Books I’ve bought this week & why:

1. ‘Holes’ by Louis Sachar - it kept appearing on people’s bookcases on BookRabbit and they said it was good, so I’m now two thirds of the way through it and yes it is good. It’s a ‘teen’ title and it shows but enjoyable nonetheless.

2. ‘Once Upon a Time In the North’ Philip Pullman - limited signed edition. I was a sucker for the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy and can’t resist a special edition so this Waterstone’s exclusive was a must, scarce already due to speculators but I think Hatchards still have some - update no they don’t.

3. Chomsky’s ‘Hegemony or Survival’ - the only Penguin Celebration title I’ve bought, I like a good polemic and Chomsky’s voice is so familiar to me now due to all those wonderful CDs AK produce he’s like an old (slightly grumpy) friend.

4. ‘Here Comes Everybody’ by Clay Shirky, I read the first chapter of this in a Penguin sampler for new non fiction and it’s a very readable and anecdote heavy approach to defining the new social space. Also a good review in the Telegraph last week which tipped me over to buying it (BTW I do not normally buy the Telegraph but I had to because of BookRabbit coverage - just so we are clear).

5. ‘The Big Switch’ by Nicholas Carr. Nicholas wrote a great piece for the Harvard Business Review a few years back called ‘IT Doesn’t Matter‘ which I once sent an anonymous copy of to the (now former) IT Director of GAME in the internal mail, although as the only person in the entire building likely to be reading the HBR it was pretty easy to work out who sent it.

Carr followed this up with a slightly more softly titled book ‘Does IT Matter?‘ but no less controversial. ‘The Big Switch‘ is his new book and I have high hopes of some good insights from him. Write up in Wired positive too (well I t-h-i-n-k it’s positive).

The Wired story is worth looking at to see the photo they have of Nicholas looking very stern in front of a bookcase - I’d like to run it through our bookcase OCR but I think it is too low res so I’ll have to make do with the human eye - and I can only make out Catch-22 which is great, but a small prize to anyone who can identify two more books!