- Dishonesty Is The Second-Best Policy and Other Rules to Live By” by David Mitchell
- “Michael Palin In Venezuela” by Michael Palin
- “Happiness: Lessons From A New Science” by Richard Layard
- “The People on Platform 5” by Clare Pooley
- “Encyclopaedia of Narrow Gauge Railways of Great Britain and Ireland” by Thomas Middlemiss
- “Moscow Coup: The Death of the Soviet System” by Martin Sixsmith
- “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen and Three-Quarters” by Sue Townsend
- “The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole” by Sue Townsend
- “Adrian Mole: The Collected Poems” by Sue Townsend
- “How To Live Like A Stoic” by Tom Hodgkinson
- “The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass aged 37 3/4” by Adrian Plass
- “This Present Darkness” by Frank Peretti
- “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” by Daniel Everett
Started: 22nd March 2026
Finished: 6th April 2026
2/5 stars
I heard about this book on a YouTube video by Genetically Modified Skeptic. Daniel Everett was an American missionary who spent years documenting and translating the language of the Pirahã, an indigenous people from the Amazonian rainforest in Brazil. Being a missionary, Everett’s aim was to translate the Bible, and attempt to convert the tribe to Christianity.
Essentially, Everett failed to do so, mainly because the Pirahã’s culture has some very interesting aspects to it that made them consider Jesus completely irrelevant. Part of this is that the language requires qualifiers as to where information comes from – if you relate a story, you need to say whether you witnessed it yourself, heard it from someone else, or inferred it. There’s no concept of any events that occurred outside living memory, and so as there are no eyewitnesses to Jesus existing, the Pirahã simply consider him irrelevant. Their culture focuses very simply on their pressing everyday needs.
This essentially led Everett to have a major faith crisis, and he ultimately became an atheist. This was the story I was really interested in reading, and hoped the book would cover in detail, but it was only covered very briefly in a short chapter at the end of the book, glossing over a lot of what happened, and how. I suspect he’s trying to protect the privacy of his family (who ostracised him pretty seriously when he told them he’d lost his faith), but it was disappointing because very little seems to have been written by former Christians who have rejected their faith. It’s something I’m keen to write about myself, so I wanted to see how he approached the subject. It was all far too brief.
The rest of the book just failed to engage me, really, feeling like a rather dry and dusty academic study of stuff that just wasn’t of much interest to me. If you’re really interested in linguistics and anthropology, there’s probably a lot more in it for you than there was for me, so don’t let my rating put you off – I just personally found it quite boring.