Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Hugh’s Veg Every Day! book is probably my favourite cookbook so far, so I was eager to see what River Cottage Every Day has to offer.

It’s not as good, but still useful. Mostly I think it is just a bit more hit and miss. The rabbit stew for example was rubbish. Whereas the home-cured bacon chops were pretty good and the breaded fish fillets were a winner.

The biggest challenge can often be getting the ingredients for the recipes. I haven’t dared schedule in devilled lamb hearts and oxtail stew yet in case my butcher can’t supply the foods, and the Thai seafood soup required squeezing a trip to the fish market into my lunch break.

The best part is probably the bread though. Hugh’s focaccia recipe has quickly found a regular place in our kitchen.

We have a One Pot cookbook already and it’s reasonably good. At least in theory, when I use it it has been good, though I rarely do. This book is a much larger (size wise it is A4, though not long) and similarly well presented with large photos and simple instructions with clear timings.

All of that is brilliant.

It is let down by the rest of it though. Many of the recipes just do not work very well and often they take longer than 30 minutes. They also differ from the one pot philosophy (dump everything into a pot and cook) with a variety of different cooking styles, though I’m not too fussed about this.

There are some nice recipes that I am sure we will be doing again. The meatballs worked quite well. However it look quite a quite to narrow it down to the ones that work and the ones that do not, which was a frustrating process.

Don’t get your hopes up, it isn’t 500 ways to cook a vegetarian. However, it is still pretty good. For a start, it has 500 recipes in. That is loads. Often such lists would just be identical dishes (beans with fennel, beans with onion, beans with leek), but the book does a pretty good job of providing genuinely different recipes.

Everything has a photo too. They are only small, but that is better than fewer, larger photos in my opinion. The recipes are reasonably simple and don’t take too long to make, though are not massively fancy or memorable. It’s a good every day book though.

Simon Rimmer claims he bought a vegetarian cafe and then learned how to cook. Given how successful Greens has been, you have to wonder how true that is. However, with it being a cookbook, who really cares.

The book is okay. It has some good recipes in it, most notably the sweet potato and pineapple sandwich (a main that uses pineapple for bread), Lancashire cheese sausages (that contain so much cheese they are probably less healthy than real sausages) and honeycomb ice cream.

Overall though it is let down by not having a photo of most of the recipes. The photos that do exist are large and colourful, but I dislike recipe books in which I cannot judge if what I have made looks anything like it should or not.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is a masterpiece of science fiction writing. After many years it was followed up by Foundation’s Edge, which was so-so. Then, the year I was born, it was added to with Foundation and Earth, following Golan Trevize’s quest to find the planet from which all live originally came from.

It was heavy on the philosophy. Discussions of morality, ethics, whether robots are human and whether the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. This makes it slow going at the start by picks up as the book moves on.

There is a certain excitement generated on being in on the answer as it were. Obviously, being actually from Earth, and having a basic knowledge of our galaxy, you can feel the rush when you realise that Trevize is getting closer and closer.

The end is quite a nice twist too. It doesn’t throw everything on its head but provides something satisfying different. If you enjoyed the series so far, this is well worth a read.

Sam Vimes running round the countryside solving crimes. Honestly, I found it dull. Yet another Discworld novel about how society learned to accept yet another species. Fine, but I’m sure we have had this storyline over and over again. I thought the Willikins jokes were a bit overplayed too.

Don’t get me wrong, it was okay. I was just disappointed, especially with just one more Discworld novel to go after this. The end is nigh :(.

A Storm of Swords is the third novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series. However, I haven’t actually read it, I have only read part 1 because it is so amazingly long.

Good though. Nothing really happens, it’s just people marrying each other. This is good if you enjoy the chess of politics, though perhaps does not live up to the name – there is no storm of swords. There is quite a detailed description of people dying in gibbet cages if your worries about a lack of gore though.

How exactly it is two separate books is unclear. It ends right in the middle of a story. It feels a lot more like cashing in on having able to sell two products than even a vague attempt at pretending there are two parts.

What was this book even about? I have no idea how this is considered one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century. Modern Library voted it the second best novel! Better than Brave New World, Catch-22, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Grapes of Wrath and yes, even Battlefield Earth.

