Category: Books

As I mentioned previously, I’m going to try to get around to talking more about what I’m reading here. I picked up The Chalk Circle Man, because I’d not previously read any Fred Vargas novels, but had heard good things about her, and I found myself in town at the weekend without anything to read…

I’ve been frankly awful detailing what I’ve been reading recently. So let’s try to right that wrong in 2010. The book I’ve most enjoyed recently – if enjoyment is the right word – is Henry Porter’s new novel, The Dying Light. Porter is British editor of Vanity Fair, but more relevant is that he was…

A lot has already been said and written about Wired editor, Chris Anderson’s new book, Free. In particular Malcolm Gladwell reviewed it for The New Yorker in a not completely complementary fashion. This in turn has been refuted elsewhere. Books like Free aren’t the most demanding of fare. Essentially it’s 250 pages devoted to a…

I’d completely missed the fact that this book existed until I saw a reference to a Daily Mail extract via a friend’s blog (obviously I wouldn’t ordinarily link to a Daily Mail extract – it’s not as though I was surfing the site or something). Written by John Osborne – no, not our John Osborne…

Back in 2005 I read a book called The Oxford Murders which was a perfectly enjoyable thriller set in Oxford around mathematics and murders by Argentinian author Guillermo Martinez. In the meantime, it’s been made into a film which I’ve not seen, and wasn’t exactly well reviewed. Now comes The Book of Murder, which is…

I picked this interesting little title up after reading a review of it in The Guardian a week or so ago. The story involves an unnamed housekeeper who is assigned by her agency to look after the professor. He had an accident years earlier, and now his memory only lasts 80 minutes. That means he…

If you just went by this blog, you might think that I’ve stopped reading books. Well that’s not true. I just stopped writing about them here. Quite why, I couldn’t really say, but I intend to right that wrong. So let’s start with a book I read a few months ago, and its sequel that…

I tend to avoid cash-in books to accompany popular TV series; you won’t catch me buying the complete Little Britain Scripts or whatever (OK, so Little Britain is well past its sell-by date). But I’ve always been intrigued by Derren Brown. It’s true that his last special – The System – I found to be…

Nick Davies has written a fascinating book that details exactly how we get our news – and he’s not a happy man. I like to think that I know a little about what goes on in the media and how truths are distorted and the way that newspapers and news broadcasts are put together. In…

This is one of two books published towards the end of last year to tie in, unofficially, with Radio 4’s 40th anniversary. And Now On Radio 4 takes a fairly brisk look at the history of the channel, with very little background about what radio had been broadcast in the UK prior to the big…

This slim volume is a well aimed blast at what should be relatively small proportion of our society who believe in some facile and provably untrue beliefs. Yet, as we know, there are all too many people who follow suspect “nutritionists”, waste money on homoeopathy, pay too much attention to 9/11 mythologies, and read “history”…

I’d not previously read any James Lee Burke novels, despite him having written over 25 in the past. But I heard him in the book section of the Simon Mayo programme a few weeks ago, and the setting of his most recent novel in and around New Orleans against the backdrop of Katrina was an…