A down-to-earth stock-take on avoiding the climate disaster. What do we need? What do we have? What do we need to invent? An honest look at what will it take and how hard will it be. But also filled with the inventor’s optimism and faith in the power of the human mind. After I wholeheartedly …
Continue reading How to Avoid a Climate Disaster – Bill Gates
Sometimes you come across a book that makes you think: ‘how nice to finally talk to someone intelligent’. And that is one of those books, Głowacki’s ease of storytelling and ability to seamlessly jump from a raunchy anecdote into very serious musings on the nature of the world make this book a pleasure to read. …
If you’re looking for a crime fiction where one twist chases another that’s your choice. It’s one of those books where from the second page you start second-guessing yourself. As you know from the get-go that in the end nothing will be what it seemed at the beginning. And the author makes no mystery of …
And another one of the December 2020 gifts, this one is probably a birthday one. I timed it well with my birthday, it is too far from Christmas to give people and excuse to lump the gifts together, so I get them twice in one month. I start wondering if I'll ever again read a …
Continue reading Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (as told to me) Story – Bess Kalb
This is another one of my delicious Christmas 2020 gifts, they were so amazing they pretty much recouped the year. By way of disclosure, I have never read anything by Flannery O’Connor, even though her name is familiar to me. When dealing with a fiction writer it may not be best to start with their …
Fates and Furies has been recommended to me by my mum (funnily enough, as I read it I discovered she did not, so it was all a hearsay recommendation), back when it was published in 2015. It was lingering on my Kindle for a while despite, or maybe because the book caused so much noise. …
As you may know from my previous post I had some adventures getting to read The Queen’s Gambit. But I finally got there, and decided to follow my mum’s footsteps in reading the book before watching the series. Which, having now done both, I still think was sound advice. Now, you either already know what …
Yet another one of the subscription boxes books. But this time for the life of me I cannot remember if it came from How Novel of The Willoughby Book Club. This may not have been my favorite book, but I still enjoy the subscriptions immensely. The Burning Girl focuses on the friendship of Julia and …
It wasn’t really about the engineering of the space, the real battle was about the culture — about changing the hearts and minds of New Yorkers, of changing their minds about who their streets were for. If building roads actually resulted in less traffic, then surely after sixty years of interstate highway construction we would …
It was probably last year when I got from my mum a set of four books about modern approaches to urban design. I read them slowly because the subject matter is a serious one. It touches us every day. Since most of us live in cities, the design mistakes haunt us, making our life difficult …
Continue reading Streetfight. Handbook for an Urban Revolution – Janette Sadik-Khan, Seth Solomonow
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