By Nic Lindh on Thursday, 27 September 2012
The subtitle tells the story: “Surprising Science Reveals How We Can: Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer.”
Reynolds has done a great service with this book, collating recent scientific studies on exercise into an eminently readable whole.
As anybody who has spent any time around a gym knows, exercise is fraught with myths, disinformation and “truths” disseminated by your high school coach lo those many years ago.
The First 20 Minutes covers things like, Should you stretch before working out? What’s the best way to prevent soreness? How long should you work out for? What effects does exercise have?
It’s a highly enjoyable deep-dive into peer-reviewed research on those questions and many others and deserves a place on your Kindle. Highly recommended.
The First 20 Minutes is also exceptionally motivational, showing the mass of scientific evidence about just how ridiculously good for you it is to exercise.
If you have a body, you should read this book.
This is the story of the people behind the World War II operation to convince the Germans the D-Day Normandy landings were only a feint and that the real invasion would take place near Calais, thus forcing the Germans to hold back crucial reinforcements during the critical first few days of the invasion.
If Double Cross had been fiction, I would have found it preposterous, but it’s a true story, populated with people John Le Carré couldn’t have dreamed up.
Fascinating.
During the late ’80s while struggling with an addiction to, well, pretty much anything he could get his hands on, but especially heroin and cocaine, Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx kept a diary. The Heroin Diaries is that diary amended with present-time updates from the people involved, who are now mostly sober and seem understandably flabbergasted by their past behavior.
It’s fascinating, engrossing reading. While it’s very, very hard indeed to like any of the people involved, it’s a window into a world I’m very happy to never have been a part of and offers chilling insight into the psychology of addiction.
In this autobiography, Mötley Crüe lead singer Vince Neil comes across as a profoundly damaged individual, spending most of his life in a thoughtless haze of hedonism, drugs, alcohol and sex. It’s fascinating reading, in a train wreck sort of way, and paints a deeply unflattering portrait of Neil himself as well as the rest of the members of Mötley Crüe, who are portrayed as as a group of sad wretches driven by pure, thoughtless id.
After reading Tattoos and Tequila and The Heroin Diaries, the main question in my mind is how any of these people are still alive? Followed by, how did they manage to create any music or go on tour? Really, it’s debauchery and addiction on a level that would make Emperor Nero ask for a time-out.
A rare non-Discworld novel by Pratchett, Dodger is set in Victorian London and is the story of the eponymous Dodger, a 17-year-old tosher scraping out a living in horrific squalor. The novel is, as you’d expect from Pratchett, very clever, but the humor is more of the little smile than the laugh-out-loud quality of the best Discworld novels, and above all Pratchett has infused the novel with pathos and genuine caring for his characters.
It is also compulsively readable with a break-neck plot.
If you haven’t been able to get past the fantasy elements of the Discworld series, Dodger is a great way to get acquainted with the genius of Pratchett.
Powerful alternate history novel that starts out as Agatha Christie with a strange murder at a rural British estate and then becomes increasingly dystopian in its depiction of a country descending into fascism and hate.
Farthing takes place in 1947 in an alternate England that made peace with Germany after the Blitz, an England growing ever more fascist as Nazi Germany continues its stranglehold on the continent.
Walton’s writing is period-perfect and the way she at first lulls you into a genteel English murder mystery only to expand on the darker, true, theme of the novel is nothing short of brilliant—it begins as Agatha Christie and ends as George Orwell.
Highly recommended.
The best in Kadrey’s very good Sandman Slim series, Devil Said Bang continues Slim’s travails in Hell. If you’ve enjoyed the series so far, this one’s a no-brainer.
But it is not the place to start—if you haven’t already experienced the irreverent, in-your-face brilliance of Slim’s journey to—literally—Hell and back, you want to begin at the beginning with Sandman Slim.
(DISCLOSURE: All links go to the Amazon Kindle store and are affiliate links. If you buy one of the books through a link here I get a tiny kickback from Amazon. Tiny kickbacks make me happy and allow me to buy more books to review.)
Includes Doppelgänger, Be Useful, Rose/House, System Collapse, and Empire of the Wolf.
Includes Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Extremely Online, Number Go Up, Mercury Rising, The End of the Myth, and The Big Break.
Includes Hello World, A Frozen Hell, Powers and Thrones, Dead Country, Blitz, The Hope that Kills, and Worth Killing For.
We pour one out for The Expanse and Sandman Slim, and we raise our glasses for a sequel to Malazan. Also, an extra-bleak Holocaust tour and a discussion of how cults control their members through language. Includes Cultish, Nein, Nein, Nein, Driven, Happy-go-Lucky, The Nineties, Fargo Rock City, The Scholast in the Low Water Kingdom, King Bullet, The God is Not Willing, and Leviathan Falls.
Why your body hurts, lots of politics, and some truly demented grimdark fantasy in this installment. Includes Reign of Terror, Evolution Gone Wrong, The Cruelty is the Point, How to be a Liberal, The Splendid and the Vile, Deep Work, A Desolation Called Peace, Black Stone Heart, and She Dreams in Blood.
Includes Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You), Pappyland, Backstory, and Medallion Status.
Some very good history, some very strange novels and some slick space opera. Includes Enemy of all Mankind, A Very Punchable Face, Confederates in the Attic,Ballistic Kiss, Harrow the Ninth, The Library at Mount Char, Children of Time, The Last Emperox, and Cage of Souls.
