Jamie

I'm not the biggest fan of Limmy. I don't mean that I don't like his stuff, it's just that, barring the odd clip from Youtube or the occasional highlight reel from one of his streams, I've never really engaged with what he's done, so I'm not entirely sure why I bought this, to be honest. Thankfully, however, I enjoyed it a lot. It's probably the most...intimate autobiography I've ever read and includes chapters with titles like ‘My first wank' and ‘Becoming an alky'. Like his TV shows, it's funny, but never funny in a way that makes you actually laugh aloud, and a lot of it is truly, desperately sad. The chapter where he talks about his mother's death was heart-wrenching, though not necessarily for the reasons you'd expect, and the ending is somewhat ambiguous. I hope he's doing ok...

Highly recommended, even for people who, like me, aren't diehard fans.

Acaster is one of my favourite comedians. Unlike his first book, which is just a collection of very funny anecdotes, this is more focused and autobiographical, centered on a year in his life (2017) where he was going through a lot and used music as a way to escape, specifically by obsessively researching and then buying 366 different albums, all from 2016. The book takes the form of an autobiographical account of 2017, where Acaster goes, quite intimately, into how he was feeling at the time and what was going through his mind, including the suicidal thoughts that he was grappling with. This is interspersed with passionate and largely insightful reviews of the various albums he listened to, many of which are extremely obscure and were only unearthed from the hours Acaster spent digging through the internet to find them.

I enjoyed it, but not as much as his first book and I liked the autobiographical stuff more than the music reviews, which got a bit tiring after a while. Still, I'd recommend it if you enjoy the author and/or the music of 2016.

An engaging, if convoluted, old school spy novel

I was inspired to read this after watching the fantastic film version from 2011. It's only taken me 8 years! I enjoyed the intrigue and the double-crossing, but I have to say that I felt the need to re-watch the film after reading the first few chapters so that I could figure out what was actually going on. There is a lot which is deliberately left unsaid that could be missed, as well as a lot of jargon that I had to look up. The book is also very much part of the George Smiley series of Le Carré's novels and makes reference to previous events from the earlier books.

Still, a good read. Some of the ruminations on the mind and motivations of a spy are especially engaging. Recommended!

This was very enjoyable - a fun page-turner from start to finish that keeps its pace and energy all the way through. I thought the juxtaposition between the virtual paradise that the protagonist escapes into and the dytstopian real world he actually exists in was especially well done. The nerd in me enjoyed spotting the different pop culture and gaming references, too (although, being a child of the 90s, quite a few of them were lost on me).

I will say that the third act seems a bit rushed and arbitrary in places, lacking the nuance and tension of the rest of the novel, but overall I'd definitely recommend this to anyone with a passing interest in light sci-fi, videogames and/or the 80s.

The first Connelly I've read, I thought this was a satisfying page-turner with a couple of good twists that I didn't see coming. Reading it for the first time in 2019, however, 27 years after it was originally published, some of the characters and ideas felt a little hackneyed, but I enjoyed the Chandler-esque charm of it all the same.

Shocking and tragic, this kept me engaged until the very end. Tonally and thematically it reminded me strongly of Achebe's masterpiece, Things Fall Apart. Recommended.

It's easy to see how this has become such a touch stone for the genre: the twists and turns that the plot takes, the amorality of the powers that be on both sides, and the central antihero have all become staples of the spy thriller. This was the first Le Carre novel I've read and I'll definitely be picking up some more soon.

Full of brilliant, laugh out loud jokes, but the plot is just about coherent and mostly takes the form of a series of episodes which build up to the next punchline. Marvin the Paranoid Android remains a work of genius, however.

Superbly funny. Probably the best Pratchett I've read since Guards! Guards! and further justification for my belief that the Discworld novels which focus on the Watch (and Death) are the best in the series.

This was a quick read. It presents accessible information in a large font. All I really learned from it, however, is that it's important for the father to be as equally involved as the mother is in caring for the baby, something I knew already.

A passionate (although maybe overlong) description of Ingram's ascent of 16 different British mountains. Each chapter is full of historical, scientific, geographical and occasionally literary information about each mountain or the surrounding areas. I often found these bits more interesting than the accounts of the ascents themselves, which were sometimes a bit dry.

