Category: Books
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Swag by Elmore Leonard
I’ve recently begun a rewatch of perhaps the best TV adaptation of Elmore Leonard – Justitifed with Timothy Olyphant. I’m halfway through the second season. But I happened to be in Heffers in Cambridge recently where they have famously good Crime Fiction section. Richard Reynolds is their crime fiction expert, and earlier this year he…
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Rosewater by Tade Thompson
It’s always good to keep up with the Clarke Award, Britain’s premier SF award which this year was awarded to Tade Thompson for Rosewater. The book is set in a future Nigeria, where Kaaro is earning a living using his special skills to find things. He is a “sensitive” and he’s been recruited by a…
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Hello World by Hannah Fry
Having previously read and very much enjoyed (if that’s the right phrase) Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Destruction I wasn’t sure if Hello World was going to tell the same story. These are both books about the dangers of artificial intelligence – or more specifically machine learning – that is behind so much of what…
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Waterland by Graham Swift
Earlier this year, I was cycling through Fen Drayton, the Cambridgeshire nature reserve, with a friend, and he mentioned reading Waterland some years earlier. I’d always known of the book but had never read it. But now I was beginning to become interested in this strange landscape, that is as man-made as any other landscape.…
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Crudo by Olivia Laing
Note: I’m a little behind on some of my book reviews, so there here follows a big batch all at once! I do this mostly to have a comprehensive record of my reading. Crudo is a slight novel; in terms of length as well as subject. Our narrator is Kathy, and she’s relates her life…
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Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri
A lot of Japanese novels that seem to get English translations can be quite similar, addressing universal themes of love or loneliness through outsider characters. I’m not sure if that’s a reflection on a society where the need to conform to norms is stronger. This book is similar, but very much different. Tokyo Ueno Station…
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Fen by Daisy Johnson
I think I picked up Fen in Blackwell’s in Oxford, drawn to it by one of those bookseller reader cards. Fen is a short story collection set in and around the fens, telling dark gothic tales. It reminded me a little of Angela Carter’s short stories, although in a much more contemporary setting. The tales…
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Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott
Swan Song is a remarkable novel that explores the life of Truman Capote and his “swans” the society women he hung around with – you could say, the set that he inveigled his way into. I confess that I knew relatively little about Capote, having not seen any of the biographical films about him, nor…
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I Like to Watch by Emily Nussbaum
Emily Nussbaum is The New Yorker‘s TV critic, and this is a collection of her writing about TV from that magazine and others that she had worked for previously. There are often short introductions to these pieces, and a couple of brand new pieces – one of which takes up a significant proportion of the…
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Need For The Bike by Paul Fournel
My Tour de France inspired cycling themed book marathon continues with Need For The Bike, a classic that I’d somehow never heard of. Paul Fournel is a French writer, poet, publisher, and cultural ambassador – a wonderful job description to have, I’m sure you’ll agree. He’s also been in love with bikes since he was…
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Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar
Continuing my non-stop cycling reading during this year’s Tour de France, I turned to a volume has been sitting around on my bookshelf* for a number of years – David Millar’s book where he digs into his life story, and in particular the years that he doped. I’ve always liked David Millar, and latterly he’s…
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Three Weeks, Eight Seconds: The Epic Tour de France of 1989 by Nige Tassell
Channel 4 burst onto UK TV screens in 1982 – a new commercially funded public service broadcaster. One of the things it would do was cover sports that the traditional BBC and ITV weren’t showing. They would show highlights of the NFL and even kabaddi. But for me, the sport that Channel 4 would really…
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The Yellow Jersey by Peter Cossins
The first thing to say about this book is that it’s beautifully made. Telling stories from the Tour isn’t a new idea – there are dozens of books that, quite often, recycle the same stories of races of yesteryear. But this book takes as its starting point the Yellow Jersey. This year is the 100th…