If I took this book [affiliate link] to heart, I should try to convince you to read it.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d like this book, and I mainly took it out of the library so I could make the joke in the first paragraph (and others like it). I mean, negotiation isn’t my job. I’m not, like the author, a hostage negotiator. I’m not even in sales. The key, of course, is that we all have to negotiate from time to time. While I may not often have to negotiate money in my day job, I do have to agree on the scope of work. This is a form of negotiation. We all have to buy stuff or hire someone to deal with jobs around the house.

Matthew Syed’s “Bounce” [affiliate link] is a pop-science book that I borrowed from the library on a whim. It’s about the the “science of success” and starts with the idea that experts have at least 10 000 hours worth of experience in their field.

It’s… fine. I think I believed the thesis before I started but, while it was easy to read, I’m not sure how much it added.

A few years ago we got an Amazon Fire tablet and I could almost copy and paste that review for the ninth generation unit [affiliate link].

My biggest complaint this time around is the battery life. It feels like it’s always in need of recharging. Almost everything else from last time is improved. It’s slightly smaller. The build quality is much better. It’s faster.

Having said that it’s still no iPad. While faster it still feels sluggish compared with Apple’s tablet, the screen is a lot worse and the software library is laughable by comparison. But, as before, it’s also a tenth of the price. As an almost disposable consumption device, I have few complaints.

I failed.

By half a book! I missed my goal of twelve books in 2019 by a few hundred pages¹.

In my defence, “Guns, Germs and Steel²” is very long but the real culprit (like the previous year) is my lack of a commute. Not that I’m sick of working from home yet but that was my reading time and now I just don’t have a time that I consistently set aside.

I should have believed the reviews. This is not a good book [affiliate link]. A few light sniggers and that’s about all.

The conceit is that Tony Hawks, writer and comedian, gets fan mail for Tony Hawk, celebrity skateboarder. He writes back.

I’ve loved many of Hawks past books but, despite only paying 99p for this one, I still feel like I overpaid for it.

It’s been fascinating watching Ben Elton grow as a writer. I read his first book, Stark, when it first came out. It was political and funny, as you might expect for a stand up comedian. It wasn’t terribly well written, though.

Next came Gridlocked, which was better written but not as funny.

I’d argue that he finally hit his stride with Popcorn, which was a real page-turner, with structure and humour and it was well written.

If you read my thoughts on the first book in the Kestrel series, “Changer” you’ll have a good idea of my thinking about the second, “Toll” [affiliate link].

It’s an entertaining, light read. I think that’s the intention, so I don’t mean that as a back-handed compliment.

Compared with last time, the MacGuffin didn’t bother me as much. What jarred were the constant info-dumps.

“[Barcelona is] the sixth most populous urban area in the European Union. Within Spain, it is second only to Madrid. But globally, it does not appear in the first ninety.”

Jared Diamond’s door-stop of a book [affiliate link] has been on my to-read list for quite some time. Maybe not quite since it was released over twenty years ago but probably not far from it.

The gist is pretty much there in the title: in the last 13,000 years, the most successful societies used guns, germs and steel to conquer others. Why, for example, was it Europeans who had world-wide empires rather than Africans or Americans or Chinese?

Having read “Ready Player One” and seen the film recently, picking Ernest Cline’s next book, “Armada” [affiliate link] was an easy choice. “Ready Player One” wasn’t my favourite book, but it was an entertaining read and that’s what I was looking for this time.

It pretty much exactly met those expectations. It’s well written and easy to read. There are all the retro-references you’d expect in a Cline book. The story moves along at a reasonable clip. The characters mostly make sense, though they could have been better developed.

After reading quite a few non-fiction books I decided that this time I would pick a novel. Having read “Red Shirts” a couple of years ago, I randomly selected another John Scalzi book, “Fuzzy Nation” [affiliate link].

The history of this is a little unusual: it’s not an entirely original story. It’s based on an older story by H. Beam Piper called “Little Fuzzy.” (“Think of this as a ‘reboot’ of the Fuzzy universe, not unlike the recent J. J. Abrams ‘reboot’ of the Star Trek film series (but hopefully with better science.)”) Not having read that, I can’t compare but I did enjoy this one.