As always, I’ve listed all my non fiction reading for the year on this page. This year, for ease of collation, I’ve done it in roughly reverse order of when I read them. And it was a good year for me. Lots of fascinating books.
How do I find my books? Lots of sources. Every year, around this time, there are best of lists. Here are a few:
and a new discovery for me, the #stemministBC – Steminist book club. Started by Associate Professor Caroline Ford on twitter, it is a monthly discussion of a book of interest for feminists in STEM. I always read these lists when they come out, and pick the books that look the most interesting, and then add them to my Amazon wishlist. Then I’ve got a ready made source of books for next time I need a book to read. I do occasionally buy books and then not read them, but I don’t think my success rate is any different from when I used to visit the bookshop most weekends to buy my next book or two.
I found this one through the Stemminist Book Club, and it was the most recent one. A companion book to Invisible Women, it tells the story of chronic pain, and how the structural misogyny of the medical profession has tended to minimise female pain. The most interesting insight for me was something I had read in passing in one of Atul Gawende’s books – that chronic pain may rewire the nervous system to increase sensation and hence pain in all parts of the body. Which is consistent with the number of chronic conditions with associated pain that seem to come in groups.
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I’ve been hesitating about reading this for a while, as it is a bit grim. It is an authoritative book about domestic abuse in Australia. What it is, why it happens, how to predict it, what the different state and federal governments are doing about it and much more. As Hill points out, many people who don’t think they know anyone affected by domestic abuse end up realising, when it is described without adjectives, that it is very common even in their own circle. There are lots of horrifying stories in this book, but I felt it had to be read, to really understand what happens in our community. Hill is very clear eyed, and determined to research all aspects. So some of her conclusions to vexed questions like whether domestic abuse is more common in aboriginal communities, whether women make up allegations for the family court, whether men are abused at the same rate as women, or abused at all would not satisfy anyone who would prefer a simplistic answer on any side of a complex issue.
An example of a surprising statistic in a good way was that the number of male perpetrators of domestic abuse in the US killed by female victims went down by 69% between 1976 and 2002. In a bizarre twist, the introduction of women’s refuges in America – an innovation to save the lives of women – has actually done more to save the lives of the men who terrorise them.
For me the most horrifying chapter (which you can read as an initial article here) was the one about the Family Court. The quote at the beginning of the chapter tells you why:
Women will be told by child protection, it’s absolutely critical that your child have no contact with the [abusive] father, otherwise we’ll remove the child from you. Then the next week, they’re told in the Family Court it’s absolutely critical that this child has contact with the father. – Fiona McCormack, CEO of Domestic Violence Victoria.
Highly recommended
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This is a graphic novel by economist Bryan Caplan, and cartoonist (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) Zach Weinersmith. It is deliberately a polemic – to persuade the reader that completely open border are the best way to manage immigration, both for the good of humanity and for the good of the country that is being opened up. While I didn’t find it completely convincing (even though I am much more in favour of immigration than the average person – as an immigrant myself, I almost feel a moral obligation to be), it does a fantastic job of outlining all the benefits, and all the objections, and how you can modify open borders to reduce some of the negative impacts that worry people.
My own concern is mostly about the welfare state – as befits a US economist, Caplan seems quite comfortable with the idea that immigrants could be removed from access to the type of welfare that costs a lot. I’m not sure if I’m morally comfortable with that. But Caplan would point out that even those immigrants who would need the welfare state are likely to be better off than where they would have come from.
An easy, and very enlightening read.
Highly Recommended
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Peter Kropotkin was a Russian activist and philosopher who is the founder of anarcho-communism. This is a bit of a cheat having this book on the list, as I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m hoping to be shamed into it. I’m reading it because one of my kids has become an anarcho-communist, and I’m hoping to be able to improve my arguments in favour of managed capitalism at the dinner table. So far it isn’t working!
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I found this book through my obsessive reading about Brexit – Lynskey is the host of The Remainiacs – a great weekly podcast that helped me understand what on earth was going on in the British parliament during 2019.
The book has nothing specifically to do with Brexit, but as Lynskey pointed out, since Orwell died in 1950 almost every conceivable strand of political thought has quoted Orwell as if he would have approved of them. I didn’t really think you could get a whole book out of this concept, which is the story of George Orwell as it prepared him to write 1984, and then how the world has interpreted it and reinterpreted it since. It was fascinating, and in the sure sign of a good book, I kept trying to quote it to my family (unfortunately you need to read the whole book to really get it, so the quoting didn’t quite work…). Next I’ll be going back to read 1984 itself.
