FAVOURITE BOOKS

 

BOOKS I HAVE READ

  2010

  • The Meaning of It All (Richard Feynman)

  • Bring on the Apocalypse: 6 Arguments for Global Justice (George Monbiot)

  • Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond)

  • The Last Giant of Beringia: The Mystery of the Bering Land Bridge (Dan O'Neill)

  2009

  • The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (Robin Lane Fox)

  • Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum (Richard Fortey)

  • The Lying Stones of Marrakech (Stephen Jay Gould)

  • The Hobbit Trap (Maciej Henneberg & John Schofield)

  • The Persians (Aeschylus)

  • Seven Against Thebes (Aeschylus)

  • Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus)

  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Author unknown)

  • The Poincaré Conjecture (Donal O'Shea)

  • The King's English (Kingsley Amis)

  • Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician's Journey Through Symmetry (Marcus du Sautoy)

  • The Immortal Game: A History of Chess (David Shenk)

  • Made to Stick (Chip Heath & Dan Heath)

  • In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (Alexander McCall Smith)

  • The Full Cupboard of Life (Alexander McCall Smith)

  • Charles Darwin (Arthur Gregor)

  • The Jewel that was Ours (Colin Dexter)

  • Morse's Greatest Mystery (Colin Dexter)

  • Service of All the Dead (Colin Dexter)

  • Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant (Richard Stone)

  • The History Boys (Alan Bennett)

  • Behind the Bestsellers (Jenny Bond & Chris Sheedy)

  • The Kalahari Typing School for Men (Alexander McCall Smith)

  • Morality for Beautiful Girls (Alexander McCall Smith)

  • Mort Artu [The Death of King Arthur] (Author unknown)

  • Brick Lane (Monica Ali)

  • I Fought the Law (Dan Kieran)

  • The Elegant Universe of Albert Einstein (Misc. Authors)

  • Autobiography of Charles Darwin (Charles Darwin)

  • Tears of the Giraffe (Alexander McCall Smith)

  • The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (Alexander McCall Smith)

  • Richard Dawkins (ed. Alan Grafen & Mark Ridley)

  • Thinks ... (David Lodge)

  2008

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien)

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)

  • Ethical Living (Peter Macbride)

  • Confucius: A Biography (Jonathan Clements)

  • Homo Britannicus (Chris Stringer)

  • The History Boys (Alan Bennett)

  • The Sixpenny Debt and Other Oxford Stories (Misc. Authors)

  • Britain in the Middle Ages: An Archaeological History (Francis Pryor)

  • Borneo, Celebes, Aru (Alfred Russell Wallace)

  • Rome: A Cultural and Literary History (Jonathan Boardman)

  • Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw)

  • The Daughters of Cain (Colin Dexter)

  • The Meaning of It All (Richard Feynman)

  • Genius Explained (Michael Howe)

  • Genes, Peoples, and Languages (Luigi Cavalli-Sforza)

  • For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)

  • Climbing Mount Improbable (Richard Dawkins)

  • The Decipherment of Linear B (John Chadwick)

  • The Story of Decipherment (Maurice Pope)

  • The British Museum is Falling Down (David Lodge)

  • Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh)

  • The Map that Changed the World (Simon Winchester)

  • The Man who Deciphered Linear B (Andrew Robinson)

  • The Remorseful Day (Colin Dexter)

  • Eumenides (Aeschylus)

  • Choephoroe (Aeschylus)

  • Agamemnon (Aeschylus)

  • Dao De Jing (Lao Zi)

  • The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order (George Monbiot)

  • Starter For Ten (David Nicholls)

  • Alcestis (Euripides)

  • The Outsider (Albert Camus)

  • The Knights (Aristophanes)

  • Tuva or Bust: Richard Feynman's Last Journey (Ralph Leighton)

  • Small World (David Lodge)

  • Changing Places (David Lodge)

  • Lawrence of Arabia (Jeremy Wilson)

  • Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse (ed. Robert Nichols)

  • Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles)

  • Oedipus the King (Sophocles)

  • Antigone (Sophocles)

  • The View from Mount Improbable (Richard Dawkins)

  • Born on a Blue Day (Daniel Tammet)

  • Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)

  • To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

  2007

  • The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins)

  • His Dark Materials: The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman)

  • His Dark Materials: The Subtle Knife (Philip Pullman)

  • His Dark Materials: Northern Lights (Philip Pullman)

  • Lawrence of Arabia: The Life, the Legend (Malcolm Brown)

  • Blueprints (Maitland Edey & Donald Johanson)

  • Home Truths (David Lodge)

  • Last Seen Wearing (Colin Dexter)

  • The Third Mile (Colin Dexter)

  • The Golden Ratio (Mario Livio)

