I have just started reading David Nobbs’ new novel The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger (thanks Jane!) and came across something very interesting on page 12. The hero, Sir Gordon Coppinger, is wondering whether the press had information about an infidelity of his and whether they would write anything about it: He was invulnerable [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Books'
The way we were
September 4th, 2012 · No Comments · Life, Technology
At the moment I am re-reading a humorous book about computers from 1996 called Dave Barry in Cyberspace. I have quite a few of his books and like to dip into the ones that are basically collections of his newspaper columns every now and then because they are light reading and more or less timeless. [...]
Harry Harrison RIP
August 26th, 2012 · 1 Comment · Life
Yesterday I was surprised and sad to hear that Harry Harrison died on August 15th. I was surprised because these days when somebody well-known dies you learn about it really quickly, either in the normal media or from Facebook or Twitter updates. I’m sure that quite a few people I follow on Twitter and Facebook [...]
Tags: Books
Alice in Zombieland
August 20th, 2012 · No Comments · Uncategorized
Another book I finished this month: Alice in Zombieland by Gena Showalter. It is due to be published in October. I leapt in and started reading this just on the strength of the title, being a bit of a zombie fan, so I didn’t notice that this is a book aimed at the teen market [...]
Soccernomics
August 19th, 2012 · No Comments · Life
Yet another recently finished book – it has been a good month for reading. This one is Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. Here is what I wrote about it:
Thihnking Fast and Slow
August 19th, 2012 · No Comments · Life
Another book I recently finished is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It is another one of those books that occupies the intersection of psychology and economics, so if you liked Nudge, Freakonomics, The Wisdom of Crowds, Predictably Irrational, The Black Swan or any of the other many similar books you will probably love [...]
The Prankster
August 19th, 2012 · No Comments · Life
This week I finished reading The Prankster by James Polster. It was an advance proof copy, but the book is on sale now – I read it all in a day but had to wait until I finished a couple of much more substantial books before I could start it. The most notable thing about [...]
Look before you leap
August 1st, 2012 · No Comments · Life
People who know me well will know that I am a sucker for advance proof copies of books, and I am fortunate to be able to get one most months. Last month I got two. One was a 100-page novella which took hardly any time to read, the other is more substantial and I grabbed [...]
Olympics serendipity #1
July 29th, 2012 · No Comments · Life
This week I have been reading Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. It is a reprint of Why England Lose, with some revisions and updating and a title change to make it sound a bit more like the very successful Freakonomics book. It is a good read, covering all sorts of aspects of football [...]
Economical enigma
July 13th, 2012 · No Comments · Life
I’m reading another of those books that covers the overlap between psychology and economics and so I’m awash with terms like cognitive ease, utility, prospect theory and regression to the mean but I’ve just realised that my own behaviour says something about perception of value. Maybe by the time I’ve finished the book I will [...]
