Thoughts on books and reading, book recommendations, writer profiles and litereary trivia
The premise of this book is that Heaven is a company, and that God is the CEO. Heaven Inc is involved in many activities, only one of which is managing and directing the activities of human beings. The book opens with God, sitting in his plush office, watching TV. He's monitoring the war in Venezuela, …
Robin Ince is a comedian and science enthusiast. He presents one of the world's most popular science podcasts called The Infinite Monkey Cage with Professor Brian Cox, a physicist. Unlike the science-for-the-layman books written by scientists like Carl Sagan and Carlo Rovelli, this is not a straight-forward explication of a particular science or a broad-strokes …
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Peter Roget, the man who created Roget's Thesaurus was born in England in 1779. He was a physician and he worked as a doctor for most of his life. Like other intellectuals of his generation, he was a man of many interests and he was proficient in a variety of subjects. He invented a slide …
This book was written in 1937. It's an account of several weeks that the author spent in one of the most stunningly beautiful places in the world. Frank Smythe was a British mountaineer who, in 1931, was a member of the group that successfully scaled Mount Kamet (25,447 feet) in the Gharwal Himalaya. As the …
Grace Dent is a restaurant critic for The Guardian, and a judge on BBC's Master Chef UK. This book, as the title suggests, is about the foods that we turn to at the end of a long day, meals that we eat by ourselves when we're in need of a bit of lifting up, foods …
The Detection Club was founded in 1930 by a group of leading detective novelists, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, G K Chesterton and Anthony Berkely. Berkley was the driving force behind its creation. The club had twenty-six members in all, and Chesterton was its first president. It’s the oldest and …
Death of an Author was first published in the 1930's. While it has a few characteristics that are typical of the mystery novels published in that era, it is one of the most unusual crime novels that I've ever read. It begins with a missing person report. The missing person is question is a celebrated …
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This is a book about the future, about the possibility of building a society that is just and fair, where hunger and scarcity are a thing of the past, where education, healthcare and a fair wage are fundamental rights, where work-life balance is not something anyone has to struggle to achieve...the author clearly means it …
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Slightly Foxed is a publishing house, a podcast and a literary magazine. I would enthusiastically recommend all of them. The idea behind all three is to promote good writing, to shine a light on books that, to quote the editors, “are no longer new and fashionable, but have a lasting appeal”. The magazine is a …
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This is a book about the history of manned space flight told through the lives and stories, the accounts and experiences of the men and women who’ve made the journey to space, all the astronauts and cosmonauts starting with Yuri Gagarin. It all began in the late 1950's with the soviet launch of an unmanned …
This is a remarkable and very necessary book that is not so much about idleness as it is a call to examine our lives and our choices, and to do a better job of living than we currently do. Hodgkinson’s definition of idleness is not that we sit around and do nothing, but that we …
July 4, 1971, saw the creation of the world’s first e-book when Michael Hart, typed the American Declaration of Independence into a mainframe computer at the University of Illinois and sent it off to about a hundred users via ARPANAET, the precursor to the Internet. With this, was born Hart’s vision of making literature “as …
Like most readers, I have a list of books that I want to read. This is a a long list that I've been adding to for years, and it grows by the day. There are books here that I want to read someday, others that I will likely read next week, and several that made …
This is an adaptation of a book that I genuinely loved, so I approached it with all my usual trepidation. There is so much in the book that I didn't think could be translated to the screen - so many long conversations, talk about faith, the complex relationships between the different people in the village, …
This is is book one of the Canon Clement mystery series. It's set in 1988, in the fictious village of Champton, which is in many ways a fairly typical English village. Canon Daniel Clement is the rector of the parish. He is a kindly, thoughtful man in his forties, he loves books and music and …
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Smallbone Deceased is a classic crime novel from the 1950's. It's a remarkable book with an excellent plot, well-written characters, clever dialogue and a baffling mystery at the heart of it. The story begins when a new member joins the staff of the law firm of Horniman, Birley and Craine. We see the members of …
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Season one of this show was based on All Systems Red, the first book of The Murderbot Diaries. I watched it because I was curious, I was also a bit dubious because the TV and film adaptations of books are rarely as good as the books themselves, and they often do the book or books …
This has to be one of the best science fiction series that I've ever read. It features a protagonist who is fascinating and utterly unique, and it is this character, the murderbot in the title, that makes the books so worth reading. The Murderbot is an AI, what the people in this world of the …
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Madeleine L'Engle was born in New York City on 29th November, 1918. She had always wanted to be a writer, but she knew she couldn't make an adequate living as a novelist, at least, not right away. So she found work in the theatre, and did a bunch of odd jobs, and took small parts …
“Even big collections of ordinary [non-magical] books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than stories and those rows of shelves which end …
between the pages 