Recommended
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This book is a very easy read – lots of different ways in which mathematical mistakes have been quite serious. Presumably to encourage you to study your maths! In a year in which mathematics in NSW has once more become compulsory for students in Year 11 and 12 (the final years of high school), hopefully that will reduce the number of mathematical errors that happen here.
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A book that was 10 years in the making, as Solomon selects a number of distinct groups where children are dramatically different from their parents in some way, and what that does for their relationships, the children’s view of where they come from, and the parents’ view of their children. Solomon has a concept of horizontal identity and vertical identity – the vertical one is one you get from your parents, and the horizontal one is the cultural one that comes from the identity you have that may be very different from your parents.
Before reading it, I thought it was a book about disability but it is so much more. The thread of themes reading through discussions with thoughtful parents and children had two main strands:
- Many disabilities are much more severe, or even disabilities at all, because our society is not set up for people in that category. Deafness is the strongest example of this, but the milder part of the autism spectrum is similar.
- A parent-child relationship across boundaries of identity is harder to maintain (as society as a whole is so set up for in groups and out groups), but when it works it is ultimately incredibly strong.
All parents have some differences in identity from their children, that is the job of children, to be their own person. So this book is thought provoking for any parent.
Highly recommended
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I reviewed this Essay here. In a follow up essay to her previous book The Wife Drought, Annabel Crabb investigates what is stopping men taking on more of the parenting load.
In a very readable essay, Crabb investigates the causes of the massive discrepancy between the working experience (paid and unpaid) of mothers and fathers after the birth of children. And what she finds is that there are a lot of fathers who would quite like to share in the parenting and household work load. But there are forces lined up against them, both in workplace cultures, and also in the financial structures set up to support parenting. What she finds is a combination of culture and rules that make it hard for men to take advantage of the various possibilities of flexible work that women use as a matter of course in many workplaces in Australia.
It’s always a pleasure reading Annabel Crabb’s writing. And I always enjoy her serious mode, even though she can’t help make the odd joke. But I particularly liked the tone of this essay. Crabb isn’t interested in casting blame on anyone for how parenting is shared. She’s interested in helping men have more choices in the way they participate in their families than they have right now.
Recommended
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I love the idea of linguistics, but to my shame, I don’t actually speak any languages other than english. But the concepts of how different languages come out of a single language, how words spread across the world is fascinating.
This book is a brisk look at all the languages of Europe. Amazingly, Dorren finds something interesting and unique about each one. My favourite (as it is an ancestral language for me) is Channel Island Norman, something I had always been told was called patois – a channel island version of French. It’s slightly more complicated than that, as it was the Normans (who were originally vikings) who conquered the Channel Islands and England – so their language was a romance language, but with a fair bit of viking in it.
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Another book coming from the Stemminist Book Club. In these days when racism seems to be making a comeback, Saini does a fantastic job of reviewing the science. Science is often invoked as a higher authority by people who want to make an otherwise unacceptable comment about differences between people. But as Saini says:
The truth – that it is perfectly possible for prominent scientist to be racist, to murder, to abuse both people and knowledge – doesn’t’ sit easily with the way we like to think about scientific research.
There is a lot of pseudo science used to justify racism, among other things, and Saini looks at much of it with a critical eye. None of it stands up. Just writing this makes me want to reread it so I can memorise the arguments.
Recommended
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By the same author, Saini uses the same technique on women – deftly skewering many pieces of science from the animal world that are used to justify views of female inferiority. Once again, reading this kind of thing in one places makes you realise just how much science is based on the prejudices of the practitioners. All those scientists analysing chimpanzee family structures were unavoidably influenced by their own views of gender roles as to how they interpreted actions, and how much the generalised to human behaviour.
In common with a number of the books I read this year, this also tells a number of stories of women not being studied in their own right, but rather as the slightly weirder version of a man who is the default.
I enjoyed this, but possibly made the mistake of reading it after Invisible Women, which was both more fun, and more biting with data examples and covers similar ground (which is purely a taste comment – they are both excellent).
Recommended
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This book is a linguist describing how language has been both changed, and become more studiable because the internet has changed the way we use it.
Starting from the observation that almost everyone writes more prose than they did in the days before the internet (emails, facebook posts, texts, whatsapp messages etc), McCulloch shows how all this text has become the answer to a linguists dreams – it is searchable and can be studied intensively. It is also much more vernacular – the available text 100 years ago was much more formal, and not how people really communicated.
And she has a fascinating section on emojis, and the insight that they are really the gestures of the internet – they aren’t communication in their own right, but if you think of them as gestures then they make a whole lot more sense.
