First of all I'll reveal my ignorance. Having read the book and enjoyed it greatly, I still have no clue why Zoe Heller's book is called The Believers. It probably means that there's a whole sublime level that I've missed.

I've read Notes On A Scandal, and Everything You Know …

I never knew Stephen Donaldson wrote sci-fi. I'd read the Thomas Covenant trilogy and found it intense and somewhat harrowing to read. A friend of Janos' found it difficult to complete, it was so emotionally demanding. Donaldson tends to write about characters undergoing unrelenting mental stress, and Real Story is …

In 1971, the year I was born, my dad designed a roundabout in Marple, his first piece of road design when he started a new job. You can see it's a bit of an odd shape. Yesterday, as I was helping him set up his broadband, my dad told me …

I heard someone on the radio saying of the England cricket team, 'I think the team don't mind that their success isn't attracting media attention, they're just happy to get on with the job', or words to that effect.

For most jobs that's true, but the aim of a professional …

Silk is like a small, neatly wrapped Japanese package. A poem, a haiku.

I read it this afternoon, sitting in the garden. It has that Japanese device of repetition, which Baricco uses to brilliant effect. Each of the descriptions of Herve's journeys mention the local name for a lake. It's …

What are the other books like? As good as the first?

Glad you liked it. I've got books two and three ready and waiting.

Anonymous, and not on facebook!

My profuse thanks to Bill for lending me The Traveller, it was an exciting and interesting read. The book involves people living 'off the grid', out of the clutches of the Vast Machine, the network of surveillance devices and databases that track what everyone is doing.

The privacy issue is …

A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness In The Sky by Vernor Vinge are among my top sci-fi books. I borrowed Vinge's Rainbows End from Janos, a novel set here on Earth in the near future. The implicit predictions contained in the descriptions of the lifestyles and technology are …

A few weeks ago I went to Oxford to say hello to my friend Matt, and we went to a lecture on the singularity by David Chalmers. He covered many aspects, but one idea he talked about was that for safety reasons a superhuman AI should be developed in virtual …