When I reached for Storr’s book The Science of Storytelling, I hoped to find a scientific exploration of the way storytelling affects our brains. Continue reading Will Storr’s “The Science of Storytelling” – book review
The phrase “surveillance capitalism” has been appearing in the newspapers recently as a way of describing the business practice of Google and Facebook. The phrase was coined by Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Captialism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of AI. The book begins with a definition of surveillance capitalism Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n. A new economic order that … Continue reading Shoshana Zuboff “The Age of Surveillance Captialism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of AI” – book review
I devoured this book in one gulp as I would a box of chocolates. It is a collection of Nora Ephron’s personal essays, just the sort of length so that one can read it in a single afternoon. Continue reading Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman” – book review
Rather than providing a matter-of-fact account of what she has done and when, Hurston mixes together fiction to create an origin story for herself. That said, the book was first published in 1942, and it shows many signs of its time. Continue reading Zora Neale Hurston “Dust tracks on a road”- book review
Naturally I was very excited to find that Joseph Conrad visited Mauritius too – and that he wrote about it. Continue reading Joseph Conrad’s “A Smile of Fortune”- book review
What better time to read Jared Diamond’s Upheaval? After all, the world is having a crisis of some sort at the moment. Sadly, the book doesn’t lay out a ten-step-plan to get ourselves out of the COVID-19 crisis, as it was published in 2019, a world away from what is actually going on now. Still. Jared Diamond’s Upheaval is a case study of 7 nations … Continue reading Jared Diamond’s “Upheaval” – book review
Girl Woman Other chronicles the lives of black British women who are linked either by family relations (the book covers several mother-daughter pairs) or tangential connections. Be warned though, the novel uses no formal sentences. Apart from commas, there is little punctuation. However, the sentence “chunks” tend to be separated by line divisions which makes me the book relatively easy to read. Girl, Woman, Other … Continue reading Bernardine Evaristo’s “Girl, Woman, Other” – book review
I have a history of not receiving feedback terribly well. When I was little and my Mum had the audacity to say that I was not vacuum cleaning in the corners, I would cross my arms and reply “You can do it yourself if you don’t like it”. The slightest criticism was a risk of me either giving up or bursting into tears. Obviously, as … Continue reading Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen “Thanks for the Feedback” – book review
If this was a realistic novel about spies in suits, I’d be so happy… Continue reading Jason Matthews “The Red Sparrow” – book review
Did I really ‘read’ William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy?
I let it waft around me, listening on Audible as I cooked dinner and I cleared the kitchen. That is surely not the reading it deserves. Continue reading William Dalrymple’s “The Anarchy” – book review
