Really enjoyed it. Lots of stupid tales - surprisingly fresh for 1889.

As per the title, it's a story, almost, of three men (and their dog), who take a boat from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford.

I learnt that originally the book was written as a tour guide of the Thames which explains some of the diversions into the history of particular towns or parts of the river.

As it turned out, Jerome's stories had so much humour that it turned into the book we have today.

It's told from his perspective, even referring to himself as "J." and occasionally breaks through the story to remind the reader that he promised to keep to the truth the the story (which ironically there's a lot of references to fisherman and river workers that have time honoured tradition of lying).

Although there's a touch of sadness towards the end of the book, as the Three Men start their journey home in the rain, the bulk of the book is humourous and made me chuckle along quite often.

As Jerome rambles along the river with his friends, retelling stories either from himself or his companions.

I did really enjoy the book, and mostly because of the stupidity of the characters which I found myself easily relating to (having my own stupidity inner monologue).

Finally, for a book written in the late nineteenth century, I was quite surprised how tender some of the more sombre parts of the book could be.

Holds up surprisingly well nearly 140 year old book about a row boat on the Thames.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

A book about work, felt like work.

I suspect this is very specific to me, but I found the majority of the story pretty triggering - specifically, I felt pissed off a lot of the time I was reading. After reading the About the Author section at the end of the book, it looks like I've had a similar timeline of a technical career to them (which perhaps is why the story got under my skin).

This is because I spent a decade in a company (over a decade ago) that treated it's employees a lot like the characters in the book and it was doing my in that the story seemed to centre around people who made their company the be-all of their lives.

Though the story (sort of) follows two main characters, you really don't meet anyone outside of the company, Gerbach, and there's a scene in the book where it seems pretty clear they all live in each other's pockets.

I didn't really have a good sense of timings until the very end (4 months). The story opens with outages the devs are firefighting, and I couldn't tell if they were still dealing with issues across the timeline or… if they'd just accepted it was all terrible and the characters swan off and pull sickies when their infrastructure is on fire 🤷.

Then there's the AI aspect that's sort of supposed to be looming, but, sort of not really… Around 2/3rds of the way into the story there's a development (not quite a plot twist) which I managed to guess how it related to the AI.

I think if you work in the technology industry, and you are (or have been) a dev, then this book might be worth a read. I'm not sure it's quite that accessible outside of the tech industry, specifically around some of the terminology (which, though I knew, I didn't realise there was a full appendix at the end, "log4j" might throw some people).

Read through a recommendation (later realising that the person who recommended it was listed in the author thanks!), I think I'd struggle to recommend it myself.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Quick easy read. Little repetitive, but shines a nice light.

The story starts in 1938 and we follow Gertie as she plans to retire as a widow having run a bookshop and successful book clubs for many years.

That's put on hold when she agrees to take in a child from the Kindertransport - which I'd know about but hadn't read a great deal of detail.

As a parent myself, this is the first part that breaks my brain a little, and indeed this part is entirely based in history. An amazing effort and so terrible too.

The story then follows Gertie as she takes care of Hedy, a 15 year old German Jew who also longs to be reunited with her family.

The story takes us through The Blitz, the air raid shelters, rolling blackouts and rationing that took place over the years as Hitler and the Nazis spread through Europe.

I've not read any wartime books, so this was an experience. Obviously: harrowing. The story does also do a good job of making me believe the life that tries to march on.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Loved it. Intelligent and genuinely made me laugh.

This book was recommended in our work Slack, and just pull quote for the book description, I found myself instantly buying it:

By normal, you mean like you? A slag with a saviour complex?

The story follows Nadia, an academic who is pulled into a job with the UN to apply her proposal to rehabilitate ISIS brides so they can leave the camps and return home.

What I really enjoyed about this book was the exposure to completely different backgrounds to my own. So for an example, Nadia is Muslim. She has turned her back on her faith. She's gone into academia, and she's now offered a job in the UN to help these ISIS brides.

Most of the characters are completely different to the people in my real life, but the writing is steeped in reality (the author's note at the end explains that she, Younis, was a humanitarian worker known for her expertise on contemporary Iraq, and that though fictionalised, there's a lot of real experience in the story).