Recommended for anyone who enjoys hill walking.

This book provides a detailed overview of each of the different aspects of photographic composition, with a page or two dedicated to each consideration and many of the author's own photos to exemplify the concepts. It doesn't provide bitesized, step-by-step instructions on ‘how' to compose photos, as this would be very limited, in the same way as a book which told the reader ‘how' to compose a painting. If you're looking for something like this then go elsewhere.

As others have noted, the writing is quite ‘dense' and abstract in places, and it presumes some knowledge of the lexicon and concepts of photography and art in general, so it's not for complete beginners. It's a book that I imagine I will return to and reread as I become a more experienced photographer, and in so doing some of the concepts it explores will become clearer to me. I enjoyed reading it and found it interesting and insightful throughout. Best read in combination with a book on the more technical aspects of digital photography, such as Understanding Exposure by Peterson.

Comprehensive, accessible and very informative. The best pregnancy book I've read so far.

I thought this was an excellent treatise on the values of a knowledge-rich curriculum. It is well-written, well-informed, concise and progressive. Recommended to all teachers, as well as anyone else interested in modern education. I think it's best read in tandem with Willingham's “Why Don't Students Like School?”, whom Christodoulou cites frequently. As she concludes: “Unless we place the powerful and liberating force of knowledge at the heart of our education system, it will continue to fail our pupils and to deepen inequality.”

There are a few ideas I'll take away from this, but I found that a lot of it was overly vague and no grounded enough in examples to be particularly useful. The writer gives you a long list of things that are apparently “vital” to every classroom, but then only writes a short paragraph on how to go about actually implementing them into practice, then all of a sudden it's on with the next idea. A good overview but lacks depth.

A tragic story and scathing attack on the Indian caste system, let down by ponderous paragraphs of self-consciously “good writing” and endless similes.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

I was disappointed with it, overall. I read Northern Lights when I was about 12 and the original three novels were my favourite books growing up, more so even than the Harry Potter series, and although I knew this could never live up to their brilliance, part of me hoped that it was going to be the start of another epic, soaring fantasy series. Instead, I just thought it was a bit flat and didn't really go anywhere.

The first part, at the pub, was much better than the second; I was genuinely intrigued to find out why Lyra was being hidden away, who Bonneville was and why he beat his daemon, and Malcolm was a likeable character, even if he did seem to be very similar to Will (not to mention the most precocious eleven year-old in existence). I thought Pullman was going for a similar structure to Northern Lights: a young character in a familiar setting who is suddenly whisked far away on an amazing adventure. As soon as the second part began, however, it became obvious that this wasn't going to happen, and the novel instead became a series of repetitive vignettes that were picked up and then just sort of left, unexplained. The island with the fairy mother, for example, the island with the magical lawn party, the bit with Old Father Thames junior, the island with the witch, the island when Bonneville suddenly came back again as some sort of shadow creature before being killed off... Each time I just found myself thinking, “Oh, is that it, then?” It read like a much bigger book that Pullman had had to ruthlessly pare down in a massive rush to the ending, which was also unsatisfying - Asriel basically says “Cheers for coming all this way to find me, but I've got to get going now to the North, so I'll take you back to Oxford. BTW, please look after my daughter. Cheersthen.” Doctor Relf's (or is that Dr Malone's?) plotline, which initially seemed interesting, is also just sort of left with no real closure. You could argue that this is going to be tied up in the next book, but that one is going to apparently take place after the events of The Amber Spyglass, presumably when Malcolm and Alice are in their late twenties/early thirties, and seeing as Dr Relf, Malcolm or Alice aren't featured in the original trilogy, I can't see how that's going to work.

I'll still buy the next one, as and when it appears in probably ten years' time, but I thought Pullman could have done a lot more with this. I was expecting exotic tales of Grumman's original expedition and discovery of Cittagazze, Asriel's adventures, Iorek's exile from Svalbard, something to do with the angels or the witches' prophecy about Lyra, maybe the tale of Mrs Coulter's and Asriel's passionate affair...Instead, though, he's just given us what feels like a novella, an episode, similar to Lyra's Oxford, but dragged out over 500 pages, and still managing to feel too light.