The story follows a young man named Nick and his interactions with his mysterious next-door neighbour Jay Gatsby who throws the best parties in Long Island. However, the story gradually reveals how Gatsby is slightly more than a one dimensional character, but not that much more.

iWoz, autobiography of Steve Wozniack, has a very long subtitle: “How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It”. It’s also quite a bold statement for someone as reserved as Woz.

The first half of the book looks at his childhood and college days. His dad was at the forefront of the transistors game and was a firm believer in science, which no doubt gave Woz an excellent start in life. When he says he knew more about chip design than anyone else in the world, it’s not arrogance, it’s probably true.

He is an unashamed geek. He talks about his quest to get the best phone number he can – we wanted all the digits to be the same. I read this wondering “is this really important? Is this something you want to devote so much of your book to?”

Apparently it is, as it was packed with details like this. Apple only gets mentioned in the second half, and it’s pretty brief.

It also gets quite technical at many points. Chances are they if you are reading the Great and Powerful Woz’s biography, you are in the computer game, so that probably makes sense, but some of it I struggled to follow so a non-technical person would be lost.

My favourite anecdote from the book was when he talked about confusion between his number and the airline Pan Am’s. He started taking bookings for them (he would eventually tell the customer he was joking). He tried to see what they would agree to – multiple stops, travelling in cargo, 36 hour flights. The surprise is that most people agreed to all of this if it would get the price down! No wonder budget airlines have boomed, consumers will put up with a lot to save some cash.

Have you ever wondered what my favourite and most influential books are? The answer is to that question is almost certainly no. However, I was making a similar list for books I might want to re-read if I ever get somewhere near finishing my reading list, and decided it would be nice to stick it on my website too.

Fiction

• Isaac Asimov. The Foundation series is probably my most-read fiction books. I also like the Robot and Galactic Empire books which all form into one universe.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. This used to be my favourite book because at its heart it is a love story. Wrapped in a terrible dystopia, so well thought out that we often struggle to distinguish it from the world we live in today, despite the horror of it. Blog post.
• Brave New World. A lot of people confuse Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel for a dystopia. It’s clearly a utopia because it creates a world where everyone is happy. If you’re not happy, that’s fine too, you get to go live on an island. What could possibly be wrong with that? Blog post.
• John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath is done an injustice to every time it fails to top any literature list. Also check out East of Eden, Of Mice and Men and Travels with Charley.
• James Joyce. Ulysses is worth a crack just to see if you can read it. For large stretches of that novel, I had no idea what was going on. The fire and brimstone preaching in A Portrait of the Artist is immense, too.
• Terry Prachett. How much joy has one man delivered the world? 40 Discworld novels with another one on the way, and many non-Discworld books too. I am sure that like me, many of you were heartbroken when Pratchett passed away in 2015.

Non-fiction

• The Four Hoursemen of Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Harris offers some good stuff on morality; notably The Moral Landscape and Lying. I also like Unweaving the Rainbow (Dawkins), God is Not Great (Hitchens) and Consciousness Explained (Dennett).
• Religion For Atheists by Alain de Botton. His book shows us how we could design secular society to utilise the many truths and good ideas that can be found in religion. Blog post.
• The Purpose Driven Church. Rick Warren is a man who knows how to run a church. Even if you are running a secular organisation, or any community organisation, This book is a source of inspiration for how to do it. Blog post.
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman really started to develop my interest in psychology. Kahneman is so good that he has a Nobel Prize, despite the fact that there is no Nobel Prize in psychology. Blog post. Also check out Duncan J. Watt’s Everything Is Obvious: Why Common Sense Fails Us.
• The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer. Why do people form irrational beliefs? According to Shermer, it is because all beliefs are formed for personal, social and emotional reasons and the rational reasons only ever come second. Blog post.
• The Blank Slate. Are humans inherently good and will we reach a state where we are all just nice to each other and live in perfectly fair, honest and utopian societies? No. I would like to believe we would, but Steven Pinker comes in with so much evidence to prove I am wrong that I am forced to submit. He writes boldly and honestly. Blog post.
• The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver. If you have ever wondered why humans are terrible at predicting stuff, this is a good read. Blog post.
• A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel. Promise me that you will never invest in the stock market without reading this book first. Blog post.
• Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. A well-argued case of keeping our egos in check. We often think successful people are successful because they have a big ego. But Holiday shows that they did their best work when they were most humble and that we should strive for the same. Blog post.