Table of Contents

Books

I have always read a wide variety of books, from an early age. I am no longer at what anyone would call an early age.

These days the main themes of these books are (in no particular order) crime thrillers, science fiction, biographies, fantasy, cryptography, and travel.

Examples of the authors I enjoy (this time in alphabetical order) are Arthur C Clarke, Ben Elton, Blake Crouch, Bruce Schneier, Derren Brown, Douglas Adams, Gerald Kilby, Isaac Asimov, Jeremy Clarkson, John Cramer, Mark Lawrence, Michael Crichton, Michael Palin, Neal Stephenson, Paul Davies, Peter James, Stephen Fry, Terry Pratchett and William Gibson.

I'm not saying I really like everything every one of those people have written - some have produced stuff I like, and stuff I don't get on so well with; some have produced very little, but what there is, I think is great.

I haven't yet found anything by Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett which I don't like (and sadly I don't think I'm going to find anything new published by either); John Cramer has only published two books that I know of (one is good, the other is excellent); Isaac Asimov published so much that I don't think I shall ever read all of it (and it's all been good so far except what he wrote with his wife Janet); and Neal Stephenson and William Gibson both fall into the "some is really good, some isn't" category for my taste. Peter James used to be in my "definite" category, until I started reading more of his earlier works, written before he settled on the Roy Grace character. He now falls into the "most is good, but not all" category.

A note to authors about time

I pretty consistently dislike books which dart about from one timeline to another.

Unless you are writing a book about time travel, in which case it's not only reasonable, but pretty much expected, please avoid it.

If you have to, write a preface or foreword about things which occur well in advance of the main story, and if you really feel you have to, write a preface or foreword about things which occur some time after the main story, but other than that, please write from the start to the end in as reasonably continuous a way as possible. It's just the way life works.

I understand that you might want to jump from one set of characters to another between chapters, and their actions might to some extent overlap, but that's fine - you can't write about everybody simultaneously. What's not good, though, is jumping about between things that happened 20 years ago, and the present day, and then back again, to the same or different groups of people, continuously, throughout the book.

If you know of readers who say "Please don't write a linear story! Keep it changing between then and now, and maybe some other time too, just to keep things interesting", then by all means pander to their needs, but please put a warning on the cover that this is a non-linear story.

To summarise: Life happens one thing after another. There may (in fact, almost certainly will) be other things happening at the same time which you don't know about, and you only find out about later, but as far as you (the character in the story) are concerned, that finding out happens later, so if you (the author) are writing about people doing realistic things, please keep that in mind.

Amazon.co.uk

I'm really impressed with Amazon.co.uk's eBook pricing policy. I have no idea what the policy actually is, but the result is that every day there are plenty of good eBooks available for £1 each or less, and it's often possible to find them priced at around £5 - £10 on one day and 99p the following day, and then sometime later (maybe the day after, maybe a week later), they return to the original £5 - £10.

Because of this (and the fact that some books, such as collected works of historical authors like H G Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Orwell) are often completely free of charge, I've bought 224 eBooks from Amazon in the two years since early 2020, at a total cost of £128. Even Tesco (where I've been buying my paperbacks for the past ~25 years) can't match that. Plenty of my purchases have been books published completely recently (up to within the past month), so you can get very good deals on very new books, if you look for them.

Unless you feel that "I want this book now", you can get really good deals on good books with just a little bit of patience.

You'll find most of the link references to the books below are for Amazon.co.uk, largely for this reason.

The only problem I've been encountering with Amazon since around mid-2023 is they're increasingly using a DRM encryption system which my copy of Kindle for PC can't handle (and upgrading it doesn't work on my computer), so there are more and more books being published which I can no longer read.

On the other hand at least Amazon has a really simple returns policy for eBooks, which works well.

Some books I simply recommend absolutely with no further comment (5 stars):

These books are great; just read them. I don't need to say more than that.

Some I recommend, with a bit of a comment (4 to 5 stars):

These books are also good, but I wanted to say a bit more about them. Your should read these as well.

