Our very own Ian Rankin (http://www.ianrankin.net/) has at least 25 novels to his name and has a huge following for his Edinburgh policeman Detective Inspector John Rebus. If you’ve not taken the plunge so far into this most appealing of tartan noir (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartan_Noir) crime fiction, why not start with the 9th of the Rebus books – The Hanging Garden. […]
The Hanging Garden Read More »
Part of the ‘Little History’ series (http://www.littlehistory.org/) from Yale University Press this book takes on a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. John Sutherland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutherland_(author)) is perfectly suited to the task. He has researched, taught, and written on virtually every area of literature, and his infectious
A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland Read More »
Dutch writer and actor Herman Koch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Koch) offers us a dark suspense of a novel in The Dinner (first published in Dutch in 2009). The summary is as follows. It’s a summer evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery,
In 1974 Thomas Nagel (http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/thomasnagel and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel) published a highly influential philosophy paper entitled ‘What is it like to be a bat?‘ In it, he argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it feels like to be a particular conscious being. We are not constituted likes
The Higgs boson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson) is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider (http://www.lhc.ac.uk/), the world’s largest energy particle accelerator, which lies in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 575 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It took ten years to build and this
The Particle at the End of the Universe Read More »
Karen Rose (http://www.karenrosebooks.com/index.php), from Baltimore, was a chemical engineer and a teacher before taking up a full time career in writing. She has produced at least one novel per year since 2003. Her latest thriller is Watch Your Back. Here is the summary. Baltimore homicide detective Stevie Mazzetti has suffered losses no woman should have to
Plant biologist and President of the Genetics Society (http://www.genetics.org.uk/) Enrico Coen offers us a wonderful book in Cells to Civilizations. This is a unified account of how life transforms itself – from the production of bacteria to the emergence of complex civilizations. What are the connections between evolving microbes, an egg that develops into an infant, and a child who
Cells to Civilizations Read More »
Born in New England Charles Palliser is an American citizen but has lived in the United Kingdom since the age of three. He went up to Oxford in 1967 to read English Language and Literature and took a First in June 1970. He was awarded the BLitt in 1975 for a dissertation on Modernist fiction. From 1974
Rustication by Charles Palliser Read More »
Patricia Cornwell (http://www.patriciacornwell.com/) has sold more than 100 million books and given us the character Kay Scarpetta, medical examiner. Her crime mysteries are distinguished by the level of detail offered concerning forensic science. An excellent place to start reading Cornwell is with the 1990 novel Postmortem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_(novel)). It received the 1991 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The summary
