It turns out that I can’t read big flappy picture books after all.

A powerfully vivid, hallucinatory fable on mankind’s relationship with its gods, tying together religion and zookeeping with a firm and beautiful knot.

Bought this cheap, being in an emergent sort of mood, but was very disappointed; the nanoswarm stuff begins well, but is quickly crowbarred into meaningless, genre-friendly clich

More precisely and delicately placed meanderings through the mundane and the extraordinary. Although touching on many of the usual themes and motifs, it feels a lot purer than his later work.

Excellent mix of well-researched (or well-invented) throwaway trivia, and weird social parasitisms. Tails off a bit, but not too badly.

Imaginatively-crafted satire, kicking the straw man of an inverted society. A wonderful demolition of religion, a very vivid reversal of prison and hospital, and an essential few chapters on the dangerous evolution of machinery.

A reclusive, flatulent poet is reluctantly dragged from his life of comfortable squalor in a Hove bedsit. Good, grumpy writing.

Good introduction to complexity theory; patterns and schemata and stochastic data. Becomes very stodgy and rambling during the quantum physics and conservation sections, though, most of which I ended up just skimming.

Hmm, thought this was going to be about aphasia, but it wasn’t. And I get the feeling I missed a lot of clever linguistic references. Decent enough read, though.

A slyly-narrated cycling tale from the underdocumented few years when bicycles ruled the roads and cars were yet to appear. A good and decent point-missing, self-convincing protagonist; Pooter with attitude.