Genre: Non-fiction

Review – Blind Spot

Posted May 7, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Blind Spot: Exploring and Educating on Blindness

by Maud Rowell

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 106
Series: Inklings

Synopsis:
Two million people in the UK live with sight loss, and many more worldwide. Yet the general population knows very little about the day-to-day life of the blind, who must move through a world not designed with them in mind, from city planning and technology, to pop culture and education. What’s more, blind people often fall off the pages of our history books, despite being some of the most prolific figures in their fields.

In Blind Spot, Maud Rowell challenges readers to think differently about what they may take for granted, carrying them on a whirlwind tour through time and space - from Japanese tube stations to the 18th century museum - to showcase what the world looks like for someone who does not see. She offers practical insights based on her own experiences, as well as spotlighting incredible blind pioneers - explorers, artists, scientists, and more - through history and the current day, unearthed through her own research and interviews.

In educating us about the realities of sight loss, Maud shows us how to be aware of our own blind spots, offering the knowledge needed to become better, more tolerant members of diverse communities. Society needs to support everyone - it's time we caught up.

A while back, I was a volunteer for the RNIB (that’s the Royal National Institute for the Blind, in the UK), which means I have a bit more awareness of the accessibility options for the blind in the UK (and in general) than most. Even so, I was trained by a sighted person, and all the volunteers I knew were fully sighted. Maud Rowell’s Blind Spot makes me wonder what, in consequence, we missed.

If you’re curious about accessibility for blind people (not just in the UK, but also in Japan), about experiencing art and museums as a blind person, being a visual artist while blind, and lost blind role models, this is definitely one for you.

It’s short, like all books in the Inklings series, and thus it can’t possibly be exhaustive — but it’s a window into that world, nonetheless.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Maud Rowell, non-fiction

Review – The Roads to Rome

Posted May 6, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Roads to Rome

by Catherine Fletcher

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 400
Rating:

Synopsis:
Inspired by original research and filled with color and drama, this is an exploration of two thousand years of history as seen through one the greatest imperial networks ever built.

"All roads lead to Rome” is a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire—and these ancient roads continue to grip our modern imaginations as a physical manifestation of Rome’s extraordinary greatness.

Over the two thousand years since they were first built, these roads have been walked by crusaders and pilgrims, liberators and dictators, but also by tourists and writers, refugees and artists. As channels of trade and travel—and routes for conquest and creativity—Catherine Fletcher reveals how these roads forever transformed the cultures, and intertwined the fates, of a vast panoply of people across Europe and beyond.

The Roads to Rome is a magnificent journey into a past that remains intimately connected to our present. Traveling from Scotland to Cádiz to Istanbul and back to Rome, the reader meanders through a series of nations and empires that have risen and fallen. Along the way, we encounter spies, bandits, scheming innkeepers, a Byzantine noblewoman on the run, young aristocrats on their Grand Tour, a conquering Napoleon, John Keats, the Shelleys, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and even Mussolini on his motorbike.

Reflecting on his own walk on the Appian Way, Charles Dickens observed that here is "a history in every stone that strews the ground.” Based on vibrant original research, this is the first narrative history to tell the full story of life on the roads that lead to Rome.

Catherine Fletcher’s The Roads to Rome was a miss for me. It took me months to read, slowly, because something about the style or content was just completely undigestible for me — I literally couldn’t remember what I’d just read, more than half the time. I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it is about it, but I just couldn’t retain any of it. Take this with a pinch of salt: maybe it’s just me.

Ostensibly, the subject is fascinating to me, but I think part of the problem is the format: it’s partly Fletcher’s own travelogue and thoughts about her own travel, about which I couldn’t possibly care less. The history gets unspooled in disconnected snippets, surrounded by her comments on her hotels and train trips. Yawn.

It also moves from discussing the Roman Empire toward more modern stuff, which… if I could retain any of it, would fill a gap in my knowledge about Fascist Italy, but I doubt I’ll remember.

All in all, should probably have just not finished it. Oh well.

