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Books of 2024 on the Price Writer Podcast Episode 23
12 Plays1 month ago
Books mentioned:
Best of the year
A Risky Business: An Actuary's Guide to Quantifying and Managing Risk in Society - Catrin Townsend
Non-fiction
Fluke - Dr Brian Klaas
Escape from Model Land - Erica Thompson
You're Better Than They Think You Are - Sir Rod Aldridge
Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne
The Power of Moments - Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Enzo Ferrari - Luca Dal Monte
The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life - Steven Bartlett
Churchill - Andrew Roberts
Normandy ’44 - James Holland
D-Day - Antony Beevor
Stalingrad - Antony Beevor
Band of Brothers - Stephen E. Ambrose
D-Day - Stephen E. Ambrose
The Battle of the Atlantic - Jonathan Dimbleby
Masters of the Air - Donald L. Miller
Sicily '43 - James Holland
Becoming Superman - J Michael Straczynski
Midnight in Chernobyl - Adam Higginbotham
Challenger - Adam Higginbotham
Supercommunicators - Charles Duhigg
Methods of Persuasion - Nick Kolenda
Imagine Reading This Book - Nick Kolenda
Pre-Suasion - Robert Cialdini
The Challenger Sale - Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson
Dark Psychology and Manipulation - Lucas Bailey
The Illusion of Choice - Richard Shotton
The Charisma Myth - Olivia Fox Cabane
Want - Gillian Anderson
We Can All Make It - Sara Davies
Single-Minded: My Life in Business - Claude Littner
Fiction
Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey
Caliban's War - James S. A. Corey
Abaddon's Gate - James S. A. Corey
Cibola Burn - James S. A. Corey
Nemesis Games - James S. A. Corey
Babylon's Ashes - James S. A. Corey
Persepolis Rising - James S. A. Corey
Tiamat's Wrath - James S. A. Corey
Leviathan Falls - James S. A. Corey
The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu, Ken Liu
Pompeii - Robert Harris
Greyhound - C.S. Forester
The Roommate - Rosie Danan
Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire - Isaac Asimov
Second Foundation - Isaac Asimov
Precipice - Robert Harris
French Short Stories - Lingo Mastery
Short Stories in French - Olly Richards, Richard Simcott
French Sci-Fi Short Stories - Sebastian Cutillo
To Children
Skin in the Game - Jane Wurwand
I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai
Jo Malone: My Story
The Trials of Life - David Attenborough
World War 1 & 2 History for Kids History Brought Alive
The Princess Bride - William Goldman
Tin Tin – various including TinTin on the Moon
Star Wars: In the Shadow of Yavin
Some of The Wizard of Oz Collection by - L. Frank Baum
The Princess Bride (again)
The Adventures of Parsley the Lion
Wonka - Sibéal Pounder, Paul King
Sing - Dreamworks
Both
My Family and Other Animals - Gerand Durrell
Kensuke's Kingdom - Michael Morpurgo
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Transcript
Introduction to 2024 Book Reviews
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello! So in this video I'm going to do a rundown of all the books I read in 2024. I was inspired by video on YouTube by Angela Collier who is a physicist, YouTuber, really good.
00:00:14
Speaker
She ran down all of the books she read in 2024 and I was like I could do that, I wonder how many I read. So I read roughly 65 books but you see why that's a little bit tricky to count.
Favorite Book: 'A Risky Business'
00:00:31
Speaker
So best book of the year by far is A Risky Business, An Actuary's Guide to Quantifying and Managing Risk in Society by Katrin Townsend who very kindly wrote the foreword for my own book Pricewriter.
00:00:46
Speaker
i think it's a great book so it's written in a way that just feels like Katrin is explaining these quite complicated things to you in a very nice and kind way. It's not a book that's really for me as a qualified actuary. It's more an introduction for people who want to know what actuarial science is to read through and find out about it.
00:01:09
Speaker
But for example, my dad really wanted me to be an actuary, but he never really understood what it was. So he worked for a life insurance company and to him, the actuaries were people that sat in offices and got paid a lot.
00:01:23
Speaker
And I'd love to have been able to give him the Catrin's book for him to read and understand what my
Exploring Luck and Randomness in 'Fluke'
00:01:29
Speaker
job was. But unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago, so I couldn't.
00:01:34
Speaker
But I think Catrin's book is fantastic. I do think it's a good thing to get for your teens in pricing departments. And if anyone's thinking about going through the actuarial exams, they should definitely read the whole of the book. Because trust me, you'll enjoy reading Katrin talking about actuarial science in a way that you might well find much more interesting than you will do when you get into the actuarial notes and actually studying for your exams. so So that was my favourite book of the year.
