I loved The City & The City by China Miéville when I read it 9–10 years ago, and I thought the recent BBC TV adaptation was reasonably good, particularly given the source material doesn’t really lend itself to TV. The core problem with adapting it is the need to represent the objects, buildings and people in the other city that each character is unseeing, as well as making it easy for the viewer to work out which city they are seeing. (There are mild spoilers below. You’ve been warned.)

So: the two cities had very different palettes and appearance: Besźel uses muted browns and yellows, with a ’70s vibe, and Ul Qoma is brightly lit with blues and reds, and looks like a wealthy Western city. (They actually highlighted the colour aspect in the dialogue of a scene where Borlú is training for a visit to Ul Qoma.) To represent unseeing, the camera is declared to see what Borlú sees, and parts of his field of view which he’s unseeing are blurred. When Borlú breaks the rules, as he does during a chase sequence where the suspect is in the other city, what he’s looking at comes into focus. While watching, I thought these techniques worked quite well (unlike some dodgy CGI in a couple of places, which definitely did not).

But when I discussed this with the others in Garuda¹, Trev – who’s just finished the novel, and not seen the TV adaptation – pointed out that the differences between the two cities are meant to be so subtle that outsiders can’t easily spot them, so making this change means dropping one of the more interesting elements of the book: the willingness of both cities to respect the separation based on minute cues. It’s true that I spent the whole TV show wondering how they would film a sequence in the novel where the suspect is carrying himself in such a way that he’s not obviously breaching, but no-one can work out which city he is in, so neither police force can pounce. The disappointing answer: they didn’t.

I also realised that I barely remember anything more than the broad strokes of the novel, even though I’ve been enthusiastically recommending it to anyone who asks for a decade. So I had trouble distinguishing between things which had been changed for the TV adaptation – such as TV Borlú’s Orciny-obsessed wife who disappeared a few years ago – and things I just didn’t remember. For example, I don’t remember a whole subplot involving a far-right nationalist Besź Mayor-elect, but I’m told it was in there. Oh well. It’s the only Miéville novel I have ever felt able to recommend to people who aren’t into chitin and/or alien cultures built around similes, and I’ll keep recommending it anyway.

¹⁾ Our band was, of course, named for the creatures in Perdido Street Station.

It’s been a year and 6 days since my last year notes! Let’s see what happened.

Serious Business

I still work at Endless bringing the year of Linux on the desktop to the 75% of the world that don’t have access to computers. This is now my second-longest-ever period of continuous employment, and I hope it continues. It goes almost without saying that Endless is hiring.

Over on my GNOME blog I wrote about the technique we use for non-destructive dual-boot installations (and its teething pains), and some surprisingly interesting work getting Endless running well from a DVD. I also took part in this Reddit AMA with many colleagues, and found two bugs in Windows.

Two years ago, I wrote the following about my previous project:

I had hoped that something would have made it out into the world by now, but it was not to be.

This is still true.

Bleep Bloop

I made and then abandoned a bot which parodies the “That’s Not My ____” series of books for babies and toddlers. Because it has to maintain state between tweets, it does not use Cheap Bots, Done Quick! despite being mostly implemented as a Tracery grammar. Nonetheless, please consider supporting CBDQ and its creator George on Patreon.

@fewerror turned 4. I noticed it was getting a lot of spam followers and in November decided to report a bunch of them, whereupon it was suspended. I have filed two appeals, and have never heard back from Twitter. I had been thinking about retiring it for a while – the joke is done and spam-fighting is no fun – so I guess the decision was made for me. Still, it would have been nice to switch off new posts and have all its old #content visible for posterity. Twitter obviously has larger problems than my stupid bot, but it’s very discouraging to have no idea what rule it violated, and to have no recourse, despite having put a lot of work into making it well-behaved. I think I’m done making bots for that platform.

Cis and I formed a band, Downlands Cancara, and performed at DIY Space for London’s First Timers in April. I played the GSA Capital Commemorative Balalaika in public for the first time. I’m mentioning this under “bleep bloop” because this was my first band with electronic instruments (all of which were under Cis’ expert control). It was a new kind of songwriting for me, and I was really pleased with the three tunes we came up with: I rank Isola Bella among the best songs I’ve cowritten. I hope we’ll get a chance to record some of these tunes and write some more, but we are on hiatus while I do Life Stuff and while Cis is living in Indonesia.

