Category: Books
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Bewilderment by Richard Powers
Alongside The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, this is probably the most important, and affecting novel that I’ll read this year. Theo is an astrobiologist, a scientist who studies exoplanets around other stars in our galaxy. He’s a single parent bringing up his 9-year old son Robin, a child with behavioural issues,…
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Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
One of the most anticipated novels of the year doesn’t disappoint, delivering in large part what you expect it to deliver. Alice is a novelist, a very successful novelist, who has struggled with some issues in recent times, and has now moved into a temporary home in a rural part of Ireland to take a…
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Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen/The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly
Squeeze Me came out last year, but for some reason I’d been sitting on it rather than reading it. That’s my stupidity because Hiaasen is master of the comic crime caper, and this is yet another wonderfully funny book in his oeuvre. We mostly follow Angie, a wrangler of all kinds of wildlife working in…
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A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark
This an enjoyable steampunk romp through a 1912 Cairo in which magic and djinns exist in a world related, yet unrelated to North Africa at the start of the last century. Fatma is the newest agent for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities. As one of the few females on the force, it’s…
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The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich
This is the new book from Ben Mezrich, author of The Accidental Billionaires, the book that became the movie, The Social Network. It covers a handful of weeks at the end of 2020 and the start of 2021 during which time, a Reddit group called wallstreetbets ended up driving up the stock price of a…
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The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman
The key thing to know about this book is that if you liked The Thursday Murder Club, then you will love this! The gang is all back – Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim, as well as Donna and Chris from the local police station, and the man of mystery that is Bogdan. This time around,…
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Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Having just read one novel, where there’s a book-within-a-book as a key part of the plot, I turned to The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, in which the fictional book within is even more fundamental to the story. And it’s no surprise that Stephen King happily gives this book a blurb on the cover even…
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Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Recently Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to Casey Newton of The Platformer, for both his newsletter and The Vergecast podcast. It was a wide ranging interview covering many of the hot-button topics of the day – not least Covid misinformation on Facebook’s platforms and what they were doing about it. But the interview kicked off…
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Billy Summers by Stephen King
I’m not sure what kind of deal Stephen King has with his publishers (Simon & Schuster in the US, Hodder & Stoughton in the UK), but I do know that every so often, he publishes a book with Hard Cast Crime, the noir paperback imprint that comes with original illustrations on the cover, as though…
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Recently Read Crime Fiction
[Note: There has been, and will be, a flurry of book reviews on this blog at the moment. In part because I’ve suddenly been reading a bit more, but also in part because I’ve read a few books this year, but just not gotten around to writing about them.] The Less Dead is Denise Mina’s…
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The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion
I’m not 100% sure when I became fascinated with the office sub-leasing business WeWork, but it was certainly ahead of its mid-2019 filing for an IPO, and which point things really did seem to fall spectacularly apart. Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell are a pair of Wall St Journal reporters who covered WeWork on the…
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An Ugly Truth by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
For a long time now, Facebook has had a serious problem with some of its users – myself included – a lack of trust. It’s hard to put a finger on why that is exactly, and why they should be viewed as any worse than, say, Google. Perhaps it’s the way they introduce new features…