  • Armada by Ernest Cline is not quite as good as Ready Player One but is a good story nonetheless
  • Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is excellent non-fiction, which reads like a thriller.
  • Beyond Broadhall by Keith A Pearson is not as good as The '86 Fix, but is still a decent sequel.
  • The Christmas Pig by J.K. Rowling is a nice children's Christmas adventure (and much better than the Ickabog)
  • Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is a very good book, provided you're a bit of a geeky nerd (or maybe a nerdy geek?) and have a bit of a thing for cryptography (nothing in the slightest maths-heavy, but at least comfy about discussing public keys). Do not assume that I'm automatically advocating any of Neal's other works, though.
  • Denial by Peter James is a well-written book about a very unpleasant character
  • The '86 Fix by Keith A Pearson is a pretty good time-travel story. Not quite as good as Meeting Mungo Thunk, but well worth reading.
  • The Girl Friend by Michelle Frances is a very good book, which merits a bit more of a comment than easily fits here.
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter is a challenging but absolutely fascinating book. I'm certain it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I think it's amazing - a splendid mix of philosophy, mathematics and music, complete with pictures (if the mere word "pictures" is a worthy term to use for Escher's masterpieces). It's a pity it doesn't appear to be available as an eBook.
  • The Ickabog by J.K. Rowling is a well-written and pleasant enough children's story with a strong moral subtext, but nothing like as good as The Christmas Pig
  • Impossible Times by Mark Lawrence is a trilogy:
    • One Word Kill is an excellent book with a fascinating premise, and ends with a splendid "but what happens next?", leaving you wanting the next in the series…
    • Limited Wish continues the story well, although it's probably the least engaging (by a very slim margin) of the three books. A new (and very significant) character appears, but disappointingly briefly.
    • Dispel Illusion brings the various threads and characters back together, and ends with a splendid "I never saw that coming" finish, which totally deals with the feeling you get in One Word Kill, of "how is he going to manage that when the time comes?"
      • I thoroughly recommend these, and I wish I could read the fourth book, about Eva. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist.
  • Interference by Brad Parks is a good book with just enough quantum physics in it for a detective story
  • The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster is a splendidly prescient short story (12,300 words) from over 100 years ago (published 1909), which I thoroughly recommend to anyone who uses anything online: banking, shopping, dating, email, wikipedia, or search engines, for example.
  • Meeting Mungo Thunk by Keith A Pearson is a very good book indeed. Would have got into the "absolute recommendation" list above, if not for the need to endure the uninspiring lead character through the first 12 chapters.
  • Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter is not quite up to the same level as Gödel, Escher, Bach, but it's still very good. Also, unfortunately, not apparently available as an eBook.
  • No Safe House by Linwood Barclay is a good story which keeps the reader engrossed, although it does have a few oddities
  • No Way Out by Cara Hunter is a very well-done detective story, based around two incredibly irresponsible parents, and their children. It's a real pity about the dog.
  • The Ops Room Girls by Vicki Beeby is a very nice romance (with a good, and not over-done, element of thriller to it) set in WWII. Some of the central characters are pretty silly at times, but then that's the nature of romance. Very nicely written to emphasise strong female characters (which, after all, was one of the few positive aspects of WWII, to enable women to demonstrate what they could very well do, despite prior male prejudice and stereotyping).
  • Recursion by Blake Crouch - not quite up to the standard of Dark Matter, but pretty good anyway
  • The Signal by Nick Cook is a good story, let down by a few irritations.
  • The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk is a fascinating book about, effectively, whether we live in The Matrix.
  • Spore: A Novel by David Kristoph is worth reading
  • Unthinkable by Brad Parks is very good indeed - read it
  • What we cannot know by Marcus du Sautoy is in the main a very good book indeed, but is severely let down by the author's inability to remember that "dice" as a noun is plural (I don't think it ever occurs in the book as a verb).
    • The word occurs 298 times* in the book, compared with 8 uses of the word "die" (of which 5 turn out to be referring to the end of a life), and in the vast majority of cases, he is talking about one specific casino die he has on his desk, and which he uses to illustrate some of the fascinating points he makes.
    • The three lonely instances of "die" to mean a single cube with some representation of the numbers 1 to 6 on its faces, which occur fairly early on in the writing, indicate that he does actually know the correct word, but the majority of the 298 instances of "dice", when he's referring to precisely the same singular object, simply make it difficult to read the book with any fluency.
    • This is a shame, especially for an eBook published in 2016, which could so easily have been proof-read and corrected by now.
      • * No, I didn't count them myself. I have a computer for that sort of thing.

However, some books do make me wonder about (at least some parts of) the story (3 stars):

These books are okay, so long as you can put up with some oddities. Read them once you've run out of the ones above.

Some are okay (or even good) in general, but irritating (2 stars):

Read these at your own risk.

Some I really do not recommend (1 star):

Don't bother reading these. Just thank me for doing it for you and saving you the bother. Somehow I got to the end of them, but I wish I hadn't.

Some are simply awful (0 stars):

Don't even consider reading these. They range from bad to terrible, and include unpleasant.

Some just made me give up in despair (0 stars):

I'm amazed these are still even being published. They're worth neither the paper nor the electrons.

  • 84 K by Claire North
  • All the light we cannot see by Anthony Doerr
  • Bumfuzzle by Patrick Schulte
  • Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
  • The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
  • Note: Life of Crime by Kimberley Chambers almost made it into this category, except that she's clearly a good writer, so I optimistically (although ultimately misguidedly) made it to the end before accepting that she simply chose to write an awful book. Hence it's in the category above.

Currently reading

This section is so that I can make notes on whatever I'm currently reading, before I know which of the above categories it's going to fall into.

Not yet reviewed

These are some books I've read but didn't review at the time.

Not yet read

I've bought plenty of books on Amazon but haven't yet got around to reading all of them. They should all gradually move to one of the lists above in due course, but then again the list here will also get bigger as I buy more books…

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