tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-180777052009-07-02T20:43:13.761+01:00What's a website for if not for the selfish indulgence of one's own opinions? So here are the books I think are worth reading (as well as some music and movies). Any one of them should bring you pleasure. (And if not, well, it is only an opinion.)Davidnoreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1130944916749074352007-12-31T17:21:00.000Z2006-01-19T16:57:50.636Z

As well as writing the Barbican poster in the From Here to Here exhibition at 2005's London Design Festival, I wrote one of the stories in this accompanying book. Again based on Barbican, the story isn't quite as happy-go-lucky as the poster, but I'm pretty pleased with it. Being published alongside Simon Armitage is quite nice, too. If you'd like to read my story, or any of the 30 others in the

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1130945483604154062007-12-31T15:30:00.000Z2006-01-19T16:55:02.586Z

The 26 Letters exhibition at the British Library was part of 2004's London Design Festival. It featured 26 posters, each built around a letter of the alphabet, and it proved a terrific success. I was lucky enough to be invited to create the poster for X (which you can see in my portfolio), alongside designer Thomas Manss of Thomas Manss & Company.I also wrote the article that accompanies the

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1162894516874568852006-11-07T10:06:00.000Z2006-11-08T11:10:39.123Z

Perhaps the most thrilling thing Richard Dawkins says in his furious polemic on religion shouldn't really be thrilling at all - it should be almost axiomatic. Religious ideas, he says, should be as open to challenge as, say, Marxist ideas, or Big Bang Theory. As obvious as this point might seem to many, it's one rarely made or championed. And it's about time that changed.The God Delusion is by no

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1147340926018067872006-05-11T10:40:00.000+01:002006-05-11T10:59:43.783+01:00

This is one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. It's about how we make very quick, split-second decisions about people and situations, but often don't trust them. Gladwell shows how powerful the unconscious is in making these decisions, and why they're very often extremely accurate.But he also shows how they can be skewed by environmental, social and cultural influences, and how we can

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1139489052876642752006-02-09T12:38:00.000Z2006-04-28T09:27:38.863+01:00

If I'm looking for sheer, sophisticated entertainment, and Wodehouse isn't to hand (and sometimes even when he is), I reach for the Burglar books. Lawrence Block, who must be one of the most prolific writers in any genre, has turned out ten of these sparkling mysteries so far. And long may he continue.The hero of the books is one Bernie Rhodenbarr, a Manhattan bookstore owner who also happens to

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1139155132942584892006-02-05T15:41:00.000Z2006-02-05T16:01:15.440Z

I finished this extraordinary book on the train the other day. I don't recommend you do the same. Try to read the final pages somewhere private. Then you won't have to fight back the tears.Tears over a comic book? A comic book about mice being terrorised by cats? Absolutely.Maus is Art Spiegelman's retelling of his parents' experiences in the war, and in the camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz. And

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1132048763187698482006-01-15T21:49:00.000Z2006-01-15T13:30:44.816Z

The "favourite book" question is an impossible one, of course. But this is the one I always end up giving as my answer. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems, by Michael Ondaatje. It's a perfect little book, knitting a life of William "Billy the Kid" Bonney from history, mythology and Ondaatje's own imagining.Now best known for The English Patient (also easily in my top five,

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1137353053997903622006-01-15T19:14:00.000Z2006-01-15T19:24:14.030Z

Of course you know this, but the late Grahame Chapman was one of the Monty Python team, and is widely regarded as its most eccentric of all. This is his autobiography, more or less, and it's still one of the funniest books I've ever read. It's as anarchic as he clearly was himself, it's often startlingly angry, and just as often (as just as startlingly) extremely touching.As well as being

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1137330976585073112006-01-15T13:15:00.000Z2006-01-15T13:31:33.353Z

"She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill towards the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly enters the house."Now maybe

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1136973580855448492006-01-11T09:58:00.000Z2006-01-11T10:15:43.563Z

Rejoice. For at last we have a CD reissue of Talking Heads' epic live album. Plus, it comes with enough extra tracks to fill a whole other CD. And it is, of course, trancendentally wondrous. The only downside is that fans like me who never got to see the Heads know from this album (even more than the better-known Stop Making Sense) just how much we missed. Many years ago, in a pub called The

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1132047126694409882005-11-15T09:29:00.000Z2005-11-15T09:48:35.630Z

I've been a big fan of Carroll's since I read Bones of the Moon at school. His is a distinctive voice: romantic, philosophical, often sinister and sometimes chilling. Set in Carroll's beloved Vienna, Sleeping in Flame is a beautifully told love story, a compelling mystery and a dark fantasy. In it, Walker Easterling (most of Carroll's characters have rather exotic, cool-sounding names) meets and

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1131661329004592562005-11-10T21:45:00.000Z2006-01-19T16:50:24.510Z

Is that a daft thing to say, in the face of Shakespeare, Milton, Hemingway, et al? Perhaps it is daft, but perhaps that's the point. If I had to read one author for ever more, I think I'd rather have Wodehouse's sublime form of daftness at my bedside than anything else. Wodehouse isn't just a writer. He's a friend for life, restoring the warm glow in gloomy times.He's also, without doubt, one of

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1131378491890310632005-11-07T15:28:00.000Z2005-11-09T11:56:23.346Z

It's quite a grand claim for any book, but Jean-Dominique Bauby's account of life with "Locked-in Syndrome" is surely worthy. Bauby, once Editor in Chief of French Elle, suffered a massive stroke - something which, until recently, was unequivocably fatal. But, as Bauby puts it, "improved resusitation techniques have now prolonged and refined the agony". It's one of the few bitter moments of this

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1131369464584471132005-11-07T13:06:00.000Z2005-11-09T11:57:58.356Z

I've just finished this extraordinary, and extraordinarily strange, book. And it leaves its mark. The story is sparked by a mysterious ritual, never fully described, enacted by four university friends. In later life, the results of this invocation haunt them all - except, it seems, for the narrator, who spends a lot of his time trying to help the others, or at least to comfort them.If you don't

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18077705.post-1131374588045914062005-10-07T14:23:00.000+01:002005-11-09T11:55:09.846Z

The Streets' debut album, Original Pirate Material, was about as ballsy as debuts come ('Let's Push Things Forward' is as straightforward a manifesto as you could wish for), and all the better for it. But the follow-up is even braver: a 'concept album' with none of the overblown pretentiousness that label tends to evoke. This album tells the story of a lost thousand quid and, as the 'chapters'

Mike Reedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01254406764366639916noreply@blogger.com0