I’m A Leaf On The Wind

I visited:

• 🚗 Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, where I snowboarded 📷, walked, and met a cat 📷 and some Alpine llamas 📷.
• ✈️ Hamburg, where (among other activities) I marvelled 📷 at Miniatur Wunderland. If you’re in Hamburg I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s huge, and if you’re anything like me you’ll unexpectedly want to spend ages looking at tiny details, so budget a few hours and accept that you won’t see everything.
• 🚄 Manchester, for one day of GUADEC 2017. It was great to see lots of familiar faces from the GNOME world, and to meet a fair few colleagues for the first time. Shame that the year it’s in the UK is the year when I can’t really stay for more than a day, but so it goes.
• ✈️ Orkney, to see family and to catch a bit of the Orkney International Science Festival. It’s been running since 1991 and the organiser is a relative, but I’d never been before. Strongly recommended if you want a broad selection of talk subjects – including archaeology, ancient music, additive manufacturing, renewable energy, and Peter Higgs – in a beautiful archipelago 📷 prone to windy deluges 📷.

Consumer of Content

I read 26 books, a little more than half what I read in 2016, and two more than I was aiming for. Hooray! The best was Kindred by Octavia Butler; by far the worst was Deep Work by Cal Newport. This does not include dozens of children’s books.

The new laser sword film is fine. Mad Max: Fury Road was extremely enjoyable a second time in “black and chrome”. Hey Duggee Series 2 episode 31 “The Stick Badge” is great.

Public Service Broadcasting were good 📷. The Spook School were good 📷.

I started learning German on Duolingo. Supposedly I am 25% fluent, but I can barely read Die kleine Raupe Nimmersatt.

Life Stuff

Last year I said:

In particular, I hope that when I write these notes again in 12 months, I am reporting something other than “I have a new job”. I also hope that we are not all vapourized during this ongoing period of “political turmoil”.

The second sentence still seems a bit touch-and-go. As for the first sentence: I became a dad in May. It’s great! Of course there have been some tough days/weeks/months but it’s all worth it. It does mean that working from home is rather more distracting these days.

Okay, that’s enough! Onwards for another year.

I made a new bot, That’s Not My Bot…, inspired by the series of books for young children by Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells. The books have 8 spreads, in this format (from “That’s Not My Tractor…”):

That’s not my tractor. Its engine is too bumpy.

That’s not my tractor. Its trailer is too rough.

[more pages]

That’s my tractor! Its headlamps are so shiny.

Each page has a cartoon of a different tractor, with a textured area representing the adjective: corrugated foil for “bumpy”, rough foil for “rough”, velcro for “scratchy”, and so on.

The bot has a simple grammar for generating sentences like this, and fixes the first object (eg “tractor”) for 1 or more negatives before generating a positive sentence, and gradually posts them as threaded tweets. The grammar may be simple but it is enormous – 12,337 lines at the time of writing. I hope this extremely large space of possible texts will keep it fresh a bit longer than some previous bots in this genre. I went a bit overboard lifting word lists from dariusk/corpora and added a few of my own. My favourite touch is using terms from wine tasting notes as some of the adjectives.

I planned to use Flickr’s CC image search to mock up pages for the book. I decided to get the bot going with just text (perfect is the enemy of good, etc) and come back to images when I had time. I tried searching Flickr for an object the bot picked (“can of peas”) at the maximum Safe Search level and found a swastika in the first page of results so I’ve decided it’s better left as text, unless or until someone comes up with a good way to generate inoffensive-but-funny imagery.

I also originally planned to use Cheap Bots, Done Quick but wanted a feature that unmodified Tracery does not provide: adding “is” or “are” to agree with a word which may be singular or plural. So I used Allison Parrish’s Python port of the library, and wrote my own crude implementation of the .is modifier. It gets (eg) “cans of soup” and “surgeons general” wrong, but then again the the built-in .s modifier (to make a singular noun plural) gets these wrong too (“can of soup” → “*can of soups”) so I am not too worried.

There’s a popular riddle which goes something like this:

Find a word that you change from singular to plural by adding a letter, and then change back to singular by adding the same letter again.

The canonical answer is the title of this post, but are there others? I did a little breakfast experiment channelling the power of Azure Notebooks, Python, WordNet and /usr/share/dict/words which you can look at if you’re interested in the methodology. Here are the candidate answers I found:

• a → ad → add
• bra → bras → brass ★
• care → cares → caress ★
• employ → employe → employee
• hi → his → hiss
• ma → mas → mass
• ma → mat → matt
• me → mes → mess
• needle → needles → needless ★
• pa → pal → pall
• pa → pas → pass
• prince → princes → princess

I think the starred ones are plausible answers to the riddle, though “needless” is not a noun. If you accept “ma” and “pa” as terms for parents that can be made plural, then those ones work too, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch.

