Library
This is a list of all the books I've reviewed since 2001. Enjoy!
2025
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Fabulosa! - The Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language by Paul Baker
The Wicked of the Earth by A D Bergin
The Little Book of Ikigai - The secret Japanese way to live a happy and long life by Ken Mogi
The Man In The Wall by KJ Lyttleton
Machine Readable Me by Zara Rahman
Hive - Madders of Time Book One by D. L. Orton
Medieval Cats - Claws, Paws, and Kitties of Yore by Catherine Nappington
Web Accessibility Cookbook by Manuel Matuzović
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser
Queen B by Juno Dawson
We Need New Stories - Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik
The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett
The Great White Bard by Farah Karim-Cooper
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
What If? 10th Anniversary Edition - Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
Rules for Radicals - A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul Alinsky
2024
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway
Git Commit Murder by Michael Warren Lucas
Platformland : An Anatomy of Next-Generation Public Services by Richard Pope
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
How Spies Think: 10 Lessons in Intelligence by David Omand
The Appeal by Janice Hallett
4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang
How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication by Tom Mustill
The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson
Berserker! by Adrian Edmondson
Myself When Young by Margot Asquith
The Intergalactic Omniglot by Jenni Fleetwood
Somewhere To Be by Laurie Mather
Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield
The Pursuit of Purpose Part memoir, part study – A book about finding your way in the world by Ken Banks
Dystopia X by A.E. Currie
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
Relic by Alan Dean Foster
Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde
Fallen Idols by Alex von Tunzelmann
The Doors of Opportunity by Rosalind Messenger
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Star Wars Propaganda: A History of Persuasive Art in the Galaxy by Pablo Hidalgo
Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World by Georgina Voss
The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
How Big Things Get Done : The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner
The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz
We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins
Julia by Sandra Newman
How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History by Samantha Cole
The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography by Rob Wilkins
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Babel by R.F. Kuang
Refuse to Choose! A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love by Barbara Sher
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane
The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal
2023
Hokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas
Year's Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 4 by Emily Brill-Holland
Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants - Britain's First Female Crime Syndicate by Brian McDonald
Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Hamlet, Prince of Robots by M. Darusha Wehm
The Man From the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya
The Modern Bestiary: A Curated Collection of Wondrous Creatures by Joanna Bagniewska
A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell
Embroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction From Ukraine & The Diaspora by Valya Dudycz Lupescu
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand
Bournville by Jonathan Coe
The Twilight of the British Empire: British Intelligence and Counter-Subversion in the Middle East, 1948–63 by Chikara Hashimoto
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick
The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll
Time Squared by Lesley Krueger
The Variable Man and other stories by Philip K. Dick
Hacking Capitalism: Modeling, Humans, Computers, and Money by Kris Nóva
The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Kill It With Fire - Manage Ageing Computer Systems by Marianne Bellotti
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Eight by Jonathan Strahan
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock
Pleased! A short story anthology in celebration of The Beatles' Please Please Me album's 60th anniversary by Gayle Ramage
Plain Text - The Poetics of Computation by Dennis Tenen
Engraved on the Eye by Saladin Ahmed
The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems by Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow
Starter Villain by John Scalzi
Invisible Planets by Ken Liu
Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress by Hasok Chang
It's Not About the Burqa by Mariam Khan
Caliban's War by James S. A. Corey
The Constant Sinner by Mae West
A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them by Tom Phillips & Jonn Elledge
The Reincarnated Giant by Mingwei Song
Radicalized by Cory Doctorow
"You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World by Torie Bosch
Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton
Shakespeare in Jest by Indira Ghose
Leviathan Wakes: Book One of The Expanse by James S. A. Corey
The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy
Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by Qntm
The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold by Sam Knight
Denizen 43 by A. E. Currie
Portraits of Childfree Wealth by Jay Zigmont
Consider the Platypus by Maggie Ryan Sandford