This book made me think I needed to improve my informal communication – I still text in full sentences, and my emoji game is at the kindergarten level. .
Recommended
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I reviewed this here. This is a topic close to my heart. Many people I work with have heard me say that my KPI for myself is that my team gets enough sleep. That is short hand for quite a few things – not too much stress, not working too hard, and planning well enough in advance of deadlines that the work can be done in good time.
This book is a fascinating review of everything we know about sleep and why it is important. The book starts by introducing you to a few pretty confronting facts:
“Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle… Sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety and suicidality.”
A list of facts, though, is far less interesting than reading about the experiments that have demonstrated them, and the weight of evidence that shows just how important sleep is for all humans. And fundamentally all those people (eg Margaret Thatcher) who claim not to need that much sleep are likely to be kidding themselves. People who haven’t had enough sleep don’t realise who cognitively and emotionally impaired they are. As well as reducing their current functioning, they are putting their physical and mental health at risk.
Sleep! Make sure you get enough.
Highly recommended
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Another book in my sweet spot – the history of voting in Australia. We have a regular disagreement in our household about whether compulsory voting is a good idea – I’m 100% for it, and I think our democracy would be in even worse shape if we didn’t have it. This history of Australia’s democratic systems reminds us of how much we have to be proud of as well as compulsory voting – secret ballot, one of the earliest countries to give women the vote, as well as the earliest to allow women to serve in parliament, independent electoral commissions drawing boundaries and managing elections, and of course, the democracy sausage served to us by the harried P&C volunteers of our local school.
More seriously, it also reminds us of what we shouldn’t be proud of – that in contrast with NZ, Australia at the time of federation gave women the vote at the same time as taking it away from all aboriginal people, in a debate that was so racist it was hard to read that chapter.
I’m still proud of our Australian democracy, and the efforts that our Australian Electoral Commission and state equivalents go to to enable everyone eligible to enrol and to exercise their franchise. There are aspects that could be improved (notably the reporting of political donations), but it is something to cherish, and not take for granted.
Recommended
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I reviewed this book here. This book is almost at the centre of a Venn diagram of the kind of book I enjoy. It is a book about data, and how the way in which our society collects and categorises it tends to ignore women. And in a world of big data, where decisions are increasingly made based on analysis of data, this matters.
Criado Perez’s book involves a brisk review of all the many different ways in which inadequate data can give quite the wrong impression of the world, subdivided into Daily life, the Workplace, Design, The Doctor, Public life, and Emergencies. Every chapter is full of infuriating examples.
Too often planners, statisticians, and other professionals decide that women’s lives, bodies and activities are too complicated to measure.
In the information age, there is a lot of hubris that big data will create the answers to everything. But if big data is only measuring half the population, it will make things worse, not better. Read this book, and if you have any influence over data; its collection or its use; think honestly about whether you are considering women as much as men in the way you collect your data. And remember that the more often decision makers reflect the general population (whether by gender or other measures of diversity) the more likely it is that decisions will be good for that diverse population.
Highly Recommended
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I’m a big fan of John Scalzi’s blog and website, Whatever, so I bought this book when it was on a kindle sale. Not as good as I hoped, its a collection of his blog posts on writing that are more enjoyable to read spaced out as they were originally on the blog rather than all in one go.
I do really enjoy Scalzi’s blog (and as I’ve said before here, he also does a great service to science fiction and fantasy writers not to mention the occasional non fiction writer by showcasing them in his regular Big Idea section).
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With an anarcho-communist in the family, and my brother and his family living in Madrid, we can’t help but be quite interested in the Spanish Civil War in this family. When I searched the best books on the topic, I was surprised that the consensus was George Orwell rather than Ernest Hemingway (in English at least). The description of the mess of Barcelona as they were losing, and the factions turned on each other is painful, and helps explain why George Orwell, unlike many of his left wing/socialist contemporaries was always against the Soviet Union.
This helps to flesh out the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War I read about a few years ago with The Ghosts of Spain, by Giles Tremlett.
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Quarterly Essay is generally a political essay, and while this fits that description, it is much more data driven than most. Rebecca Huntley is an Australian social researcher. This quarterly essay is a summary of what the Australian people really want from our country, according to Huntley’s research over many years. It is a surprisingly optimistic essay about consensus in Australian politics being quite strong, but with the major caveat that neither major party is really listening to what Australians actually want.
