Benders are a traditional, low-impact dwelling space, traditionally used by travellers and protestors. Having lived in a few, it was lovely to come across a book about them. It is a beautifully illustrated and wryly amusing little book that I read cover to …

I am actually kind of surprised that I hadn’t read this novel before. It is probably one of the first steampunk books. Imagine an alternate Victorian era Neal Stephenson and you will have a fairly good idea of w …

This is a collection of Gibson’s ruminations on technology written for various publications including Wired, Time and Rolling Stone. I enjoyed the collection immensely. This is smart, accessible and compelling writing abou …

I have been working my way slowly through this classic FP book for the last couple of months. Bird’s style is rigorously mathematical but very readable. He is interested in developing programs a …

This was a birthday present from a chum of mine. A really wonderful book that manages to capture the anarchic spirit of Anonymous, LulzSec and all those lot. It manages to be anthropologically interestin …

A pioneering lit …

This was a fantastic book. It very much reminded me of Dostoyevsky. The basic plot is about a mathemetician who is on the verge of making a theoretical breakthrough. Suddenly all sorts of distractions appear in his life, and it is the s …

Given that this is a book from Yale University press, I would have expected it to be more scholarly, by which I mean I suppose hard to read. As it turns out it is a lightweight, very readable romp through Goldman’s lif …

I had been meaning to pick up Silver’s paean to the virtues of Bayesian statistics for some time and found it on discount at WHSmiths. It is thoroughly entertaining and manages to hop from baseball stats to climate change, poker and globa …

Diamond’s epic look at what we might learn from how non-state traditional societies work. I am not well enough read in anthropology to be able to critique Diamond fairly, but to an amateur it sometimes seems a little reductionist. Neve …