A book of various “five day” thought exercises designed to help analyse your own thinking processes. Physical puzzle solving stuff (“build a bridge between four wine bottles, with four knives”) and some game-playing strategy – good ways of thinking about thinking; I’m quite enlightened.

World-weary English cynicism versus simplistic American decency, fighting over a girl and a country in 50s Vietnam. More appropriate to current events than I expected (lots of old-school war reporting, as well), and I’d forgotten how glorious Greene’s writing was.

Actually an overblown textbook, written for teachers or managers. Some good guidance, but the insanely useless diagrams and the mounting megalomania (“I propose… an important new word which we cannot manage without!”) begin to grate.

Read “The Use of Lateral Thinking” instead.

Amiable Ronson follows and interviews both sides of the conspiracy theory world, arranging effortless interviews with members of the Bilderberg group, while mundane extremists attempt to infiltrate the same groups through overdramatic subterfuge. The double-edgedness of “Them”.

Collection of magazine articles, short stories, and the like – they’d be better if he was reading them aloud, although there are some wonderful gems of adjective-noun in there.

A lone figure exploring and remembering a genetically-modified apocalypse. The setting is a bit too generic and underplayed, but the details that are there are wonderful, the overall story is a strong one.

Another hardback of fairy-tale deconstruction and humorous moralising; one of the “children’s” ones, but still enjoyable enough reading.

A soberingly unfinished look at alternative medicine (it cuts off midway through chapter six), from a journalist dying of throat cancer. Some very harsh destruction-through-analogy – I have been saying “Ha!” aloud, a lot.

Religious numerology, text-randomising software, and the fragmented history of the Templars, with tangents. A bit over-detailed and clever-trousers, but it works within the book’s context, the expositional dialogue being punctured with sufficient drama, cynicism, scenery and asides. (It’s getting a bit heavy towards the end, mind.)

A wonderfully constructed memoir of a cryptic-crossword fiend, interspersed with guidance to the uninitiated – the connecting coincidences manage to feel a lot like overlapping answers, somehow.