bROWSE BY TOPIC

PUBLISHING IN GENERAL

Publishers: no better than fund managers? - a better way of picking winners

Confessions of a sexist reader - why haven't I read more books by women?

E-books: shaking up publishing, but not content? - why haven't ebooks prompted authors to explore non-linear narrative etc?

Publishing: the hedge fund approach - can algorithms pick out which books will succeed?

The curse of OCR - the sheer f*ing laziness of publishers when it comes to ebooks 

Falling down the cracks in the genre map - on publishers' obsession with genre

theatre reviews

"Patriots" by Peter Morgan - a play about Putin, Berezovsky and Abramovich

"User not found" by Dante or Die - death and digital legacy

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time"adaptation of the Mark Haddon novel

technology, AI etc

Google ate my story! - self-published fiction as AI training data

Sci-fi, litfic and AI - Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Louisa Hall and Ted Chiang 

Publishing: the hedge fund approach - can algorithms pick out which books will succeed?

Federov's dust - technology, religious beliefs and "revenge effects"

MUSIC

Vangelis: an appreciation - beyond Blade Runner

COVID & chronic fatigue

3 posts on my experience of Chronic Fatigue and similarities with Long COVID:

What is it?

Why is there (still!) no adequate medical explanation?

What can you do about it?

WHAT TO READ NEXT

Book recommendation sites - whichbook.net, bookbag.co.uk, recommendmeabook.com  

Librarything - better than Goodreads? Or maybe just more manageable...

Free fiction review - my pick of the best free fiction by self-published authors

All my book reviews

brexit

I wrote a lot of nerdy stuff about Brexit - in hindsight, here are the most interesting ones:

Review of All Out War by Tim Shipman - why did Leave win? And what does Shipman get wrong?

Inselaffen! - thoughts on the referendum result

POLITICS

The Greek bailout - review of Adults in the Room by Yannis Varoufakis

The end justifies the means: a bad motto to live by - thoughts on the 2019 election

Still the hardest word - on Boris Johnson's resignation