How Music Works by John Powell, The Num8er My5teries by Marcus de Sautoy and Click by Ori and Rom Brafman

How Music Works
by John Powell (Penguin, £12.99)
If the Advertising Standards Authority regulated book titles, this one would get a slap. The author cheerfully introduces the basics of acoustics, musical instruments, chords and so forth, but what he has to say about how music actually works is limited to implausible pseudo-evolutionary speculation, weird anthropomorphism (does major-key music really sound "self-satisfied"?) and near-useless generalisation (the fact that we find faster tempos exciting is "probably linked to our dislike of uncertainty").

Denser arguments about the science and psychology of music are to be found in Philip Ball's The Music Instinct, but Powell (a physicist and composer) is aiming his book at a much less-informed audience, and he is at least very good on the subtleties of vibrating strings, the impracticality of the decibel system and the structures of various scales.

In order to keep things chirpy and fast-moving, Powell is occasionally led into oversimplification (the opening of "Hotel California" is not exactly "a series of arpeggios"), though the mood of enforced jollity starts to wear. Still, I was pleased to learn of the wonderfully curmudgeonly Professor Frederick Corder, whose 19th-century guide to orchestration seems to have expressed hatred for most orchestral instruments, as well as those who played them. Sample quote: "Viola players have always been both scarce and bad." Perhaps a little harsh.

The Num8er My5teries
by Marcus du Sautoy (Fourth Estate, £16.99)
Omnipresent maths cheerleader Marcus du Sautoy here presents an introduction to the fields of number theory, topology, probability, encryption and simple physics. He is at times vulnerable to charges of mathism ("mathematics really is at the heart of all that we see and everything we do") but has a mitigating streak of self-awareness – for example when relating how he demanded a series of new numbers from the telephone company in the hope of getting one that was prime. (As punishment, he ended up with one that was even.)

The unique selling point here is du Sautoy's relentlessly friendly and inventive attempts to draw on the real world – architecture, gambling, football, sudoku and the music of Messiaen and Alban Berg all get a look-in. On France's La Grande Arche de la Défense monument, he writes: "It's almost as if constructing a shadow of a hypercube in Paris has opened up a portal to another dimension." He also reveals how to stretch noodles and create a pyramidal teabag, and considers the possibility that the universe is a hyperbagel. I finished the book and considered the option of a second breakfast.

Click
by Ori and Rom Brafman (Virgin, £11.99)
What makes people "click", and instantly become firm friends or lovers? And could you harness this "quick-set intimacy" in order to make your business run better? Yes, we are in the increasingly crowded territory of high-concept corporate flirting, where social-science research is repackaged in the hope of attracting lucrative consulting gigs.

The danger of the genre is often that the material has to be twisted to fit the sales pitch. Here, the authors seem almost to be doing the opposite since their vivid slice-of-life case-studies and interviews – with a police hostage negotiator, a pair of physicists, a social butterfly and some basketball-playing roommates – don't really throw up any novel recommendations ("companies can look for ways to foster a sense of a framed community"; face-to-face "interactions" are important). Instead, they proceed quite amiably, inventing bits of vague jargon ("transformative presence") and telling lots of interesting stories about basically nice people. It made me want to kick something.