Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik
08 Jul 2013 01:54:44
Stuff Matters can be seen as a book in the line of JE Gordon's Structures: Why Things Don't Fall Down and The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor – 1970s classics still in print and cited in Miodownik's further reading list. But times have changed. Gordon was a great populariser who enlivened his tales of materials with stories of yachting and classical Greece, his other great passions; he even gave us the basic equations of materials science. Miodownik has no... Read Full Story
Taipei by Tao Lin
06 Jul 2013 02:38:36
In Taipei a writer named Paul – who rather resembles Lin – wanders around New York and Taipei with his girlfriend Erin and takes a lot of drugs. Imagine Trainspotting, with better teeth, and on a generous personal allowance. Paul and Erin chug down cocaine, MDMA, Adderall, Percocet, caffeine, LSD, mushrooms, heroin, Xanax, Klonopin, Methadone, Oxycodone and more. Not surprisingly perhaps, this chemical regime rather restricts what else they can get up to: mostly they film themselves having sex a... Read Full Story
A Bright Moon for Fools by Jasper Gibson
06 Jul 2013 02:36:24
The progress of A Bright Moon for Fools is picaresque. It proceeds via a series of absurd coincidences, reversals and rescues. Christmas – Ignatius J Reilly by way of Tunbridge Wells; Falstaff with a tincture (perhaps it's just the setting) of Malcolm Lowry's drunken consul – barges through its pages living on his wits, but is incessantly prone to witlessness, insulting strangers with panache and railing against the vulgar inanities of modern life. "The Rot", as he calls it – characterised by of... Read Full Story
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
06 Jul 2013 02:34:52
On the cover of Neil Gaiman's extraordinary tale, Coraline, is a quotation from Terry Pratchett, saying that the story has "the delicate horror of the finest fairytales". Gaiman is a master of fear, and he understands the nature of fairytales, the relation between the writer, the reader and the character in the tale. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, like Coraline and like The Graveyard Book, has a young central character – a resourceful and determined child – who finds his world transfigured by... Read Full Story
Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston
03 Jul 2013 00:52:42
Weston's protagonist Nancy is a gynaecologist for whom terminations are just one of the procedures that make up her working day: "In some ways, it is no different to any other kind of surgery. Not easier or harder, not more gory or more disgusting." She agrees with abortion in principle – she's had one herself – and she's extremely good at her job, but then one day in the operating room she freezes. A woman on her table starts to haemorrhage and Nancy just sits there.
Much more complex than a p... Read Full Story
The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig
03 Jul 2013 00:48:34
This episode is one of the many entertaining and enraging examples in a new exposé of the super-rich. Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks focus their ire on income levels and tax. Between 1980 and 2008, during the time of supposed plenty, the income of the bottom 90% of Americans grew by a measly 1%. The income of the top 0.01% grew by 403%.
Their polemic is assiduously researched and a fast-paced read. They leaven graphs and data with amusing quotes from a rogue's gallery of the rich. Lloyd Blankfei... Read Full Story
Run brother run by David Berg
03 Jul 2013 00:47:31
It's a good thing this is a memoir, because if it was a novel we'd say it was unbelievable. This book has everything. It's a tale told by a southern trial lawyer whose brother was murdered when he was young man. David Berg's brother, Alan, disappeared one night after work leaving his pregnant wife and two kids alone. The police thought he was just another Houston husband who'd walked out on his family, and refused to investigate. For six months his family searched for him, paying rewards and hir... Read Full Story
Court Confidential by Neil Harman
30 Jun 2013 00:39:20
It seemed an opportune time for a book about the professional game, thought Neil Harman, a sports correspondent for the Times and respected authority on the ins and outs of tennis (both on the court and off it). Published in the run-up to this year's Wimbledon, his account traverses the season that saw Murray shine, starting in Australia in January and finishing up at London's O2 arena, for the men's tour finals, in November.
As the title hints, what makes this book special are the disclosures ... Read Full Story
The Sea of Innocence by Kishwar Desai
30 Jun 2013 00:34:55
Simran Singh, the recurring narrator-heroine of Kishwar Desai's mystery novels, is an unusual mixture – not exactly a rebel but very far from conforming to Indian social codes. She drinks both beer and whisky, and on her holiday in Goa (where this rather sombre adventure is set) sees the dilatoriness of the Indian government as a blessing for once, since a long-proposed ban on beach smoking hasn't yet come into force. She describes herself as a strong atheist but can be moved to light a candle i... Read Full Story
Undercover Paul Lewis and Rob Evans
30 Jun 2013 00:33:31
Overexcitable publishers like to bandy around words such as "explosive" and "shocking" when trying to flog their books, even though generally you could substitute them for ones such as "mildly interesting". Not with Undercover, though. Subtitled "The True Story of Britain's Secret Police", and doggedly written and researched by Guardian journalists Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, the revelations in its pages are genuinely explosive. And even though a lot of the material was in last week's news and for... Read Full Story
All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
29 Jun 2013 01:00:59
Or so she thinks. She's in no mood to put up with it: her cottage contains a gun, but no fresh bread, axes but no homely fire. Her only companion is a dog called Dog. Is it a yellow-eyed beast, or someone out to track her down? Is it just a fox? When something clatters through the house at night, it could be the ever-present wind and weather, or something more like a poltergeist: a manifestation of all her traumatised and anxious energy.
For the outsider is not the "beast" but Jake herself, who... Read Full Story
The Walk and Other Stories by Robert Walser
29 Jun 2013 00:59:50
The Swiss bank clerk Robert Walser was diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1933 and spent the last quarter of his life in an asylum. But he left a curiously brilliant and utterly original corpus of work, whose wry surrealism is reminiscent of Kafka, Beckett and indeed John Lennon, given that the protagonist of his short masterpiece "Helbling's Story" imagines no possessions and goes to bed indefinitely. To get a flavour one need only consider some of the opening lines: "Once there was a man and on his... Read Full Story