Back once again with the sci-fi and general calamity. Includes The End is Always Near, Eat the Apple, A Memory Called Empire,Gideon the Ninth, Infinite Detail, Permafrost, Fallen, and The October Man.
A sci-fi and fantasy heavy installment that includes The Valedictorian of Being Dead, The Mastermind, Broadsword Calling Danny Boy,Tiamat’s Wrath, The Raven Tower, The Liberation, The Light Brigade and Cryptonomicon.
Includes The Incomplete Book of Running, Aching God, The Murderbot Diaries, Lies Sleeping, The Consuming Fire, and Rendezvous with Rama.
Includes Hollywood Dead, Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, The Court of Broken Knives, and Port of Shadows.
Includes The Storm Before the Storm, White Trash, Calypso, Tell the Machine Goodnight, Prince of Fools, and Provenance.
Mostly excellent non-fiction in this installment. Includes Fantasyland, The Miracle of Dunkirk, Das Reich, The Undoing Project, Waiting for the Punch, Vacationland and Points of Impact.
Lots of sci-fi in this installment. Includes Retribution, Boomerang, The Collapsing Empire, All Systems Red, and Ninefox Gambit.
Includes a mea culpa, Hillbilly Elegy, Gulp, The Stars are Legion, and The Kill Society.
Lots of fiction series in this one. Includes Grunt, 1177 B.C., Louder Than Hell, Smarter Faster Better, The Hanging Tree, Death’s End, Chains of Command, and Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?.
This installment features grimdark fantasy, peppy astronauts and the Roman Empire. Includes SPQR, And On That Bombshell, The Code Book, Schiit Happened, Beyond Redemption, The Severed Streets, The Martian and Veiled.
Includes The Antidote, One Nation, Under Gods, Losing the Signal, The Todd Glass Situation, The Last Policeman, The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Beacon 23, Killing Pretty and Queen of Fire.
Lots of fantasy and sci-fi in this installment plus a book about sports! Includes Boy on Ice, Difficult Men, Restaurant Man, The Red Line, Cunning Plans, Seveneves, Nemesis Games, Bitter Seeds, The Mechanical, Angles of Attack, and City of Stairs.
Nic is sad about Terry Pratchett's passing. Includes No Land’s Man, Idiot America, Something Coming Through, The Burning Room, Foxglove Summer, and The Dark Defiles.
Things go dark and magical in this installment. Includes So, Anyway…, Yes Please, The Mirror Empire, London Falling, Broken Homes, Perfidia, The Peripheral, Burning Chrome, and the Bel Dame Apocrypha Omnibus.
Lots of good reads in this installment. Includes All Hell Let Loose, Metallica: This Monster Lives, 10% Happier, Onward, Echopraxia, Cibola Burn, The Getaway God, Lock In, The Red: First Light, Terms of Enlistment, and Lines of Departure.
Solid reads abound in this installment of the roundup. Includes Console Wars, Your Inner Fish, Flash Boys, Digital Wars, The Perfect Storm, Tower Lord, By Blood We Live, I am Pilgrim and Lexicon.
Some great reads and a huge disappointment in this installment. Includes The Loudest Voice in the Room, Hatching Twitter, Dogfight, Ancillary Justice, KOP Killer, The Circle, Working God’s Mischief and Where Eagles Dare.
Some solid reading awaits you in this installment. Includes The Outpost, Masters of Doom, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, The Everything Store, Bomber Command, Gods of Guilt, and Low Town.
A slimmer-than-usual book roundup is heavy on the non-fiction, including several must-read titles.
Another book roundup, including some stellar athletes and soldiers, what might be the most jaded, soul-weary protagonist ever, and some grimdark fantasy.
Nic reads a book about the processed food industry and is incensed.
The Core Dump is back! Books were read during the hiatus. Includes The Coldest Winter, Oh, Myyy!, Tough Sh*t, The Revolution Was Televised, The Rook, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, Gun Machine, Fortress Frontier, Standing in Another Man’s Grave, and The Memory of Light.
From a true patriot to a world-weary detective, a dead god, and a civilization about to sublime from the galaxy, this book roundup spans the gamut. Includes Where Men Win Glory, Wild, Inside the Box, The Black Box, Three Parts Dead, Red Country, and The Hydrogen Sonata.
Includes Wabi-Sabi, Making Things Happen, D-Day, Tallula Rising, Blood Song, The Americans and Amped. All in all, a happy romp through the meadows of literature.
Includes Search Inside Yourself, The Information Diet, Redshirts, The Gone-Away World, Wool, Leviathan Wakes, and Prince of Thorns. One of these may very well change your life.
Includes Shadow Ops: Control Point, The Night Circus, The Hunger Games, Quiet, The Science of Yoga, and Kitchen Confidential. Lots of good stuff in this one.
Includes Angelmaker, The Magicians, Magician King, Iron Council, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and Talking to Girls About Duran Duran. One of these is the most important book of 2011.
Includes The Drop, Ready Player One, Moon Called, Among Others, Excession, Inferno, The Paleo Solution and I am Ozzy.
Includes Sandman Slim, Snuff, The Cold Commands, Reamde, Goodbye Darkness, Steve Jobs and The Psychopath Test.
Some books you might enjoy reading.
Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia is an important book, and it will make you angry enough to froth at the mouth.
The Heroes is an intense, wild ride into a maelstrom of violence, brutality and flawed human beings. You should read it.