Tag: books

As I write, Apple is the second most valuable company in the world. A couple of weeks ago it was the most valuable, but many tech stocks have taken a tumble over that period. Nonetheless, Apple is currently worth $2.4 trillion. While Steve Jobs set Apple on the way, it has actually been Tim Cook…

In 1996, I was on a mountain biking holiday in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. It was an organised trip with a small travel company and we spent our days cycling between fairly remote towns and villages, camping out at night. One day, I noticed large numbers of people dressed up in costumes. There were…

I should probably preface this review by saying that I know one of the Cavendish’s ghostwriters, Daniel Friebe. So make of that what you will! When Mark Cavendish stormed to victory on Stage 4 of this year’s Tour de France, I was ecstatic. Cavendish is a cyclist who I’ve loved to follow for years. He…

The latest book from Michael Connelly feels as contemporary as anything he’s written recently. Connelly always says that his books are set at the time that he writes them – hence his characters like Harry Bosch age in real time. But he also heavily references what is happening in the real world, and this book…

In The Second Cut we revisit the world of Rilke, who readers first came across in Louise Welsh’s fantastic debut The Cutting Room. Rilke works for Bowery Auctions, and he’s given a tip by a friend, Jojo, that there’s a house clearance sale coming up that his firm might want to get involved with. Rilk…

I’ll start by saying that I absolutely loved this novel set in the world of independent computer games from the 90s onwards. It took me a chapter or so to get into the book but then I was swept up in the story of Sam, Sadie and Marx – who end up setting up a…

On Saturday, I went for a nice long bike ride, and along the way listened to some podcasts including that morning’s new episode of Slate Money. They had a guest with a new book on it, Christopher Mims, talking about logistics and supply chains and in particular, how companies like Amazon operate. It sounded fascinating.…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…