Back in 2005, When the Guardian relaunched in its Berliner format, a number of new sections were added to the Saturday edition. One of these was the slightly ill-conceived (but still-running) Family section, and therein lay the anonymous Living with Teenagers column, a weekly diatribe on the difficulty and horrors of family life in bourgeois England. Specifically, predictably, amongst the London middle-classes.

This book – a collection of these columns – is possibly the least self-aware volume I’ve ever read. The writing is even less self-aware than mine, and I take some beating in those stakes. And yet, that’s not a criticism; In fact, it’s what makes the whole thing work.

This is the story of a thoroughly modern parent try, and hopelessly failing, to deal with her three teenagers’ behavioural abberations of varying scale. She suspects her kids are on drugs, she’s shocked when they’re unhappy at the prospect of spending two weeks in an isolated cottage, and terrified by bad academic grades. In essence, she views everything her children do with her own frame of reference, which is not only far removed from theirs, but sometimes appears to reside in an utterly different universe to the rest of us.

Not only that, she views everything they get up to as a direct result of something she’s done at some point in their upbringing: a life-course view that descends into kind of social post hoc ergo propter hoc, with no more validity here than in a court of law.

Yet the anonymous mother seems genuinely to struggle throughout to be fair and accurate in her reportage, despite being so wildly removed from that goal. And whilst lacking self-awareness in her writing, she is incredibly self-critical, and perceives that she has many flaws as a parent.

Living  with Teenagers warms the heart, in that the imperfect children and the imperfect parents rub along, and genuinely care for and love one another. Yet it’s also wonderfully, unintentionally, darkly comic, and more engaging than I ever expected.

Unfortunately, the wonderful denouement to the series was published in The Guardian long after the book was released: The friends of one of the teenagers found out about the column, and it came to an abrupt end – with Jack given the right of reply.

If you prefer, you can read all of the columns online, but nothing’s quite the same as settling down with something akin to a diary, and becoming fully imersed in the world of the anonymous author and her family – you’ll want to intervene in the slow-motion car crashes within, you’ll be frustrated at the mother’s inability to keep firm on even a single issue, and you’ll laugh out loud again and again, but I’m certain that you’ll feel a renewed sense of the good of humanity.

Living with Teenagers is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback. There’s no Kindle edition available, which is pretty unforgivable these days. Boo!

I really like Alain de Botton and his accessible, absorbing approach to philosophy. When I read the press coverage surrounding the book launch, which included de Botton’s arresting announcement that he wanted to build a secular temple, I was intrigued. But, in the end, I really didn’t enjoy this book, I’m afraid.

The structure of each chapter is very formulaic:

1. Identify a positive aspect of religion
2. Cite a singular example of where this is lacking in modern society
3. Propose a secular solution

The majority of his arguments collapse at stage 2. For example:

1. Churches get strangers talking to one another
2. Restaurants don’t
3. Set up new restaurants

The problem, of course, is that the assignment of this quality to restaurants is arbitrary. There are plenty of secular places and events, from knitting circles to Skeptics in the Pub, where strangers are encouraged to talk and interact. I simply don’t accept the premise that this is a function of religious society that is absent from secular society.

Similarly:

1. The church guides us on practical life skills
2. Universities teach fact-based courses like history, with little regard for life skills
3. Change university curricula

I studied at a university with an Institute for Health and Society and a Campus for Ageing and Vitality: I don’t accept the premise that universities only offer impractical courses.

And so it goes on. Almost every chapter is built upon one of these illogical leaps – and, not only that, but the structure of the book gives little expression to the downsides of the prescribed form of living encouraged by religion, and its secular reversioning encouraged by de Botton.

Overall, this was a disappointing and frustrating read from one of my favourite authors. It feels a little like a cynical attempt to cash-in on the growing popularity of secularism. I sorely hope de Botton returns to form with his next work!

Religion for Atheists is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.

I was really attracted to the idea of this book: 39 passengers on a lifeboat struggling for survival, making tough choices, and operating within a tricky ethical and moral framework.