00:02:08
Speaker
The next book on my list is Fluke by Dr. Brian Clas. So it's a book about how pretty much everything in the world is actually just pure luck, random chance. Very little is actually planned and occurs as we expect it.
00:02:25
Speaker
So if you see a time travel story, people go back in time and are absolutely scared of doing anything that may change the past. But we totally don't live our lives as if every single thing we do is going to change our possible future, even though that probably is the case.
00:02:42
Speaker
So as an example, I've got two friends from university. They are married with a couple of children and they met in halls.
00:02:53
Speaker
They met because the university system that allocates people into different halls put the two of them together. And that just is such a random thing. If the system had just been coded slightly differently, they may never have met.
00:03:07
Speaker
So their children might never have existed. So it's just a really interesting way of seeing the world and very eye-opening. So next was Escape from mo Land by
Disappointments and Forgettable Reads
00:03:17
Speaker
Erica Thompson.
00:03:18
Speaker
It's quite a good book. It's I found it a little bit light, but it is quite good at making you think about how our models actually affect the world and how our own thought processes often affect how we build our models.
00:03:34
Speaker
So it's an interesting sort of double layer there. And models are really our interpretations of the world, no matter how much we think the machines have made them or that we've been very dispassionate in the way that we've built them.
00:03:48
Speaker
They are particularly full of our own biases and our own way of viewing the world. So i also read You're Better Than You Think You Are by Sir Rod Aldridge.
00:03:59
Speaker
So he's a business founder. I didn't really enjoy this book very much. I often find some biographies lack any form of consideration of people's lives and perhaps how lucky they were or how they treated other people around them.
00:04:16
Speaker
I just think Rod Aldridge came across as someone who was like, I always did everything correctly, how I thought was the right thing to do stuff. He had a lot of help from the government, which he does talk about, but doesn't really acknowledge how society helped him become extremely rich and build a very big business. So I find that rather strange and almost almost disappointing, really.
00:04:40
Speaker
I read Blue Ocean Strategy by w Chan Kim and Renee Morgborn. I can't remember anything from this book at all. Not at all.
00:04:51
Speaker
I definitely read it. It's about how you should avoid competition. So you've got your sort of red, your kind of red seas that are full of lots of businesses all fighting it out, very predatory.
00:05:06
Speaker
And you should look for your like
Seizing Pivotal Moments in Marketing
00:05:08
Speaker
blue ocean. So your empty areas where there isn't already lots of businesses already doing stuff where it's really competitive but honestly I can't remember a thing of this book beyond that so um I read The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath I thought it was an interesting book so they're quite good at taking a concept and making it a very clear step strategy or a very clear step plan for
00:05:37
Speaker
through how you should deliver something. And that's really what they do here. So the idea is, particularly in marketing, you've got these moments where you can capture people's attention. So it comes about, because when people go on holiday, generally you remember like the best thing that happened and you might remember the start or the end of the holiday.
00:05:56
Speaker
so it's really about pandering to those particular moments where people will engage with your product or your marketing. I read Enzo Ferrari by Luca Dalmonte about the founder of Ferrari.
00:06:11
Speaker
I didn't take a lot away from this book. I think it's just another one that my own life is so different to these people that founded particular
Uninspiring Biographies and WWII Insights
00:06:20
Speaker
businesses. I just don't really cross over with them.
00:06:24
Speaker
I read The Diary of a CEO by Stephen Bartlett. It's okay. It's actually sort of 33 marketing tips and some of them are okay.
00:06:37
Speaker
I read Churchill by Andrew Roberts. which kicked off quite a long series that we're going to do in a second on Second World War books. Churchill, he's a guy that was born into a very privileged family who then lived an extremely privileged life and rose to be the leader of the country in that pretty typical prime minister story for like most of the people that seem to have ruled the UK.
00:07:06
Speaker
And I didn't take a lot away from this. I didn't really feel like, wow, there's a life I could emulate or in any way learn from. I read Normandy 44 by James Holland. It was brutal.
00:07:23
Speaker
It's a very in-depth explanation of the conflict in Normandy between D-Day and really when they finally broke out and retook France.
00:07:39
Speaker
it's It's good. It's in-depth. I did like it. I did take quite a lot away from it. I also read D-Day by Anthony Bivoua and Stalingrad by Anthony Bivoua as well. They are both, again, very in-depth.
00:07:56
Speaker
blow by blow, day by day accounts of these conflicts. Stalingrad is brutal, really grim. And the thing I really took away from it is that the reason the Russians and Germans lost so many people in the war is just the terrible way they fought it. It's absolutely grueling and grinding.
