So, I’m not very good at reading the “several interconnected stories in alternating chapters” books – there’s always one story I just want to stay with, and one I’m a bit impatient with, and that was certainly the case with this. But! Also: very pleasingly written, lovely plot, fun technology, adventures, likeable people, funny bits, and lots of really good things.

So, this is long, and intermittently confusing, but it’s very very rollicking. If you feel like a rollick comprised of almost perpetual chase scenes, this is a reliable and charming bet.

Loads of short articles by game designers on games they think are important or interesting – great not just for turning up new games I should play, and new thoughts about games to consider, but on showing one of the angles that the designers themselves think about games from and thereby shining a different light on their own games.

Very good but a bit disappointing towards the end; hobbled by history in that respect, I think.

A bit too much about Quammen being all journalisty and interested in things, rather than concentrating on the things themselves. I’m sure it worked in the original context of monthly articles, but the relentless endings of “there may be no biological evidence, but history tells us, I think, to bet on the pigeons” and general meaningless slightly-jovial “argh it’s the end of the article what do I do now I CAN’T JUST STOP” seem symptomatic of the problems of the whole, which don’t have enough actual content for my liking.

Seven chapters on different Weird Things About Colours In Nature. Really interesting, and written in – well, you know that thing where bad journalists write glib formulaic things that don’t really mean much? This is the opposite of that: slightly weird approaches to explaining everyhing that work really well and are full of stuff.

Obviously I’m intrinsically incapable of being objective about books in which giant cities roam the planes and consume each other, but I’m pretty sure this was great.

I get bored easily and consider two and a half hours to be unforgivably long for any movie, but as unforgivably long movies go it was pretty okay!

Also, slightly unpleasant! I had to think “it’s rated 12, they’re going to cut away before anything too nasty happens” in order to not spend the whole thing wincing and looking away.

Thrillers aren’t really my genre, but “something about games and secret libraries” is clearly the sort of thing I should like, so it seemed worth a try. It turned out to be good to read on trains, with a sort of idle sense of slow progression running through it. A few years on from publication, the “game” parts seem predictably off-target, despite there being few details about the actual mechanics, but it’s all readable enough.

I do want to start keeping track of phone conversations people have in fiction to show the reader how good they are at something, though – there’s a hilarious couple of paragraphs early on in this one when the hero is talking about French insurance in order to show what a confident financial whiz he is.

Darwin’s chronological-but-distracted memories; very amiable, and completely delightful for the first half or so, though the second half does get into quite a bit of “and here is a list of some other books I wrote”.

I told another little boy (I believe it was Leighton, who afterwards became a well-known lichenologist and botanist), that I could produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me. I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once gathered much valuable fruit from my father’s trees and hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless haste to spread the news that I had discovered a hoard of stolen fruit.