But the book didn’t live up to its promise. The characters were poorly developed, and I simply didn’t care about them. The single first-person narrative structure lessened the reader’s ability to interpret the situation from multiple points of view. This problem is worsened by the narrator being a dull, submissive, self-centred bore. There are too many flashbacks to the time prior to the sinking of the ship, and too much of the story is set after the final passengers have been rescued. The dilemmas were framed in the predominantly Christian ethical framework of the early 20th century, which was very limiting. And, predictably, there was a church figure amongst the passengers on the lifeboat. Even reading that last sentence alone, you can probably guess his fate.

This is a short book, but it was a struggle to plough through. It had enjoyable moments and passages, but the narrative structure of the story and the period in which it was set both conspired to constrict the moral and ethical superstructure to such an extent that it ceased to be interesting.

In summary, the premise is great, but the execution is poor.

The Lifeboat is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

I’m not sure why this book’s author wanted to remain anonymous. Perhaps he’s a particularly shy individual. Perhaps he felt it would threaten his future career. Perhaps it was a marketing ploy. But it certainly can’t have been because of any shocking revelations or accusations made in the book, because there simply aren’t any. And, actually, the associated coyness around mentioning the sport in which he competes makes this book lack a little something. The anonymity is a shame.

That said, it does give a great insight into the life and psyche of an Olympian, much of it backed up by descriptions from named competitors. He describes sometimes a crippling doubt about sporting ability that apparently affects most Olympians; the challenge of a whole career resting on a performance lasting just minutes or seconds; the extraordinary commitment needed to reach the top in a given sport.

The Secret Olympian also gives a compelling description of how National Lottery funding has transformed professional sport in the UK. Through interviews with Team GB competitors before and after 1994, he’s able to document the transition from the former attitude of “turn up and have a go” to the professionalism that dominates sport today. And he peppers the early part of the book with the interesting descriptions of how Olympians found their sport, sharing the perhaps surprising fact that few of them excelled at sport at school.

There is, as one would expect, detailed descriptions of the seemingly absurd excesses of life as an Olympian: the masses of free kit, the gallons of free Powerade, the inside-story (also well-described elsewhere) of life inside the Olympic village. Though, clearly, this book can’t give the inside-track on London 2012, as it was written well before that got underway.

I’ve said before that I like reading about other people’s jobs, and I guess this fits into that category. Reading it while the country is gripped by Olympic fever might have coloured my opinions, I guess, but I certainly thought it was a worthwhile read. I’d recommend it.

My Trade is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

This book is a coming-of-age crime-thriller for teenagers. I’m not a teenager, and I’m not really a fan of thrillers. This book isn’t for me. And yet, I thought it was awesome.

The basic plot centres around of group of friends in their mid-teens. As with any decent thriller, there’s sex, booze, drugs and missing people. I’ve often said that moral ambiguity is the key to any good story, and you’ll find that in abundance here.

This book might be marketed to teenagers, but the quality of the writing is very high, better than most thrillers I’ve read that are aimed at adults. Of course, it doesn’t use long words or complex references, and the descriptions become a bit repetitive at times, but the simplicity of the language is barely noticeable thanks to the force with which the plot is driven. I had hoped to make a pun of the fact that Brooks uses the word “dully” so many times in this novel, but it’s hard when the novel is anything but dull.

Brooks cleverly interweaves a genuinely thrilling mystery with neat social commentary and acutely observed humour centred around the teenager-parent relationship. The plot is of it’s time – it’s only four years old, and many of the sociocultural references are already dated – but the themes are timeless: rich versus poor; stereotypes versus reality; childhood versus adulthood.

There are some real benefits to having a teenage protagonist in a thriller. The combination of strong-headedness and strained relationship with parents sets up a clear set of boundaries in which the action can take place. This negates the need for complex, unbelievable expositions of reasons for not going to the police or seeking help. The settings are limited, too, to those that are commonly experienced and relatable: no school child is going to go wandering off to an isolated aircraft hanger, a nuclear bunker, or any such nonsense. Brooks builds tension in common settings: the wrong bit of the local Council estate, the middle of a bit of waste ground. This takes substantial skill, but the familiarity also heightens the jeopardy.

There are, of course, also downsides. Surly teenagers can occasionally make for frustrating protagonists. The central character’s habitual lying (and that of his friends) thickens the plot, but does give rise to occasions where one wants to reach into the book, give him a good slap, and tell him to grow up.

