2018: My year in books

In 2018, I finally managed to make time for reading again.

Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

One of those classics that has been recommended many times over the years, and I am pleased to report that it does live up to its reputation. Nobel laureate Kahneman presents an overview of his contribution to the field of psychology, with particular focus on the "two system" model of though. This is not a light read, covering a wide range of subjects in the field in some depth, including lots of case studies, but it is readable and thought-provoking throughout. Life-changing would perhaps be too grand a description, but it is certainly empowering, and I found it hugely helpful for getting better at monitoring and understanding my own responses and the causes of them.

Lenin on the Train - Catherine Merridale

This thrilling and fast-paced history book follows the journey of Lenin from his adopted home in Switzerland back to Russia, over the course of one week at the height of the first world war. In doing so, Merridale cleverly covers both the wider European context and the background and ramifications of the 1917 revolution, using the journey through Germany, Scandinavia and eventually back into Russia as the narrative constructs on which the story is built. An excellent read.

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

This book has the reputation of required reading among entrepreneurs, and it is packed full of helpful advice about how to successfully run a startup. Ries gathers definitions and frameworks that young, innovation-led companies (or teams) will find helpful, and also includes plenty of illustrative examples from his own career. A practical guidebook for the budding entrepreneur.

The Primal Urge - Brian Aldiss

A puzzling speculative fiction novel from respected British author Aldiss. It is rather hit and miss in its satirical elements. It is set in a Britain in which, for slightly unbelievable reasons, it suddenly becomes a legal requirement for all adults to have a light installed on their forehead which glows when they experience sexual arousal. The "humour" comes from the impact this has on the repressed British society of the early 1960s. Not without merit but certainly the weakest of this author's books that I have read.

Memoirs of a Dervish - Robert Irwin

This accurately-titled memoir by novelist and noted academic Irwin covers the fascinating and at times hilarious true story of how, as a young British man in the 1960s, he travelled to Algeria, converted to Islam, and dived into the world of sufi mysticism. Every bit as entertaining as might be expected from the author of Satan Wants Me, the book is also an informative introduction to the world of sufi psychics, whirling dervishes and holy faqirs, as well as a record of a way of life that has since largely fallen by the wayside.

The Children Act - Ian McEwan

This taught and thoughtful novel from Ian McEwan, one of my favourite novelists, centres on a judge who finds herself presiding over a difficult case regarding a family of Jehovah's Witnesses objecting to the blood transfusion needed to save the life of their son following a leukaemia diagnosis. More than a legal thriller, the books serves as a meditation on the extent of the law in its jurisdiction over the body, and also on the nature of the law itself and how it overlaps with the psychology of those mandated with defining it.

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

This blockbuster examination of the history of Homo Sapiens is amply worthy of its success and reputation. Harari writes with clarity and vision on a narrative that encompasses the scope of human history, from the initial development of early Sapiens and their competition with other species of Homo, through the nascence of civilisation, science, political ideologies and all the way up to the present day and near future. A terrific, enlivening read.

The Fellowship - John Gribbin

I thoroughly enjoyed Gribbin's history of the original and establishment of the Royal Society. Well-researched and structured, one of the more surprising aspects of the book was the importance that Gribbin places on the contribution of Robert Hooke, both to the theories of Isaac Newton and the wider scientific revolution of the 17th Century.

A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula Le Guin

Having read some of Le Guin's science fiction previously, I was pleasantly surprised that this novel, the first of a fantasy series, also demonstrates the same deftness at weaving deeper ideas into a deceptively simple narrative. The story concerns a young wizard entering a wizarding school and embarking on his first adventure. But rather than Harry Potter, the feeling is closer to a Kurosawa film - or perhaps one of the meditative westerns that they inspired. Ignore the "young fiction" label - this is great stuff.

No Is Not Enough - Naomi Klein

Klein has the habit of writing extensive, moment-defining journalistic treatises on major political issues - No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything. This book is different, a quickly written and minimally-researched response to Trump and several other contemporary events, and the importance of both hope and dissent in counteracting shock politics. As with all of Klein's work, it feels essential reading for those interested in doing more than burying their head in the sand.

Heaven and Hell - Aldous Huxley

A sequel of sorts to The Doors of Perception (Huxley's vivid description of his experiences dropping acid), Heaven and Hell is a slightly lesser work, being an essay which meditates on the nature of art, geometry and perception. Stimulating, but it suffers in comparison to the earlier work.