Rating: 1/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Catherine Fletcher, history, non-fiction

Review – Mood Machine

Posted May 1, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 288
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
An unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike.

Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.

Building on her years of wide-ranging reporting on streaming, music journalist Liz Pelly details the consequences of the Spotify model by examining both sides of what the company calls its two-sided marketplace: the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all. The music business is notoriously opaque, but here Pelly lifts the veil on major stories like streaming services filling popular playlists with low-cost stock music and the rise of new payola-like practices.

For all of the inequities exacerbated by streaming, Pelly also finds hope in chronicling the artist-led fight for better models, pointing toward what must be done collectively to revalue music and create sustainable systems. A timely exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music, Mood Machine will change the way you think about and listen to music.

Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist is quite the antidote to the optimism of Glenn McDonald’s You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song. Of the two, McDonald’s is based on personal experience but necessarily also very close association with Spotify (and most likely some NDAs). Liz Pelly’s book is based on a lot of varied sources, both official and unofficial, and from artists affected by Spotify as well (something which McDonald doesn’t touch on at all).

In the end, because it’s thorough, Mood Machine is also repetitive. The problems with Spotify at each turn are essentially the same: it was never about music, only about something that could be used to deliver ads packaged acceptably; privacy concerns; issues about artist remuneration; the seeding of playlists with throwaway tracks commissioned by Spotify (something which Glenn McDonald specifically denies, by the way) in order to pay fewer royalties… etc, etc. You can get the gist by reading any good reporting on Spotify.

All in all, it mostly solidifies my intent to continue doing what I already do: supporting artists directly wherever possible, even if I discover their music via sources like Spotify or YouTube where I can listen free/supported by ads/for a small subscription. Which is to say, despite the dramatic blurb, it didn’t change the way I think about and listen to music; it isn’t that revelatory, if you’ve had your eyes and ears open.

…Now if anyone can tell where to buy Rabbitology’s “Bog Bodies (dorm demo)” track without paying for it on Amazon, that’d be great.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Liz Pelly, non-fiction

Review – Who Owns This Sentence?

Posted April 29, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs

by David Bellos, Alexandre Montagu

Genres: Non-fiction, History
Pages: 384
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Who Owns This Sentence? looks at how throughout history, principled arguments, greed, and opportunism have ensured copyright's ascendency, and unveils those who are behind a phenomenon that has faced little public debate.

David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu’s Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs is surprisingly readable, for a book on a subject that could be incredibly dry. It helps that they split things down into plenty of chapters, and take one or two examples at a time — they’re quite thorough in discussing the development of each successive law and expansion to law, but the chunks are pretty bitesize for the most part, and the tone is fairly casual.

If you are pro copyright without limit including for corporations, then you probably won’t enjoy the general tone they take, pointing out multiple times (and in multiple ways) that the argument that copyright gives people a livelihood and fosters creativity isn’t a universal truth (people will often create without financial incentives) and that the laws anyway aren’t focused on providing that (you wouldn’t need lifetime + 70 years just for that).

Their argument is that far too much stuff is tied up in copyright in a way that hampers creativity and the sharing of knowledge, and they make a fair case for it, especially when it’s clear that a bare handful of companies own almost all of it anyway, and the net result is that the rich keep on getting richer and richer — based on the hard work of others who are often dead.

That said, it is a fairly opinionated account, so if you want a dispassionate rundown of what copyright is, you don’t want this book.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: Alexandre Montagu, book reviews, books, David Bellos, history, non-fiction

Review – You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song

Posted April 24, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music

by Glenn McDonald

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 236
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
For the first time in history, almost every song ever recorded is available instantly. Everywhere.

This book charts what music’s dazzling digital revolution really means for fans and artists. As a former data guru at the world’s biggest streaming service, Spotify, Glenn McDonald reveals:

- What the tech giants know about you
- How they serve up your next song
- Whether fans can cheat the algorithm
- Whether jazz is dead and ASMR is the new punk
- Your chances of becoming a rock star

Having analysed the streams of 500 million people, McDonald explores what the data tells us about music and about ourselves, from the secrets of russelåter in Norway to Christmas in the Philippines.

