Marie Le Conte is one of my favourite panelists on the Oh God What Now podcast. I thought I should make an effort to read one of her books, hence “Escape” (affiliate link). It is about how Millennials were the first generation to grow up with the internet and how they shaped it.

Whatever you make of the ideas or commentary¹, one thing is abundantly clear: her personality shines through. You can hear her speaking every sentence. Fast, slightly scattered thoughts with the occasional random aside. In books of this type, it’s rare to come across lines such as:

Popular opinion is that the whole of the UK was against Blair’s invasion of Iraq. Over a million people marched in London.

I wasn’t one of them.

I’m not sure that I was as politically engaged then as I am now, but the main reason that I wasn’t there was because I wasn’t entirely against the intervention. Sure, I never believed the justifications that they gave. The whole ability to attack in 45 minutes seemed unlikely, and the connection to Al Qaeda didn’t seem plausible either. Blair deserved all resistance he got for such obvious untruths.

“Wilt on High” is another one of those books that I read because a number of people said “if you like Douglas Adams, you’ll enjoy Tom Sharpe.” This book was picked arbitrarily by virtue of being available in a second hand bookstore for 50p.

Since it’s the third book in the series staring Wilt and I’ve not read any of the others, there were some references to the backstory that I missed. I don’t think those details were absolutely critical.

Following on from XKCD, “What if?,” and “How to” comes Randal Munroe’s “What if? 2.” It’s another collection of silly questions with scientific, humorous answers. Examples include “Could you eat a cloud?” and “How far could you see if you had an eye as big as the earth?”

It’s as simple as this: if you liked those books, you’ll like this one.

“Incineration of organic matter within it” is a bad feature for an umbrella.

Recently I laced up my Brooks Glycerin and took the Tube a couple of stops north to run my one-hundredth Parkrun. I deliberately picked Tooting Common, as that’s where I ran my first back in May 2018. I only just arrived in time – missing a milestone shout-out – but otherwise, there was no drama, only the satisfaction in achieving it.

My previous milestone run didn’t go as smoothly. I ran my 49th on the first of February 2020. Work and weather conspired against me for a few weeks. Then as I was ready for run 50, COVID hit properly, and Parkrun was cancelled until mid-2021¹.

I’m not sure that I can explain why it took me so long to read this Charlie Stross book. Some of the references to nineties computing tech dated it a little, but no more than Douglas Adams’ obsession with digital watches. The characters are pretty good, as is the writing. It strays into the mystical, magical world but there was always a logic underpinning the world. (The lack of “logic” in many fantasy books is one of the reasons I generally prefer sci-fi.)

I’ll cut to the chase: David Baddiel’s book about anti-semitism and how it’s often treated as a second-class form of racism is very much a worthwhile read. I’m sure you can find more academic works, or with more detail, but even in this short text, he’s able to passionately and effectively makes his case.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I didn’t fully understand the subject, and it does a nice job of filling in those gaps. As he notes at one point, there are lots of oh yeah, I suppose so, never really thought about it like that moments.

If there’s one good thing that has come out of the whole Brexit omnishambles, it’s that my understanding of how British politics works has dramatically increased. I don’t think it’s worth the cost, but understanding how laws are debated and passed is something that should be taught in schools, but isn’t.

Brexit taught me about Proroguing Parliament and the various readings of bills. I learned of the role that committees serve and the works that the Lords do. It made me do homework to find out what a “three line whip” is.

“A Decade in Tory” by Russell Jones was a shorter book than I thought. Ordinarily that might be a bad thing, but the reason for my confusion in this case is that there are nearly five hundred pages of footnotes and fifty for the index. There are plenty of criticisms you could make, but you can’t argue that it’s not well researched or that the events are made up.

“How not to be wrong: The art of changing your mind” is a follow-up to James O’Brien’s earlier book, “How to be right.” The idea this time is that he walks through a number of areas where he has been wrong in the past and has changed his mind.

It’s such a simple concept, but, as a society, we have difficulty doing exactly that. Politicians are criticised for doing the wrong thing and then again for doing a u-turn. Tribal loyalty means that people won’t change their minds if that would mean agreeing with “the enemy.” I’m not putting myself above this¹, sadly, and neither does O’Brien.