Category: Books

  • Make Amazon like a real bookshop

    This is great: an interface for Amazon that attempts to recreate the bookshop browsing experience. [Via MetaFilter]

  • Kill Your Friends: good on music, sub-American Psycho story

    John Niven‘s book, Kill Your Friends, is set in the music business at the height of Britpop. Niven knows what he’s talking about – he was an A&R man at the height of Britpop – and his protagonist’s rants about the music business, consumers and the general bovine stupidity of artists clearly come from experience.…

  • If you liked NYPD Blue or Hill Street Blues, you’ll like this

    …because it’s great.

  • Flat Earth News

    As one of the cover quotes puts it, if even half of what Nick Davies writes in his expose of the news industry is true then things are truly terrifying. The stuff on Iraq, the neutering of the Sunday Times Insight team and the problems of “churnalism” have been covered elsewhere, so I won’t go…

  • A great book, but the people who need it won’t read it

    I mentioned this briefly before, but I’d like to mention it again: Suckers, by Rose Shapiro, is a wonderful demolition job of the alternative medicine racket. Like all polemics, it sometimes crushes things that perhaps don’t deserve to be crushed – so it’s very hard on acupuncture, despite some indications that it can be useful…

  • The rules: crime novel covers

    When you’re bouncing a baby around your mind tends to wander, and today was no exception: I found myself staring at the bookcase, which contains far too many crime novels, decoding the visual grammar of the cover designs. I don’t know if there are similar rules to other genres, but there’s definitely a set of…

  • Eels book in “brilliant” shocker

    Things The Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett (E from Eels) is one of the best things I’ve read in ages.  Some of it’s very, very sad. And some of it is like this: During the ‘with strings’ tour one night in Germany, a concertgoer calls out “YOU ARE BORING!” between songs. He’s German…

  • E from Eels has a book out

    It’s called Things The Grandchildren Should Know, it’s an autobiography, it’s under E’s real name (Mark Oliver Everett), it’s out on the 17th and it’s getting excellent reviews from the critics. In best Amazon.com reviewer style, I haven’t read it but it’s the best book ever. I want the book even more than I want…

  • Blimey, another year’s nearly gone

    As ever, magazines are doing their review of the year thing and I feel inspired to follow suit. Rather than a “what a year that was, eh?” thing, though, here’s a quick list of things I’ve really liked or been let down by this year. Books: Mr Biffo, David Quantick and Charlie Brooker made me…

  • Books’n’telly’n’tunes

    More odds and sods: Charlie Brooker has a new book out, called Dawn of the Dumb. It includes the column Face at the Window, which may be the funniest thing I’ve ever read. I’m not exaggerating. The BBC4 documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives is a little gem. It follows E from Eels as he tries…