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 - Doris Lessing

The fourth of Lessing's five-book "space fiction" series Canopus in Argos, this is something of a standalone book (as with the second book in the series), and concerns a planet undergoing catastrophic environmental collapse. Written in the early nineteen-eighties, this is no climate change tract, but instead, with its powerful descriptions of harsh winters and meditative relfections on the nature of the self, the author that it most brings to mind is Solzhenitsyn.

Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker

An authorative, well-reasoned and carefully structure pop-science book about the importance of good quality, lengthy and regular sleep. Walker writes passionately about the subject, and provides a good overview of the field of sleep research, up to and including contributions from contemporary neuroscience and epidemiology. Pretty convincing and it certainly convinced me to value my regular eight hours a night.

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge

Over the years, I have read various books covering racism around the world and through history - from Nazi Germany to apartheid-era South Africa, and from the American deep south to colonial Burma in the early twentieth century. British journalist Eddo-Lodge's book is the first that have read to primarily address the presence and nature of racism within contemporary Britain. While many of the events addressed are familiar to me (the murder of Stephen Lawrence, British National Party leader Nick Griffin appearing on the BBC's Question Time etc), the narrative that Eddo-Lodge traces around these and other themes was eye-opening, to say the least. Writing with what I would consider to be an intersectional feminist stance (with a focus on structural racism), she presents a powerful and important piece of journalism that will also serve as a document to future generations. Highly recommended.

The Death of Bunny Munro - Nick Cave

When considering this, Nick Cave's second book, I find it hard to ascertain whether I should have known what to expect, or if the whole novel comes seemingly from nowhere to fans familiar with his work as a songwriter. Caustic, morbid and at times hilarious, the story of sex-crazed travelling salesman Bunny Munro and his son veers deliberately between the sublime and the ridiculous.

Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now - Jaron Lanier

I think I bought this book in an attempt to convince myself to delete my Facebook account. In that one respect, Jaron Lanier, something as close to a grandfather figure as the young tech industry can muster, has failed - at the time of writing, it is still active, though unloved and untouched for years. Despite this calamitous failure (I am sure he both knows and cares), the book is an excellent exploration of the cultural, political and psychological impact of centralised, siloed social media networks, and manages to present not just the negative aspects of our current enthrallment, but also give some glimpse of the joy and life that might lie beyond - if we can ever break our habit.

The Call of Cthulhu - HP Lovecraft

My first and probably last foray into Lovecraft's literature. His reputation as a writer of mind-bending and disturbing cosmic horror is clearly well-deserved, and some of the passages in this short novella are memorably written, with imagery that lingers long after the pages are closed. However, I found much of the writing repugnant in its racism, and in no superficial way. In fact, I found that much of the "horror" to be found here was little more than exaggerated racist tropes of black magic and wild savages communing with Hell. Quite apart from the moral discomfort I found in reading such bigoted drivel, I also found that it completely undermines much of the appeal of his work. if the world is intrinsically unbelievable (in this case because it relies on a racist worldview that I find incompatible with my own) then fantasy literature collapses under the weight of its own edifice.

Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari

Where Sapiens was an epochal, world-expanding single narrative about the course of human history, this second work by Israeli academic Harari is more a serious of extended essays on what the next 100 years of human progress might hold. While this results in a lesser impact overall, Harari's thesis is still profound and thought-provoking. Essentially, he proposes that as war, famine and disease are now problems with (at least theoretical, if not yet practical) solutions, humanity's next stage will be to turn ourselves into gods - through bio-engineering, artificial intelligence, virtual reality - or all three in some combination.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived - Adam Rutherford

An excellent and readable introduction to the field of modern human genetics, which covers the science but also delves deeply into the implications regarding human identity and history. Rutherford is among that rare class of popular science writers who can clearly express complex and novel ideas, without watering them down, while also maintaining a strong narrative and keeping the reader engaged. It is also written with a great deal of humour (the first chapter, covering the out-of-Africa theory and evidence for intermingling between early human species, is titled Horny and mobile) and deftly applies science to rubbish social concepts from racial classification (genetically a provable nonsense) to the prestige some find in family tree tracking (literally everyone alive today is descended from Charlemagne).

The Egyptians - Jack Shenker

An astonishing and in-depth first-hand account of the series of revolutions that have taken place in Egypt in recent years, starting with the Arab Spring and overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Shenker is a British journalist who lived in Egypt for the several years covered by the book. He provides an excellent background on Egyptian history, from antiquity through to the present day, with an emphasis on the twentieth century, and then startling descriptions of turmoil and hope ensuing from the Arab Spring. Perhaps most surprisingly, it is a book of great hope, with Shenker's descriptions of the spontaneous, anarchistic society that formed in Tahrir Square during the revolution with the same reverence that writers a century earlier once described the Paris Commune. Vital and fascinating reading.

