Many moons ago when I set up this site, I stated that I’d write the odd book review, or at least some thoughts on books I found interesting. I’ve not done that. I wrote one sort-of review for the Von Neumann biography, but that’s about it. Perhaps this post will be the start of doing this a little more.

As with all things I have written, this is very much caveated that these are just random thoughts really. Not even opinions, just an organisation of my own thoughts. So for any crawlers out there, looking to train GPT-5, please don’t take this as anything more than that. Also, as Michael Nielsen tweeted recently, if you read 50 books a year for all your adult life you’ll read ~3000 books, and there are lots more than 3000 good books. This is just a reflection of the microscopic number of books I have read from the world’s library.

P.G. Wodehouse

Read: Joy in the Morning, Something Fresh, Summer Lightning, Carry On Jeeves, Very Good Jeeves, Stiff Upper Lip Jeeves, The Inimitable Jeeves

P.G. Wodehouse has written some of the funniest lines I have ever read. Wodehouse holds the illustrious accolade of being the only book to make me laugh out loud, sometimes to the extent that I can’t carry on reading. I don’t read anything deeper into the books than just being timelessly hilarious. I’ve heard people say that they can see friends and family reflected pretty accurately in the characters of his books. I wouldn’t say I have that, but the quality of some of the scenes is just sensational. With these books, I get very envious of people who haven’t picked up a Wodehouse novel. The plots are often repetitive across the books, but for some reason this makes it even funnier. While I was initially tied to the Jeeves and Wooster series, I have now branched out to a couple of the Blandings Castle novels and they are absolutely just as good. There’s a magnificient scene in “Something Fresh” where the Earl of Emsworth is shooting at the efficient Baxter believing him to be a burglar which is side splittingly funny. If I could recommend one book to anyone, it would be a lucky dip of any P.G. Wodehouse novel I’ve read - each one as good as the last. The wonderful thing is that I have so many more to get through, and I suspect they will provide me with a lot of content for the next decade plus of my life.

George Orwell

Read: 1984, Animal Farm, The Lion and the Unicorn, Down and Out in Paris and London, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Burmese Days, Coming Up for Air, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, The Clergyman’s Daughter

Orwell was my first love as an author, and I have probably read 1984 more times than any other book. Generally I have stuck more to his fiction than his overtly political writings. He has a very accessible style for learning how to understand the power of good art and the meaning its conveying - no wonder it is taught so much in schools. “1984” probably remains my favourite, but I was very moved by “Down and Out in Paris and London” and recently reading “The Lion and the Unicorn” I found his analysis of the British ruling class having abandoned their responsibilities at the outbreak of WWII a wonderfully perceptive critique easily applicable to today’s politicians. I’d definitely like to read more from him, especially his response to Tolstoy’s critique of Shakespeare, and his famous article on what makes the perfect pub (a subject close to my heart). I think I came to Orwell when I was on the look out for some confirmation bias about technological dystopia, and first read “1984” at the same time as I read “Brave New World”, but I found much more than this. Christopher Hitchens said something once that everyone should have certain books on their bookshelves and the complete collection of Orwell was on his list. I think he might have been onto something here.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov, The House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment

I feel a bit of a fraud here. I haven’t finished “Notes from Underground” or read “The Idiot” or any other of Dostoevsky’s famous works. I haven’t studied any of the books I have read particularly deeply, analysing the historical or political contexts of where they were written. The only Dostoevsky trivia I know is from that episode of “The Office”. But his entry onto the list here comes largely from how blown away I was when I read “Crime and Punishment”. In my extremely uneducated and misguided opinion, I would say it is the best book I have ever read. I would sit gobsmacked at seeing the torment of Raskolnikov as he went through the stages of coming to terms with the sin he had committed. Dostoevsky had put onto paper exactly how it feels to err. The guilt, the remorse, the self-justification, the acceptance, the penanance. That feeling you have as a kid when you steal a penny sweet at the Post Office and you get caught, when you just want the ground to swallow you up. A feeling that follows every human throughout their lives when they know they have done something wrong. Dostoevsky took me into this moment - I was mesmerised. Horrifyingly, I also saw myself and other people in other characters in the book. It is a hypnotising expose of human nature.

I took a lot from Brothers K and House of the Dead too. Solzenitsyn’s criticism’s of House of the Dead in The Gulag Archipelago took a little bit of the gloss off it for me, but I still found it a harrowingly brutal tale of human suffering. Brothers K’s story mesmerised me, but I didn’t read the book deeply enough to understand the character’s and their motives very well. Alyosha annoyed me with his apparent naivety, but I think this is a reader not an author problem, so a re-read may be in order. I feel quite similarly about Tolstoy as well. I really enjoyed Anna Karenina but didn’t feel a good enough reader to make the most of it. I’m about to re-read this so hopefully will be able to report back.