- “Dishonesty Is The Second-Best Policy and Other Rules to Live By” by David Mitchell
I’m reviving an old habit from my LiveJournal days of keeping tabs on the books I read here – this is the first book I’ve completed reading in 2026, although only just. It was bit of a disappointment and I skimmed quite a lot of it. Here’s my review…
Started: 28th December 2025
Finished: 11th January 2026
I’m a big fan of David Mitchell and his work, so I had high hopes for this, but I ended up disappointed, and found the book rather a tedious trudge.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with any of his writing – much of it is very good – but the main problem with this book is that it’s a collection of newspaper columns, and now rather old ones at that, some dating back to 2014. So much has happened since then that much of the content of this book feels like it’s aged really badly. It doesn’t help that the columns are undated in the main body of the text, so it’s even quite hard to look up the news stories they relate to, many of which are pretty obscure. That’s the problem – the columns were topical for about five minutes, and they now feel irrelevant.
Much of the content of the book is about the shenanigans of the previous Tory government, in my opinion truly a dark age for this country which absolutely ruined everything, culminating in the absolute disaster of Brexit. There’s nothing funny or insightful left to be said about this any more, it’s all in the past and there’s nothing that can be done about the colossal damage a bunch of utterly useless idiots inflicted upon us. There’s a lot about Brexit in this book, including a whole chapter of columns devoted to it – I didn’t read any of them, I don’t want to be reminded of what a shitshow it all was.
There’s certainly good moments in here, but as a collection it fell very flat, and personally, even if you’re a fan of Mitchell, I’d say skip this. Enjoy his brilliant TV work, but unless you’re particularly interested in Britain’s mis-steps from 2014 to 2019, there’s nothing to commend this really. By the end, I was skipping large chunks, just finding it all really depressing. That’s obviously not the intention of the book at all, but it’s the effect it had on me.
