Tally of 2010 Books

I’ve just finished updating my 2010 Books page. Despite 2010 being the year of the kindle I seem to have read about as many books as I have done for the last few years – 15 fiction, and 11 non fiction. From my contemporaneous review, the top fiction was Wolf Hall: A Novel (Man Booker [...]

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Book musings: Lois McMaster Bujold and Peter Hamilton

Two of my favorite authors are Lois McMaster Bujold and Peter Hamilton. They both write speculative fiction, but that is where the similarity ends. I’ve recently finished each of their latest books, and it has given me occasion to reflect on how each of them has changed as an author, thinker, speculator. I’ve sometimes seen [...]

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Books books books

This household is at the geeky end of the spectrum (we have one computer per person at all times). And we’re at the library end of the spectrum (last time I tried to count by shelfspace we had around 3,000 books, more than 95% of which had been read by at least one member of [...]

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Book Review: The End of the Line

Today’s book review is The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat, by Charles Clover. I’ve known, fairly well, for years, that we are overfishing the seas. Reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky, was the first book that brought it [...]

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Book Review: Bailout Nation, by Barry Ritholz

Today’s book review is Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, by Barry Ritholtz, with Aaron Task. Barry Ritholtz is the author of The Big Picture, a blog I became addicted to when I was trying to make sense of what was going on in the world during the [...]

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Books in 2009

I’ve updated my Books in 2009 page. This year I read 18 fiction books and 13 non fiction. Plus (which I haven’t fessed up to), lots more re-reads of various books that I’ve read and re-read over the years. In what I expect is the start of a long term trend, quite a few of [...]

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Book Review: The Pin Striped Prison

Today’s Book Review is The Pinstriped Prison: How overachievers get trapped in corporate jobs they hate, by Lisa Pryor. Lisa Pryor is a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald who got 100% in her HSC (school leaving exams). She started a law degree, but ended up a (less well paid) journalist, and this book is the [...]

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Book Review: Nudge

Today’s book review is Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H Thaler, and Prof Cass R Sunstein. I’ve missed the zeitgeist with this one – this book was apparently very popular with Barack Obama’s policy team well before he won the election. And Sunstein is now head of the White House’s [...]

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Feminist Book review

In today’s book review, I’m doing a combined review of two Australian feminist books that were published in 2008. The Great Feminist Denial, by Monica Dux and Zora Simic, and The F Word: How We Learned to Swear by Feminism, by Jane Caro and Catherine Fox. First a disclosure of my biases. I got given [...]

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Book Review – The Unthinkable

Today’s book review is The Unthinkable – Who survies when disaster strikes – and why by Amanda Ripley. When I was in year 5 at school, I shocked my teacher by writing in a book review that I liked a book which involved an earthquake (Ballet shoes for Anna) because ”I like books about disasters”. I [...]

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