2 Books - 1 Small Update. Blame my Kindle

I Blame My Kindle - a 2 book mini-review.

"Stuff White People Like" - Christian Lander

"Seeing Further" - edited by Bill Bryson

You see? This is what you happens when you get a Kindle. It's the book equivalent of an MP3 player. With a cassette, or even with a CD player, you were more inclined to listen to a whole album the whole way through, and give it a couple of listens before you abandoned it. With MP3 players, your whole album collection is on shuffle, and if you're like me, there are songs on there you have never listened to. So it is with the Kindle - I have about 200 books on there and the temptation to skip around, especially if the book I'm currently reading is a bit tricky, is always there. 

So, the book I'm officially reading, I'm still reading and hopefully I'll review that next week. Hopefully. Despite it being an interesting read, I couldn't help but stray off course not once, but twice. Hence the 2 book mini review you now see in front of you.

So - 'Stuff White People Like' was a very funny website (it still exits, it just hasn't been updated in over 2 years). It pokes fun about, well - about stuff white people like. More specifically it pokes fun at the white liberal middle-class (me, then). Each week - it picked a different topic: Having Black Friends, Picking Their Own Fruit, Banksy, Ironic Tattoos, Mad Men, Yoga etc etc, and took the piss out of it. It was pretty funny, mostly because it was an accurate dart through the heart of pretentious hipster trendies. I fully confess to liking a lot of the topics in here: The Onion, Being On Time, Microbrewery Beer etc. As a book, it just doesn't work as well. The only reason for this is that it feels a bit samey if you more than 3 or 4 in a row. As such, it makes for a very good 'toilet reader', and that isn't damning with faint praise - toilet reading is a very underrated experience. Maybe 'Reading on the toilet' will be in Book #2 of the series. 

'Seeing Further' threw me off guard. This was mostly because my Kindle said it was a Bill Bryson book, and if you cast your view up into the top right hand corner of this blog to see the cover, you'll see a great big red 'Bill Bryson', and above it, a teeny-tiny "edited by". So, the first chapter is a highly enjoyable Bill Bryson style romp through the history of the Royal Society. If you liked 'A Short History of Nearly Everything', you'll enjoy this too. However, thereafter you'll find individual chapters written by assorted historians, scientists and authors. I confess to not knowing who most of them are - with the exceptions of Margaret Atwood and Richard Dawkins (he does Science too!). The problem is, that none of them write as well as Bryson, who has an everyman approach to science, which for me, makes it highly accessible.

There's no doubt the Royal Society (basically the inventors of modern science) are deserving of a stellar book celebrating its life and times, and of course there's no reason it all has to be easy-reading and easy to understand. It's just going to be one of those books, like Stuff White People Like, that I won't be reading in one go - it'll be chapters here and there I think. Too big to tackle on the toilet I should think - even for me.