Statistically, you have not yet heard your lifetime’s favourite song. This book will take you on a voyage of discovery through music’s fast-flowing new waters.

10 bonus playlists of wonder included!

In a way, it’s really hard for me to know how to rate/review Glenn McDonald’s You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song, because he could tell me that Spotify has an arts-and-crafts department just for employees and I’d have to believe him — and when it comes to math (as when he discusses Spotify’s payment model), anyone can blind me with science, I’m afraid.

What I can say is that McDonald clearly has a passion for music, and believes that streaming is fair, equitable, and good for music going forward — or at least not worse for it than any of the other models we’ve had of music getting into people’s hands. He’s fascinated by the diversity of music, and eager for Spotify and other services to bring that music to people and let them try it.

In some ways, I’d rather he stuck to that part, because when he talks about the revenue models etc, it’s always with the caveat that he had nothing to do with that. As such, it’s all very back-of-the-napkin. He also outright contradicts some of the reporting about Spotify (e.g. that they commissioned some music for a flat fee to fill up playlists, so they don’t have to pay out when those songs are listened to) where I don’t know who is right or wrong at all. My instinct is that McDonald is definitely working hard to protect Spotify and cast it in the right light, which seems to be out of love, and may or may not be truly accurate.

I’m now reading Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly, and I get the sense that McDonald’s book is a bit more like a PR machine (even if he doesn’t work for Spotify now) and Liz Pelly’s is more accurate reporting.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Glenn McDonald, non-fiction

Review – Sheeplands

Posted April 23, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Sheeplands: How Sheep Shaped Wales and the World

by Alan Marshall

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 256
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Human civilisation was not just created by humans: we had the help of many creatures, and foremost among these were sheep. From Argentina to Australia and from Mesopotamia to Mongolia, just about every country with hills and meadows has adopted and then developed sheep farming as a way of living. And in Wales in particular, sheep played a central role in shaping landscape and culture.

Sheeplands outlines the journeys taken by some of these sheep as they voyaged across the world, both by themselves and with human shepherds, from the earliest human settlements to the present day. Along the way, Alan Marshall paints vivid portraits of the roles sheep have played in the development of the modern world, in times of peace and war, and describes how our sheeplands might continue to influence Wales and the wider world in future years.

Alan Marshall’s Sheeplands is, as it says, a history of Wales (and the wider world) through the lens of sheep and sheep-farming. This isn’t trivial: farming has been very important over the years, and the development of farming techniques, breeds of sheep and ways of transporting the sheep have been vital in the economy, war, colonisation, and everyday lives. I definitely appreciated a history that kept coming back to Wales, specifically, and from a very pro-Welsh point of view.

However… the problem is, the book doesn’t have numbered references, just a list of sources in the back, making it very difficult to follow up a particular anecdote and reference it. Sometimes something is stated as sheer fact when it sounds like mere theory, and sometimes the flippant easy tone elides the author’s lack of knowledge on a subject (“Homer” didn’t “scribe into text” anything, folks; Homer quite possibly never existed — it’s all more complicated than that). Sometimes that doesn’t affect the underlying point, and it didn’t in the case of this example. But. What about inaccuracies in the stuff I don’t have personal knowledge of? How can I tell apart flippancy, opinion, and fact, without proper sourcing?

I know it’s meant for a popular audience, but that shouldn’t mean you put yourself beyond fact-checking. Adding numbered sources doesn’t interrupt the flow for someone who is reading very casually, and allows anyone to look up the source for more information if they’re curious, sceptical, etc.

I did also find that I wasn’t so keen on the personal interjections about the author and his son Shelley. It’s cute, but it doesn’t really add to the narrative for us to be told what the author’s six-year-old son thinks about a given fact or location.

So… there were definitely things I enjoyed about the reading experience, don’t get me wrong, but it did also leave a lot to be desired in other ways.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: Alan Marshall, book reviews, books, history, non-fiction

Review – A History of Britain in Ten Enemies

Posted April 18, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

A History of Britain in Ten Enemies

by Terry Deary

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 256
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Ah, Britain. So special. The greatest nation on earth, some say. And we did it all on our own. Didn’t we?