There’s a brilliant thread of hallucinations and psychiatric disturbance that runs through this novel – and there are key plot points to explain it. I mention this only because it demonstrates that this book deals with complex concepts, and uses really quite advanced literary techniques to make its points. It might be for teenagers, but there’s no sense here of writing down to them. And it doesn’t pull punches.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Black Rabbit Summer is the extraordinary and memorable ending. Of all the novels I’ve read lately, this has the strongest ending. And, again, it’s not an ending you might expect from a book aimed at teens.

I didn’t particularly relish reading this, but it completely surpassed my expectations. It is a teen novel, but that just means it’s easy to read. It’s a narratively tight well-written gripping novel. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Black Rabbit Summer is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

Before I started Only Time Will Tell, I hadn’t read an Archer novel since I left school, a little over a decade ago.

While reading this tale of a young Harry Clifton growing up, from pre-school boy to seaman, I was reminded of the phenomenal power of Archer’s storytelling. Judging his work as a piece of plot-based writing, it isn’t great: there are moments of spectacular unlikelihood (the wedding being one that stands out); there are literary cliches of characters littered through the text, from a slightly-eccentric brave old war veteran, to a caddish owner of a sleazy nightclub; and there’s a sense that Archer’s politics bleeds through the whole book, from the plot line to his turn of phrase. Even the narrative structure is a little hackneyed, with parts of the plot narrated from different characters perspectives (with some repetition, just so the important clues to future events aren’t missed).

Despite all of that, this is gripping stuff – a real page-turner of a book. Archer has that rare gift of making the next step in the plot absolutely predictable, setting up a sort of loose dramatic irony, in which the reader can sense what’s coming next long before the characters can. There’s a sense, as with most of Archer’s novels, that each development in the plot is a well-worn device being redeployed in a new setting. This continuous fulfilment of expectations isn’t dull, though: like a great piece of music, the certainty of knowing what the next note must be adds to the enjoyment… though just an occasional confounding of expectation might heighten it a little.

There’s no author I’ve discovered that has the story-telling ability of Jeffrey Archer. This is a book that knows it isn’t a literary great, and has no pretensions to being one. This is a masterclass in “spinning a yarn” – and it’s a very enjoyable read.

Only Time Will Tell is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

Tony Blair’s autobiography gives a real and detailed insight into what it’s like to be Prime Minister: the stresses and how he coped with them, the challenges and how he tried to overcome them, the successes, the failures, the balancing of family life with political life and statesmanship. It really is quite fascinating.

Politically, there’s little in here that we haven’t heard before, but the detail and explanation of how and why decisions were reached seemed interesting to me. The “behind the scenes” detail of the huge events that occurred under Tony Blair’s leadership provided genuine insight, if not new information – Diana’s death, 9/11, 7/7, the Hutton Inquiry, and Iraq to name just a few.

Yet, it’s taken me the best part of two years to plough through this tome. That’s mainly due to what Ben MacIntire of The Times described as a “congenial style peppered with slang and gossipy asides”. I’d describe it as a style resembling transcribed speech, and it frequently becomes very thick and frustrating.

Let me pepper this review with some examples. When talking about the themes underpinning his leadership (something he does frequently, citing different themes each time), the following sentence appears: “Perhaps above all, an emphasis bordering on the religious on what counts to be what works.”

It’s not a crime against humanity, but it is a verbless sentence that doesn’t really scan very well. It’s the sort of sentence you have to re-read a couple of times to get the message. In a paragraph of prose, it’s a frustrating sentence that should have been edited. And these are little throughout the book.

Here’s another example. Read this sentence aloud: “I wondered – as did some of the newer and more radical faces in my Policy Unit, although this was still heresy in the party, not least among most of my ministers – whether we had been right to dismantle wholesale GP commissioning in the NHS and grant-maintained schools in education, instead of adapting these concepts of local self-govenment to spread decentralised management across the state health and education systems, but without the inequity inherent in the underfunded Tory reforms we inherited.”

Again, the message is clear, but it isn’t an easy read. A decent editor would surely have added some more punctuation, or cut this down into several sentences.

And, since we’re on a roll, let’s play “count the subclauses” in this example: “Precisely because the roots of this wider struggle were deep, precisely because it was a visceral life-or-death battle between modernisers and reactionaries, precisely because what was – and is – at stake was no less than the whole future of Islam – the nature of its faith, its narrative about itself, and its sense of its place in the twenty-first century – precisely because of all this, there was no way the forces opposed to modernisation, and therefore to us, were going to relinquish their territory easily.”

