“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” While I don't agree entirely with this quote by Oscar Wilde, in the sense that there are some books which are brilliant and beautiful which don't lend themselves to re-reading, I'm wholly in sympathy with …
Miracle Workers by Simon Rich
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, …
The Importance of Being Interested by Robin Ince
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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The Valley of Flowers – Frank Smythe
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 …
Comfort Eating – Grace Dent
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 …
In Focus: The Detection Club
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 …
Book Recommendation: Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
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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Space by Tim Peake
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 …
In Focus: Project Gutenberg
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 …
Reading Habits: The Groaning TBR
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 …
Book Recommendation: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
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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Writer’s Corner: Madeline L’Engle
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 …
On Books: Terry Pratchett
“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 …
Book Recommendation: In Xanadu by William Dalrymple
In Xanadu is William Dalrymple's first book. It’s an account of a journey in which he retraced, as near as possible, the path that was taken by Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Shangdu in China, the legendary summer home of Kubla Khan which, thanks to Coleridge, we all know as Xanadu. This journey took him …
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Book Recommendation: Death at the Chateau by Ian Moore
This is book three in the Follet Valley mystery series written by Ian Moore. This series is set in the fictional town of Saint-Sauver in the Loire region of France. It features Richard Ainsworth, a mild-mannered Englishman, and owner of a B&B as the amateur detective, along with Valerie D’Orsay, formerly of the French Secret …
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Poet’s Corner: Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Spender, is an English poet and critic who was born in 1909. He was a member of the generation of British poets who came to prominence in the 1930s, a group sometimes referred to as the Oxford Poets. It was a group that included W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. …
Book Recommendation: Auto Pilot by Andrew Smart
The point at the heart of this book, is that our brains are not designed to be in a constant state of stimulation. Multitasking means not only that we don't do any of the tasks that we're engaged in well, but also that we push our brains well out of their comfort zone. Our brains …
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Book Recommendation: Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett is one of my favourite writers. I have loved every book of his that I've read so far. They are all brilliant, and Unseen Academicals is right up there with the best of them. This is book 37 in the Discworld series and the seventh and final book that features characters from the …
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Book Recommendation: The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett
This is the story of a couple, a Mr and Mrs Ransome, who find their sedate and predictable lives disrupted by a completely unexpected event. They go to the opera one evening and they come back home to find that they have been robbed, or so Mrs Ransome says. "Burgled," Mr Ransome says, because people …
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Book Recommendation: The Socrates Express by Eric Weiner
This is a lovely book about life and the best way to live it. It is philosophy in the original, and in my opinion, best sense of the word. Eric Weiner is not a philosopher, he's a journalist. He, like the rest of us, is trying to make sense of life, trying to find meaning, …
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between the pages 