00:08:18
Speaker
The Russians are fighting a war in the middle of the 20th century on horseback because they just don't have supplies. the Germans as well, they just don't have the equipment that they need.
00:08:32
Speaker
An absolutely gruelling and shocking conflict. I don't think I'd recommend other people to read it unless you're really interested in in the conflict.
00:08:45
Speaker
I read Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose. I really liked that, actually. I thought it was a good a good way that it focused on a relatively small number of people and how they fought the war.
00:08:59
Speaker
And you do get a sense of the camaraderie between them. And it is a story full of characters. You will like some people more than others. It's interesting just how the backgrounds are so different for the soldiers, but how they did end up coming together and really developing as a unit.
00:09:19
Speaker
You really take home from it, especially reading it after Stalingrad, is how the Americans fought is so incredibly different, and the Brits as well, to how the Germans and the Russians fought each other. So we were super well trained before we even went into combat.
00:09:36
Speaker
We had lots of supplies. We didn't advance until we had very comfortably built supply routes for our troops. We genuinely cared about the troops and didn't want to en masse throw people into what were meat grinders in Stalingrad. So it's just the real contrast.
00:09:55
Speaker
And actually, one of the reasons I think the death toll was so much lower for the UK and the USA is the way that we fought was just completely different and much more sensible, in my view, way of fighting.
00:10:09
Speaker
I also read D-Day by Stephen Ambrose, fairly similar to Band of Brothers. I then switched to The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby. This was a great book actually, I will definitely read more by Jonathan Dimbleby and don't, I didn't really know any detail about the Battle for the Atlantic and I think the thing that's really amazing about it for me is the way that the allies are really on the ropes trying to supply Europe and the UK and it prevents them from doing any action like in reinvading the continent, retaking back and liberating the continent.
00:10:49
Speaker
And then really very suddenly it turns for them and largely because of technology. So improved radar, improved ships, lots of technological improvements, sudden improvements in depth charges and sonar.
00:11:06
Speaker
And all of it just seems to come together at once. And they turn the tide of the war really suddenly in the Atlantic. And quite quickly, the U-boats go from being the victors to being penned in.
00:11:21
Speaker
unable to actually leave and fight and it just really again shows the difference in the way that we fought the wars and the power of science and technology.
Practical Insights on Marketing and Communication
00:11:30
Speaker
also read Masters of the Air by Donald Miller.
00:11:33
Speaker
I watched the Apple show as well and I thought it was good. I can't remember a great deal from it. I think that the book was quite similar to the TV show so it just crossed over so much that I didn't really take that much away from the book.
00:11:47
Speaker
And the last war one I read is Sicily 43. I read that whilst so I was in Greece, actually, that I had been to Sicily before. I had no idea how brutal the fighting was on Sicily. And again, it's quite play by play.
00:12:04
Speaker
it's It's a very in-depth analysis. So I then finished with Second World War books. So next one, another one I read on holiday. It's Becoming Superman by J. Michael Straczynski. So he's the creator of Babylon 5 as well as the author of several successful Hollywood films.
00:12:23
Speaker
I found the guy brilliant, really inspiring. And he grew up in the 50s in the US and often I think we have this like rose-tinted view of the 50s as this real time of prosperity, this like golden age of Americana.
00:12:41
Speaker
But J. Michael Straczynski's life was brutal. He had very poor upbringing, he was very abused by his parents and people around him And yet he turned that into such a positive thing in his life, which is why it's called Becoming Superman.
00:12:58
Speaker
He really embodied being the opposite of this terrible upbringing that he had. And he just, he just is a nice person. He's created such great things.
00:13:09
Speaker
And I really take away from it, he's just, he's just like, right. because that's what he's famous for, writing, and he just writes really prolifically, and he'll go back and edit and make something really wonderful, but he's like, just write, and write, and write, and write.
00:13:27
Speaker
Don't get hung up, don't stop, don't think too much, just keep writing, and then sort it out later, and I just found that really inspiring, but he's a great guy,
00:13:38
Speaker
Then I read Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham. It's a good book. It really brings home the just awful nature of communism and the perverse way the whole system was set up to be so much more about pretending mistakes never or couldn't or never would happen or hadn't happened than actually dealing with the realities of both a nuclear industry and a nuclear disaster.
00:14:10
Speaker
I found it great. It's really in-depth, really detailed. It counts as like 100 pages of in the bibliography.
