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‘His favourite book was by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick’: how books perform on dating apps

Mentions of reading in Tinder bios are up 29% in the last year. But is searching for a fellow fan of one’s favourite author really a shortcut to compatibility?

‘One of my Hinge prompts is: ‘What’s the best book you read this year?’ and I swipe left on anyone who says a book I don’t like,” says 29-year-old Ayo*. “Someone once replied with a book by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick.”

It’s a blunt approach to romance, but Ayo is far from alone. Books have long functioned as cultural shorthand for personality – signals of taste and worldview – but dating apps have accelerated and intensified that process. In an attention economy that rewards speed, these signifiers have to be legible at a glance.

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Good People by Patmeena Sabit review – addictive mystery caters to modern attention spans

Who killed Zorah? Snippets of gossip expose the divisions in a migrant community in this polyphonic portrait of contemporary America

There has been debate lately about whether novels should cater for our cauterised attention spans. If that means narratives constructed in short chunks that can be consumed in five-minute bursts on a phone – intelligent, but with plenty of cliffhangers and well-timed packets of information to keep us coming back – then Good People ticks all the boxes.

Patmeena Sabit’s debut is constructed from a chorus of short testimonies – none more than a few pages, some just a few lines – about the death of Zorah Sharaf, an Afghan American teenager who has drowned in a canal at the wheel of the family car. We hear from family, friends and those in the wider community – neighbours, teachers, schoolmates, journalists, the guy who found the body – as well as those involved in the investigation (though very little from the police), and bites of media commentary. A picture slowly forms of a devastated family, but what kind of family was it? Versions are multiple and contradictory. The Sharafs are perfect, loving, tight-knit. They are dangerously dysfunctional.

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The Uncool by Cameron Crowe audiobook review – memoir of an awestruck insider

The film-maker and author narrates this vivid account of his wide-eyed adventures as young music journalist in 70s America, hanging out with heroes from David Bowie to Led Zeppelin

The title of The Uncool refers to rock critic Lester Bangs’s assessment of Cameron Crowe, whose adventures as a music journalist were loosely depicted in his 2000 movie, Almost Famous. Long before he became a film-maker, the teenage Crowe travelled around the US interviewing some of the biggest rocks acts of the era, among them Gram Parsons, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Eagles and the Allman Brothers Band. Crowe’s memoir reveals him as the perennial outsider who, unlike his interviewees, cared little about sex, booze and drugs and who lacked a certain savoir-faire. Yet rock stars liked having him around, enjoying his sincerity and the fact that he was more admiring fan than dispassionate reporter.

Crowe is the reader, delivering a warm and vivacious narration that conveys the wide-eyed astonishment of his youthful self as he is thrust into the orbit of his heroes. He also paints a vivid picture of an era in which bands weren’t protected by gaggles of PR representatives and a writer could spend 18 months with an artist – as Crowe did with Bowie in the mid-1970s – to write a single profile.

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Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald review – a joyful celebration of the gaming giant

A portrait of the company whose ‘toymaker philosophy’ stands in contrast to the tech giants that rule our lives

What is the highest-grossing entertainment franchise of all time? You might be tempted to think of Star Wars, or perhaps the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Maybe even Harry Potter? But no: it’s Pokémon – the others don’t come close. The Japanese “pocket monsters”, which star in video games, TV series and tradable playing cards, have made an estimated $115bn since 1996. Is this a sign of the lamentable infantilisation of postmodern society?

Not a bit of it, argues Keza MacDonald, the Guardian’s video games editor, in her winsomely enthusiastic biography of Nintendo, the company that had become an eponym for electronic entertainment long before anyone had heard the words “PlayStation” or “Xbox”. Yes, Pokémon is mostly a children’s pursuit, but a sophisticated one: “Like Harry Potter, the Famous Five and Narnia,” she observes, “it offers a powerful fantasy of self-determination, set in a world almost totally free of adult supervision.” And in its complicated scoring system, “it got millions of kids voluntarily doing a kind of algebra”.

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The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine review – drag fabulousness in war-torn Beirut

Spanning eras of conflict and Covid in Lebanon, this irresistible queer coming-of-age tale explores what it means to be truly free

Meet Raja, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s new novel. A 63-year-old gay philosophy teacher and drag entertainer, he is a stickler for rules and boundaries, living in a tiny Beirut flat with his octogenarian mother, the nosy and unfettered Zalfa. Invited to a writing residency in the US, Raja will use the occasion to relate his life – that is, if you don’t mind him taking the scenic route. “A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it’s true,” Raja tells us. “Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks and distributaries.”