Nadia's character is witty, flawed, pissed off, broken and I found myself actually laughing out loud at some of the lines from the book. The book's blurb includes the following line, which I absolutely felt was accurate:

A bitingly original, wildly funny and razor-sharp exploration of love, family, religion, radicalism[…]

I really enjoyed the book, and found it hard to put down - as seen in my 10 day read of what normally takes me a month.

For a first novel, from someone that on paper is very academic and doing very serious work, this is A*. Love it.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Solid entry into the series.

I've read all the previous Murderbot books, but since the last, I also watched the TV series - which I equally enjoyed, but…or put a weird spin on reading this latest book.

I'd entirely forgotten the "diary" part, and because of the TV series, I had the external perspective and wondered why this book was both being told from Murderbot's internal monologue, but also why there was so much…noise, I guess the word would be.

Once I'd finally remembered that this was the actual format of the book I settled into it, reminding myself there wouldn't be huge character developments (because the diaries tend to last for one mission/episode).

Still, the Murderbot character is in fact growing and evolving and that's fun to read.

The story pulled me along pretty well. Not quite the rip roaring page turner, but a solid entry all the same.

I'm not 100% sure you could just pick this book up without having read at least a few previous books, which is why I hadn't rated it higher (the very first novellas are absolutely excellent).

Enjoyable, even if it took me a minute to remember the specific Murderbot format.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Took me a minute to get into, but then…I cried. The good kind.

It took me until around 20% of the book to get on with it properly. I was struggling to even want to pick up the book. It's well written, but the subject, end of life, was so unappealing that I found myself wanting to avoid reading the book.

At some point around 1/5 of the way in, this feeling settled and I was swept along by the narrative that the main character, Bo, gives us.

I think reading this there's going to be different aspects that hit different people hardest. I'm not a dog person, so the thread about Sixten, his dog, though sad (the dog doesn't die!) it didn't gut punch me.

I did however relate hard to the inner monologue not linking up to what's actually said. Something I suspect most people can relate to - which I suspect is the reason this book is well recommended.

The book is told almost exclusively from the thoughts of Bo, the elderly 89 year old man (which took me quite a few pages to actually work out). From his thoughts we travel back and forth in his memory which worked really well. I didn't feel lost at all, maybe because Bo's memories felt like they flowed naturally back and forth.

The story really does feel like it's being faithful to the human flaws many of us share.

It also, for me, did an excellent job of building up my relationship with Bo and gently brought me to tears right at the end in a way that made me message my kids to tell them I love them.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Enjoyable, well drawn characters, a pleasure to read.

I really enjoyed reading this book. The story floats like a butterfly from one character to the next and it works without losing the reader.

The story, I think, follows the Flynn family and though they're painted as somewhat dysfunctional, they're all spirited in their own journey.

There's a line towards the end that reflects on the mother's character not having given up on her art career, but having chosen to be a mother. The book definitely left me with this sense: that we're okay.

There is a strong religious thread in the book (not being religious myself) but it wasn't an agenda being pushed, but rather something for some of the characters to hang on to.

Easily enjoyable. I loved the characters and would definitely recommend.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

"Our diverse literary heritage reveals that we do not need a single national story"

I bought and read this book after seeing Caroline Lucas speaking with Zack Polanski during a live session of Bold Politics. It's a book that tries to reclaim "Englishness" from the weaponising that the Far Right have been using it for.

Overall, it's an interesting read, lots of history, both good and bad, lots of literature and how stories and poetry has been used over the centuries to act as a force for political change for good.

Solidarity and standing up for what's right is the theme the ran through for me.

From a technical perspective, I didn't enjoy that nearly every single page also came with a long paragraph of footnotes - which normally I skip (because it goes off to the end of the book and back, but these were inline on the same page), and completely broke the flow of what I was reading. I wish that these had simply been part of the written content rather than regular sidebars.

Then as I read, I felt like perhaps I wasn't quite the audience to fully appreciate the book. There's certainly a good chunk that is accessible, but it often felt like if I worked in politics this content would make more sense.

I did come away with 23 highlights and wanted to highlight more, partly to remember what I had read, partly as a "wow, I did not know".

I think if you enjoy your history and commentary and literature, then you'll enjoy this book. I struggle to read non-fiction in any reasonable amount of time, so I often find by the time I get to the end of a book, I forget the important things from the start!

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Vivid voice, fun and dark and original.