Mostly lifted from my Goodreads reviews:

1. Fahrenheit 451: someone told me that writing two-sentence mini-reviews without explaining what the book is about is not very helpful. So! This is about a future where books have been outlawed; the protagonist’s job is setting unearthed caches of contraband on fire. Spoiler: he realises that Books are Actually Good.

   The idea is that books fell out of favour gradually: first you introduce other forms of mass media which are easier to consume in bite-sized chunks (TV, cordless earbuds, sleeping pills), so that people mostly stop reading of their own accord. Then you make buildings fire-proof. Now you can ban books and set them on fire when you find them without anyone kicking up too much of a fuss. The population is itself partly to blame for allowing this to happen.

   (Aside: writing this reminded me of the precise moment I lost my last shred of interest in the band Porcupine Tree: 11½ minutes into yet another tedious song about how the youth of today are numbed by TV and antidepressants, concentric circles of spinning pills appear, in case you hadn’t fully appreciated the subtle and original message they’re trying to deliver.)

   It’s a pretty good read. Every so often Bradbury flips into Metaphor Mode and spends a page or more describing some minor detail, which I could do without. It all feels a bit rushed at times – and according to the foreword and afterword in the edition I read, its original short-story incarnation was written in 10 days, and the expansion into a novel twice the size was to a tight deadline, so it feels that way for a reason. There’s some interesting commentary in those about how the timing of the two versions of the novel interacted with the ebb and flow of McCarthyism, and the well-timed launch of Playboy where it was possible to take literary risks, distracted by another form of media which is easier to consume and get enraged about.

2. The Collapsing Empire: spaaaaaaaaaace stuff. Premise: faster-than-light travel is possible, but only via “the Flow”, a poorly-understood system of predetermined pathways between points in space. An empire has been built up around this network, with every node economically dependent on the others. So what happens if the network starts to fail?

   This was fine as series-openers go. It’s nice to see latency in the spread of information – I liked this about Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series. On the other hand, without knowing up-front the travel time between the different settings of each chapter, it’s a bit hard to keep track of whether character A knows about event B yet – I think this could have been clearer, or maybe I have a bad memory. (Broadly speaking the answer is “if you’re not sure, they don’t know yet”.) I expected a bit more from the republican movement, but no, the empire and system of family monopolies is pretty entrenched and almost every character we meet doesn’t seem too bothered about it. (To be fair, most of them are pretty blasé about everything, like most of Scalzi’s characters.) Maybe that’s a strand for a future installment.

   Compared to Scalzis past: it’s broadly similar to Old Man’s War etc. but with a lot less shooting and wacky technology – an improvement. There’s at least one minor character who echoes the gimmick from Lock In, I guess as an Easter egg for the attentive reader.

3. Bumpology: A Myth-Busting Guide for Curious Parents-To-Be: Good pop-sci round-up of evidence-based answers to questions about pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. Cochrane reviews make regular appearances. A lot of things can be summed up with “it probably doesn’t make much difference” or “moderation in all things”.

   One nice example is the early question, “Is coffee bad for my baby?” Apparently, more than 550mg of caffeine per day has a slight but measurable impact on babies’ height, and low amounts are probably okay. But a survey of espresso strength in Scotland found the amount of caffeine varied wildly: between 51mg at Starbucks to 322mg at an unnamed café in Glasgow! So one double-shot drink might be totally fine, or it might not.

   The later stages of the book – how much do newborns understand about the world around them? when should one introduce solid food? – seemed more actionable to me as a non-pregnant participant (unsurprisingly), but of course it’s a bit early for me to say if the advice is actually useful. Answer unclear, ask again later (this month).

4. A Tiger Remembers: The Way We Were in Singapore: Notes on family structure and social dynamics in Singapore over the past century or so, told by “the founding mother of social work education in Singapore”. I don’t really know anything about Asian family structure, so I found the variations between the different social/ethnic groups of Singapore particularly interesting reading. There are some good chapters on living conditions before and after the post-colonial drive by the HDB to provide affordable but good-quality housing for all – and how this negatively affected social structures and agricultural work. Also, plenty of anecdotes from the author’s experience growing up in wartime Britain and marrying into a Singaporean Chinese family. A nice mix.

