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Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn't Food… and Why Can't We Stop?
Imported from Goodreads.
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Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food
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The Kamogawa Food Detectives (Kamogawa Food Detectives, #1)
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Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives
The kind of book that you want to buy a dozen copies of to hand out to friends and anyone else who will listen.<br/><br/>To be clear, this book simply affirmed what I already felt was the case, so it didn’t have to try convincing me that our lives would be measurably better if there were fewer cars around.<br/><br/>That being said, each chapter focuses on a different area that could enjoy improvements from rethinking how cities are designed and run for the benefit of the people who live in them. Think chapters on the elderly, disabled, children, and even about how making cities quieter by reducing traffic noise comes with a whole host of health benefits.<br/><br/>Oh, and you’ll probably want to relocate to Delft by the end of the book.
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Potholes and Pavements: A Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network
Equal parts depressing and optimistic about the state of cycling in the UK and how far we still have to go.
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Notes from a small island
Imported from Goodreads.
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The Mill House Murders (House Murders, #2)
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Blink Publishing No Free Parking The Curious History of Londons Monopoly Streets.
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Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter
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Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots
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Lessons in Chemistry
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Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames
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The Decagon House Murders (House Murders, #1)
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We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People
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The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
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How Innovation Works
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Men Without Women
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Shoe Dog
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Hatching Twitter
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How Google Works
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
I was a little bit let down by this book - despite the absolutely fascinating cases in the book, I found that the presentation of the accounts was fairly sterile and clinical. I would have preferred a slightly more narrative style of the patients and conditions, and a little more help for a layman to the subject so I didn't have to reach for Google or a dictionary every few paragraphs to double check the meaning of a certain specialist term. Still giving a 4 star simply for the mind-bending topics covered.
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The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong
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The Vegetarian
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Strange Weather in Tokyo
Imported from Goodreads.
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The Secret Life of Snow: The science and the stories behind nature's greatest wonder
Great little seasonal book about all things snow. The book is extremely wide ranging, covering the science of snowflake formation and weather patterns, culture and myth behind snow (think tribal snow dances and the Yeti), snow world records (where is the snowiest place on Earth?), snow in media and popular culture (such as famous James Bond stunts), as well as plenty of chapters on skiing.<br/><br/>The first few chapters seemed a little bit confused - switching between topics and introducing completely unrelated information quite often - but this soon settled down with each subsequent chapter neatly covering a specific aspect of snow. The book is a mixture of the author's personal anecdotes and stories of snow from elsewhere. As someone not interested in skiing, I would have preferred a bit less about that and more about the science of snow, but that is purely personal preference.<br/><br/>Definitely a book to read with a warm drink as the nights draw in and the temperature drops.
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The Memory Police
Imported from Goodreads.
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Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
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Entangled Life
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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data
<b>The Good:</b><br/>- A fairly light, easy, and quick read providing a light refresher on the basic statistical concepts of probability, variance, regression models, sampling, and so on.<br/><br/><b>The Bad:</b><br/>- The book is rather U.S.-oriented in the examples provided. Illustrating an example with the number of tries in NFL is not very useful for someone who barely even knows what the NFL even is.<br/><br/>- A lot of the examples are <i>extremely</i> well known, especially for someone who has studied statistics several times before. Monty Hall problem, Target pregnancy prediction, etc. However, I did pick up a few interesting new pieces of statistical trivia.<br/><br/>- Most of the interesting mathematical 'meat' is either relegated to the appendix or 'left for a more advanced text'. I think this is a shame, as the intuition can only take you so far and the maths of statistics is not overly complex. If this book is intended for the mathematical and statistical layperson, then the author does a poor job of encouraging the reader to explore the concepts in more details - instead preferring for the user to simply let a computer program crunch the numbers (which is contrary to one of the key points made in the book!)<br/><br/><b>The Ugly</b><br/>- The book is littered with typographical errors, particular when representing formulae inline (it took me a long time to realise that a jumble of dots was meant to be a square root). This really distracted from the points the book was trying to make.
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Ms Ice Sandwich
Imported from Goodreads.
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Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
3.5/5. An interesting look into both the failed and successful building schemes and developments from the mid 19th century around Great Britain. The book is a bit disjointed and lacks any kind of flowing narrative, but Grindrod's writing style is agreeable and I did enjoy reading about various new towns, architecture styles and camps, scandals, cancelled plans, and the general optimism of times gone by. Worth a read if you have a passing interest in the post war years, or architecture.
