And the answer is: not a lot. Or rather, I didn’t actually finish many books in January, because I was still working my way through the longest one when the end of the month came, so you’ll have to wait until the February post to find out what that was all about. So here we go…
Humble Pi by Matt Parker. My daughter bought me this for Christmas and then immediately regretted it, assuming that I’d already read it. However, it turned out that I hadn’t, although I’d frequently noticed it appearing alongside The Truth About Archie and Pie in the Amazon chart for Kindle Mathematical Recreation and Games (I love Amazon categories). Parker (also known as “The Stand-Up Maths Guy”) is a very entertaining writer, and this was a lot of fun to read, despite my feeling more than a little jealous of someone who was clearly building a much more successful career out of combining humour and mathematics.
The Big Short by Michael Lewis. I read Liars’ Poker years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I’ve always meant to read more of Lewis’s stuff and when I saw this in the Hestercombe Gardens secondhand book shop, I snapped it up. It’s an excellent account of the 2008 financial crash and the insanity that led up to it. He’s particularly good at picking apart and explaining the crazy financial instruments that were used to build the house of cards, which makes it all the more inexplicable that in his latest book, he appears to have completely misread Sam Bankman-Fried and the wacky world of crypto.
And that’s it. Plenty more next time, however.