It’s very true that men as well as women nowadays feel pressured to attain the ‘perfect’ body, doubtlessly egged on by countless airbrushed images of models.  Indeed, I have sometimes perhaps overdone it in the gym in my desire to improve my physical well being.  However, there is a health aspect to gym going which [...]

 
This is an account by a young American missionary of his attempt to convert the Amazon tribe of Piraha to Christianity.  Daniel Everett always knew that this was going to be a challenge, as the Piraha have resisted conversion for centuries.  However, fired up by youthful enthusiasm, Everett thinks that he will succeed where others [...]

 
This is a fascinating second novel from Bethan Roberts.  Kitty answers an advert in her local newspaper for a ‘good plain cook’, and while she is quite plain, she is not a good cook.  Her plainness is partly due to the fact that she is so young and inexperienced.  The advert had also called for [...]

 
This is a fascinating novel by Eli Gottlieb.  Nick Framingham is coming to terms with the death of his best friend, Rob Castor, who had seemed to have a stellar career in New York as an author.  Not only has Rob committed suicide, but he also murdered his ex-girlfriend Kate Pierce.  That would be traumatic [...]

 
Although I’m a bloke, I am partial to a good, well-written romance.  On the outside, it would appear that there would be a lot in Crossed Wires to appeal to me.  For instance, I spent many years happily ensconced in Cambridge, where Peter, our hero, is based.  It’s also great to read a book where [...]

 
This is an excellent novel by Alex Wheatle.  Dennis Huggins lives in one of the more bourgeois streets of Brixton, and his parents, unlike many of his peers’, are still together.  His parents also have good jobs, especially his mother, who works as a legal secretary.  However, his father is crippled due to a violent [...]

Mary Beard’s exposition of Pompeii was undoubtedly one of the best books that I read last year.  Indeed, so enamoured was my father of the book that he bought 3 copies, as he’d recently been on a field trip to Pompeii, and knew that my uncle and I are also greatly enthused [...]

This is a fantastic treatise on the subject of violence, very much aided by the fact that Slavoj Zizek’s prose is always very lively and informative.  Zizek also employs examples from popular cinema to illustrate his work, which very much adds to its readability.  You can’t really argue against a book that draws sublime parallels [...]