   I found myself reaching for my phone to look up Singapore-specific terminology. For example, the term “HDB” – Housing and Development Board – was explained several chapters after it started getting casually dropped into sentences. I don’t think I am the intended audience, though, so fair enough!

5. Angel Catbird, Volume 1: This is a pulp-y little volume about a man who, through a Freak Science Accident, can transform into a humanoid half-owl, half-cat. It’s fun enough, particularly if you like bad cat puns, but doesn’t really break any new ground. Being one of the world’s greatest living authors grants one a certain amount of freedom… maybe a future volume will be a bit deeper.

Previously in 2017.

It really bothers me when people write in clumsy, pseudo-formal English. Here’s the main paragraph of an email I got after asking to be removed from a (postal) mailing list:

I am sorry to hear that you do not wish to receive mail form ourselves. Please be assured that we have requested your address to be taken off our own mailing list, so you should not receive any further mail from ourselves.

Let me count the ways…

• “form”
• “ourselves”: you mean “us”
• “Please be assured that” is redundant
• “we have requested your address to be taken off”:
  • I don’t care whether you did it yourself, or asked someone else to do it; just tell me “we have taken your address off”
  • But if you insist, is “to be” correct here? I think “We have requested your address be taken off” reads better
• “our own mailing list”: is “own” really necessary? Come on. Nobody talks like this.

On a less petty level: one of the great consequences of engaging with brands on social media is that a conversational (but polite) tone is becoming acceptable, so maybe we’ll see less of this, and more of:

Thank you for your email. We have removed your address from our mailing list.

Here we go again. New year, new series of lazy reviews:

• number9dream: my least favourite of the David Mitchell novels I’ve read so far, but still enjoyable.

• The Fly Trap: it’s good. Obviously I heard of this because its author won the 2016 Ig Nobel literature prize for this and its two sequels (not yet translated). Nice combination of memoir, description of unusual pastime and biography of a little-known (to me, though that’s not saying much) entomologist.

  I really like this observation at the start of chapter 14 (pp. 199):

The history of biology has many stars, and two of them shine brighter than all the rest together—Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin. I don’t know what kind of breakthrough it would take for someone, sometime, even to approach the power they exercise over the way we think about life on earth. Above all, Darwin strikes me as utterly impossible to surpass, so great is the truth he saw and described in the most complete detail. Of course, Linnaeus is also magnificent, but what makes him a megastar forever is that he managed to sell an operating system, a bit like Bill Gates. What he didn’t do was formulate an eternal truth.

• Empire Games: fine but definitely the first of a trilogy. Heavy on setting things up for later volumes; light on developments which aren’t broadly predictable from previous installments in this universe. I’d never noticed it before, but Stross has an irritating habit of ending chapters with dialogue ending in an ellipsis, in lieu of actual suspense.
• Home (Binti #2): a quick read, in an interesting world. Some good stuff around the arbitrary but powerful divides between communities.
• Rivers of London, Moon Over Soho, Whispers Under Ground: not exactly high art but good fun and extremely readable (obviously, he says, having read three volumes in a month). Fantasy in a 21st-century London where Magic is Real and all that goes with it. It seems inevitable that I’ll compare this to Stross’ Laundry series, given the premise and tone: 100% more jazz vampires and 75% less insufferable narrator.

The year’s over. I read 48 books, four short of my goal but matching last year’s count, so I’m awarding myself points for effort. Here’s my final set of reviews:

1. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World: excellent. The future looks bleak for the cod. Unexpectedly slavery-heavy for the first third, and I had no idea that the Cod Wars happened. Full of recipes which I will never follow for a variety of reasons.

2. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone: real food for thought in here, laying out evidence to show that a more equal society raises all boats, and arguing for a few possible changes to help bring that about (more employee-ownership of companies is the big one). But, the authors often refer to “a society which knows where it wants to go”, and similar:

   The task is now to develop a politics based on a recognition of the kind of society we need to create and committed to making use of the institutional and technological opportunities to realize it.