  • The Electric Universe (David Bodanis)

  • Nice Work (David Lodge)

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke)

  • Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)

  • Faust, Part 1 (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

  • The Adventures of Tintin at Sea (Yves Horeau)

  • The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)

  • Stradivarius (Toby Faber)

  • Einstein's Heroes (Robyn Arianrhod)

  • Stephen Hawking (Kitty Ferguson)

  • One World: The Ethics of Globalisation (Peter Singer)

  • The Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize (Peter Doherty)

  • Classical Music Without Fear (Marianne Williams Tobias)

  • Country (Tim Flannery)

  • Dos and Don'ts in Hong Kong (Mary Leong & Colin Story)

  • Culture Smart! Hong Kong (Clare Vickers)

  • The Big Questions (Paul Davies)

  • Some Time with Feynman (Leonard Mlodinow)

  • King Solomon's Mines (H. Rider Haggard)

  • Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong)

  • Fermat's Last Theorem (Simon Singh)

  • Dr Riemann's Zeros (Karl Sabbagh)

  • A Mathematician's Apology (G.H. Hardy)

  • Scenes of Academic Life (David Lodge)

  • The Wench is Dead (Colin Dexter)

  • The Young Lawrence of Arabia (James Cadell)

  • Last Bus to Woodstock (Colin Dexter)

  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon)

  • Tolkien's Gown (Rick Gekoski)

  • Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis and the Narnian Chronicles (David Downing)

  • Tolkien: A Biography (Michael White)

  • The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)

  • Death is Now My Neighbour (Colin Dexter)

  • Longitude (Dava Sobel)

  • Quantum Theory (John Polkinghorne)

  • French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France (Tim Moore)

  • Hunting the Double Helix (Anna Meyer)

  • Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

  • The Rape of the Lock (Alexander Pope)

  • Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

  • The Way of Alexander the Great (Charles Mercer)

  • The Turk (Tom Standage)

  • The Cloudspotter's Guide (Gavin Pretor-Pinney)

  • Notes from Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

  • Miracles and Idolatry (Voltaire)

  • Green Hills of Africa (Ernest Hemingway)

  • Still Life with Woodpecker (Tom Robbins)

  • The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)

  • Chinese Chess (H.T. Lau)

  • Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Daniel C. Dennett)

  • The Eternal Frontier (Tim Flannery)

  • Please, Mr Einstein (Jean-Claude Carrière)

  • A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Marina Lewycka)

  • Robert Hooke (Margaret 'Espinasse)

  • Oriental Assembly (T.E. Lawrence)

  • Lawrence of Arabia: The Man and the Motive (Anthony Nutting)

  • Dublin (Robin Gauldie)

  • Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)

  • Freakonomics (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)

  • Manufacturing Consent (Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky)

  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche)

  • Wheels Out of Gear: 2-Tone, the Specials, and a World in Flame (Dave Thompson)

  • Ubik (Philip K. Dick)

  2006

  • Evolution Versus Intelligent Design (Peter Cook)

  • The Future Eaters (Tim Flannery)

  • The Early History of Rome (Livy)

  • The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)

  • Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Lynne Truss)

  • The Way Through the Woods (Colin Dexter)

  • Collected Short Stories V (Philip K. Dick)

  • The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams)

  • The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins)

  • The Secret of Annexe 3 (Colin Dexter)

  • The Character of Physical Law (Richard Feynman)

  • 100 Tang and Song Poems (translated by Xu Yuan-Zhong)

  • Invitation to Statistics (Gavin Kennedy)

  • Dawkins vs Gould (Kim Sterelny)

  • River out of Eden (Richard Dawkins)

  • The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)

  • The Music of the Primes (Marcus du Sautoy)

  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

  • The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (Colin Dexter)

  • Seven Pillars of Wisdom (T.E. Lawrence)

  • Tesla Electric (David G. Fraser)

  • The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

  • Amsterdam (Misc. Authors)

  • Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities (Marcel Paquet)

  • New York (Misc. Authors)

  • Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

  • René Magritte (Marcel Paquet)

  • Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller)

  • On the Suffering of the World (Arthur Schopenhauer)

  • Walden (Henry Thoreau)

  • Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)

  • A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare)

  • A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)

  • Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)

  • Winnie-the-Pooh (A.A. Milne)

  • Sandro Botticelli (Barbara Deimling)

  • Fast Food Nation (Eric Schlosser)

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Peter Feist)

  • Pablo Picasso (Ingo Walther)

  • Paradise Lost (John Milton)

  • Difficulties With Girls (Kingsley Amis)

  • Why I Am So Wise (Friedrich Nietzsche)

  • The Xmas Files: The Philosophy of Christmas (Stephen Law)

  • Nietzsche (R.J. Hollingdale)

  • Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle)

  • On the Generation of Animals (Aristotle)

  • An Instance of the Fingerpost (Iain Pears)

  • Heavy Water and Other Stories (Martin Amis)

  • Roy Lichtenstein (Janis Hendrickson)

  • The Greek Myths (Robert Graves)

  • Lady Windermere's Fan (Oscar Wilde)

  • The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde)

  • The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)

  • The Invisible Man (H.G. Wells)

  • Jake's Thing (Kingsley Amis)

  • The Time Machine (H.G. Wells)

  • The Fall (Albert Camus)

  • Starter For Ten (David Nicholls)

  • Our Final Century (Martin Rees)

  • The Plague (Albert Camus)

  • The Old Devils (Kingsley Amis)

  • Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis)

  • Mr Tompkins in Paperback (George Gamov)

  • Galapagos (Kurt Vonnegut)

  • The Outsider (Albert Camus)

  • Human Evolution (Bernard Wood)

  • The Seashell on the Mountaintop (Alan Cutler)

  • The Chronicles of Narnia, 7 books (C.S. Lewis)

  • The Timewaster Letters (Robin Cooper)

  • Evolution's Captain (Peter Nichols)

  • The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)

  • Crito (Plato)

  • Apology (Plato)

  2005

  • Euthyphro (Plato)

  • The Early History of Rome (Livy)

  • Take a Girl Like That (Kingsley Amis)

  • I Like It Here (Kingsley Amis)

  • The Oxford Murders (Guillermo Martínez)

  • Candide (Voltaire)

  • Tartuffe or The Impostor (Molière)

  • The Matter Myth (Paul Davies & John Gribbin)

  • The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

  • The Misanthrope (Molière)

  • Mutants (Armand Marie Lerois)

  • Notes from a Small Island (Bill Bryson)

  • Wittgenstein (David Pears)

  • The Consolations of Philosophy (Alain de Botton)

  • Imaginary Interviews with the Existentialists (Robert Solomon)

  • Virgil (David Slavitt)

  • The Age of Shakespeare (Frank Kermode)

  • Philosophy: The Classics (Nigel Warburton)

  • New Scientist: The Last Word (New Scientist)

  • The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)

  • The Russian Girl (Kingsley Amis)

  • Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee)

  • Rivals: Conflict as the Fuel of Science (Michael White)

  • Turing and the Universal Machine (Jon Agar)

  • The Man who Deciphered Linear B (Andrew Robinson)

  • Rameau's Nephew (Diderot)

  • The Cherry Orchard (Anton Tchekov)

  • Quiz Book (Misc. Authors)

  • Compact Classics (ed. Stevens Anderson)

  • The Poems of Catullus (Catullus)

  • The Divine Comedy: Hell (Dante)

  • Michelangelo (Gilles Neret)

  • Leonardo da Vinci (Frank Zöllner)

  • Zadig (Voltaire)

  • Candide (Voltaire)

  • Italy (ed. Emily Hatchwell)

  • Venice Condensed (Damien Simonis)

  • Florence Condensed (Martin Hughes)

  • Rome Condensed (Martin Hughes & Sally Webb)

  • Best of Barcelona (Damien Simonis)

  • Philosophy: The Classics (Nigel Warburton)

  • University Challenge Quiz Book (Marina Coles)

  • New Scientist: The Last Word 2 (New Scientist)

  • Introducing: Genetics (Steve Jones)

  • Introducing: Chaos (Ziauddin Sardar)

  • The Mould in Dr Florey's Coat (Eric Lax)

  • The Odyssey (Homer)

  • Life: An Unauthorised Biography (Richard Fortey)

  • Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche)

  • The Prince (Nicolo Machiavelli)

  • The Music of the Primes (Marcus du Sautoy)

  • Go and Go-Moku (Edward Lasker)

  • Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)

  • Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Stephen Jay Gould)

  • Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis)

  2004

  • Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (Stephen Jay Gould)

  • Utopia (Thomas More)

  • Explorers of Australia (Geoffrey Badger)

  • Weapons of Chess (Bruce Pandolfini)

  • The Iliad (Homer)

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

  • John Milton (Kathryn Bevis)

  • Six Not-So-Easy Pieces (Richard Feynman)

  • Introducing: Kant (Christopher Want)

  • Oscar Wilde (Sheridan Morley)

  • Extraordinary Minds (Howard Gardner)

  • Michelangelo (Gilles Neret)

  • Paradise Lost (John Milton)

  • Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

  • The Meaning of Everything (Simon Winchester)

  • The Further Letters of Henry Root (William Donaldson)

  • The Henry Root Letters (William Donaldson)

  • A Hero of our Time (Mikhail Lermontov)

  • Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)

  • Monkey (Wu Cheng-En)

