Category: Books
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Chances are that you have experienced enshittification without even knowing there was a word for it. If you can remember the dial-up days of the internet, you might remember that when Google first appeared, it was absolutely amazing. The other search engines of the time, like Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Infoseek and AltaVista, were clunky and…
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There’s a certain irony to this review of Johann Hari’s 2022 exploration of the attention crisis currently gripping society. I bought the book when it first came out and only recently finished reading it after three abortive attempts. The reason? Other things distracted me. Clearly this issue is affecting me too, so recently I sat…
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One of the things I am extremely grateful to my mother for is instilling in me a love of reading. From a very early age she would read to me as I sat on her lap, watching her finger pointing out the words on the page. I was able to read well before I started…
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Happy by Derren Brown is another book that I bought when It came out but took a long time to get around to actually reading. I read about a third of it back in 2016 before getting distracted by something else and putting it back on the shelf. It was only recently, during a particularly…
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This is quite an unusual book review in that it is thirty years since I first read William Shaw’s account of the year he spent joining religious cults in and around London. What has prompted me to write about it after all this time was reflecting on my review of Lucy Brown’s Hate Club. In…
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As a pupil in a Catholic junior school in the 1970s, one of the things I used to look forward to was the monthly arrival of Crusader magazine. This would be sold to us by our teacher for 8p a copy, and avidly read during morning break on the day it arrived. Crusader was a…
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In her memoir Hate Club, author Lucy Brown takes us back to 2016, and a Britain in turmoil. The Brexit referendum, racial tensions, fear of Islamist terrorism, concerns over immigration, and the increasing likelihood that Donald Trump would be successful in his bid for the White House all had Britons feeling uncertain about the future.…
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I picked this one up thanks to a New York Times recommendation, and it’s an assured debut for Irish author Aisling Rawle. It’s a tense psychological thriller set in a near-future world. The Compound is the most popular reality show on television. In it, ten young women and ten young men live in the titular desert compound, surrounded…
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One thing I imagine people who have grown up with BBC iPlayer, DVR or even VCR would find hard to understand about growing up in the 1970s is the notion that if you missed an episode of a TV series, you had missed it. End of story. The only way you would ever be able…