No, Peter Falk.

I didn't really like any of the Hitchhiker books.

Monty Python don't really interest me much.

... I ... what? WHAT?!

I think it's massively overrated.

Listening to people repeating favourite lines get tedious pretty quickly, but then we were all young once.

They were alright. I read the first one, and the one with the restaurant at the end of time.

I fail miserably at things geeks are meant to like: Star Wars, HHTTG and Monty Python don't really interest me much.

Star Wars was pap.

May be opening a can of worms here, but Star Wars always was and always will be, a kids film.

Star Wars was pap.
HGTTG was ok. Some good stuff in there, but hardly wall to wall Awesome.
Monty Python, again, had good stuff, but intermingled with less good stuff, and things that have been repeated so many times they've got much worse than not funny.

I'm intrigued to know what exists that you do find wall to wall awesome?

Freakonomics is great

The original is a bit crumbly now, get a new paperback version.

I'm intrigued to know what exists that you do find wall to wall awesome? It's not that I'm calling you a miserable bastard, I'm just implying that I think you are a miserable bastard.

I'm intrigued to know what exists that you do find wall to wall awesome? It's not that I'm calling you a miserable bastard, I'm just implying that I think you are a miserable bastard.

Ghostbusters films, T'original Blues Brothers (Not a musical!), Shawshank, Evil Dead 2, Dude where's my car.

(One of those is a cunningly concealed horrible, horrible lie.)

I'm having trouble finding Mick Foley's Have a Nice Day in eBook format anywhere, so I'll probably end up buying a physical copy of that, unless someone can point me in the right direction. I'm trying to reduce house clutter at the moment, you see.

I love reading about counter-intuitive psychology, and this is absolutely full of the stuff.

If you can wait till next time I visit mummy and daddy you can have my copy.

I didn't mention this before because it is a very baseball-centric book, but "Moneyball" by Michael Beane is an outstanding account of how one of baseball's poorest teams tore up all the accepted baseball wisdom around the turn of the century about what makes a great baseball player and managed to put together a team of cheap nobodies that competed for championships year in year out. I still think it is a good read even if you don't have much idea about baseball, but I could be wrong... but it has elements that will appeal to you I think.

This am good. It am about the history of tea and the British Empire. Very interesting without being too heavy or too fluffy.

That sounds really good, too. I'll add it to my list.

Is that tea one available in the UK? Silly yanks!

Non fiction Blood River by a journalist for the Guardian or something. He recreates the trip Stanley made along the Congo at rather a lot of risk to himself. Very interesting.

It should be. I read it when I was working in a library here. He (Roy Moxham) also wrote a book about the great hedge of India - something of an almost forgotten mega-project that probably would have disappeared if he hadn't stumbled across an obscure mention of it and followed it up. It was basically an attempt to control smuggling in India, but it's obviously more complicated than that.

The tea one was a bit more my cu... my thing, though.

Love me a bit o' Kipling.

Country Slices are the best, and don't you dare say any different!

Country Slices are the best, and don't you dare say any different!

I've got Blink and Tipping Point signed by him. I'd be absolutely gobsmacked if he coined the phrase "tipping point". I don't think I could recommend either of these books though, TBH as the points get laboured too much for my liking. It feels like an interesting but lengthy magazine article that's been stretched too far, but it's probably harsh to single out Gladwell for that — it seems to be a problem that infects that whole subsection of "message" books, be it Richard Dawkins, Michael Moore, George Monbiot et al — they descend into repetitive examples ad nauseum long after anybody with an IQ higher than room temperature would have got the point.