I wasn't sure what I was getting in to reading Rivers of London (recommended multiple times on socials), especially as I kept finding the teens/young adult book cover for it (reminding me of the multiple covers the Harry Potter books had) - but I decided to jump in.

I quickly got sucked into the book and the narrative style that Aaronovitch used. For some reason I had Millie Bobby Brown as the voice which caused me a little confusion when I learn that the protagonist and narrator is called Peter Grant (I really didn't read the blurb) - but decided that she could still run the inner monologue.

The Rivers of London is a very London and British book (which I always especially enjoy because I can vividly see the places, hear the accents and usually feel the weather) that's a mix of modern copper plod story with fantastical (and certainly for me: original) characters from gods to vampires to ghosts and wizards.

There's a good balance of funny and witting against the (some times) gruesome and frankly pretty terribly bad things that make for the primary investigation for the protagonist, Grant, to work through.

Really fun stuff - I can definitely see myself returning for more in this series.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Really enjoyed this follow up to Dogs of War.

I accidentally read Dogs of War in 2018 - I never went looking for it and loved it. Equally, I can't remember when I found out about Bear Head but I knew I wanted to read it if it existed in the same universe. So finally I get around to it.

Overall well written, well drawn characters with distinctive voices in a universe that's really not that hard to conceive. I've read a few of Tchaikovsky's books now and as much as I enjoy them, for some reason it does take me quite a stretch to read the books (this one being just ~315 pages and took me a month) - not sure what's up with that.

The story is told from three protagonist's perspective: Honey, the bear from Dogs of War - once soldier, now an academic arguing for rights for others. Jimmy, the "grunt worker" placed on Mars to prepare it for the colonies that plan to settle and Carole (Springer…I want to say), the PA and "collared" assistant to the antagonist Warner S. Thompson.

Similarly with Dogs of War, Bear Head discusses self and identity (can a person be entirely digital?), freedom and slavery, and the untouchable super rich and their power.

There's some pretty horrible scenes around human slavery where people are compelled to perform, both involuntary physically but also compelled to think in certain ways (i.e. being submissive by design).

With a lot of what I'm reading lately, I can't help but associate it with today's real life events (in 2025-2026), and thinking of the corruption throughout politics we're seeing today - though I can see how this book being published in 2021 aligns fairly well with Trump's first regime from '17-21. Perhaps it's that backdrop that makes me a slow reader!

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Fine. Easy read. Guessed the murdered though 🤷

Grabbed it for the Christmas period (slightly annoyed I finished it on Jan 2nd). It's decently written, apparently part of a series (this being book 6) but stands fine on it's own. There's a few references to something that happened before, but doesn't affect the story.

It does read like a Columbo or Murder She Wrote, where there's people killing other people like it's just another Wednesday. All ends are fully tied up without anything left to the reader by the end.

I did figure out the killer around 1/3rd of the way in - or at least I keep asking the protagonist "What about X?!".

Not terribly Christmasy, but the very last chapter was very sweet.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Light on the brain.

Just the kind of read I wanted after a few longer books. Not 100% even throughout the book - but I'll come to that.

The squirrel from the cover features a nice silly-ish part of the story where the main character will often run into a local squirrel and add his own voice in a back and forth between him and the squirrel. The sort of thing I'd expect from a Bob Mortimer book.

I'm not 100% sure where the book's tone is supposed to sit. Some parts are particularly dark - police corruption, police harassment and modern day slavery. Juxtaposed next to funny little things like socks, squeaky shoes, a cranky neighbour and dog who's constantly disappointed with our main character.

The pages did turn quickly though, and it was easy reading. Nothing particularly to shout about, but not bad either.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Made me hungry and could even smell the foods, but took me a long time to read which made it feel extremely stretched and disconnected.

I really don't know why this book took me nearly 60 days to read, but it did which makes the events at the start of the book feel so utterly far away from the end.

I'm not sure what drew me to the book but I picked it up with zero expectations.

It discusses feminism, the pressure society puts on women to behave and appear certain ways (though this is Japanese culture, I do think a lot of this applies/is experienced by western white women too).

There's a strong feature of food and butter in particular (as you'd expect from the title) - and the author (and translator) does an excellent job of writing in a way that left me reading late at night and really wanting to taste the food (and I'm not a foodie).

There's also a story of friendship and support through those connections. This part of the book was really lovely to read, but seemed to all be crammed in at the end.

