parks skillfully describes Beth’s restless mind and body as she seeks to submit to Dukka, the rule that all human life is suffering. Is that why she always wants to sneeze during meditation? Could it explain too how the people she seeks to serve are so selfish, noisy and defiantly unenlightened? Against this ceaseless ego chatter, Parks plots a wry and subtle story about what happens when the western self tries to lose itself.

Finally, a book about two people whose feet were planted firmly on the ground but still managed to make a kind of magic here on earth. Kathleen Riley’s The Astaires (Oxford) tells the story of America’s most accomplished dancing duo. Long before there was Ginger Rogers there was Adele, Fred’s elder sister and the one generally reckoned to be the real talent. While Fred was the plodder, Adele shimmered like a “lilac flame,” turning the basic building blocks of burlesque into something as beautiful as anything Isadora Duncan ever dreamed. Born into a struggling Midwestern family at the end of the 19th century, the Astaires transcended their time and place to produce an art that lives on in memory, though not, alas, in the more permanent record of filmed performance. Adele gave up the stage before she could be committed to celluloid, leaving Fred—the plodder—to carry the flame.