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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
L'âge de raison (Les chemins de la liberté, Vol. 1)
This is an excellent novel about unpleasant people, with some unforgettable scenes. Here's one of the ones I liked most. Daniel, a strange character who has never managed to establish a normal connection with the world, has been hovering on the edge of suicide for some time. He's finally decided he's going to do it. But he can't just leave his three cats to starve to death, so he puts them in a wicker basket and takes them down to the river to drown them. The basket is too small, and he can hear them fighting and complaining inside. But of course it doesn't matter any more.When he gets there, he suddenly realises it's impossible. He trudges back home with his heavy basket and opens it. The cats emerge, looking very much the worse for wear. His favourite has a nasty scatch over her eye. In the middle of all the commotion, he's also managed to get himself scatched, and it hurts. He feels utterly miserable.
It's one of the most effective passages I know on the subject of why it generally isn't a good idea to want to kill yourself.
 - Jean-Paul Sartre)