When I thought of myself as a public radio producer, I never had any interest in creating a show or being a host. I just thought, “That’s what somebody else does. That’s not a strength of mine.” So when we created the CDS podcast, I thought we were going to make pieces and since I’m the only person...

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No sooner had I finished The Circle and raved about it to a friend who is a voracious reader and whose opinion I trust than she had me reading Super Sad True Love Story. There are similarities, which is why I am reviewing them together. Both are set a few minutes into the future and both of them are thoroughly dystopian. Both of them also accelerate inexorably and intensify to something of a climax. Both are equally scary, although paradoxically SSTLS, which on the surface is much more violent and unfathomable, is much harder to take seriously.

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Who is Bailey?

We'll never know. All we know is that Lionel Essro...

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Against the prevailing wisdom, I continue to rely on experts to inform me, but when experts disagree, What's a person to think?

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Sally Mann is a photographer of some notoriety. She is also, it turns out, an amazingly good writer able to create word pictures every bit as nuanced and beguiling as her picture pictures. An interesting question is whether, had she not been a renowned photographer, we would ever have learned what a fine writer she is. Would she have been prompted to write her memoir had she not been invited to give the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard?

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The internet makes it all too easy to go hunting for the information that will make sense of a book or an author, and I am resolved not to do that. At least, not till I have finished this review. From that position of self-imposed ignorance, The Sellout is a brilliantly funny and cutting satire on race in America. Nothing is safe, no-one immune, no taboo out of bounds. Sex, music, drugs, intellectualism, passivity, crime. ...

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What a wonderful book. When it first came out and got lots of praise I stupidly decided that it was not for me, possibly because the praise tended to focus on lyrical nature writing and that is not something I enjoy. However, my friend Nicola Davies was adamant that I give it a shot. I did, and was entranced from the word go.

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I enjoy Dave Eggers' writing a lot, and this was no exception. He has a deft way of filling in the back story that I admire, and his treatment of the two young children seems to me absolutely accurate, poignant and touching and funny. The adventures that these heroes get into are many and varied and...

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Really excellent guide to changes in cuisine through history, and the forces that drove them. A useful antidote to the rose-tinted myth that the cooking of times gone by was so much better than the food we have now. Some people have described the book as too dry; I disagree. It is scholarly and informative, rather than the once-over-lightly so common in so many "factual" works.

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I became aware that I had finished this book after I read the last word, me, on the last page, although of course it wasn’t the actual physical last page, for there were three blank pages, blank, that is, except for the publisher’s web address on the actual, physical last page, a result of the print...

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