Well, as it happens Britannia got its name from the Romans, and for the past two centuries we have been ruled by Germans. But then, as Horrible Histories author Terry Deary argues, nations and their leaders are defined by the enemies they make.

The surprisingly sadistic Boudica would be forgotten if it weren't for the Ninth Legion, Elizabeth I a minor royal without the Spanish Armada, and Churchill an opposition windbag without the Nazis. Britain loves its heroes so much we have been known to pickle them in brandy to keep them fresh. And after all, every nation sometimes needs a bit of unifying Blitz spirit (although in an ideal world, we wouldn’t have accidentally let Corporal Hitler go in the first place).

The British have a proud history of choosing their enemies, from the Romans to the Germans. You might even say those enemies made Britain what it is today.

A History of Britain in Ten Enemies is an entertaining gallop through history that will have you laughing as you find out what they didn't teach you in school.

Terry Deary’s A History of Britain in Ten Enemies is pretty much what you’d expect of someone who wrote for Horrible Histories: flippant, irreverent, willing to be sarcastic about everything, and… almost completely unsourced in a gossipy, opinionated account of history. It’s especially jarring when what he writes is contradictory to something I know is a prominent theory (e.g. that the building of wooden henges wasn’t replaced by the building of stone ones, as Deary suggests, but contemporaneous with them and linked to them: wood for the living, stone for the dead).

At that point I settled in to read it more or less for the tone and anecdotes, and to take everything with a heaping of salt. Each chapter does have a couple of references, but since they’re unnumbered and there’s only 2-3, it’s not very convincing.

If you’re just interested in a casual read, it’s probably perfect; for me, the tone didn’t quite land, and it turns out I get really irritated by such flagrant lack fo sourcing.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Terry Deary

Review – Unlikeable Female Characters

Posted April 17, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You To Hate

by Anna Bogutskaya

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 351
Rating:

Synopsis:
How bitches, trainwrecks, shrews, and crazy women have taken over pop culture and liberated women from having to be nice.

Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Any woman who dares to reveal her messy side has been treated as a cautionary tale. Today, unlikeable female characters are everywhere in film, TV, and wider pop culture. For the first time ever, they are being accepted by audiences and even showered with industry awards. We are finally accepting that women are—gasp—fully fledged human beings. How did we get to this point?

Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, from Samantha Jones as "The Slut" in Sex and the City to the iconic Mean Girl, Regina George, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman. Anna Bogutskaya, film programmer, broadcaster, and co-founder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls, takes us on a journey through popular film, TV, and music, looking at the nuances of womanhood on and off-screen to reveal whether pop culture—and society—is finally ready to embrace complicated women.

I really liked Anna Bogutskaya’s book on horror, but I found Unlikeable Female Characters really… well, obvious? It didn’t feel particularly insightful, more like a regurgitation of the plots of various movies and TV series, many of which I was already familiar with.

To be honest, I feel like the question is less why people are so against “unlikeable” female characters (which in this book is referring to characters who are e.g. promiscuous; not everything in this book should be considered an unequivocally unlikeable trait) and more why they hate female characters in general, and that’s part of why this doesn’t satisfy. Growing up being interested in fandom, like Gundam Wing and Final Fantasy VIII, there was such rabid hate for characters like Relena Peacecraft and Rinoa Heartily, and on an adult assessment… actually, they were really nice girls. As an outsider who knows little about the franchise as it stands, it felt like a very similar reaction to Rey in Star Wars, for example. (Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t want to argue that right now.) I think we need to examine that too along the way to understanding liking or disliking “problematic” female characters, though that too is part of the picture.

Digging into that was probably more what I would’ve been interested in, but even so I found this rather repetitive and unoriginal. I’ve read this listicle, basically. It makes me wonder if the book on horror was less insightful than I thought, and more obvious to a fan of horror… This was disappointing, anyway.