00:14:20
Speaker
eight It's an absolutely brilliant book. i I read Challenger by Adam Higginbotham as well. I didn't think this one was as good, although was really eye-opening for me to consider, like, being someone born in the 80s, to actually consider how these two things happen quite close together and have similarities between them.
00:14:44
Speaker
So Challenger came about really because of a lot of hubris in the NASA and a system where they just believe they're extremely good at things and nothing could go wrong.
00:14:57
Speaker
I really think as a book it flags for the middle third probably. it seems there's a good couple of hundred pages that are just the couple of days leading up to the launch of Challenger and I can see why it needs to be very much a book that's about that but it's really minute by minute with quite a large cast of characters and it does get drags really. they I read Super Communicators by Charles DeHigg.
00:15:31
Speaker
So can't actually remember particularly any of the things that were in it. I think it was good and I think I took stuff away from it, but i can't actually remember anything specific from it.
00:15:42
Speaker
I read Methods of Persuasion by Nick Kalander and Imagine Reading This Book by Nick Kalander as well. I thought these were really good. It's it's got a lot of genuine tips.
00:15:55
Speaker
about marketing and psychology and how to have more of an impact with the work that you do and the messages that you present and it's very much based on kind of a list of things you can do or tactics and I just found it really useful it's got things you can really yeah put into practice I read Presuasion by Robert Cialdini and He's very good. So he also wrote Persuasion and other psychology books.
00:16:28
Speaker
It's very good. It's very long, but it's really jam packed with a lot of good quality research, often that he was the academic involved in. So it's pretty impressive that he turns what he's done in his academic work into a book that's really readable by people to understand how marketing works.
00:16:49
Speaker
or marketing professionals to understand how to be more effective, or just people in their everyday life with how they can be more persuasive and more effective at delivering their message to people and engaging well.
00:17:01
Speaker
Lots of really useful, really practical tips in there. I read The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. I find this pretty dull.
00:17:11
Speaker
So it's very dry, management-y book and didn't really do it for me. I read Dark Psychology and Manipulation by Lucas Bailey. It really is quite a dark book. It really does make you think about some of the nasty stuff that goes on in the world, particularly to try and get us to buy stuff, but also to keep us addicted to social media and computer games as well.
00:17:38
Speaker
quite, quite nasty actually. ah don't recommend this one because I think you can take away a lot of the message about the psychology without it needing to be such a negative way of presenting it.
Fictional Reflections and Critiques
00:17:52
Speaker
I read The Illusion of Choice by Richard Shotten, so another psychology book and this one looking at again how we're manipulated by the world around us.
00:18:04
Speaker
read The commit Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cobain. It was good, actually. So, the premise there is that rather than charisma being something people are born with, it's actually something that you can study and learn as if it's a skill.
00:18:20
Speaker
So, it's not really even knowledge, it's about skills. And... I thought it was quite believable actually. i found I found it to be quite a believable presentation.
00:18:31
Speaker
I've not necessarily found the actual things she suggested doing to be that effective. But it's on the whole a good book. I read Want by Gillian Anderson, which I'm not going to talk any more about. It's definitely not appropriate for work.
00:18:46
Speaker
I read Sarah Davis' book, so she's from Dragon's Den. We can all make it. I like this one actually, I really like Sarah, I definitely relate to her in a way that I did not relate to the other two people's biographies I mentioned.
00:19:02
Speaker
She is super down to earth, felt like it's quite a similar background in life to me actually. And i just i think the way she went about business to be really cool. Just very focused, very listens to customers and very much wants to make products that people actually use and enjoy using. So I really liked her and I liked her as a person as well.
00:19:25
Speaker
I read Single Minded, which is Claude Littner's book from The Apprentice. It's the second time I've read that one, actually. I really like Claude Burke. I think he's a really great person as well.
00:19:37
Speaker
It gets a little bit bored, really, and a little bit corporate towards the end. He starts off very much entrepreneurial and he doesn't gloss over it. He makes some really big business mistakes, loses money, largely his own money.
00:19:54
Speaker
And then he takes moves more into quite a corporate world. And by the end of it it's extremely bored, dreamy. And I didn't relate to that much to that as much just because that's not something I find as fun as the entrepreneurial side of business.
00:20:12
Speaker
But I do like him as a person. I think he's really quite clever. He's articulate in his book. He's got very good business kind of ethics. And yeah, I think that's a good book. Very inspirational. now we move on to the fiction books that I read.
00:20:31
Speaker
So I read all eight of the Expanse books, one after another. It was towards the start of the year. So there's Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey.