The story also includes a very manipulative character, Kajii, and whilst I read I felt sorry (and frustrated) for the protagonist, Rika, that she couldn't see the obvious manipulation (but perhaps that's the point, when we're close up to manipulation, we can't see the wood for the trees).

There really is a lot (of meaty subjects) in this book, and perhaps this contributed to my slow reading but it did leave me struggling to carry all the ideas through to the end of the book.

I've written about urgency in writing, and that's what helps me turn the page. This book doesn't have that, which isn't bad, but doesn't help me.

I suspect I would have enjoyed this more had I been able to digest it a little faster than two months.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

I'd recommend anyone who wants to understand the emergence of AI and OpenAI in particular to read this book.

I do struggle reading non-fiction, and this book was no different. It took me nearly 2 months to finish reading (in my evening snippets) - but it was definitely worthwhile. It was this 90 minute interview by Novara Media with Karen Hao that made me immediately purchase the book.

I don't think I can fully review this book and do it justice, but I can share what I learnt from the book where my original assumptions were wrong about AI and AI companies.

The book is focused primarily around OpenAI and Sam Altman, and in particular how his ousting in November 2023 came to be, through hundreds of interviews and documents, and paints a very insightful picture of the messiah complex (though not in her words) that Altman has.

Here's a short summary of things I didn't know but learnt through reading this:

1. Altman and friends started conversations (and business, albeit initially as a non-profit, though that didn't last) in 2015 because they were going to build AGI and that it was inevitable.
2. The company was formed with scientific researchers originally, again as an open company with the intent of sharing, though spoiler alert: this all changed
3. I had always assumed it was cowboy bro developers working on the code, but it was, originally, academic based engineering
4. AI safety was constantly there and initially significant - but as we all know now, eventually lost a battle to make an impact, left "hobbled" and thrown rather to the wayside.
5. The training data was, after GPT-2, ingested wholesale and attempt to clean/sanitise would happen on the results coming from prompts - i.e. the inputs were not cleaned, which means applying dizzying array of filters to catch on the output and edge cases.
6. Common Crawl was introduced at GPT-3 - which is also where the input filtering stopped happening
7. AI, or Western AI companies including OpenAI (but also Google and Microsoft) put their data centres in the Global South, additionally sourcing their data annotators from the poorest countries allowing them to pay (via third parties) literal pennies per hour for the work (which could also come with terrible mental health side effects as the worker would read and view the generative content that AI could come up with based on the unfiltered dark corners of the web)
8. Sam Altman lies. Little lies, but from a great deal of documentation, a lot and often to tell people what they want to hear whilst (we guess?!) having some ulterior motive
9. The path that OpenAI decided to take to head towards what they believe will be AGI, effectively requires unlimited compute power, when in reality, there are lots of different applications of AI that don't need that level of power, Stable Diffusion being one such example trained using 256 GPUs (still not a desktop computer, but not hundreds of thousand GPUs either)
10. OpenAI's approach, to close off it's scientific findings, close it's source and refusing to share methods means that there's no way to verify any of their progress, but more importantly is stripping the academic scientific community of it's researchers (as someone who has visited CERN on two occassions, seeing science being shared is incredible and incredible for society)

My only complaint about the book (and it's likely to be my own fault) is I had trouble with the jumping backwards and forwards in time - I'd often be unsure where we were in the timeline.

If you work in tech, I'd absolutely recommend this book. If it's not possible, then definitely the interview I linked above.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

No quite the same murderfest from Sweetpea 1, but still enjoyably angry at the world.

I think I expected the same kind of murder spree from the first book, and it's not that at all (although Rhiannon, the protagonist, desperately wants that). It's actually written on the tin, In Bloom is Rhiannon's experience of being pregnant - which, for a change, rolls up all the shitty experiences into one.

I enjoyed, and laughed at, the cutting turn of phrases - the kind of brutal honesty that you might reserve for the closest of friends knowing that it's for the "inside voice".

I can see myself reading the next instalment in the book (though perhaps not so soon) and I'm not entirely sure where the character can go given the way the book ends, so that's definitely intriguing.

But just for the the record (my record!), Rhiannon is a terrible person!

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Honestly not sure what I thought of the book…

I'm unsure how I got this on my to-read list. I think I was looking for funny books from the last few years. I didn't laugh once reading this book though. It was a sweet story, set in the 80s, but I'm not sure where the arc was.