The Rules of Attraction - Bret Easton Ellis

Lacking the visceral impact of American Psycho, I nonetheless enjoyed this discursive and difficult-to-categorise satirical novel by American author Ellis. Written in first person from several viewpoints, it covers the lives of three students caught in a love triangle. Whether you consider it trash or high art probably depends on how willing you are to indulge Ellis's taste for the modernist raised eyebrow (the book starts and ends midway through a sentence, for example) - personally I was able to engage with it and found something to enjoy.

Non-Stop - Brian Aldiss

A high-concept science fiction classic, Non-Stop is something of a mystery adventure that I think it is best to read with few expectations. Eminently possible to spoil by revealing details of its plot, I prefer to merely give it a firm recommendation for anyone who likes their mind-bending science fiction to remain weirdly grounded in reality. Terrific stuff.

Jobs to be Done - Anthony W Ulwick

Read in order to get myself quickly up to speed on some UX (User Experience) basics, this is an excellent and practical framework for how to structure and map out a user research programme, and translate its outputs into tangible next steps for your product or service. As the name suggests, the focus is on specific jobs that are being accomplished, rather than competing frameworks which focus more on user personae and psychological motivation.

Another Day in the Death of America - Gary Younge

This searing piece of investigate journalism follows Younge as he attempts to track down and meet the relatives of every child killed by gun crime on one arbitrarily-chosen date. A work of potent force, it is at times unbearably moving, and at others provoked in me the most desperate sense of futility that I can remember feeling from reading a book. It is to Younge's great credit that he makes such a tremendously difficult subject a relatively easy read, keeping the user with him and helping us to see dispassionately both the human tragedy and the political one.

The Longest Afternoon - Brendan Simms

This laser-focused history book centres on a small group of just four hundred soldiers on one afternoon: the Second Light Battalion, King's German Legion, at La-Haye Sainte farm on 18th June 1815 - the epicentre of the battle of Waterloo. Simms presents the various characters involved, a mixture of British and German men forming part of the assemble troops of Britain-Hanover, and in exacting detail recreates the twists and turns of a small but crucial corner of the battle over the space of a few hours.

Product Leadership - Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson and Nate Walkingshaw

This extremely practical and interview-led book on product management avoids the pitfalls of confirmation bias that regularly plague such literature, by putting the words of a wide range of industry professionals front and centre, even though the authors are themselves experienced and knowledgeable practitioners. As a relative newcomer to the field, I occasionally found its advice a little impenetrable, but for the most part the insights presented seem as relevant to seasoned professionals as to dilettantes like myself.

They Can't Kill Us All - Wesley Lowery

This first hand account of Ferguson, Baltimore and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the depth of the political turmoil in America today. Lowery, a Washington Post journalist and one of the first reporters to reach the front line, provides an account that is both deep but also provides enough context to ground the story for someone such as myself, watching in horror from the other side of the Atlantic.

The Conquest of Bread - Pyotr Kropotkin

A classic book of early political anarchism, I first heard of this in reference to the Occupy movement, but its influence has been felt across many movements in the 126 years since it was first published. Straddling being both a series of extended essays on the nature and source of civilisation, and an overview and manifesto of sorts for anarcho-communism, it surprisingly still feels relevant today, and indeed continues to go through periods of being fashionable.

Mooncop - Tom Gauld

A short and surprisingly moving graphic novella by Gauld, a cartoonist for the Guardian and New Scientist (among others), it is both wryly amusing (as with all his work) and also a sly meditation on loneliness.

Oscar et la dame rose - Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Parce que c'est le premier roman que j'ai lu en français, il me semble approprié d'essayer d'écrire ma réponse en français. Un livre drôle et émouvant, écrit comme une série de lettres adressées à Dieu du garçon épynome, Oscar, qui a dix ans, ça concerne l'amitié qu'il développe avec une dame plus agée dans le même hopital que lui, pendant qu'il progresse à travers la leucémie en phase finale. Très amusant, mais aussi très triste, je l'ai trouvé assez beau.

(As this is the first novel I have read in French, it seems appropriate that I should also try to write my response in French for first time too. A funny and moving book, written as a series of letters addressed to God from the eponymous Oscar, who is ten years old, it concerns the friendship he develops with an older lady in the same hospital as him, while he progresses through the final stages of terminal leukaemia. Very funny, but also very sad, I found it quite beautiful.)