One of the things about being a blogger, and reviewing things here, is that it means that quite often when I am reading something, I find myself bookmarking various pages in the text because I think “if I decide to review this book for my blog, I’ll have to mention this”. After having found about [...]

I was a little concerned to hear today that: Sex offenders will be made to take lie detector tests as part of probation conditions when they are freed from prison, the Ministry of Justice says. BBC News: Lie tests tried on sex offenders Firstly, before I explain, I will qualify. I am not against people [...]

Rachel’s Food For Living is another book I was given a review copy of, in exchange for, well, a review. I was intrigued by this, as I’d never attempted to review a cookery book before. I wasn’t entirely sure how you’d go about it — there’s no main “character”, there isn’t a “plot” as such, [...]

Last year, I bought a book called The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch, the Only Surviving Veteran of the Trenches, and promptly placed it in my TBR pile. For one reason or another, it didn’t make its way across to being actively read until this week. And that’s a shame. Harry Patch [...]

I had really, really hoped that I would like the novel The Amateurs, by John Niven, as I’d been given a copy in exchange for a review on the blog. Fortunately for me, the comedy was strong with this one. On the one hand, it was a book about golf, which isn’t generally my kind [...]

For World Book Day, BTP’s school is trying to encourage children to read by asking them to bring in pictures of them reading in all sorts of different locations, ideally unusual ones. This isn’t perfect: unlike me, he’s only five, and therefore doesn’t spend all his spare time wandering about with his nose in a [...]

I don’t know what specifically attracted me to The Birthing House, as I don’t tend to read much horror as a genre anymore — I will generally read whatever Dean Koontz and Stephen King produce but not much more. It might have even been my experience with the last ‘new author’ horror book that I’d [...]

It’s not often that I come across a book which I think everyone should read. Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, by Dan Gardner, is one such book. Risk tells us about how we are constantly misled in every day life about how dangerous things are — drugs, cancer, paedophiles, knife crime, terrorism — [...]

I’m sure by now you have heard of the film, Slumdog Millionaire. For a start, I mentioned it in my post Slumdog Review, where I described a review of it given by an un-named source. It has also been nominated for ten Oscars, eleven BAFTAs, has already won five Critics’ Choice Awards, four Golden Globes [...]

If you don’t understand the line above, you’ve missed one of the planet’s finest comedians (although frequently not so much near the knuckle as well past it). Difficult to believe we’ve been missing him almost 14 years now. Anyway, I thought I’d start 2008… er, I mean 2009… with a look at my TBR pile. [...]