The story is told from the perspective of Lizzie, an 18 year old young woman who moves out of home to work as an assistant to a dentist. The dentist himself is fairly sexist and xenophobic. The mother (of the protagonist) is … hard to describe. In short, she's a pain in Lizzie's arse - though she definitely loves her.

I think there's some part of flying the nest and finding your own feet, but Lizzie somehow ends up in a very similar place by the end of the book. There's times I was reading and thinking surely she's going to realise that she herself is actually a good dentist and will take that path, but nope, she ends up as a clothes store assistant, so … I don't know.

It was cute to have 80s nostalgia peppered throughout the book, the highlight being the salad spinner (which my own mother still owns and I definitely remember spinning it for fun).

I guess I was left with the sense of why did I read what I read?

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Funny, unwavering and dark.

Rhiannon, Sweetpea, is according to BuzzFeed, a serial killer - and probably a psychopath. For the first half of the book I just read it as she's a bit crazy and has decided to act on her impulses.

Except as I carried on reading, I realised that what she was doing was listing the things that piss her off all the time and just landed at the inevitable conclusion that the only way to get rid of these things is to get rid of these things. Not unlike a lot of us except we don't go all the the way to fully extinguishing someone.

There were some really funny turns of phrases throughout the book and I just wondered how I could possibly end but suspected it would end the way it did which isn't a bad thing. I definitely plan to read a few more of these books in a series.

Graphic, explicit, raw, quite angry (and annoyed), funny. Good stuff!

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

An easy read, good for the holiday.

I chomped this down in a matter of days (though it helped being by the pool to spend more time reading). I've read a number of Matt Haig's books and find I prefer his older material over the newer books, and this book fitted nicely into that category.

Without examining the story too carefully (because I think the balance of humour and darkness, in retrospect, is a little off balance and the wheels sort of come off!) - it was a fun read.

Definitely reading the book in 2025 rather than the years which the Twilight stories were at their height probably makes the story a little more refreshing for me (it's about a British vampire family - not a spoiler, you'll get that from the blurb).

The characters were fairly simple to follow and switch between on each (nicely short) chapter. I didn't really feel much sympathy for the parent characters (I'm not sure if I was supposed to, but like I said, it doesn't want too close a look), but there's some fun twists on the vampire genre (or perhaps I'm not that familiar with the genre!).

Some fun gory bits, a decent mini twist here and there, very easy to read - a good choice for the holiday read.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

A book of letters…kinda made me want to write letters…

I picked this up based on "funny books" though I'm really not sure how I landed on this book. I know, sort of, Spike Milligan's work, but only from TV. I didn't know he was an author, particularly from funny war stories so I missing considerable context. Arguably I'm not sure why I read this book.

The back cover quotes appeared almost immediately at the start of the book and it was pretty clear that this read like a bottom-of-the-barrel book, just printing every letter that could be found. There was the odd occasion that the correspondence was funny, but unfortunately not laugh-out-loud-funny, just a bit of a snicker.

In the last part of the book (part 4: words of support), the letters are about mental health (dating back to the late-60s), which was interesting to read as it feels like in the real world we've only started to talk openly about mental health in the last decade or so. Milligan would write letters offering support to others, and would often talk about how the NHS support was missing the love and understanding and rather delivered pills (which he says helps, but only as a band-aid).

It was these last group of letters, mostly about sending out love and positivity to the world that brought this up from 2 stars to 3. It definitely made me want to actually write words down to people rather than the usual email, and it was nice to see some silly humour throughout his decades.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

300 pages but wow it felt 4 times longer...

I found the writings quite difficult to consume. A lot, if not all the names were sounds but without any familiar rhythm, and Le Guin was describing, with I assume great accuracy a world with locations, cities, regions and mountains - but I was struggling to map it all.

Then the story was thread through this detail, which left me struggling to read and struggling to enjoy the book.

It's only when I hit around 60% and the two characters embark on a journey across the ice did I finally manage to engage properly. I really did feel the characters relationship change through their journey and felt their struggle, which I think is what turned this book, for me, from 2 star to 3.

There's a scene towards the end when the protagonist revisits the King of {whatever the name of the city was}, and the protagonist reflects on how the time has passed since his first visit much earlier in the book. I could empathise! It felt like a lifetime!

Probably a great book. Maybe passed me by though.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log