   Unfortunately, inasmuch as the society I live in has a direction, I don’t think it’s the one they have in mind…

3. A Closed and Common Orbit: pretty much what I expected based on its predecessor. A nice read!
4. Station Eleven: excellent. Reminded me of second-hand descriptions of Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play which I would love to see performed some day. There is only so much fiction about the downfall of human civilization that I can cope with, but this is not so relentlessly negative as the genre can be, and the point-of-view characters are well developed.
5. Ninefox Gambit: I found this really hard work for the first ⅓ or so, but it really grew on me. The core mechanic – the local belief system affects local physics – has some interesting consequences, even if it all boils down to “space magic, as needed by the plot”.
6. The Best of the Nebulas: an absolutely gigantic tome. It took me four months to get through this but there are some really good stories in here, such as Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones by Samuel R. Delany.
7. Babel-17/Empire Star: I’m beginning to wonder whether I need a “Sapir-Whorf Fanfic” shelf on Goodreads… These stories have both aged pretty well. There’s a nice passage playing with first vs. second person pronouns – just long enough for you to adjust your mental mapping from quoted speech to characters. (It reminded me a little of reading Halting State, which is written in the second person: very annoying for a while, and then it fades into the background.)
8. Bridging Infinity: I enjoyed some of these stories a lot while I was reading them. There’s a nice one about troubadours on a Dyson sphere, for instance. Unfortunately I read these late at night while I couldn’t sleep, and didn’t take notes, so remember relatively little about them. I enjoyed an earlier collection from this series, Engineering Infinity, so I guess I should check out the intervening three volumes.
9. The Iron Tactician: not bad; also not Reynolds’ most outstanding work. The main twist was no great surprise.

(part 1, part 2, part 3)

Serious Business

I spent the first half of the year working with Phenomen on the Dau media project. Last year, I wrote:

I had hoped that something would have made it out into the world by now, but it was not to be.

This is still true. I’ve left with new friendships, many fascinating conversations around topics I’d never otherwise have discussed, and a deep well of anecdotes.

In July I joined Endless. I work on the downloadable version of the OS (until shortly before I joined the only way to get Endless OS was to buy a computer with it pre-installed). This means that after a decade as a card-carrying free software zealot, I now maintain an MFC-based Windows application. It’s a Wubi-esque installer that allows you to install Endless OS alongside Windows non-destructively (without repartitioning your disk, and so on), with a few novel twists which I’ll write about some day. I have learned many weird and wonderful things about GRUB, crappy UEFI firmware (naming no vendors because one could really just list them all…), NTFS on-disk structures, the default Windows defragmentation schedule, overlayfs, OSTree, and more.

It’s great to be working with many old friends and collaborators, not to mention new faces. It’s my first real experience working remotely, and my first taste of the VC-funded startup world. This is also my first experience writing scary, system-altering software that will be run on arbitrary hardware and OS versions by non-technical users, and I have learned some hard lessons about defensive programming and customer support.

From a technical perspective, it’s a bit ironic that, in the same year that a former Collabora colleague (now working mainly in Scala) discovered the joys of monads and other FP stuff I used to drone on about, I find myself back in the manual memory management mines. The GNOME stack has got better while I wasn’t looking, and pig-lipstick C macros like g_autoptr are definitely better than nothing, but it’s still a bit of a shock to the system to have to worry about every allocation again. Perhaps 2017 will be the year of Rust on the Endless OS desktop. On the Windows side of the fence, I’ve never written much C++ before and my review is that it’s “alright” and “unavoidable”. I try to resist assuming that unfamiliar API design is bad API design, but I will say that you can really feel the cost of maintaining source compatibility all the way back to Win16 (in some cases).

Bleep Bloop

Pretty quiet on the side-project front. A little bit of bot tinkering:

• @gnuerror has more Stallmanisms plus more-chaotic whitespace.
• @xbotsdoney happened after an evening with Cis playing Katamari Forever and coming up with ever more ludicrous synonyms for “Cheap Bots, Done Quick”. Apparently no-one had done this joke before.
• I wrote a thing a few months ago about three years of @fewerror. The only thing I have to add is that I added some probabilistic festive emoji. Suggestions welcome for other topical emoji at other times of year.

Oh, I almost forgot! I wrote a little Euclidean rhythm sequencer, and gave a talk about it. That was fun. I would like to give more low-profile talks next year.

I’m A Leaf On The Wind

I visited:

• 🚄 Loch Ard (for a wedding) 📷
• ✈️ Budapest (in honour of @millerdl and @elledodd’s union) 📷
• 🚗 Cornwall (for a wedding) 📷
• 🚄 A field near Guildford (for Electromagnetic Field, which I highly recommend)
• 🚄 Bolton (for a wedding) 📷
• ✈️/🚄 both Irelands (📷 Giants’ Causeway is pretty good, eh?)
• ✈️ Massachusetts (for the 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony) 📷
• Probably some other places

My carbon footprint is broadly unchanged, ie “too high”.

