Martin Gardner is absolutely brilliant on puzzles and mathematical topics, but when he moves to other topics as he does in this collection, he writes as just a smart, opinionated and slightly old-fashioned commentator. The title essay is about the multiple-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. He thinks it’s tosh, which I tend to agree with. But somehow these pieces do not read like balanced and insightful discussions; rather, they sound like slightly irascible kvetching.
Continue reading
If you like Terry Pratchett then you will probably get a lot out of this book. If you also like philosophy then it’s an absolute shoo-in.
I have read a few of Terry Pratchett’ novels and enjoyed them all immensely. The humour, the characters, the gentle yet insightful parody. He deals with some fairly weighty subjects, but since they’re transferred to a fantasy setting the topics become less fraught and easier to discuss. Philosophy & Terry Pratchett brings these topics out and shows the philosophical underpinnings of the stories and plots.
Continue reading
I read this book about 30 years ago and loved it. It may be a pretty easy read, but Suzanne the protagonist is very witty and likeable and the dialogue is packed – packed! – with one-liners and profundities in equal measure.
Continue reading
This is an entertaining chronicle of a couple’s relationship, starting from the very beginning. There is a lot (a lot) of analysis behind the story, which might sound heavy going but is actually what makes it all so engaging. I am a big fan of Alain de Botton’s “voice” — you can tell that just by looking at my bookshelf.
Continue reading
This is a cornucopia of several different books, fiction, modern politics and ancient history, all thrown together into a cohesive and visually pleasing package. I love it.
Continue reading
The more I read him, the more I like him. I read his Me Talk Pretty One Day before this book, and they’re quite similar. His autobiographical episodes are wry and amusing and contain a lot of truth even though there are a lot of embellishments. In short, he makes stuff up, but only in the interests of humour. Except that in the second-last story, he (reportedly) tells a terrible and callous lie – that struck a bum note and made me like him less. Still, perhaps he just made that up too.
This is a collection of evocative, affecting, poetic, imaginative short stories. (Extremely short: microfiction, I think it’s called.) Some are slices of life, some are magical, some are funny, but they are all beautiful and satisfying to read.
This wonderful novel opens on New Year’s Day, and a girl has gone missing: the whole village has turned out to search for her. It seems that we are in for a missing person mystery, or possibly a whodunit. As days go by we meet some of the inhabitants of the village and learn about their own stories. There is also a lot about the mundane happenings of village life, and a lot about the natural world of plants and animals too as the days turn to weeks and months.
Continue reading
This is quite a well-argued and eminently reasonable defence of atheism. It’s much more measured and even-handed than the likes of Christopher Hitchens or even Richard Dawkins. It may still be preaching to the choir, but at least it’s a much nicer choir.
Reality+ is a compendium of half-baked speculation: part science fiction, part wishful techno-utopianism. The whole book is based on one very contentious, if not indefensible, premise: that it is possible for a simulated consciousness to actually be conscious.
Continue reading