I’ve just published my annual reading list for 2023 here, as I’ve done for over a decade. Do check out the whole thing, but here are a few of my particular favourites from this year’s list, which, as always, is a bit of an eclectic mixture.
One of my favourite books of this year. Darryl Jones is an urban ecologist, and this is a memoir of many of his experiences of helping humans and birds live better together, as well as how he and his fellow scientists figured out the daily lives of birds in urban areas. There are many great stories in here. My particular favourite,as I gradually watch the brush turkeys take over my local streets, is the story of how brush turkeys live in wilder areas, and how they have adapted to conquering suburbia in great numbers, despite it being much harder to raise individual chicks.
Other notable birds are the magpie – even smarter than I thought, and I thought they were pretty smart – one magpie demonstrably remembered a particular individual ecologist from a brief interaction five years earlier – and the rainbow lorikeets, who love bright lights at dusk.
I devoured this book pretty quickly, its very readable and fully of observations of the hidden lives all around our suburban streets.
One walk I did this year was the Tour de Mont Blanc. So I also I read this history of mountaineering in the area, and how gradually a bunch of people, sometimes with a lot more money than sense managed to successfully get to the top of Mont Blanc (the tallest mountain in Europe) and many more even harder mountains nearby. The fascinating thing for me was how much this history was dominated by the British – reading the contemperaneous accounts they had the same stereotype then as American tourists often do today – fairly intolerant of local customs, and throwing their money around because they were lucky enough to come from a rich country and could afford to buy up much of the local economy. Their base was Chamonix, which is still a local centre of mountaineering, which these days includes a lot of hiking, trail running, mountain biking, etc, as well as the traditional mountaineering. This book was a great comprehensive history, which filled in a lot of the gaps from the various plaques dotted around the mountainside.
The area is extraordinarily beautiful, and while I have no desire to risk my life “conquering” it, the interest of those early explorers has helped to develop the tourist infrastructure which doesn’t do too badly balancing the need to preserve the beauty but make it accessible.
Erica Thompson is a physicist and climate scientist by background. She has taken her background of trying to understand climate atmospheric models (with massively different outputs) for her own research into a broad and rigorous understanding of models – what they can do, what they can’t do, and how to use them most effectively. The title “Escape from Model Land” – is a guide to the philosophy underpinning this book.
I loved this book, so much so that I reviewed it for the blog when I first read it here.
Thompson concludes with five principles for responsible modelling, which should be up on the wall in any modelling team:
- Define the purpose – What kinds of questions can this model answer? What kinds of questions can it not answer?
- Don’t say “I don’t know” – the model generally has a point to it, even it is not a perfect representation of reality. if we give up on the prospect of perfect knowledge, what can this model show us about the situation? Does it help us understand tradeoffs between decisions?
- Make value judgements – All models require value judgements. If you can’t find any in your model, look harder, or find someone else to look, who might be affected by the outcome. For example, a model that only looks at economic outcomes of a decision is implicitly not valuing non economic outcomes (such as time that is not paid for by someone).
- Write about the real world – the model builder needs to think about how to translate the outcomes into the real world, not just stay in model land.
- Use many models – this is the principle I found hardest – I instinctively look for the “right” model. But it really does depend on the purpose the model is built for. In particular, using more than one model makes it easier to expose the implicit value judgements that have gone into the building of each one.
The one sentence from the book that sums up the thesis is:
Although all models are wrong, many are useful…. The future is unknowable, but it is not ungraspable, and the models that we create to manage the uncertainty of the future can play a big role in helping to construct that future.
Slavery is a fascinating and horrible part of the history of the world. This animated map shows the documented history of the Atlantic trade; but this book shows just how much of the economic history of the world is bound up in slavery. Walvin started by looking at single caribbean islands, as a historian, and this book goes from there, and then zooms out to look at the whole world. To give just one small example (which is how I started going down this particular rabbithole of history enough to read a whole book about it), Lloyds estimates that “Slavery-related business overall accounted for between one-third and 40 per cent of premium income of Lloyds of London in the second half of the 18th century. The insurance of the slave-voyages themselves accounted for an estimated 5-10% of total marine insurance premia at Lloyds. Of more financial importance to the insurance business were the ships sailing directly from Britain to the Caribbean and back, accounting for some 30% of total marine insurance premia paid.”
Once you’ve read this book, you’ll never look at sugar in quite the same way again.
Michael Mann is a climate scientist, whose original publication of the famous hockey stick graph of temperatures for the last 200 years brought the speed and extent of global heating to the public eye. I’ve previously read Mann’s campaigning books (his experience of being a climate scientist in the public eye has given him a deep understanding of the tricks climate deniers play in the public discourse). This book is more scentific, a round up of all the evidence of what is likely to happen (and has happened in the past) with temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations on Spaceship earth. Reading it makes you realise just how much research (from some quite amazing sources) goes into the understanding we now have of how the climate works, and what might happen as we pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. His main point, which is important, is that there is a lot we can do now to slow and even reverse climate heating, and it is worth doing!
And finally, as always, one book of fiction I particularly loved this year.
This is a great companion piece to Empireland – a colonisation history that I also read this year. It is an alternative history of the Industrial Revolution, if it was powered by translators from around the world (rather than coal and other natural resources). And it is told through the eyes of prodigies from around the British Empire who are trained up as translator keys to that power of the Empire.
So much of the theoretical objections to colonisation I had read came to life through this book, understanding the contradictions inherent in the colonial experience through the eyes of those at the heart of it. And a bonus, the authors love of languages shines through the pages, so if you’ve ever had an even passing interest in linguistics, or translation then you’ll love this book from that perspective as well.
The bit of beauty for this post is the State Library of South Australia, which I wondered into on a whim a few months ago. A beautiful room, as old libraries invariably are.