Consumer of Content

It’s December 31st and I’ve read 48 books, four short of my goal. I have written short reviews of the first 39, which you can find under the 2016 in Books tag, and reviews of the rest will follow. I don’t think I’ll repeat this challenge next year: it is much harder work to read a lot now that I don’t commute.

I didn’t write and record any new music this year. I was given that rarest of beasts, an English-language book on how to play my balalaika, but I haven’t made much progress.

My favourite album of the year was Silent Earthling by Three Trapped Tigers; the best track is Engrams. I saw them play twice this year and the novelty still hasn’t worn off. I liked Valuables by Enemies a lot more than their previous work; shame this album is their swansong. Once again I find it hard to remember what new music has really excited me this year.

Some recent film mini-reviews:

• Arrival was good apart from the final two lines of dialogue
• After seeing The Force Awakens at the end of last year, we watched Star Wars in the Machete Order: IV, V, II, III, VI. Having not seen the prequels before, my conclusion is that this order is indeed more satisfying than release order (IV, V, VI, I, II, III) or chronological order (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) would have been. My shocking and unprecedented review of the prequels is that they are bad. I have still not seen The Phantom Menace and do not intend to. Rogue One was fine. I don’t want to see another lightsaber for at least a year.

Life

I turned 30, which was nice. I don’t really do gambling but I did place two small bets on the “wrong” side of two important votes as a kind of consolation-prize insurance; so I’m a bit disappointed that both June and November ended without any nasty surprises.

I’m expecting the next year (and decade) to be more chaotic in certain ways, and less so in others. In particular, I hope that when I write these notes again in 12 months, I am reporting something other than “I have a new job”. I also hope that we are not all vapourized during this ongoing period of “political turmoil”.

I’m pruning my bookshelves, and all of the following books are free to a good home! All paperback unless otherwise noted. Happy to post them to UK-based strangers, too! (Books marked ✔ are spoken for.)

Fiction:

• Gravitas and Gigapolis by S. Christopher – I remember this author being another pseudonym of chromatic, the notable Perl developer, though this page just describes them as a “friend and frequent collaborator”
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow – a signed copy I got when I joined the Open Rights Group
• ✔ The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle – a single hefty volume
• ✔ Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
• Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov
• Borderliners by Peter Høeg – I think I read this off the back of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, which as I recall was better
• The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• ✔ Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
• Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson – I read this trilogy backwards, which I don’t recommend. I don’t know what happened to my copy of the middle book, Idoru
• ✔ Etc Etc Amen by Howard Male – I think the edition I have predates a round of editing, so might be worth getting a fresh copy (with a cooler cover)
• ✔ Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark – I remember really enjoying this, but I am unlikely to re-read it and in hardback, at ~800 pages, it takes up a lot of space on the shelf!
• ✔ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson – as if the charity shops of the land weren’t overflowing with this one
• Flux by Stephen Baxter – oh, now I see that this is the third in a series. That explains why I couldn’t make head or tail of it
• Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress – the first Kress novel I read. It’s good!

Non-fiction:

• ✔ Attention All Shipping by Charlie Connelly
• ✔ Watching the English by Kate Fox
• ✔ Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent
• ✔ Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
• ✔ The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? by Paul Davies
• Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity by David Allen – though really, if you were going to join this particular cult you would have done so by now
• ✔ The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw – I remember this being pretty good, it doesn’t shy away from mathematics to help explain a concept. Hardback.
• ✔ The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex: What’s Wrong with Modern Movies? by Mark Kermode – no Oxford comma in the title, it’s dead to me

The Internet, Now In Handy Book Form¹ (and similar coffee-table books):

• ✔ The Internet is a Playground by David Thorne
• ✔ He Died With A Felafel In His Hand by John Birmingham
• Diesel Sweeties: Pocket Sweeties Volume One and Crush All Hu-Mans: A Diesel Sweeties Treasury by R. Stevens
• Garfield Minus Garfield by Jim Davis, Dan Walsh – it even has the subtitle “The Internet sensation–now in book form!”. Hardback.
• ✔ Cyanide And Happiness: I’m giving you the finger – Hardback.
• The Book of Bunny Suicides and Return of the Bunny Suicides by Andy Riley – he gave a great (and totally unrelated) talk at Boring Conference in 2015. Hardback.

¹ I only just realised that there is a David McCandless book titled The Internet Now in Handy Book Form. Doesn’t it sound terrible?