I think these examples demonstrate the message that this book is not an easy bedtime read. Yet, within a few sentences of passages like those above, Blair tells us about Alistair Campbell’s “clanking great balls”, describes Iraq as “a basket case”, PMQs as “a girls’ school playground” and relates that “I like to have time and comfort in the loo.”

And then, occasionally, Blair becomes suddenly coy: he didn’t want to discuss his son’s vaccination status “for private reasons the family was sensitive about issues to do with.” Note, again, that this hardly scans well.

The constant juxtaposition of long badly written passages of political prose and puerile descriptions of characters and situations wore me out. I couldn’t read more than a couple of chapters of this at once.

I think this demonstrates that I found this book a difficult read, which makes it difficult to rate. On the one hand, much of the content is five-star – well worth reading, whichever side of the political fence one occupies. On the other, the form of expression is risible, bordering at times on unreadable. This is a book that badly needs a revised and edited edition under the guidance of a decent editor! Until then, I can’t in good conscience give it more than three stars.

A Journey is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

Alan Turing is a fascinating subject for a biography: A leader in the fields of logical mathematics and computing, a war hero of a very different kind, and a social misfit. There’s so much to explore, and so much to learn. Yet, before turning to this definitive volume, I hadn’t read a proper biography of the man – although given the size of his standing in our cultural, intellectual and scientific past, I had a fairly good knowledge of many of the key moments in his story.

This comprehensive biography is certainly detailed. It is, perhaps, the most thorough biography I’ve read. This allows a great insight into the character and intelligence of Turing, but it did quickly become unnecessarily dense in parts, and felt like it was veering off at a tangent by placing Turing’s academic work in a wider context than was really necessary. I don’t think the book needed to explain some of the mathematical concepts in quite the detail it did, nor did it need to explain in fine detail the sequelae of those concepts as discovered by others.

I was also a little uncomfortable with the degree of subjectiveness in this description of his life. Clearly, it is impossible for any biography to be written from a totally objective stand-point, but it is clear that Hodges stands in awe of Turing, and constantly tries to explain and justify anything that could be seen as a fault in him. There were times when motives and opinions seemed to have been assigned to Turing’s actions without a clear explanation given as to how Hodges had derived these, which made me question their veracity. I’m also awed of Turing and think he’s a giant of our age, but even I found the warmth, bordering on sycophancy, of this book a little overbearing. I think the point would have actually been made more strongly had the reader been left to draw their own conclusions from a more objective description of the events.

I was disappointed with some of the omissions of this book. Turing was clearly a man with a strong sense of morality and ethics, and yet cryptography – perhaps his best-known skill – has inherent within it the ethical complexity of choosing when to act on intelligence, and when to ignore it and effectively sacrifice people in order to maintain the illusion that the code has not been broken. This, to me, is one of the most profoundly interesting parts of the work completed at Bletchley, and of cryptography, yet this is given relatively short shrift in this biography. I feel sure that Turing would have reflected on this point, and probably had interesting things to say about it, so it seems a shame that they aren’t discussed here. Perhaps this reflects a wider criticism of the book – it’s difficult at times to pick out Turing’s character amongst the reams of detailed mathematical and computational theory. That said, I think the story and an impression of the character of Turing does manage to shine through over the course of the book as a whole, even if it is hard-going in parts.

It’s really difficult to give this book a star-rating, because there are passages of five-star descriptive biographical brilliance, and passages of five-star mathematical or computational explanation, but the two cannot really happily co-exist in one volume. For a general reader like me, it leads to passages of tedium; the opposite passages would probably have the same effect for someone reading for the theory.

My head says, therefore, that this is a three-star read; but my heart, perhaps more because of the piquancy of the tale, says it’s a four-star read. So I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Alan Turing: The Enigma is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback, and also a special Centenary edition. There’s no Kindle edition available, which may well have frustrated Alan if he were alive today, and is really inexcusable when a new edition has only just been published.

Given that we’re in the middle of the annual GCSE and A-Level results period, and especially given the recent debates on reform of the exam system, I thought this was a particularly apt choice for this week’s book review.