00:20:44
Speaker
I thought this one was really good, actually. It's quite basic story in a lot of ways, and it's very much... influenced and inspired by noir stories from kind of the mid-20th century usa and it it really works. So without a sci-fi setting the genre is almost detective fiction and action orientated as well.
00:21:16
Speaker
So I think it's quite good In fact, yeah, I think it's a good book. i I liked it a lot, but like say, it's got a surprisingly basic story as well. So I then read Caliban's War, so the second Expanse book.
00:21:30
Speaker
This one is good. I think it's probably not as good as Leviathan Wakes, but it's all right. It feels like a bridge in a way between the first story and the rest of what's going to happen. So it's one of those kind of setting things up books, which is surprising because it's quite long.
00:21:52
Speaker
So I then read Abaddon's Gate, I think this is probably my favourite of the eight books or perhaps second favourite, so it's a book with a lot of mystery, it's a book with a lot of like realistic physics and it's got a lot of action in it as well, so I think it's probably my preferred one, I would definitely recommend it, I mean I recommend reading all eight,
00:22:19
Speaker
because you need to, to appreciate the whole thing, but I particularly recommend that one, the third book, as being, being probably my favourite. Then it was Cibola Byrne, it's as good as well, actually, it's got the mystery aspects, it's very, kind of,
00:22:36
Speaker
influenced by the sort of Wild West and the settlers and the pioneers in the USA in the 19th century. it also confronts lot the reality of what it would be like being so far away from Earth and able to communicate in sort of real time with just the light delay to get messages back but for you to be unable to affect anything at home and for them to be unable to affect anything with you it it's an interesting look at how that would really function and yeah I think it's okay the next two books Nemesis Games is okay it's an interesting change in the way that it's written
00:23:22
Speaker
which I don't want to do any spoilers, but it's, it's all right. It's quite a big change of setting as well. It's sudden kind of change in the way that the story works, but it's, it's okay.
00:23:37
Speaker
Babylon's Ashes is my least favorite of the lot. I found it long, quite plodding. It ends really with a kind of ghost in the machine. Ex Machina, everything's okay in the end, that felt slightly lazy on the part the author. I mean, ultimately, when people write these, they get to decide what happens.
00:23:57
Speaker
And it just felt like they didn't really know how they were going to sort this one out. So then they Easter egged throughout the story a way that it could all just be solved at the end.
00:24:08
Speaker
in a really quite tidy nice kind of way, just didn't feel like it worked for me. So there's then quite a another kind of change in the way the story works for the next three books, there's quite a time jump between them.
00:24:22
Speaker
so next one's Persepolis Rising, it's to me a bit like Caliban's War, it's just a setup, even though it's quite a long book it just feels like it's setting up the pieces for the finale of the story.
00:24:35
Speaker
It's okay, there's a bit of action in it, it's quite, it's quite a good read, but yeah, I don't, I don't think it's, yeah, it's towards the bottom of the, the ranking for me.
00:24:47
Speaker
Then we come to Tiamat's Wrath, which is also my favourite of them, or maybe my second favourite, it's really hard to choose between that and Abeddon's Gate. This is a great book,
00:24:59
Speaker
The way all the characters have been built up for so long, so carefully, really comes together. It is full of action. There's twists, there's surprises. You keep guessing. It's tense.
00:25:12
Speaker
You'll be on your seat. You can wonder really where the story's going to go. i yeah I really like this one, actually. It was well worth reading the rest of them to get to such a such a great book.
00:25:24
Speaker
And then the last one is Leviathan Falls. It's not... it's okay and it does have a satisfying ending. It's again kind of long for the amount of story that's actually contained within it, but it's good and it, let's say, it is a satisfying ending. i would recommend all eight of them They are good books.
00:25:46
Speaker
So then having read a bunch of fiction, i don't very often read fiction But I was, I really wanted to read these Expanse books. So I was like, oh yeah, fiction. Fiction's great.
00:25:57
Speaker
Brilliant. i want to read more fiction. Then I read The Three Body Problem. I'm sorry to say it, I do not understand why people like this book. I think it's partly came because I just read eight pretty good sci-fi books.
00:26:13
Speaker
I was like, yeah, I'll read another sci-fi book. And yeah, I just, I found this one dull. i i The bits I found most interesting were finding out about the cultural revolution and things I didn't know about life in China.
00:26:30
Speaker
in the sort of fairly recent past, mostly within my kind of lifetime or or a little bit before. But the sci-fi I didn't, wasn't interested in.
00:26:40
Speaker
a lot of it just felt really contrived. I know that people say it's great that it uses realistic physics, but I'm not really sure that's true. And I feel like the physics is used in a way that's just contrived to make the plot work.
