I’m writing an essay at the moment about the notion of a Sixth Extinction, and about the numbers that are regularly rolled out to show what a dire situation nature is in. As part of that I’ve been thinking a bit about the urge to use data to prove things in situations where data is […]

I posted these on my Substack on 29 & 30 December 2022, but now I have plans to shut that down so here it is, reposted on my blog. My 2023 stats and favourite books are incoming… The graphs Once upon a time, I used to produce nonsensical graphs about the books I read on […]

Writers are singularly obsessed with portraying their art and work as a waste of time and a moral failing, even though its negatives, environment-wise, are almost non-existent. The footprint of writing a book is approximately equivalent to sitting around doing absolutely nothing, which is largely what writing a book involves.

But first, some graphs! If I’d bothered to publish my graphs last year I think this would be year eight of ‘books unnecessarily graphed’. I’ve cut back over the past couple of years on the things I record in my reading spreadsheet, which means you get only the best graphs. Enjoy the colours… And now […]

I’ve just been reading about how daft end-of-year lists are and yep, that’s fair, but here it is anyway: the books I enjoyed reading (and listening to) the most in 2020.

Image: ‘Lost’ by Catherine Nelson https://michaelreid.com.au/art/lost/, which is the cover illustration for Elizabeth Knox’s novel, ‘The Absolute Book’. For the past year or so, the question I’ve been hoping to answer in my own mind (both for my current writing project and for my life) is something along the lines of ‘what are humans for?’. […]

Now into its sixth year, welcome to the 2019 edition of ‘books I read, unnecessarily graphed’. This year I started 93 books and 7 manuscripts. I abandoned 7 books (no manuscripts), mostly because they weren’t grabbing me (I noted them as ‘try again later’), occasionally because I didn’t like them at all and probably never […]