Published by: Mantle, 2025

I had to translate Ovid at school for my Latin O-level. I hadn't wanted to take Latin as a subject; I wanted to do art instead, but the staff of the grammar school I went to were obsessed with getting as many of their pupils into Oxford or Cambridge as possible and back when I was a kid that meant you needed to have studied classics, and who cares what the pupils actually wanted to do with their lives? Clearly, the school's reputation was far more important (its reputation for sexism, bullying, and a pathological fondness for corporal punishment, perhaps not so much—the school only began to admit girls when I reached the sixth form). As a result, I took no further interest in the classics for the next thirty years.

Natalie Haynes has been single-handedly responsible for changing that. Her books have cropped up here before; I'm a big fan and I very much enjoy her radio show as well.

While previous (male) versions of the myth of the Argo and the legendary Golden Fleece present Medea either as the daughter of King Aietes of Colchis or as Jason's bride, in No Friend To This House, Medea gets to tell her own story, assisted by a supporting cast of characters both human and divine, but all female. The result is a stark contrast to the heroics you might be familiar with from the Ray Harryhausen epic and quite frankly none of the men in the tale come out of this version deserving any sort of merit or praise whatsoever. It's brilliantly, scathingly written.

Natalie leavens the bleakness with accomplished humour, because she is also very funny indeed; there's a gag involving the unsuitability of King Ixion as a prospective Argonaut that had me roaring with laughter and one chapter near the end of the book reads like a lost sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. I can only imagine the reaction that this book would have provoked from my testosterone-addled teachers back in the 1970s. Watching them turn purple with apoplexy might even have offered some compensation for them completely derailing my dreams of an artistic career.

Published by: Guardian Books,2026

I've seen Dr Burnett speak many times at events which Robin Ince has organised over the years and he always presents news from the fields of neuroscience or psychology while making it easy to understand, very entertaining, and incredibly funny. That's a rare talent. The last time I saw him do this was at Kings Place at Christmas, where I was fortunate enough to pick up signed copies of a couple of his books.

This is an updated version of Dr Burnett's first book, which I bought for my Kindle when it first came out and which was therefore not as easy to get signed. As Dean says in the afterword to this new edition, most of the research and examples which he wrote about back in 2016 are still valid (and in many cases, even more relevant than they were when the book was first published). As he observes in his inimitable fashion, even the research concerning the brain's inability to detect "soup-based deception" which was carried out at Bristol University by Jeffrey Brunstrom and his team still holds up.

"Soup-based deception" is typical of the turn of phrase you're going to encounter in this book, which will take you on a witty, whistle-stop tour of the many ways in which our brains (spectacularly complex though they are) manage to completely get things wrong. And the brain can—and does—do that in all sorts of inconvenient, embarrassing, and even occasionally dangerous situations. Given what I've been going through over the past year or so, I read about them all with renewed fascination.

Dean concludes the final chapter with the observation that "It's amazing how humans get anything done, really." And after you've read the book, you'll probably agree with him. Once you've stopped chuckling, that is.

Published by: Allen & Unwin, 2022

If last year was a year of discovery and re-evaluation triggered by the experience of reading Robin Ince's Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal when I finally recognised that I have ADHD and Autism, then reading Stephanie Foo's memoir about her diagnosis of, and recovery from complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (c-PTSD) was the other shoe dropping. c-PTSD is a relatively new concept (while it's recognised by the UK's NHS, it has yet to make it into the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM) and most people will be unfamiliar with what sufferers experience. Here, Ms. Foo sets it all out clearly with brutal frankness. I didn't have a childhood that was quite as full of systemic abuse as hers was, but it wasn't radically different, either. My early life was not normal, and it wasn't pleasant. It was filled with trauma. Ms. Foo's experiences and the patterns of thought which resulted from them are painfully familiar. I connected with her story, and I connected hard.

And Professor Jacob Ham sounds like just the best medical professional you could ever hope to deal with; this conversation between the two of them demonstrates this admirably. The point they make both in the book and in that video chat is that healing from c-PTSD has to be relational, in that it has to do with the way you interact with other people. It's not something that you can fix by reading books about it; it requires you to live your life differently. For someone like me, that's terrifying. But now I have some ideas about how I should start to do exactly that.

I was crying by the time I got to the final chapters. And not just tears and quiet sniffles, either, but huge, wracking sobs. Nothing I've read has affected me like that in decades. This is not an ordinary book.