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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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 …
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 …
Continue reading "Book Recommendation: Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman"
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 …
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 …
Continue reading "Book Recommendation: Murder Before Evensong by Richard Coles"
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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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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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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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 …
Continue reading "Book Recommendation: Auto Pilot by Andrew Smart"
This is an important book. It's the story of one truly remarkable woman, but it's also the story of the women’s movement, and the fight for gender equality both in the field of sports, and in the world at large. It's an account of an athlete coming to terms with her sexuality, in a very …
Continue reading "Book Recommendation: All in: An Autobiography by Billie Jean King"
This is a play, and I don’t usually read those, but I saw The History Boys, the movie and I liked it so much, that I wanted to read the play that it was based on. This play got under my skin in a way that little else has done in all my years of …
Continue reading "Book Recommendation: The History Boys by Alan Bennett"
Antoine Laurain is one of my favourite writers. I pick up every one of his books expecting to love it, and he almost never disappoints. French Windows has all the elements that I associate with his writing. It's charming, quirky, and interesting. But this book has the added element of murder and mystery. You never …
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This book, as it says in the title, is a diary, a day-to-day record of one year in a bookshop written by the owner Shaun Bythell who runs a second-hand bookshop in Wigtown which is Scotland’s book town. His shop is called, very simply, The Bookshop. He has a hundred thousand books, some of which …
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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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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 …
Continue reading "Book Recommendation: The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett"
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, …
Continue reading "Book Recommendation: The Socrates Express by Eric Weiner"
between the pages 