What is our life? Is it the days we live or the way others perceive us? The comedian Adrian Edmondson steps us through his life. But, as he points out, what we remember and what we're interested in isn't necessarily the most significant part of the subject's life. In 2016 I adapted William Leith’s book Bits of Me Are Falling Apart into a one-man play. It took six weeks to do the adaptation, four …
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I'm not a paper fetishist. The smell of old books does nothing for me. But I'll admit to a slight sense of wonder when I held this 86-year old book in my hands. What is feminism? This is an out of print, and somewhat obscure, attempt to answer that question. Out of the shadow of the Great War and barely a decade after universal suffrage in the UK, one woman decided to catalogue the…
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Turns out, you can just relive your childhood for £2.99 on eBay! I was exactly the right age when this book came out, and I was the perfect target audience. A boy in a sleepy suburb finds a mysterious device which allows him to understand every language. Could it be… Aliens?!?!?! It's all biking to the woods, arguing with siblings, navigating growing up, and living in a diverse community. Oh, a…
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My friend has published their first novel - and it is a cracker! After a calamitous accident, the Fairy realm is cut off from the mundane world. Only one trickster remains, a sprite by the name of Mainder who is now trapped on our side. All seems to be going well in his little corner of the world, until a plucky team of archaeologists start digging around the shattered ruins of the portal…
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I want to live in the world where this book is true. But I think I'm too cynical. Adam Greenfield has expertly diagnosed the problem we're all about to face. With ecological collapse comes societal breakdown. This "failure cascade" will bring unimaginable suffering. What can we do to give mutual aid and help save ourselves and our communities? The answer is building a series of "Lifehouses";…
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I've bumped in to Ken Banks a few times over my career - and he has always been a kind, inspiring, and dedicated chap. How did he get that way? This book is part autobiography and part an explanation about how people can find purpose in life. It is refreshingly secular on the latter, and curiously impersonal on the former. While Ken's childhood family is recounted in great detail, his wife and…
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Another one in the Panopticon series. Bouncy sci-fi which scattershoots its plots all over the place. VR, Mission to Mars, evil AI, underwater cities, eyeless technomages - this has it all. It probably has a little too much crammed in. But, hey, it's a great ride. A cliffhanger every other chapter, vaguely plausible science, and mortal danger at every turn. It looked like I was about to be part …
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I hate it when I DNF a book. But "Soul of a New Machine" is just dull. It's sort of a hagiography of an obscure company which once made a 32 bit computer. All the men (and it seems to be mostly men) are in turns dull, agressive, or just dicks. As a sample quote: Grinning, he went on: “We’re trying to maximize the win, and make Eagle go as fast as a raped ape.” I completely see how staggering …
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This is a decent slice of sci-fi. It's the sort of story that probably could have been written any time in the last 100 years. The sole survivor of the human race is picked up by friendly aliens and spends his life as a specimen of scientific and cultural curiosity. And then... events occur! It's all rather silly fun. The aliens are all pacifists and spend more time negotiating rather than…
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Heather Burns has an absolutely deft way of turning the sometimes-dull world of digital privacy into entertaining, informative, and actionable prose. Too many of these sorts of books end up being a list of woes and end with "someone should do something, I guess?". Understanding Privacy is different. All the way through the mantra is "You are someone! You do something! And here's how..." …
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Fourteen years ago, I read Fforde's Shades of Grey and my life hasn't been quite the same since. It was a magical tale, almost totally devoid of exposition, building in an fantasy world like no other. Fans have been clamouring for a sequel ever since. The first few chapters of the sequel do an excellent job of exposition - but this isn't the sort of book you can pick up without having recently…
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"History is not erased when statues are pulled down. It is made." Some people celebrated when Saddam's statue was toppled in Iraq. Yet those same voices condemn the felling of Coulson, Rhodes, and a dozen other statues. Why? Alex von Tunzelmann has a knack for getting to the heart of history in an accessible manner. There isn't a hefty amount of ponderous academic theory to wade through - just…
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