Mssv

After reading Christopher Priest’s The Islanders, I was immediately compelled to figure out exactly what was going on in the story (similar to what I tried with Iain Banks’ Transition). Of course, The Islanders is even more deliberately ambiguous and dreamlike than Transition, and so I’m acutely aware that trying to unknot the plot is [...]

A few months ago, I finally had what I’d been dreaming of for years – digital delivery of every single magazine and newspaper I read. No more stacks of New Yorkers and Economists lingering on tables waiting to be given away (or more likely, recycled); no more hunting for all the bits of subscription forms [...]

(This piece may be appearing in The Telegraph, but I felt it would be useful to have it up soon given the recent interest in Unbound from places like The Economist).
The Southwest Pacific islands of Melanesia are some of the most remote places on the planet. Until the Second World War, its inhabitants had few [...]

Last year, I listened to a programme on Radio 4 called A History of the World in 100 Objects. It took 25 hours, or 1500 minutes.
In the show, the BBC and the British Museum attempted to describe the entire span of human history through 100 objects – from a 2 million year-old Olduvai stone cutting [...]

Since moving into a new flat two months ago, I resolved to demolish my pile of unread books that had been eyeing me reproachfully for far too long. Counting some extra books I tackled after the pile of doom, I read:

Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by [...]

If book publishers want to see the next decade in any reasonable health, then it’s absolutely imperative that they rethink their pricing strategies and business models right now. Hopefully this example will illustrate why:
I’m a big fan of Iain Banks’ novels; I always buy them in hardback as soon as they come out. It doesn’t [...]

Like a gamer to Starcraft 2, I can’t help but be attracted to articles about the death of books, and even better, the death of long-form reading. There’s something about the desperate handwringing that pushes almost every intellectual button I have, from impassioned but futile appeals to the past, to lurid depictions of how new [...]

Reading on the iPad is fantastic. I don’t care what other people have said, I just know that after using it for a fortnight, I can tell that it’s changed the way I’ll read forever.
I used to spend several hours a day in front of my iMac at home, using a combination of Google Reader [...]

In Publishing: The Revolutionary Future, an article in the New York Review of Books, Jason Epstein talks about the massive changes that are in store for publishing and books with the advent of digital content and devices. The article begins well, summarising the revolutionary changes wrought by Gutenberg’s press, and quickly reaches the present day [...]

Iain Banks’ latest novel, Transition, is perhaps his strongest work in recent years, straddling his science fiction persona (Iain M Banks) and his non-genre, non-M persona (Iain Banks). For me, it combined his fantastic world-building imagination that we see in his Culture novels with the more rooted nature of his traditional novels – with a [...]