Introduction
I've always been a fast reader. We were always surrounded by books when I grew up, and encouraged to use the local lending library. As a kid I used to get back to the library with the book completely read before the library tickets had been sorted out, leaving the poor librarian scrabbling to find the ticket to check it back in! There is something about a bookshop that is a complete timewarp for me. I can go into a good bookshop - Blackwells springs to mind - and come out of it five minutes later only to find that three hours have passed. Of course many of the books I read are technical books, but they are not the only ones. I'm a sociologist by training, and I guess once you get into the habit of turning the magnifying glass on society to see what makes it tick, it's difficult to get out of it! Many of the books I read are about history, society, politics, science - even economics sometimes. The very best of them are a synthesis of many of these aspects of society. There is a tremendous amount of crap published out there - the problem is separating the wheat from the chaff. When I come across a book I think is good, I'd like to share it with you via a short review on this site. I'm not a professional book reviewer, so I'm sure those who do reviews for a living will not like my style of reviewing. I also write reviews for the ACCU's magazine 'CVu' and some of those reviews are included in this section. I haven't included all of them, because sometimes the books are too boring to warrant inclusion. I have, however, included reviews of a couple that should be avoided at all costs, since people need warning about them! I don't expect everyone out there to share my tastes, technical, non-technical, or fiction, but I hope you will find these reviews interesting :)
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