00:26:55
Speaker
So no, do not recommend this and I don't get it. The last third of the book just, it feels like an, it feels like he just wanted to summarize, like it's just so like, so high level and fast paced and fitting in so much going on that it's like just reading many, many Wikipedia articles one after another.
00:27:19
Speaker
So read Pompeii by Robert Harris. i Robert Harris is one of the few fiction authors I will always read when he's got a new book out. He is a bit hit and miss though. His good books are really very good, but his small number of misses...
00:27:35
Speaker
I just, I'm not great. Pompeii, it's odd. I just, I realised I hadn't read this one, so I read everything else, but there's one I hadn't read, which is odd, because as it turns out, we owned it. So, we're not sure which one of us sits it belonged to, actually. Perhaps I've been gifted at at some point in the past, but...
00:27:53
Speaker
But yeah, so it's all right. it's It's in the sort of top end, but it's not one his knockout brilliant ones, but it's not bad either. So whilst I was reading the Battle of the Atlantic, I also read Greyhound by Siasta Forrester.
00:28:09
Speaker
It's about a... warship captain during an Atlantic crossing. It's good. It certainly brings to life what it would have been like. It's quite grueling.
00:28:23
Speaker
You are put into his head when he has to make decisions with a definite lack of sufficient information, very high levels of uncertainty.
00:28:35
Speaker
And a lot of the time it's a payoff. So he has to move his pieces around, but he doesn't know what's right. it's always trade-off so if he does move his fighting ships away from the convoy to chase down a threat then he leaves the convoy in danger if he splits his forces then he probably can't defeat the enemy it's it's good actually it's very good i read the remake by rosie dannon i read this on holiday It's, I'm not going to talk much about it because it's another one that's not appropriate for work.
00:29:10
Speaker
And then I did another couple of sci-fi actually, so I reread, but I've not read them for years, Prelude to Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, so they're Isaac Asimov books.
00:29:24
Speaker
They are good. The thing with Asimov is that the concepts are really good but the characters and the narrative is often quite basic and not terribly exciting.
00:29:41
Speaker
The characters are very light with the exception probably of a couple of the characters in Second Foundation actually. For the most part they are not deep characters and the situations are not deep and not well fleshed out. There's very little description as well.
00:30:00
Speaker
You very much have to fill that in with your own imagination. But... What Adamoff's very good at, and a lot of people fail to appreciate this, is giving you what seems like a very concrete, clever, scientific concept that solves a lot of problems and then breaking it So foundations about this idea of being able to mathematically predict the future, but it very quickly goes wrong and it's only rescued actually by the, by the existence of telepaths, which is quite unscientific.
00:30:38
Speaker
I don't want to give spoilers for the story, but it's just, it's very interesting how Asimov does this. And, and similar with the robot stories, so people think to themselves, oh, the three laws of robotics, that's a really logical, sensible of a idea. That's a way in which we can control robots and AI and stuff, but it's just not true. Nearly all of the robot stories about how the three laws don't work for various reasons, they're all about the conflicts that robots or the masters of robots end up with because of the existence of these three laws.
00:31:12
Speaker
There's a very good one where robots are used to actually commit a yeah ah murder because there's just ways of manipulating these laws in order to make that happen.
00:31:27
Speaker
But it's it's really cleverly worked out. And that's the thing with Asimov. It's often really cleverly worked out. And some of the mystery twists are actually really quite good. But as I say, the narrative and the plotting cannot be very light.
00:31:40
Speaker
Now, my last... fiction book was Precipice by Robert Harris and that is very much the opposite this was very good really good Robert Harris it's about the build-up to the first world war it's told through the eyes of the prime minister's mistress And it is a really good book. You feel like you are there.
00:32:11
Speaker
And there are some things that are absolutely true. They are, it's based on primary sources of evidence that are absolutely jaw-droppingly shocking how the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and the people around them made decisions and some of the choices they made that have put...
00:32:30
Speaker
words into our language to describe the fighting during the First World War. And the the way they made the choices are horrifying.
00:32:43
Speaker
So the last three fiction books I read are all dual language books. So they're all in English and French. So I'm going to France in August and I've not actually spoken French since we moved back. So that's about 10 years ago.
00:33:01
Speaker
So I thought it probably a good idea to check in and see if I was any good at understanding it. So, so yeah, so three dual language books. It's, they're pretty typical of dual language books. So they're all short story books.
00:33:17
Speaker
They're good for learning a language but they're not particularly good for enjoying short
Children's Books and Dual Language Experiences
00:33:21
Speaker
stories. So there's French short stories by Lingo Mastery, there's short stories in French by Ollie Richards and Richard Simcock, and there's French sci-fi short stories by Sébastien Coutelet.