In Huntley’s view, Australians want something that used to be called social democracy. To summarise what Australians want, the Centre for Policy Development found that:
Unlike Americans, Australians want an active government that boosts equality and protects the most vulnerable. Australians believe government can be a “productive partner.” Australians have consistently believed essential services like health, schools, social service payments to the elderly, and economic infrastructure and under-resourced. They value these services because of their community benefit, not because of any personal dividend.”
The rest of Huntley’s essay supports these findings with specifics about what Australians want. Unfortunately she doesn’t have a good way of bridging the massive gap between these high level desires, and political parties ability to get elected promising something similar.
I found it refreshingly optimistic to read, but its hard to remember that optimism nine months later.
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This is a fun read for people who like to have metrics about everything (certainly a group that I am in).It is a very readable way of looking at numbers and their uses as counters, as measurements, and everything else that you can think of. Thanks to this book, I know that a kangaroo can jump further than a London Bus (13.5m vs 11.2m) and many other useful or useful numbers in between. There are a whole lot of diagrams to help you understand how different aspects of our world fit together, using numbers as the glue.
Re-reading it from this summary, I am sad to see how little has stuck in my head; it would be the kind of book that would set you up very well for a (slightly geeky) trivia night.
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Bernard Keane has been Crikey’s correspondent in Canberra since 2008, writing on politics, media and economics. This is his insiders view of everything that is wrong with politics and how to fix it. The vast majority of the book is a depressing litany of all the sad things about our current political process – for example, a whole chapter on how trust has all but disappeared in major institutions (particularly private institutions). And there is a very short final chapter called Solutions, which is a little bit of a laundry list of wishes, but, to be fair do address the main issues in the rest of the book.
- Radical transparency – make the whole business of government as transparent as possible and banning political advertising
- A much more progressive tax system, including bring capital gains back into the system where it used to be
- A bill of rights – rather than various half baked specific bills (eg religious freedom) a bill of rights to tilt the balance back to citizens
- More power for unions
- More independent institutions
- Increased public funding for universities and vocational education
- A treaty with, and constitutionally recognised voice for First Australians
- Don’t protect industries
- Avoid Universal Basic income at all costs
- Stop perpetuating the endless War on Terror
It does seem to me that Rebecca Huntley’s more philosophical approach is more likely to succeed in changing towards an Australia that the majority want than a set of agenda items that are only loosely related to each other.
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This is a little fable by the author of one of my most recommended books, I know how she does it. It is about the importance of prioritisation, using the example of a young consultant who is so worried about all her emails that she neglects her boyfriend, and her family and the amazing women she is getting to spend time with at a corporate retreat. While the messages are spot on, I found the fable a bit more fake than I was hoping.
Mind you, maybe I am just more critical of a female author, and I just don’t like fables – it is at least as good as Who moved my Cheese, which was given away for free to every person at my consulting firm once.
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Ginger Gorman has taken a deep breath and dived into the world of internet trolls to see if she can work out what makes them tick. The main takeaway for me from this book was how horrendous it is if you are targeted by trolls. They are relentless, they hunt in packs, and it is clear, if it wasn’t before, that they are responsible for many of those targeted (women, and visible minorities) withdrawing from public life, particularly on the internet.
Some particularly terrible stories include people who have taken their own lives after internet harassment.
While I am grateful to Gorman for digging into the horrible place that is the depths of the internet, I feel this book mainly reminded me how horrible people can be given the right (or wrong) conditions.
I do try to see the best in people; but this book is a reminder of what the worst can be.
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Rick Morton, now a journalist with the Saturday paper was previously with the Australian. As he points out, while Australia’s newsrooms have become more gender, and to some extent ethnically, diverse, they are much less economically diverse than they used to be. Morton grew up in outback Queensland, and this is his memoir of his and his family’s life on the margins, after his parents split up. His father had been a younger scion of an land owning outback dynasty, but after he, his mother and siblings left, they had less than nothing.
It’s a hard book to summarise, but I loved it, and it is definitely worth reading.
Recommended
Tyler Cowen is a prolific blogger and economics professor at George Mason university. This book is (as the subtitle suggests) his vision for how to transform the world for the better.
He starts from a view of the future, and how we should organise our society now, so that everyone in the future is better off. His key starting points are that it is more important to grow the whole than to worry about the distribution of individual shares of society, based on the idea that strong growth, even with inequality, makes the worst parts of society better off than weaker growth, more evenly distributed. While mathematically his arguments make sense, I struggle with the idea that inequality is irrelevant to growth. If societies are too unequal, growth is hard to achieve, as not enough of the whole society is contributing to it.
As always, Cowen writes clearly and cogently, and I always find him an excellent person for stimulating my thinking about economics.
Recommended.