0691 | Touch | David Linden
This has the subtitle The Science of the Sense that Makes Us Human, but nowhere in it will you find an explanation as to why touch apparently makes us any…
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0689 | Falling Upward | Richard Rohr
Not a man I’ll read any more of, but this one was recommended to me by some friends and none other than my wife so I wasn’t about to refuse…
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0687 | Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy | Max Hastings
It’s hard to know where to start with the Vietnam War such was the lengthy prelude that the people of that nation were subjected to by the French and Japanese….
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0685 | On Photography | Susan Sontag
There’s at least one photo project on every page of this classic work on photography and there’s good reason for that. Sontag writes eloquently and persuasively about the medium and…
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0666 | The Labyrinth of Solitude | Octavio Paz
This is for die-hard fans of literature really. Very philosophical, this collection of essays wasn’t my cup of tea at all despite whatever place it may hold in Latin America…
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0640 | 1000 Years of Annoying the French | Stephen Clarke
This millennial look at the history of Britain and France is told with wry, sometimes childishly irritating, and rarely laugh-inducing humour. It’s pretty comprehensive, coming in at just under 650…
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0638 | Testament of Youth | Vera Brittain
While this is one of the classic war books and written from the almost unique perspective of a woman, if you can find an abridged version to read, get that…
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0606 | The Soul of the Camera | David DuChemin
Picked this up from a fellow photographer at a photography event one evening and, were it not for the fact that I need to get up at 5am for work,…
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0584 | Promise at Dawn | Romain Gary
This memoir is basically a eulogy to Gary’s mother. Seeing as I have never really had a mother to speak of, this was an interesting one for me to read…
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0573 | The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England | Ian Mortimer
I kind of like history and so, when I started to dip into this in a bookshop, I thought it would be right up my street. In the end, I…
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0467 | Life of Christ | Giovanni Papini
By 1921 when this was published, Papini was a man deeply passionate for Christ. This is apparent from the very introduction, let alone throughout the commentary he has written on…
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0466 | A Line in the Sand | James Barr
What the chart of my progress below does not reveal is that the day I started this was in fact in May 2013 whereas I didn’t finish it, after a…
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0457 | How Proust can Change your Life | Alain de Botton
As I’m tackling Proust’s mammoth In Search of Lost Time (ISOLT) this year (and currently over the halfway mark yeah!), when I saw this in a charity shop, I just…
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0454 | Mark for Everyone | Tom Wright
Tom Wright has done it again with an extremely readable and very accessible translation and commentary on the Gospel according to Mark. I’m reading my way through the entire set…
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0446 | The Enigma of Arrival | V. S. Naipaul
Once I’d settled into this, it was a beautiful read. Naipaul is a Nobel Laureate and so you expect that the prose will be challenging. But while A Bend in…
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0444 | Private Eye Annual 2013 | Ian Hislop (Ed.)
I haven’t bought an annual since… oohh… probably since Beano days back in the early 80s. But having moved to a country where Private Eye is probably banned and would…
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0440 | Matthew for Everyone | Tom Wright
I was looking for something that would simply take me through the Gospels of the New Testament, something without a fancy cover and a website full of Flash videos and…
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0432 | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Maya Angelou
This was and wasn’t what I expected. I think I underestimated the historical context and so failed to appreciate the significance of the story I was being told. I found…