00:33:33
Speaker
I can't remember anything from the first one. at all. I think there is actually, I remember there being a joke at one point about someone drinking from Julius Caesar's fountain somewhere in France and how if the water's good enough for Julius Caesar then it's good enough for him.
00:33:54
Speaker
yeah so the second one, short stories in French, It's okay. Some of the stories are vaguely interesting. They're more kind of situational than narrative-based and kind of conversations, but it's okay.
00:34:09
Speaker
The French sci-fi short stories, I think there was two or three that were all right. Some of them were just really high-level, really basic stories.
00:34:20
Speaker
Some of them just had massive gaping plot holes where you're like...
Inspirational Reads and Classic Stories
00:34:25
Speaker
that doesn't work scientifically or why in the world would that person behave like that, it makes no sense.
00:34:31
Speaker
So that's it, so that was it for the fiction books.
00:34:38
Speaker
So now it's the books that I read to my children. So for my daughter I read Skin in the Game by Jane Fervund, the entrepreneur behind Dermalogica.
00:34:51
Speaker
This was very good. So her business life really started off when she was freezing cold in her flat in Scotland. I think it was in Glasgow.
00:35:04
Speaker
And she saw an advert in the newspaper to move to South Africa. for work and she just did and she did a couple of years in South Africa and then her and her husband decided to go to California and they just did and they started that business it's very much a story of working hard at something building something, she definitely sees a vision and she also is not in any way put off by what we might call existing wisdom of things or in many ways the opinions of other people.
00:35:46
Speaker
She just kind of goes for it and it works out for her. Partly there's some elements of luck but I think she's very much someone who sees lots of pieces and lots of experience in her world or different people and kind of brings it together to make new things.
00:36:09
Speaker
And she describes it as joining up the dots. And I think that's a good way of putting it. So I really like this one. i also say genuinely found it inspirational. i read I Am Malalia.
00:36:21
Speaker
by Malalia Yousafzai. This is quite gruelling. I skipped over a couple of parts of it because I just found my daughter wouldn't deal with it that well.
00:36:37
Speaker
It is a real eye-opener to the reality of a young woman in kind of oppressive regime in the world and also the plight of people that flee.
00:36:50
Speaker
And for me, she is a really inspirational person. and Her story is harrowing, but also ends up very well. It kind of does make you feel pride.
00:37:07
Speaker
But yeah, very good. Quite a dark read. I wouldn't suggest reading it to to a child. It's probably okay for a teenager. also read Jo Malone, my story. So Jo Malone, the founder of the perfume company.
00:37:23
Speaker
I found her brilliant. So the book is in kind of three stages. There's the original founding of her first business. There's her coping with illness, very serious illness in the middle.
00:37:36
Speaker
And then the last third is her setting up her second business. And it's good. She admits to her failings in a way that I really like.
00:37:52
Speaker
It's also quite reflective. You sense she's telling you about the lessons that she learned and in that way it's pretty good biography. So yeah, I would definitely recommend Jane Malone's book.
00:38:04
Speaker
it's It's great for a kind of young fred for for a child, I think they can really appreciate it. So, yeah, i definitely recommend that one.
00:38:17
Speaker
I read The Trials of Life, the David Attenborough one. My daughter's very into biology. i I liked it. It's not necessarily my subject, but I thought it was good. I think it's one you can read to... My daughter's about nine, so I think it's one that you can read to someone of about that age.
00:38:36
Speaker
And she's really into biology, so it worked quite well. It's okay. I also read World War I and two History for Kids from the History Brought to Alive series. So that tied in with the yeah the series I went on to to look at this.
00:38:52
Speaker
it it's good I didn't find it that interesting. the way that it's meant to be for children, I think it could have been a lot more interesting and engaging. It had a certain list of names and dates about it.
00:39:06
Speaker
which I didn't think was brilliant as it is a massive sprawling subject. So yeah, I don't think I'd recommend that one. also read Clan The Princess Bride. So it's a, it is a book as well as a film.
00:39:23
Speaker
I think it's really quite good actually. It's a great film. It's a good book. There is the wraparound story in the film is kind of a ah boy, think it's being read a story by, think it might be Peter Fork actually, it's while since I've seen it, but it it's a boy who's ill being read the story by his grandfather.