Winner of the 2025 US National Book Award for fiction, Alameddine’s seventh novel opens and closes in 2023, but the bulk of its action takes place earlier: encompassing the lead-up to and aftermath of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), the Covid pandemic, Lebanon’s 2019 banking crisis, and the Beirut port explosion in 2020. If this timeline makes the book sound like a punishing tour of Lebanese history, I promise it isn’t. More than a war chronicle or national exposé, it is a queer coming-of-age tale, an exploration of the bond between a mother and a son, and a meditation on storytelling, memory, survival and what it means to be truly free. Told in a voice as irresistibly buoyant as it is unapologetically camp, this rule-breaking spin on the trauma plot holds on to its cheer in the face of sobering material. Poignant but never cynical, often dark but never dour, wise without being showy and always eager to crack a joke, this is a novel that insists that the pain of the past need overwhelm neither present nor narrative, identity nor personality. With Sartre as his guide, and a drag fabulousness all his own, Raja shows us how.

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Arundhati Roy and Sarah Perry longlisted for Women’s prize for nonfiction

Sixteen authors – including Lea Ypi, Lyse Doucet and Barbara Demick – are in contention for the £30,000 award, launched to address a historic gender imbalance in nonfiction prizes

Arundhati Roy, Sarah Perry and Lea Ypi are among the writers longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Sixteen authors are in contention to win the £30,000 award, launched in 2024 to address the persistent gender imbalance in UK nonfiction prize winners.

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Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-45 by Ian Buruma – how Berliners defied their Nazi masters

An immersive account of how the inhabitants of a liberal city – including the author’s father – survived fascism

In December 1941, the Nazi authorities received a letter from a soldier complaining that, on his recent leave in Berlin, he had been thoroughly disgusted by what he saw. While his comrades were dying at the front, plenty of young men appeared to have dodged military duty and were now to be found carousing in Berlin’s packed bars. The women were no better: husbandless but flush with ration coupons purloined from soldiers on leave, they were busy gorging themselves. “If Berlin were Germany,” huffed the complainant, “we would have lost this war years ago.”

Berlin had always been a case apart. The legacy of the wild Weimar years – all that artistic and political radicalism, not to mention louche living – had continued under the Third Reich. The city remained defiantly itself and, despite the efforts of high command, mulish about being told what to do. That, at least, had been the situation in 1941.

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Your Life Without Me by James Meek review – angel of destruction haunts a domestic drama

A plot to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral is seen through the lens of family tragedy

A great demolition is also an act of creation, so long as its execution is bold and impressive enough, so long as it clears out the dead wood and opens up the terrain. It’s the ethos that links Pablo Picasso to 1970s punk, Shiva the Destroyer to the anarchist hero of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Rip it up and start again. Or rip it up for the pure thrill of the ripping. In Graham Greene’s short story The Destructors, the schoolboy vandals of the Wormsley Common Gang systematically unpick a Christopher Wren-designed London house, working from the inside out so that it dissolves into rubble the moment a supporting post is pulled down. The crime’s one adult witness, a lorry driver, guffaws at the sight. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it,” he tells the home’s distraught owner. “There’s nothing personal, but you got to admit it’s funny.”

Raf, the angel of destruction who haunts the wings of James Meek’s graceful, death-haunted domestic drama, is likewise drawn to the work of Wren – although his project is conceived on a much grander scale. Raf is a professional demolition man, a gifted young engineer and natural born radical, easily moved to laughter or tears and effortlessly dazzling everyone in his orbit. For his PhD project, he has been granted free run of St Paul’s Cathedral in order to test the old building’s resistance to modern traffic vibration. He drills discreet holes in the masonry to install movement censors. But he also packs the cavities with Semtex.

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Poem of the week: To Wordsworth by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The radical young poet’s backhanded tribute to the older writer is a stern judgment on his lapsed political idealism

To Wordsworth

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou should cease to be.

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‘I’m the psychedelic confessor’: the man who turned a generation on to hallucinogens returns with a head-spinning book about consciousness

With the Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan transformed our understanding of food and drugs. Can he do the same for our sense of self?

Several years ago, Michael Pollan had a disturbing encounter. The relentlessly curious journalist and author was at a conference on plant behaviour in Vancouver. There, he’d learned that when plants are damaged, they produce an anaesthetising chemical, ethylene. Was this a form of self-soothing, like the release of endorphins after an injury in humans? He asked František Baluška, a cell biologist, if it meant that plants might feel pain. Baluška paused, before answering: “Yes, they should feel pain. If you don’t feel pain, you ignore danger and you don’t survive.”

I imagine that Pollan gulped at that point. I certainly did when I read his account of the meeting in his latest book, A World Appears. Where does it leave our efforts at ethical consumption, if literally everybody hurts – including vegetables?

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