Books I read In December 2019
Into The Woods by John Yorke
I didn’t intend to read this book about scriptwriting and plot structure because of any intent to put it into practice just that I find it interesting to see how stories work. Yorke’s book is excellent - clear, concise, well structured (one would hope so!) and worth a read if you want to understand what makes a plot work and their common structural elements.
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
I’ve never read any Waugh before. This probably isn't the greatest place to start, being as it is a lighthearted satire on the media. It’s very dated and not very funny, but an interesting period piece.
Bad Blood by John Carryrou
I loved this expose of everything that went wrong with Theranos, the briefly multi-billion-dollar valued medical start up and I wrote about it here.
Lush Life by David Hadzu
Billy Strayhorn was the man behind a great deal of arrangements and compositions for Duke Ellington from their meeting in 1938 through to Strayhorn’s death, at 51, in 1967. He wrote the jazz standard Lush Life, an extraordinary and haunting song, when he was only 17, and is responsible for Ellington’s theme tune, Take The A Train, which he wrote based on Ellington’s instructions on how to get to his house. My favourite piece of his is Chelsea Bridge which is both instantly enjoyable and rewards regular revisiting. A lot is made in jazz circles of how much credit Ellington gave to work created by Strayhorn but this book suggests that he was reasonably happy to be in the background. As well as one of the greatest jazz composers of all time, he was heavily involved in the civil rights movement of the 1950s/60s and was openly gay in New York in the 1940s. This biography is one of the best-written I’ve read and Hadzu has clearly done an extraordinary amount of research. It’s out of print at the moment but it’s available second-hand relatively easily (and is on Kindle) and I’d highly recommend searching it out.
Absolute Sandman IV by Neil Gaiman
The last of the main series of Sandman in the Absolute series and still as beautiful and affecting as the first time I read it decades ago.
The Tiger That Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
Michael Blastland was the previous presenter of the BBC’s More or Less (before the incumbent, Tim Harford) and has spent his journalistic career explaining the importance of understanding statistics and using them correctly. The examples in here are a bit dated and focus on the Blair/Brown years (it was published in 2008) but the lessons are timeless.
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
Renowned geochemist and geobiologist Hope Jahren has written a beautiful memoir of her life in academic science in which her deep passion for science shines through on every page. She’s extraordinary and the book is excellent.
Buy Lab Girl the Kindle edition of Lab Girl is only 99p right now
Strange Planet by Nathan W Pyle
This was a very welcome gift from a friend. Although I was vaguely aware of Pyle’s comics, I hadn’t paid them much attention, but they’re funny, touching and often deep. It’s a great read.
The Annotated Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (and Michael Patrick Hearn)
This is my eighth year re-reading A Christmas Carol over the festive period, so this time I went for a different edition and read this extensively annotated version, which brought to light many aspects of the text I was unaware of, as well as providing an absorbing history of its creation in Hearn’s lengthy introduction. It’s probably only of interest if you know the original text well, but if you do it’s well worth searching out.