00:39:45
Speaker
The wraparound story in the book is different, but I think it really works, it's very cleverly done, it's very meta, I liked it a lot actually. So to my son, i read various Tintin books,
00:40:01
Speaker
I found them kind of disappointing as an adult actually. The particularly kind of Tintin when he goes to the moon, so Destination Moon, it's got plot twists in it that you can just see coming so far off and you end up feeling like why yeah are the characters so foolish that it didn't occur to them what was going on.
00:40:23
Speaker
and When they actually go to the moon, they take it in their giant rocket, a ah huge heavy metal tank to ride around the moon in, and the logic of it just just doesn't work for me.
00:40:38
Speaker
And similarly, the other stories, could be really inconsistent in the characters, so Tintin can be really inept at times,
00:40:49
Speaker
ah or he can be really insightful and clever at other times it's just not kind of a clear character and the same with the captain he could just be really like inconsistent and I feel a bit like it would be funnier if they stuck to their stereotypes but I guess that wouldn't work well for the narrative always it's I mean it's obviously it's for children I read Star Wars in the Shadow of Yavin, so it's a graphic novel.
00:41:19
Speaker
We liked it actually. So I read it before, but I read it in French years ago, was quite interesting to then read it in English out loud to my son as well.
00:41:30
Speaker
ah think in French it's L'Hombra de Yavin, so same title. Yeah, it's it's a good book. I liked it. It's in the Legends series, so like no I just think it's one of those ones where they're like, oh, that's never happened.
00:41:46
Speaker
But you still buy it, and it's still ah still a good story. Lovely artwork as well. I read some of the Wizard of Oz collection, and say, by L. Frank Baum.
00:41:58
Speaker
I think it was the first couple of books, might have been maybe three or four of them. ah don't remember it that clearly. I mean, it's kind of fantasy set in this land of Oz.
00:42:09
Speaker
The thing I did take away with it is thinking about it in the time it was written. Because, like, it... kind of comes across as the wizard is kind of like the US president, might be Theodore Roosevelt, it might be slightly earlier than that, but the idea that it's kind of a guy hey is supposedly working all these levers and power and stuff, but actually isn't really that powerful, and isn't really doing anything kind of
00:42:44
Speaker
good and the way that Oz is quite an agrarian society is very like about kind of that agrarian lifestyle yeah from the US from kind of 120 years ago so in that way it's quite interesting in the q cultural aspects of the United States society that it kind of about, so I wouldn't recommend it particularly, the it was okay.
00:43:16
Speaker
I also read The Princess Bride to my son. i read him The Adventures of Parsley the Lion. He's very into a lot of the TV from when i was a child, and he's quite gentle in that way, so yes we read books about past it's quite a nice story actually they've taken the each of the original episodes made it into a story but they've actually modernized it so it works for me and I think it works for kind of an audience nowadays and he's also watched them so it connects together in that way
00:43:51
Speaker
I also read to Mo, I read him the book of Sing, so Sing the Dreamworks film, and I read him the book of Wonka. He really likes the books of films,
00:44:06
Speaker
I do not like reading the books of films. Both of them are just scene for scene, word for word, action for action, exactly what happened in the film. And that's just not a very exciting read to me.
00:44:19
Speaker
So re nearly there. The last two books are ones I read to both of my children when we're on holiday. So when we were in Greece, I read to them my family and other animals, the Jared Durrell.
00:44:32
Speaker
And so i think I read this when i was in my 20s and I remember it being a lot more funny. And I remember being it being a lot more about his kind of family and his adventures going to Greece.
00:44:48
Speaker
In reality, it's actually many, many pages describing the flora and fauna of Greece. And... It's quite interesting.
00:44:59
Speaker
It's certainly quite good to read to two kids on holiday when you want them to go to sleep. It goes on a lot.
Year-End Reflections and Future Plans
00:45:07
Speaker
So not really, not as good as I remember it being. It is funny, but it's not really funny.
00:45:15
Speaker
And final one, Kenzie K's Kingdom, the Michael... Morpogo book. I thought this was excellent, really good. A great kids book but really enjoyable as an adult as well.
00:45:29
Speaker
Really made me think, really moving actually. The interplay between the two main characters is really deep and believable. They really develop friendship and The messages about war and about love and about family just are really powerfully done and really understandable by an audience of any age.
00:45:58
Speaker
Very moving book. I definitely recommend this one. So that is the entire year of books that I read. So as I said 65 ish but I can't remember how many Oz books I read and I don't really know how to count the Tintin books but Goodyear's haul of books actually really good and on the whole I was very pleased with most of them.
00:46:24
Speaker
So that's it. So I guess I will see how this video does and maybe I'll be back in 2026 to tell you about all the books I have read in 2025.
00:46:37
Speaker
Thanks very much and have a good ah good rest of you day.