After reading quite a few non-fiction books I decided that this time I would pick a novel. Having read “Red Shirts” a couple of years ago, I randomly selected another John Scalzi book, “Fuzzy Nation” [affiliate link].

The history of this is a little unusual: it’s not an entirely original story. It’s based on an older story by H. Beam Piper called “Little Fuzzy.” (“Think of this as a ‘reboot’ of the Fuzzy universe, not unlike the recent J. J. Abrams ‘reboot’ of the Star Trek film series (but hopefully with better science.)”) Not having read that, I can’t compare but I did enjoy this one.

The gist of “ReWork” [affiliate link] is that anyone can be an entrepreneur but you don’t have to follow the Silicon Valley tradition of seeking venture funding and providing foosball tables. If you do things right — different — you can make a sustainable business in a more traditional, bootstrapped way, and you don’t have to continually grow to be considered a success.

Many of the “lessons,” however, apply to almost any knowledge work. They subscribe to a less-is-more philosophy, and the book follows that example by being a quick read. Like the less-is-more outlook, that doesn’t make it bad, only very targeted.

Lynne Murphy writes a great blog, which this book [affiliate link] is at least partly based on, about the differences between American and British English. Or should that be that this book is based on?

Books like this really make you question everything you write.

Some of the material I was already familiar with, having read it elsewhere, possibly even on her blog, but there were plenty of new facts to keep me entertained. Sometimes it’s difficult to remember where a word of phrase came from. Did I always say that or did I learn it more recently? How do you pronounce words? When it came up in conversation a few months ago, I genuinely couldn’t remember whether I normally said “skedule” and “shedule.” I kept second-guessing myself!

I first knew of Matt Gemmell as a Mac and iOS developer on Twitter, so I was curious when he decided to become a full-time writer instead. “Changer” [affiliate link] is his first novel, his second came out late last year.

Overall the story hangs together nicely. It’s well structured, the characters are not especially well developed but work well enough for a page-turner-thriller, which is clearly what it was aiming for.

I didn’t mean to immediately buy Hans Rosling’s “Factfulness“ [affiliate link]. I saw it in a “recommended reads” list (both Bill Gates and Barak Obama suggested it, if I remember correctly), thought it sounded interesting and went to Amazon to add it to my wish list. Fat fingers meant that I tapped the “buy” button instead.

Anyway. As an antidote to all the bad news around at the moment, I decided to read it right away. The narrative that the world is getting worse by many measures, this book argues, is false. I want to believe that we’re progressing but the pictures on TV of Trump and Brexit, famine and war make it hard to accept.

This was going to be my first thoughts on the new Apple Watch, posted about a day after I unboxed it. But then life got in the way and I’ve now been using it for a week. What I’d planned to be a little more than a “hot take” is now probably a little closer to an actual review!

My previous watch was not a competing smart watch. It doesn’t even have a battery. (To be clear, my new watch isn’t a replacement. I still plan to wear the Marloe.)

I’m not generally big on memoirs or autobiographies, but I’ve liked a lot of things Robert Webb has done and the title “How not to be a boy” [affiliate link] worked for me.

There’s a lot I can relate to in here. I may not have wanted to be an actor or comedian but there are definite parallels to people, like myself, who were not interested in “boys” things like football. While that’s not necessary in a memoir, it did make the more rant-y, less autobiographical parts make sense to me.

As I’ve done for the past few years, here are a few thoughts on the new version of iOS that will be heading to your phone in a few days. Usual caveats: my usage patterns are probably different to yours, I have a 6s and iPad mini, not whatever weird and wonderful hardware you have. I’ve been using the beta on my iPad since early August and on my iPhone since late August.

“What if…?” [affiliate link] is a totally ridiculous idea for a book and pretty much perfect because of it. The concept is asking all kinds of silly questions and seeing where they go. For example, what if a the earth suddenly stopped spinning? (Spoiler alert: it’s not good.)

There’s a beauty to both asking and taking the time to answer “absurd hypothetical questions.” It’s one of those things you’ll either “get” or you’ll think is utterly stupid. (Check out the reviews on Goodreads if you have any doubt.) To be fair, the people in the latter camp are probably not wrong but they’d be missing a lot of fun.

Anyone else read Scott Adams’ blog? The guy who does Dilbert? He seems to have gone off the rails a bit recently with all his Trump stuff but the idea behind some of it — the art of persuasion — is potentially interesting. I wanted to learn more.

Jay Heinrichs’ “How to argue with a cat” [affiliate link] seemed like a good introduction, in that it didn’t look too sleazy or too serious. As an added bonus, it’s also very short.