"Once upon a prime" by Sarah Hart (Mudlark, 2023)

It's an interesting "popular science" book about the connections between maths and literature written by a maths prof with a strong interest in literature. She considers maths as a structuring device (especially in poetry); maths concepts used as metaphors; maths/mathematicians used as subject matter. She covers the standard material like sestinas and OuLiPo, but also looks at the arithmetic mistakes that novelists make, and how viable Lillipotians are. Here are some notes -

• The sestina structure works for stanza lengths of 3, 5, 6, 9 etc., but not 4, 7, 8, 10, etc. It's not known whether there's an infinite number of possible lengths. She prints a sestina by Kirsten Irving - who I've met!
• She conjectures that primes, because they can't be factorised further, are useful building blocks. For example, if the 5-7 haiku pairing arose from an original 12-syllable line, the temptation to split further is less than if there were a 4-6 pairing.
• I didn't realise that each chapter of "The Luminaries" is half the length of the previous one
• "A gentleman in Moscow" (Amor Towles) is a novel where gaps between episodes rough double each time until the gap is 16 years, then halves
• I'd forgotten some details of "Life: A User's Manual". It's structured using a 10x10 double Latin square (which Euler had thought impossible, but was solved by a computer in 1959), and a Knight's Tour progression leads from room to room.
• A 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia says that in about 400AD Tryphioduros wrote a version of the Odyssey with α missing from chapter 1, etc
• "Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dun (2001) is a novel that uses lipograms as part of the plot
• The "choose your own adventure" books have to be cunningly designed to be both interesting and short.
• She says there are plenty of templates available to help with writing reversable poems.
• "Mobius the Stripper" by Gabriel Josipovici is a short story (presented as 2 "sides") whose ends join up, and also the 2 sides correspond.
• George Eliot "studied mathematics both informally and formally, including attending a course of twice-weekly geometry lectures in 1851"
• "... Even if these are deliberate mistakes, the number of corrections Joyce made to the calculation of Bloom's budget over the course of several drafts and proofs of the novel is good evidence that he did have some difficulty in manipulating the numbers"
• I knew about Flatland but not Dewdney's "The Planiverse"
• She's not impressed by Dan Brown's use of maths.
• She spends a while on Borges' "Library of Babel" - how are the hexagonal rooms connected?
• I didn't realise the cleverness of Alice in Wonderland's "Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!"