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Manny Rayner's book reviews
I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.
Currently reading
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
R in Action
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
One-Upmanship: How to Win Life's Little Games Without Appearing to Try
The successor to Gamesmanship and Lifemanship. It's becoming a little formulaic, but there are still plenty of good bits.One of my favorite sections describes how to give presents that the recipient will loathe. It's Christmas, and you hand your unsuspecting victim a packet that turns out to contain a hearing aid.
"But I don't have a hearing problem!" they say, surprised.
"Ah, let me show you how it works!" you explain. You fasten it to their ear, then, with your mouth well away from the microphone (Potter's italics), you recite:
"Where?" they ask, before they've had time to think about it.There was a boy, ye knew him once,
Ye cliffs and islands of Winander...
"WINANDER," you reply. "Handy little thing, isn't it?"
