Reviews and Comments

Apparently police are called bobbies because the Met was created by Sir Robert Peel.

I bought this in Japanese, I think it's going to take a while!

This month's book club pick

A history book that follows a bead that was found in a Viking grave in Repton across to asia where it was likely made. The book details bioarcheology involving comparing the makeup of teeth and bones to show whether people in gravesites are migrants where they likely came from. I'd never heard of that before, and found it all very interesting.

I really enjoyed the first section, but as it went I guess by necessity it became less grounded and more full of could haves and might haves.

A short story from 1909.

It feels like a cliche to say a dystopian story predicted the modern world, but wow.

This was from the library, but I returned it after the first section. It seems pretty good, but it's too soon after I read ultra processed people for me I think. It has the same messages really, avoid UPF, eat whole foods, mostly plants. Ignore health claims on packaging, the gut microbiome seems important, but most stuff about single nutrients/vitamins/antioxidants etc is bunk. Maybe I'll come back to it another day.

Jarvis Cocker having a clear out of his loft space talking through some of the things he finds. I didn't know much about him really, but fancied something quite light to read and it was on offer. I'm glad I picked it, I found his perspective on life and music interesting as a fellow awkward nerd that seems to be in a slower gear than the rest of the world a lot of the time.

Very short and very silly. I have a real soft spot for Rincewind, and the early Discworld books.

A book detailing how our food has been systematically replaced by food-like products.

Not much particularly new to me, having read In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan and Spoon Fed by Tim Spector. It's good to remind myself of this though, and try to focus on minimising the amount of UPF I consume. Not easy though!

This definitely rings true to me:

Many of the other products we buy are engineered to drive excess consumption; our phones and apps, our clothes, our social media, our games and television. Sometimes these can feel like they take much more than they give. The requirement for growth and the harm it does to our bodies and our planet is so much part of the fabric of our world that it’s nearly invisible. You may find that abstinence from some of these other products is helpful too.

It's an easy read that draws a narrative through the whole of human history. It's okay, and some ideas were interesting, but it's full of opinion written as fact, bending things out of shape to fit in with an idea and I think quite a lot of inaccuracies.

I really feel that human happiness being nothing more than the hormone levels in the brain is a massive simplification in danger of just being wrong: www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/no-evidence-depression-caused-low-serotonin-levels-finds-comprehensive-review

I'm so bored of the futurism stuff in the last chapter too.

It seems odd that he says we know nothing of hunter gatherer society cultures, then goes on to say how much worse life was after the agricultural revolution.

I think he's underestimating both how hard it would be to survive winter through foraging and the joy that people get from cultivating and farming land.