After discussing the merits of the comic 2000AD on twitter last week with James Cousins and Tim Ireland, I was thinking about how 2000 AD has changed since the early days. Originally, when I started reading it — the first issue I can remember reading is issue 316, featuring the Judge Dredd story “The Stupid [...]

There’s something about fantasy novels, isn’t there, that makes the authors think that one novel isn’t enough, that two novels aren’t enough; the story arc must extend over a trilogy. Whether this is in homage to Tolkien, or simply a much used convention, it seems to be pretty much the standard for fantasy novels. And [...]

I’d read Stuart Maconie’s book Pies and Prejudice where he went around the North of England and talked about what the North of England actually had to offer, and how it was really a nice place, and that prejudiced Southerners who thought of it as just flat caps, whippets, and derelict industrial estates were miles [...]

I recently picked up Alan Carr’s autobiography Look Who It Is. I don’t read a lot of biographies but for some reason this one jumped out at me. I think the silly seaside postcard type cover might have helped though, as I do like that. But then there’s the factor that any biographies I do [...]

Steven Johnson writes about something I vaguely knew about — London’s Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854. This is the story of how it was identified that cholera was somehow water-borne, as opposed to the previous beliefs that it was somehow carried by the smells or miasma of the urban filth. The commonly understood legend [...]

Sometimes I am attracted to a book because of the cover. Sometimes I am attracted to a book because of the blurb on the back. Sometimes I am attracted to a book because I’ve read other stuff by the same author. In this specific case, I was attracted to this book because of the pun [...]

When I saw Why Do I Say These Things? by Jonathan Ross last week I was in two minds whether or not to buy it. I like Jonathan Ross; I might even go sufficiently far to describe myself as a fan. But, without wishing to sound mean to the chap, it’s his presenting skills and [...]

I knew I would like this book. It’s the same sort of thing as the book Risk, which I loved, and Freakonomics, which I loved. It’s not so much a book, as a toolbox. In that sense it is similar to Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World: Science as a candle in the Dark. A toolbox [...]

I like Christopher Brookmyre. I’ve got all his books (or, given my reading capacity, at least those ones which have made it to the cheaper medium of paperback). Indeed I got the chance to speak to him at his book signing in Newcastle for his previous book, when he was engaged in writing A Snowball [...]

I love books that make me think. I love books that say something controversial. I love books where I can listen to the arguments that someone else puts forward, and then decide whether or not I agree with them. Michael Brooks’ book 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries of Our [...]