  • The Rape of the Lock (Alexander Pope)

  • The Wedding (Anton Tchekov)

  • The Anniversary (Anton Tchekov)

  • The Sea-Gull (Anton Tchekov)

  • A Short History of Planet Earth (Ian Plimer)

  • Oxford: A Traveller's History (Richard Tames)

  • The Fantastic Invasion: Kipling, Conrad, and Lawson (L. Sunderland)

  • Picasso: My Grandfather (Marina Picasso)

  • Life's Grandeur (Stephen Jay Gould)

  • The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Richard Feynman)

  • Spinoza (Roger Scruton)

  • Slowness (Milan Kundera)

  • Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)

  • Antony and Cleopatra (William Shakespeare)

  • Autobiography of Charles Darwin (Charles Darwin)

  • Sartre: Life and Works (Kenneth A. Thompson)

  • Existentialism is a Humanism (Jean-Paul Sartre)

  • Hamlet (William Shakespeare)

  • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

  • The Aeneid (Vergil)

  • Beowulf (Author unknown)

  • Turing and the Computer (Paul Strathern)

  • The Trial (Franz Kafka)

  • Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

  • The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

  • Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

  • The Sign of Four (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

  • A Study in Scarlet (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

  • Lyra's Oxford (Philip Pullman)

  • Symposium (Plato)

  • The Man who Deciphered Linear B (Andrew Robinson)

  • The Dragon Seekers: The Discovery of Dinosaurs (C. McGowan)

  • Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)

  • Stateless Socialism: Anarchism (Mikhail Bakunin)

  • Shaolin Fighting: Theories and Concepts (Douglas L. Wong)

  • The Double Helix (James D. Watson)

  • When Life Nearly Died (Michael Benton)

  • Freud (Anthony Storr) 

  2003

  • Ted Kaczinsky: The Unabomber (Ted Ottley)

  • The Adventure of English (Melvyn Bragg)

  • The Elegant Universe (Brian Greene)

  • The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

  • Through the Looking-Glass (Lewis Carroll)

  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

  • Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)

  • My Brilliant Career (Miles Franklin)

  • Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

  • Charles Lyell (Edward Bailey)

  • Collected Short Stories (E.M. Forster)

  • Lectures and Conversations  (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

  • Animal Farm (George Orwell)

  • Lord of the Flies (William Golding)

  • The Tree of Man (Patrick White)

  • The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells)

  • In the Blink of an Eye (Andrew Parker)

  • A Thousand Pieces of Gold (Adeline Yen Mah)

  • Red Dwarf: Last Human ("Doug Naylor")

  • Einstein's Unfinished Symphony (M. Bartusiak)

  • One World: The Ethics of Globalisation (Peter Singer)

  • Democracy and Disobedience (Peter Singer)

  • The Case of the Missing Neutrinos (John Gribbin)

  • Portraits of Discovery: Profiles in Scientific Genius (George Greenstein)

  • The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World (R. Desalle & D. Lindley)

  • Tolkien: A Biography (Michael White)

  • Deep Time (Henry Gee)

  2002

  • The Molecule Hunt (Martin Jones)

  • China (Patricia Ebrey)

  • The Universe in a Nutshell (Stephen Hawking)

  • 1984 (George Orwell)

  • Bertrand Russell (C. Moorehead)

  • Secrets, Lies, and Democracy (Noam Chomsky)

  • Black Holes and Baby Universes (Stephen Hawking)

  • General Linguistics (Jean Aitchison)

  • A History of the English Language (A.C. Baugh)

  • Fermat's Last Theorem (A.D. Aczel)

  • Wonderful Life (Stephen Jay Gould)

  • Being and Time (Martin Heidegger)

  • Philosophical Investigations (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

  • Extraordinary Minds (Howard Gardner)

  • Philosophy: The Classics (Nigel Warburton)

  • In Search of the Big Bang (John Gribbin)

  • A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking)

  2001

  • No Logo (Naomi Klein)

  • Russia: Which Way Paradise? (Monica Attard)

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien)

  • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)

  • The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)

  • Introducing: Keynesian Economics (Peter Pugh)

  • The Panda's Thumb (Stephen Jay Gould)

  • In Defence of Globalisation (Keith Suter)

  • Russian Revolution (Alan Moorehead)

  • Dracula (Bram Stoker)

  • Need or Greed? (Judith Hoad)

  • History of Greece (J.B. Bury)

  • Stephen Hawking's Universe (David Filkin)

  • Macarthur in the Pacific (Michael Green)

  • Green or Gone? (David Shearman)

  • Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)

  • The Next 100 Years (Jonathan Weiner)

  • The Future Eaters (Tim Flannery)

  • The Lighter Side of Gravity (Jayant Narlikar)