I’m often amused by the ‘Books of the Year’ lists that are a feature of literary pages at this time of year. They are delicious show-cases of judicious back-scratching by celebrity reviewers and authors. Yesterday’s literary supplements provided some interesting examples of how participants tailor their lists to different publications.

Here, for example, is Colm Tóibín writing in the Guardian.

Mary-Kay Wilmers’s The Eitingons (Faber) is a secret history of the 20th century in which members of her family played a crucial role – one in the fur trade after the Russian revolution; another as an early disciple of Freud’s; and a third, an agent of Stalin’s, who set up the assassination of Trotsky. The fact that this last one was the most fun, or at least the most fascinating, is an aspect of the book’s originality. I found the book a riveting piece of story-telling.

The best novel I read this year was Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (Hamish Hamilton), which tells the story of an ungrateful immigrant, filled with angst and attitude, in a Montreal which could be Kafka’s Prague. It is a dark book, narrated with verve and brilliance. It made me jump for joy.

Paul Durcan’s Life is a Dream (Harvill Secker) is a generous selection of his poetry over the past 40 years, and displays his skill, his importance and his bravery, his willingness to tackle difficult public matters but also to explore with eloquence and fierce honesty the most private areas of the self.

And here is the same Colm Tóibín giving his list in the Irish Times.

Diarmaid Ferriter’s Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (Profile) is a brilliant re-examination of the gnarled intersection between public life and private life in Ireland since the foundation of the state. His use of the Irish Queer Archive in the National Library is particularly valuable.

Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (Faber) offers an account of what was done to the Irish economy over the past 20 years which is lucid and convincing. It is an essential book for anyone who wants the facts and the background to refute the idea that what happened to the Irish economy was a sad accident.

Paula Meehan’s Painting Rain (Carcanet) displays one of our best poets at her most eloquent. These are poems which both confront and celebrate the world we inhabit, but they also manage in their rhythms to transcend that world. Eibhear Walsh’s Cissie’s Abattoir (Collins Press) is a wonderful memoir of growing up gay in Waterford city, and growing up in a funny and loving and often hilarious family.

Note that there’s no overlap between the two lists. Note also the fulsome reference to Fintan ‘the Curate’ O’Toole. Interestingly, his ‘books of the year’ include this puff for — you guessed it — Colm Tóibín:

Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Penguin) is a small masterpiece of resonant understatement. While maintaining complete fidelity to a simple, beautifully detailed story, it becomes a luminous exploration of the central human experience of exile. It tells us what it is like to live in two worlds at the same time.

Aw, shucks!

Anthony Beevor is another literary celeb who figures in both the Guardian and the Irish Times. Here he is writing in the Guardian:

My book of the year is Javier Marías’s conclusion to his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. Although an unashamed novel of ideas, Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Chatto & Windus) possesses an astonishing tension which makes it hard to put down. Marías’s observation in exquisite detail has prompted many comparisons to Proust, but his themes, including human corruption through state secrecy and power, could hardly be more contemporary. It is probably the most powerful and important novel to appear in European literature for some time.

His dispatch in the Irish Times is fuller:

This year has seen the publication of two very important European novels; Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Chatto) is the defiant confession of an SS officer involved in the Holocaust. It is a masterpiece, however flawed and controversial because of a sexual-scatalogical element. American reviewers hated it, perhaps because the French had lauded it so much with the Prix Goncourt and Prix de l’Académie Française.

Javier Marias’s final volume in his trilogy Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Chatto), is a novel of ideas focusing on secrecy, betrayal and the threat of violence, both state and private. Twisting like the double-helix of human DNA, shame and guilt, power and impotence, treachery and loyalty, domination and humiliation, love and hate, the past and the present, all are revolved in this extraordinary and unashamed novel of ideas.

Interesting, ne c’est pas?

Hmmm… Just read this Statement from Tiger Woods.

As you all know, I had a single-car accident earlier this week, and sustained some injuries. I have some cuts, bruising and right now I’m pretty sore.

This situation is my fault, and it’s obviously embarrassing to my family and me. I’m human and I’m not perfect. I will certainly make sure this doesn’t happen again.

This is a private matter and I want to keep it that way. Although I understand there is curiosity, the many false, unfounded and malicious rumors that are currently circulating about my family and me are irresponsible.

The only person responsible for the accident is me. My wife, Elin, acted courageously when she saw I was hurt and in trouble. She was the first person to help me. Any other assertion is absolutely false.

Methinks he doth protest too much. I mean, anyone can drive into a fire hydrant.. Besides, it’s good to know that he isn’t perfect, despite the evidence of his teeth.

