I’ve spent much of this week working with MSc students writing their dissertations, and this has inevitably led to the part of a dissertation that often causes the most pain to write (and read, for that matter): the abstract.

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Gene Sharp (1993)

A how-to manual for passive resistance to a dictatorship. It’s a believable presentation, perhaps a little too dry and deterministic in its suggestions about how to collapse a dictatorship’s will to rule, but a book that feels amazingly and unfortunately relevant at the moment.

3/5. Finished Saturday 1 August, 2020.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Kim Stanley Robinson (2015)

It’s unusual to find a negative take on the idea of generation starships. Most authors like the idea; Robinson isn’t one of them, and indeed makes a strong argument that the whole notion of planetary colonisation is flawed. It’s argued so well that’s it’s hard to refute.

The book is excellently written as well as being closely argued: good characters and social interactions, and a sensible and believable plot. My only criticism would be that it’s one chapter too long: the final beach scene doesn’t add anything, in my opinion, and I’m hard-pushed to understand why it’s there at all.

4/5. Finished Wednesday 29 July, 2020.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

W. Somerset Maugham (1927)

Better thought of as a sequence of related short stories rather than a novel, and more Leslie Charteris than Ian Fleming. If you can get past the casual racism (completely normal for the time) then it’s an interesting take on the life of an intelligence operative.

3/5. Finished Saturday 25 July, 2020.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Cyril J Wood (2009)

A companion to the author’s work on the Manchester Ship Canal. This one is a bit lighter on the process of actually digging the canal, perhaps because it’s older and perhaps because there’s little more to say than that it was in fact dug, by hand.

3/5. Finished Saturday 25 July, 2020.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)