Jerry Jarvis was formerly the managing director of the Edexcel exam board, until he very publicly quit in 2009 over concerns about the grade calibration of A-Levels in particular. In this book, he explains in some detail his reasons for leaving, muses on the state of the system as is, and gives suggestions to pupils and parents considering their educational choices.

It was actually quite a good book. It was certainly less dry than the subject matter might suggest, though it was rather short: it read more like an extended briefing paper than a short book.

There was nothing that struck me as especially ground-breaking in here, but as someone who sat their A-Levels within the last decade, perhaps that’s unsurprising. I think it would be revealing to those who are less well versed in England’s examination system.

Jarvis gives a spirited defence of the exam system, and explains why grade inflation doesn’t indicate declining standards: in fact, he makes the point that we should really expected greater grade inflation than we actually have, which perhaps hides the fact that standards in schools are not improving at the rate one might expect from the level of investment. He bemoans schools’ lack of action over poorly performing teachers, and their lack of engagement with the detailed feedback data that is provided. This was a little eye-opening: I hadn’t realised that teachers had access to such detailed breakdown on their pupils’ performance, so as to enable them to target specific areas of their teaching practice for improvement.

There were a couple of decently amusing anecdotes, like the time he was tasked with estimating how much each individual pupil’s performance had been affected by the escape of a pet frog during an exam sitting, and these did add a little levity to the book.

I suspect that student and parents of students actively sitting GCSEs or A-Levels, or making choices about what to study, would have a much more active interest in this book than I. But, having said that, as a general reader I found it really quite interesting, and given it’s brevity, most people will probably find it a worthwhile read.

Cheats, Choices and Dumbing Down is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

Somehow, despite being a virtually card-carrying Guardianista, I’d never read one of Jon Ronson’s books. This one seemed as good a starting point as any!

The book describes Ronson’s adventures with several extremist groups and conspiracy theorists as he tries to find out more about the Bilderberg Group, who are thought by many conspiracy theorists to summarily control the world. It’s long-form gonzo journalism, with the added edge that Ronson is Jewish, while a number of the groups he meets along the way are, to a greater or lesser extent, anti-semitic.

The narrative of the book is engaging, and some of the descriptions are enlightening. But it feels to me like there’s a central problem in this book: Ronson seems quite conflicted over his feelings about the people he meets. Occasionally, he plays their beliefs for laughs, but, for the most part, it seems reasonably clear that he likes the individuals whilst finding their viewpoints and some of their actions abhorrent. This was and is always going to be a problem in an ethnography like this, but the fact that there’s never any deep reflection on this in the text just gives the whole thing an air of awkwardness.

There’s also a slight weirdness in that it seems to me that the point the book is trying to make is that relatively ordinary people can believe extraordinary things with certainty. That’s a really interesting concept, but, again, there’s no real self-reflection on this. Did this experience make Ronson question any of his own deeply-held beliefs? Has it made him view conspiracies and conspiracists differently? How has this whole experience changed him?

Ronson writes engagingly about the challenge of going through this investigation as a Jew. He reflects on denying his Jewish heritage, and how that makes him feel. Yet the other big questions seem to hang in the air, and I’m left wondering what the gonzo style adds if the majority of the deep personal reflection is cut out of it. I guess it provides a narrative. But it takes away objectivity, and makes us very reliant on the author as the sole source. I’m not sure those trades are worth it if the impact on the author – which is really something I consider to be at the heart of the style – is taken away.

I’m conscious that I’ve now written three paragraphs of criticism of a book that, on the whole, I enjoyed! I learned the truth about the Bilderberg Group (not that I’d heard of it before reading this book). There were several convincing descriptions of how conspiracy theorists interpret events in a way that supports their own world view (though, disappointingly, little discussion of the degree to which the rest of us do that too). The writing brought the characters to life, and the narrative drove the “plot” forward at a good pace.

All-in-all, while I was a bit disappointed by what wasn’t in this book, the stuff that was there was great: I’ll certainly read another of Ronson’s books at some point in the future. As for the star-rating: I’ve dithered for some time now over whether to give this 3 or 4; it’s somewhere in between. On balance, this isn’t a book I’d return to again, and I think its flaws of omission pull it nearer to 3 than 4.

Them is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.