Euan Lawson
September 2021 Reading List
A bit of a bumper month. Let’s concentrate on the best offerings. I genuinely enjoyed the audiobook of Son of a Silverback and Maconie presents a compelling picture of the joys of the value of state services in The Nanny State Made Me. Both are helped greatly by being laugh out loud funny in places. If I had to suggest one then I will plump for Will Storr’s The Status Game that shows off his talents admirably. I did actually get a little irritated with the way links and footnotes are handled in the book. But that shouldn’t detract from the excellence of Storr’s work.
- The Nanny State Made Me by Stuart Maconie
- Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli
- Football Hackers by Christoph Biermann
- Son of a Silverback by Russell Kane
- Trials of the State by Jonathan Sumption
- The Status Game by Will Storr
- On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming
- The Art of Making Memories by Meik Wiking
- Privacy is Power by Carissa Véliz
- Death of a whistleblower and Cochrane’s moral collapse by Peter C. Gøtzsche1
- The Way Home by Mark Boyle
- The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery by Michael Taylor
I can’t claim to have read this fully but I am noting it for completeness. I read the first quarter of the book and couldn’t stand it any more so skimmed the rest. It details to quite extraordinary levels (depths?) the minutiae of the interactions between the Cochrane Collaboration and PCG. Ye gads. It’s not edifying. And it is, frankly, remarkably dull. I didn’t know anything of this saga and the indications are that Gøtzsche was treated badly. I can understand his desire to record his version. He has certainly done that.↩︎
Monthly Reading List Scribbles