2012 Reading
13 2012 Reading articles in total, showing 1 to 10
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2012 Reading Highlights
It is traditional — and who am I to dispute traditions? — to publish navel-gazing lists and yearly roundups at or about New Year. So, I have had a self-indulgent look back at 2012 through the lens of the books that I read and articles that I wrote this year. …
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December 2012 Reading
A Christmas present from my dad, this is a collection of 9 counterfactual accounts of history, rooted in what contemporary observers believed likely or possible, written by leading (mostly British) historians. Ferguson’s introduc …
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November 2012 Reading
I am working my way through this quite slowly. It is what I would describe as a nontrivial tome. I reckon it weighs in at a couple of kilos. And there is maths. And I am translating the ML code into Haskell as I go. But it is well w …
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October 2012 Reading
A sort of dark follow up to microserfs, I got the impression that Coupland was trying a bit too hard with this one. Its just a bit too self-consciously futureshocked-cool for my taste. Funny moments and kitsch cultural analyses are mixed with art-school-experime …
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September 2012 Reading
A beautifully acerbic take on the compulsory positivity that has overtaken American and, indeed Global, society over the last decades. Ehrenreich investigates the history of the phenomenon and the Stalinist way in which we are expected to police our ne …
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August 2012 Reading
Oh man. I am clearly going to look like a Charlie Stross fanboy. It ain’t every day you see a new Laundry novel in Blackwells though is it? So, dear reader, I bought it. Loved it. The bastard spawn of HP Lovecraft, Douglas Adams and Ian Flemi …
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July 2012 Reading
I am a big fan of the Introducing series. If you want to get your head around some topic in a general way without too much detail they are perfect. The Fractals book is pretty much what yo …
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June 2012 Reading
Mark Thomas somehow manages to combine cheekiness with right on politics, and humour without ending up sounding preachy. This story of rambling round the entire Israeli is a mix of the tragic, horrendous and baffl …
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May 2012 Reading
Butler’s take on Guantanamo, Iraq and to an extent Abu Ghraib centres around the question of grievability. The question of what constitutes a recognizably human life is a powerful way to start thinking about State violence and war and what an effect …
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April 2012 Reading
A reasonable if occasionally overargued critique of the ascendent cyber-u …
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