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Subtitled The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger examines the ways that the internet is changing the way humans deal with organising knowledge. Easy reading, but Weinberger’s observations never go beyond the obvious. His examination of the history of organisation was interesting. I particularly enjoyed the sections on Melvil Dewey (of the Dewey decimal system) and Linnaeus and the taxonomical system he developed that forms the basis of modern biological classification. But the rest seemed kind of weak.

Back when I was in school our physics teacher disappeared. Literally – one day he just stopped coming into school. So we ended up with a replacement for a couple of months while waiting for someone new to take the job permanently. Mr Green was an interesting guy, but he found it impossible to stick to the subject he was meant to be teaching. A random question would set him off on a rambling discussion of something entirely perpendicular to the curriculum. It wasn’t long before people started doing that on purpose, because Mr Green’s rambling observations were a hell of a lot more interesting than how a spring works.

The Velocity of Honey is like that. There’s no overarching theme here, no point that Ingram’s trying to make except maybe that science is full of interesting stuff and, well, here’s some of it in handy book form. It’s not serious science trying to do serious things, and it’s fascinating. The focus is a little narrow, but Ingram addresses this in his prologue: “I chose the topics based on the appeal of their science, which really meant their appeal for me. (For some unknown reason, there seems to be a lot of psychology and physics, with not much in between.)”

If you’re happy to let Ingram ramble at you on 24 different subjects this this’ll work well. I’ve read quite a lot of pop-sci and these kind of books have a tendency to cover the same ground – but I never noticed this in The Velocity of Honey. Ingram’s both original and interesting, which is quite an achievement. I had fun reading it.

I kind of liked Kalder’s debut effort, Lost Cosmonaut. But Strange Telescopes is a much more engaging and mature work by a writer who’s clearly grown up and found himself in between books. This is Kalder without much of the glibness and arrogance that characterised Cosmonaut. The dark edge is still there, but it’s all the sharper for the subtlety.

Strange Telescopes is an examination of four Russian eccentrics. Actually, eccentric may be the wrong word. Kalder’s first subject, Vadim Mikhailov, who explores subterranean Moscow is clearly an eccentric, as is the film-maker obsessed with exorcism. But it’s hard to call Vissarion, a cult leader who claims to be a reincarnation of Jesus, merely eccentric. Kalder’s final study, Nikolai Sutyagin, who built a teetering wooden tower, seems the most normal of the lot. The common thread that Kalder finds is that all these men are engaged in the creation of their own realities. By accepting their realities for a while, Kalder is able to examine how it works.

It’s fascinating. Pretty much all the criticisms I leveled at Cosmonaut are fixed in Strange Telescopes. It’s a very good book and Kalder’s style is dry, witty, refreshingly dark and cynical. The pacing is problematic – Kalder’s apt to ramble around his subject for a while. The excorcist chapters dragged a bit for me. For the most part though, your patience is rewarded.

Charlie Brooker is a very funny man and I read through these two collections of his Guardian columns in a matter of days. Brooker began writing his TV column in 2000 and together the two books cover all of them to 2007. Unlike most TV columnists, Brooker hates most TV, the way it insults viewers, aims at the lowest possible demographic, and the way it slides into needless cruelty.

In a way he reminds me of the comedian Bill Hicks, who also used savage invective to communicate a righteous anger and made it funny. Like Hicks, Brooker has a fine line in knob (and arse) gags. He’s at his best when he’s looking on at something in horror.

Not everyone will appreciate what Brooker does, but if you like this sort of thing, then what Brooker does is some of the best of that sort of thing you’re likely to find. And it does bring memories of awful TV shows flooding back.