LATER: What “false, unfounded and malicious rumors” would those be? These, perhaps?

Well, well. It seems that talks between Microsoft and the BBC about putting the iPlayer on the Xbox have broken down.

Could this have anything to do with the fact that Rupert Murdoch and Microsoft are in, er, talks, about Redmond paying the Digger to let Bing have exclusive ‘indexing rights’ to News Corp content?

Fact: the Digger (and his various offspring) detests the BBC and would like to shut it down.

Wired writer Evan Ratcliff decided to see how difficult it would be to disappear in a networked world. His account of his month on the run is absolutely riveting.

Many thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.

A few days ago I sat next to a fundamentalist Christian at dinner. She asked me at one point what my religion was. I replied that, having been brought up in Ireland, I had been thoroughly inoculated against that kind of nonsense.

Yesterday, the report of the Murphy Commission into child sex abuse by priests in the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin was published. The report shows, in graphic detail, that what lies at the heart of the Catholic Church in Ireland is a profound and widespread corruption, perpetrated by liars, child sex abusers and those senior clerics at the very top — including at least one cardinal — who covered up their crimes. The full text of the report is on the Web, and I’ve only read Part One (and I’m not sure I have the stomach to tackle Part Two), but for a quick and insightful commentary you could do worse than read Mary Raftery’s column in today’s Irish Times. This is how it begins:

THERE IS one searing, indelible image to be found in the pages of the Dublin diocesan report on clerical child abuse. It is of Fr Noel Reynolds, who admitted sexually abusing dozens of children, towering over a small girl as he brutally inserts an object into her vagina and then her back passage.

That object is his crucifix.

Nobody who grew up in 1950s Ireland will be surprised by the Murphy report — or by the earlier Ryan Report into abuse of children by Catholic religious orders throughout Ireland. To say that the Ireland of my youth was a priest-ridden society is the grossest of understatements. The deference shown by the State to the Catholic church was total. But the interesting thing about the new report is that it has been investigating a much more recent period in Irish history from the 1970s onwards — when the country was supposedly beginning its long march towards Celtic tigerhood. Now we find that the power of the church to protect its interests and to ignore its duty of care to the children of its credulous flock was as untramelled in that period as it had been in the 1950s.

What’s becoming clear is that the entire history of post-independence Ireland needs to be rewritten. The child abuse inquiries have revealed how corrupt was the religious institution that purported to provide moral guidance to the citizens of the fledgling state. And the various tribunals that have inquired into political corruption, together with what the banking meltdown has revealed about the pervasive corruption and criminality in Irish government, banking and construction, suggest that all the propaganda about a modern European democracy was just so much hooey. In truth, post-Imperial Ireland was more like Sicily with heavy rainfall than a modern secular state.

John Barrow, the Cambridge mathematician (and one of my fellow patrons of the Cambridge Science Festival) has a lovely paper in arXiv. It solves a problem that has always bedevilled competitive rowing — the fact that in an apparently perfectly-balanced coxless boat one still gets a ‘wiggle’ which reduces the efficiency of the team. The Abstract reads:

We consider the optimal positioning of an even number of crew members in a coxless racing boat in order to avoid the presence of a sideways wiggle as the boat is propelled forwards through the water. We show that the traditional (alternate port and starboard) rig of racing boats always possesses an oscillating non-zero transverse moment and associated wiggling motion. We show that the problem of finding the zero-moment rigs is related to a special case of the Subset Sum problem. We find the one (known) zero-moment rig for a racing Four and show there are four possible such rigs for a racing Eight, of which only two (the so called ‘Italian’ and ‘German’ rigs) appear to be already known. We also give the 29 zero-moment solutions for racing Twelves but refrain from explicitly listing the 263 Sixteens and 2724 Twenties which have zero transverse moments. We show that only balanced boats with crew numbers that are divisible by four can have the zero-moment property. We also discuss some aspects of unbalanced boats, in which the number of port and starboard oars are unequal.

Isn’t mathematics wonderful? When I was a graduate student, one of my mathematician friends spent three days figuring out the fluid dynamics behind the swirl patterns in his morning coffee. I’m reminded of G.H. Hardy’s lovely book, A Mathematician’s Apology and his famous observation that he had “never done anything ‘useful’. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.”

As you might expect, he was wrong; according to Wikipedia, some of his mathematical work found its way into ‘useful’ applications — e.g. in physics to find quantum partition functions of atomic nuclei (first used by Niels Bohr) and to derive thermodynamic functions of non-interacting Bose-Einstein systems.