1. Recitatif by Toni Morrison ★★★☆☆
2. The Sandman #1: Preludes & Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman ★★☆☆☆
3. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan ★★★☆☆
4. Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain n/a
5. Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi ★★★★★
6. The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster ★★★★☆
7. On Directing Film by David Mamet ★★☆☆☆
8. The Mabinogi by Matthew Francis ★★★★★
9. Through Two Doors at Once by Anil Ananthaswamy ★★★★☆
10. Tales From Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan ★★★★☆
11. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy n/a
12. A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro ★★★☆☆
13. There Are Places in the World… by Carlo Rovelli ★★★★☆
14. The Embassy of Cambodia by Zadie Smith ★★★☆☆
15. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro ★★★☆☆
16. Monkeys with Typewriters by Scarlett Thomas ★★★★☆
17. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel ★★☆☆☆
18. Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath ★★★☆☆
19. The Imagination Chamber by Philip Pullman ★☆☆☆☆
20. Dawn by Octavia Butler ★★☆☆☆
21. The Orchard on Fireby by Shena Mackay ★★★☆☆
22. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones ★★☆☆☆
23. Selected Poems by Sylvia Plath ★★★★☆
24. Touching the Void by Joe Simpson ★★★★☆
25. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher ★★★★☆
26. How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu ★★☆☆☆
27. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf ★★★★★
28. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard ★★★★☆
29. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu ★★☆☆☆
30. Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman ★★★☆☆
31. Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems by Rosemary Tonks ★★★☆☆

An outstanding series of five short videos (~10 to 20 minutes each) based on Michael Faraday’s lectures The Chemical History of a Candle.

In these lectures Michael Faraday’s careful examination of a burning candle reveals the fundamental concepts of chemistry, while at the same time superbly demonstrating the scientific method.

The lectures

“So you want to hear a story? Well, I used to know a whole lot of pretty interesting ones. Some of them so funny you’d laugh yourself unconscious. Others so terrible you’d never want to repeat them. But I can’t remember any of those, so I’ll just tell you about the time I found that lost thing…”

Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing is a thing of beauty. Wonderful art woven with an evocative narrative that’s inspirational and fun. Do watch it.