Adventures in Space - New Short Stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers by Patrick Parrinder
The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century by Jane Loudon
Pod by Laline Paull
12 Bytes - How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Way We Live and Love by Jeanette Winterson
If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable by Mikko Hyppönen
Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Mirrorshades by Bruce Sterling
Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson
Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera
More Zeros and Ones Digital Technology, Maintenance and Equity in Aotearoa New Zealand by Anna Pendergrast and Kelly Pendergrast
There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill
The Really Good Idea Test by Julia Shalet
Pink Floyd and The Dark Side of the Moon by Martin Popoff
2022
Rising Tide by Jennifer Palgrave
Reality Is Broken - Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided by Dr Amanda Foreman
The Bees by Laline Paull
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
The Language Hoax by John H. McWhorter
So, You Have to Write a Literature Review: A Guided Workbook for Engineers by Catherine G.P. Berdanier & Joshua B. Lenart
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers
Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in a World Built for Men: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men by Katrine Marçal
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
Animal Vegetable Criminal: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Me++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William J. Mitchell
Sex: Lessons From History by Fern Riddell
Illegal Alien by Robert Sawyer
Shakespeare and Immigration by Espinosa & Ruiter
When HARLIE Was One, Release 2.0 by David Gerrold
An Unnatural Life by Erin K Wagner
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
Rhetoric of InSecurity; The Language of Danger, Fear and Safety in National and International Contexts by Victoria Baines
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
The Heroine with 1001 Faces by Maria Tatar
Conundra by A.E. Currie
The Programmer's Brain - What every programmer needs to know about cognition by Felienne Hermans
Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy by Martin Paul Eve
The Uplift War by David Brin
Information Warfare and Security by Dorothy E. Denning
Constance by Matthew FitzSimmons
Ira Aldridge The African Roscius by Bernth Lindfors
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
Startide Rising by David Brin
Die With Zero by Bill Perkins
Doctor Who: The Vault by Marcus Hearn
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Dr Shashi Tharoor
The Empyrean by Katherine Franklin
2021
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal
The Medusa Chronicles by Alastair Reynolds & Stephen Baxter
Future law : emerging technology, regulation and ethics by Lilian Edwards
The Idiot Gods by David Zindell
IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black
The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
Disability and the Tudors All the King's Fools - by Phillipa Vincent Connolly
Glass Coffin by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch
Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
After Meat The Case for an Amazing, Meat-Free World by Karthik Sekar
Professional Practice in Engineering and Computing: Preparing for Future Careers by Riadh Habash
Cosmogramma by Courttia Newland
Sexual Revolution - Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback by Laurie Penny
Such Big Teeth by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch
A Teaspoon and an Open Mind - The Science of Doctor Who by Michael White
New Moons For Sam Becoming Kiwi – Life of a New Zealand Diplomat by Peter Hamilton
All That Remains: A Life in Death by Sue Black
The Atlas of Unusual Languages by Zoran Nikolić
The Transgender Issue An Argument for Justice by Shon Faye
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Darkwood by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch
Bias Interrupted Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good by Joan C. Williams
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race by Ayanna Thompson
To Be Taught, if Fortunate by Becky Chambers
The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth and Power by Deirdre Mask
Amatka by Karin Tidbeck
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China by Jung Chang
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
The Power of Privilege How White People can Challenge Racism by June Sarpong
Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by Pat Cadigan; William Gibson
Clockwork River by J.S. Emery
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman
The Cabinet by Un-su Kim
The Art of Statistics - Learning from Data by David Spiegelhalter
The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoë Playdon
No Bath But Plenty Of Bubbles: An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front 1970-73 by Lisa Power
The End of Bias How We Change Our Minds by Jessica Nordell
DALEK by Robert Shearman
Sinopticon 2021 : A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction by Xueting Christine Ni
How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford
The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
Sundiver by David Brin
The Happiness Revolution: A Manifesto for Living Your Best Life by Andy Pope and Paul McGee
Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan
Difficult Women by Helen Lewis
Assassin's Orbit by John Appel
The Computer’s Voice - From Star Trek to Siri by Liz W. Faber
The 22 Murders Of Madison May by Max Barry
Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North
Quarantine Comix by Rachael Smith