Rating: 1/5

Tags: Anna Bogutskaya, book reviews, books, non-fiction

Review – Endangered Languages

Posted April 13, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Endangered Languages

by Evangelia Adamou

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 264
Series: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
A concise, accessible introduction to language endangerment and why it is one of the most urgent challenges of our times.

58% of the world’s languages—or, approximately 4,000 languages—are endangered. When we break this figure down, we realize that roughly ten percent of languages have fewer than ten language keepers. And, if one language stops being used every three months, this means that in the next 100 years, if we do nothing, 400 more languages will become dormant. In Endangered Languages, Evangelia Adamou, a specialist of endangered languages and a learner of her own community language, Nashta, offers a sobering look at language endangerment and what is truly lost when a language disappears from usage.

Combining recent advances from the Western scientific tradition—from the fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language attrition, population genetics, and natural language processing—and insights from Indigenous epistemology, theory, and ethics, Adamou examines a wealth of issues surrounding endangered languages. She discusses where endangered languages are found, including how they are faring in a digital world, why these languages are no longer used, and how communities can reclaim languages and keep them strong. Adamou also explains the impact of language continuity on community and individual health and well-being, the importance of language transmission in cultural transmission, and why language rights are essentially human rights.

Drawing on varied examples from the Wampanoag Nation to Wales, Endangered Languages offers a powerful reminder of the crucial role every language has in the vitality and well-being of individuals, communities, and our world.

Endangered Languages, by Evangelia Adamou, is part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, so it’s essentially an introduction, a bit of a primer on what it means for a language to be endangered, what we might do about it, etc. As a Welsh person (who doesn’t speak Welsh), obviously I have a bit of a vested interest here: Welsh is the least endangered of the Celtic languages, but it isn’t for lack of trying on the part of our English rulers (see also: the Welsh Not, Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, etc).

Welsh is a bit too successful for Adamou to spend much time on here, despite all that, though I think the revival efforts probably deserved a bit of a mention alongside the revival efforts for Breton, Cornish and Irish, including stuff like the Welsh Language Acts. To compare how Welsh is doing compared to other more endangered languages is pretty instructive — but there’s a limited amount of space in any one book, of course.

In the end, discussing endangered languages and how to protect them is surprisingly similar to discussing conservation, though of course it’s best not to stretch the similarity too far. I was interested to read about the fact that languages should be considered “dormant” rather than “extinct” now: I don’t know if I think that’s a nice way to look at it, or perhaps one which softens the tragedy of losing all native speakers of a language a little too much.

Anyway, an interesting introduction.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Evangelia Adamou, history, non-fiction

Review – Now Go

Posted April 12, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Now Go: On Grief and Studio Ghibli

by Karl Thomas Smith

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 90
Series: Inklings
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Grief is all around us. At the heart of the brightly coloured, vividly characterised, joyful films of Studio Ghibli, they are wracked with loss - of innocence, of love, of the connection to our world and of that world itself. Now Go enters these emotional waters to interrogate not only how Studio Ghibli navigates grief so well, but how that informs our own understanding of grief's manifold faces.

Now Go is basically an essay about Studio Ghibli’s portrayal of grief and what that means to the author. It isn’t really just about grief in Studio Ghibli movies, and sometimes the link feels a bit tenuous. I can understand feeling a very strong personal connection to movies, and seeing things in them which reflect on one’s own grief and loss, but it ends up not being an inquiry into grief in Studio Ghibli, but very much the author’s grief and Studio Ghibli. The actual analysis of the movies as texts is fairly surface-level. In retrospect, maybe the title should’ve told me that was where it was going to tilt.

I also wasn’t super convinced that the author understood that, for example, Howl’s Moving Castle is based on a book by Diana Wynne Jones, and not something that Miyazaki came up with in his own head alone. He didn’t engage at all with the anti-war themes of this adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle, which are very much Miyazaki’s thing, developed out of very small elements of the plot of the novel. It would have fit nicely with his themes, but… nope.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Karl Thomas Smith, non-fiction