Tag: books
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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…
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The Premonition by Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis’ books are always very readable as he has a knack of navigating you through sometimes very complicated stories. In The Premonition he is tackling the pandemic. In particular, he’s actually tackling it from the perspective of a handful of individuals who had previously been planning for something like this, or who were more…
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Nightshade by Annalena McAfee
Eve Laing is an artist who works in her London studio on works based around very accurate reproductions of flowers. But she is perhaps most famous as the muse of another painter, and for moving in the same circles in the sixties and seventies as a number of other more successful artists. She did find…
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The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox
The Absolute Book is a complex and sprawling fantasy novel of a very unusual sort. And it’s all the better for being so. To try to even describe the plot would be foolhardy, but it starts in a contemporary world, mostly in the UK, but with excursions to Canada and New Zealand, and tells the…
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How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates
A year or so ago I read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, which laid out in often horrific details, the kinds of things that would happen to the planet if we didn’t change our ways. Bill Gates goes for the much more practical, “So what can we do about it now?” approach. This book…