A Brief History of Motion From the Wheel to the Car to What Comes Next by Tom Standage
Record of a Spaceborn Few : Wayfarers 3 by Becky Chambers
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Our Biggest Experiment by Alice Bell
Handmade A Scientist’s Search for Meaning through Making by Dr Anna Ploszajski
Agency by William Gibson
A History of Women in Men's Clothes by Norena Shopland
The Gameshouse by Claire North
What White People Can Do Next From Allyship to Coalition by Emma Dabiri
Always On by Rory Cellan-Jones
Good Data by Sam Gilbert
Monstrous Design by Kat Dunn
The Wrens of World War II: Bletchley's Secret Source by Peter Hore
Star Wars from a Certain Point of View by Various
Feminist City Claiming Space in a Man-Made World by Leslie Kern
Doctor Who - The Witchfinders by Joy Wilkinson
Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth
Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen
Kindred - Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Black Sci-Fi Short Stories by Temi Oh
Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
Dangerous Remedy by Kat Dunn
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
How To Invent Everything by Ryan North
The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
I'm a joke and so are you by Robin Ince
BitCoin Hurricane by Kate Baucherel
Radical Help by Hillary Cottam
Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Humble Pi by Matt Parker
Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy
The Problem with Men: When is it International Men’s Day? (and why it matters) by Richard Herring
2020
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
Sweet Harmony by Claire North
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole
Doctor Who: Scratchman by Tom Baker & James Goss
Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble
Shouting Zeros and Ones by Andrew Chen
The Thief on the Winged Horse by Kate Mascarenhas
Circe by Madeline Miller
Privacy is Power by Carissa Véliz
Utopia Five by A.E. Currie
Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain by Nadine Akkerman
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch
The One That Got Away by Jennifer Palgrave
A Short Philosophy of Birds by Elise Rousseau
The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin
The Relentless Moon: A Lady Astronaut Novel by Mary Robinette Kowal
Between the Stops by Sandi Toksvig
A Symphony of Echoes by Jodi Taylor
Black Tudors: The Untold Story by Miranda Kaufmann
Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini
Philosophy of Race: An Introduction by Naomi Zack
ood Services - How to Design Services that Work by Lou Downe
The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard
The House Without Windows by Barbara Newhall Follett
Teaching Medicine and Medical Ethics Using Popular Culture by Dr Evie Kendal
Beyond the Labyrinth by Gillian Rubinstein
This Is Shakespeare by Emma Smith
Touch by Claire North
The Future of Feeling by Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips
Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu The Adventure of the Deadly Dimensions by Lois H Gresh
Something Beginning With by Sarah Salway
A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong
The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North
The Memory Illusion by Julia Shaw
Sapience by Alexis Lantgen
Alone Together by Sherry Turkle
The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White
Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor
The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato
Terry Pratchett's Discworld Imaginarium by Paul Kidby
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
2019
Mismatch by Kat Holmes
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon
Zero Sum Game by S. L. Huang
Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch
Chemical Detective by Fiona Erskine
The Five by Hallie Rubenhold
The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) by Philip Pullman
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
Helpful Hackers by Chris van 't Hof
A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier
Queer Privacy by Sarah Jamie Lewis
The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal
Jennifer Government by Max Berry
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet
Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson
Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
Playing with FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) by Scott Rieckens
Do No Harm by Henry Marsh
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Vs. Dracula by Loren D. Estleman
Deep Medicine by Eric Topol
The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz
84K by Claire North
The Secret Barrister by Anonymous
The City & The City by China Miéville
The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla
The End of the Day by Claire North
Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
How Long 'til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
Inferior by Angela Saini
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Hello World by Hannah Fry
Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Longitude by Dava Sobel
Death's End by Cixin Liu
This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Letters from Alcatraz by Michael Esslinger
Fukushima Dreams by Zelda Rhiando
The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates
The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright & Bradley Hope
Was This in the Plan? by Stephanie Nimmo
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
Nina is Not OK by Shappi Khorsandi
Factfulness by Hans Rosling
Thank you for this - you’ve given me plenty of ideas for books to check out over the Christmas break. We share some 5-star reviews, but you were wrong about Klara and the Sun, so everything else you’ve written is void.