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Mindf*ck
Imported from Goodreads.
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Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Imported from Goodreads.
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Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's Legendary CEO
A touching tribute to the late Satoru Iwata. A short read, but packed with interesting insights into Nintendo's corporate culture, Iwata's mentality, and anecdotes from Iwata himself, Shigeru Miyamoto and Shigesato Itoi.
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Billion Dollar Loser
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The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook
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どんどん読める！ 日本語ショートストーリーズ vol.1 Nihongo Short Stories 1
Great selection of short stories. Probably N3 level-ish, fairly simple grammar and vocab.
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The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth and Power
Imported from Goodreads.
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A Wild Sheep Chase
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Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome
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The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth
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Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing
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Tokyo Ueno Station
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Prisoners of Geography
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1Q84
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No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (Green Ideas)
I have mixed feelings about this book. Let's start with the positives: The book contains a dozen of Greta's speeches given over the past few years, and if publishing this book makes them more accessible to the general populace, then that is certainly a positive. In fact, if just a small fraction of those readers make changes to their lifestyle in the wake of the climate crisis, or are persuaded into taking action, then I believe the book has served its purpose. Greta is certainly a decent orator, and her speeches, although short, pack a punch. Now, onto the negatives...<br/><br/>Taken as a piece of literature at face value, I think this book is poorly executed. Of all the published speeches in this book, all of them share around 80% of the same content. I had a big sense of déjà vu between each speech, though on the plus side it does help to drive home the point she is making - I'm not sure if it needs to be driven home 10 successive times, though. Ultimately, there is not enough content in Greta's speeches alone to make a coherent and flowing book. I also think that the speeches are missing something without her delivery, which adds to the speeches, in my opinion - just go on YouTube and watch her speeches instead. You get a real sense of her passion and urgency which just doesn't translate very well to text.<br/><br/>All things considered, I am giving this book four stars out of five. This is not a book to read from cover to cover (although you certainly could - it's a mere 80 pages), but it is a topic which everyone needs to have awareness of and act on. I'll pass on my copy to someone else and hope that they do the same.
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Permanent Record
What a fantastic read - this book is thrilling from start to end. As someone who had only loosely followed Snowden's revelations in 2013, it was eye opening and shocking to understand the extent to which the surveillance reached, and still reaches. However, the book doesn't focus purely on the documents that were released, but rather the lead up to the events, and the events following - which I perhaps found even more fascinating, particularly the events in Hong Kong and Snowden's then-girlfriend Lindsay's accounts shortly after the whistleblowing. High recommend.
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The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book
This book is composed of 100 language puzzles based on more than two dozen far flung as well as familiar languages, interspersed with preamble to give more background around how the different language features came about and how they work.<br/><br/>While I enjoyed solving some of the puzzles, be warned that many of them (perhaps the majority) are fiendishly hard and with just a casual interest in languages you should expect to spend many, many hours working through them all. My favourite aspect of the book was in fact the prose rather than the puzzles, and I would have loved if it had been more in-depth, because fitting it all in 250 pages (the remaining ~150 pages are taken up by answers) along with the puzzles resulted in many interesting looking concepts deserving of more discussion feeling a bit rushed.<br/><br/>Because this book is aimed at a more general audience and not professional linguists, I would have enjoyed if the more difficult puzzles contained a bit more hand-holding or context beforehand, which would give a more realistic chance at solving some of the puzzles without resorting to reading the (detailed and thorough) answer section. For example, some of the puzzles jumped to conclusions and made assumptions which didn't feel rigorous enough to me as a non-professional linguist, but I imagine are fairly common methods among professionals. Perhaps a section dedicated to approaching this kind of puzzle would be welcomed in a future edition? Despite this, I am still giving this book four stars because the answer section was still an interesting read, and I ended up learning about some wonderful and wacky languages and their features in the process.
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Alex's Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics
Imported from Goodreads.
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The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
Imported from Goodreads.
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Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas
Hilarious but short read which is more of the same anecdotes from the first book except set around the festive period. Great if you enjoyed the first book and want another fix.
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Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Imported from Goodreads.
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This Is Going to Hurt
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Convenience Store Woman
Whimsical, often-funny, often-sad window into the life of a Japanese convenience store worker who doesn't quite fit into the 'normal' world. Short read but easy to get invested into the protagonist's life.
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Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors
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In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom
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Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
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This Is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood
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Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea
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