‘A serial killer stalks the games’ ... Although I do find myself wondering how much of the book was simply inspired by the title. Having come up with that, did the rest of it all fall into place?

There are a few writers for whom I will read anything they care to offer. Rebecca Solnit is one of them. She never fails to delight me, both with the ways she builds a sentence and, even more so, the way she builds bridges between ideas. Somehow, River of Shadows had eluded me for a while, but the light it throws on the character of Muybridge and Leland Stanford and how their joint obsession ultimately gave rise to the movies is beyond fascinating.

In the past, building a market required users, products, all that mess—farmers taking their plump pigs to market. What we have now is a means of spinning up any number of auctions, a method for the mass manufacture of middlemen. This is the destiny of Silicon Valley. And with ICOs and Bitcoin exchan...

When I thought of myself as a public radio producer, I never had any interest in creating a show or being a host. I just thought, “That’s what somebody else does. That’s not a strength of mine.” So when we created the CDS podcast, I thought we were going to make pieces and since I’m the only person...

No sooner had I finished The Circle and raved about it to a friend who is a voracious reader and whose opinion I trust than she had me reading Super Sad True Love Story. There are similarities, which is why I am reviewing them together. Both are set a few minutes into the future and both of them are thoroughly dystopian. Both of them also accelerate inexorably and intensify to something of a climax. Both are equally scary, although paradoxically SSTLS, which on the surface is much more violent and unfathomable, is much harder to take seriously.

!!!In the process of bringing over old posts from previous sites, I've come across old reviews. They’re not the same as the more recent ones, but I want to preserve them nevertheless. This was originally published on 1 June 2013.

Who is Bailey?

We'll never know. All we know is that Lionel Essrog...

Against the prevailing wisdom, I continue to rely on experts to inform me, but when experts disagree, What's a person to think?

Sally Mann is a photographer of some notoriety. She is also, it turns out, an amazingly good writer able to create word pictures every bit as nuanced and beguiling as her picture pictures. An interesting question is whether, had she not been a renowned photographer, we would ever have learned what a fine writer she is. Would she have been prompted to write her memoir had she not been invited to give the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard?

The internet makes it all too easy to go hunting for the information that will make sense of a book or an author, and I am resolved not to do that. At least, not till I have finished this review. From that position of self-imposed ignorance, The Sellout is a brilliantly funny and cutting satire on race in America. Nothing is safe, no-one immune, no taboo out of bounds. Sex, music, drugs, intellectualism, passivity, crime. ...

What a wonderful book. When it first came out and got lots of praise I stupidly decided that it was not for me, possibly because the praise tended to focus on lyrical nature writing and that is not something I enjoy. However, my friend Nicola Davies was adamant that I give it a shot. I did, and was entranced from the word go.