1. Monkeys with Typewriters by Scarlett Thomas ★★★★☆
2. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel ★★☆☆☆
3. Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath ★★★☆☆
4. The Imagination Chamber by Philip Pullman ★☆☆☆☆
5. Dawn by Octavia Butler ★★☆☆☆
6. The Orchard on Fireby by Shena Mackay ★★★☆☆
7. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones ★★☆☆☆
8. Selected Poems by Sylvia Plath ★★★★☆
9. Touching the Void by Joe Simpson ★★★★☆
10. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher ★★★★☆
11. How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu ★★☆☆☆
12. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf ★★★★★
13. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard ★★★★☆
14. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu ★★☆☆☆
15. Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman ★★★☆☆
16. 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.

Rain falls,
Darkening red brickwork
Featureless apartments
Of five floors.
A lone street light’s shadow falls
Into the alley.

There are two men there
Face to face
Trench coats
Fedoras
Rivulets running.
A fumbling of hands,
Damp and dextrous,
A brief exchange.
Back to back.
One back into the black.
The other heads this way.
Echoing footfalls
Bouncing off the side walls.
A glance to right
A nose tip
A dart to the left
Evasive.