Non fiction
Every year I do a review of my reading for the year, with recommendations for my favourite books. This year, being a year of isolation, I read a lot more than normal (mostly fiction, which I review briefly at the end) but quite a lot of non fiction as well, including some fantastic books that I highly recommend. Hope you find something of interest here. The order is roughly the order I read them in, with the most recent first.
This memoir of life in Silicon Valley, by Anna Weiner is much more than I was anticipating. There is the story of what it is like being one of the few women in a room of tech bros, but there is also much about data, privacy, robots, founder culture, and the arrogance of people who assume that because they are smart and good at one small thing (such as coding), they don’t have much to learn from people who have studied whole fields.
The writing is sharp, crisp and insightful, and I found myself ploughing through this at a very quick speed (always the sign of a good memoir).
Recommended.
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Ketan Joshi writes about many science related topics, but particularly about the economics of energy. His background working for wind generators, and renewable energy more generally means he has a lot to say in this space. I particularly enjoyed the sections where he looked at how to get communities on board with renewable energy.
It is easy for a city person to roll their eyes at a farmer who worries about the non existence sound pollution from a new wind farm. But that kind of protest rarely happens in a community in which all members fully share in the benefits that accrue to wind in their neighbourhood, whether or not the right spot for a windfarm happens to be on their land. As Joshi says on his website
I also think the political, social and cultural context of technology and science should be front and centre – own it, don’t avoid it.
Joshi takes climate change as a given, and asks how the necessary changes to our energy sector should happen – not just technically, but socially and politically – how should the benefits and costs be shared, and what has worked around the world.
Recommended.
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Huntley is an Australian social researcher and expert on social trends. She describes how she has moved from a general concern about the environment to a passionate connection, and a conviction that she needed to act, after watching one of the first climate school strikes in Australia. And that transition was an emotional one, to a position where her priorities changed and she started taking action in her own professional life to work on environmental issues and understand climate change.
This book is unashamedly activist – to help people become better equipped to talk about climate and act on what they know. Huntley uses her social research background to help explain how to persuade people to act. In the end it is a hopeful book, believing that the technology exists to respond to climate change, but that understanding the psychology of why it is not being used is an important part of the process, alongside understanding the science.
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SuperPower: Australia’s low carbon opportunity, by Ross Garnaut
This is a sequel of sorts to Garnaut’s 2008 Climate Change review in which he famously predicted that without adequate action, the nation would face a more frequent and intense fire season by 2020. Well it became famous when the 2019/20 Australian fire season was extreme, even by extreme Australian bushfire standards, with 12.6 million hectares burned (roughly the size of Greece).
This book offers a roadmap of how Australia could take advantage of its natural resources, and become an energy superpower of low carbon energy, rather than trying to cling to fossil fuels until the last moment.
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This is the political story of climate policy in Australia for the last 30 or so years. Marian Wilkinson uses her forensic journalistic skills and a formidable set of sources from all parts of the Australian political spectrum to outline the twists and turns of climate policy in Australia; how Australia has gone from being, if anything, slightly ahead of the western world on thinking about climate change to having the worst ranking of the world (equal with the US) according to the Climate Change Policy Index of 57 countries.
It is a political book, rather than looking at the technology, which I found frustrating at times, as both sides of policy use climate change to score political points against their opponents (almost as often within their own parties as against the opposition). It does seem as if our political system has been captured to a distressing extent by mining and energy interests, so that political action, particularly at the federal level is lagging the views of the average Australian (for example in this poll from a couple of months ago, which found that 59% of Australians want the Covid recovery powered by investment in renewable energy, compared with 12% who would like it powered by investment in gas).
One for the political junkies.
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Ian Dunt has been my goto commentator on Brexit during the long and tortuous process of the UK working out what to do and how to do it since the referendum in 2016. Whenever there is something happening in Parliament he writes twitter threads that are snarky, hilarious, sweary, and at the same time very accurate accounts of what is happening – far better than any mainstream media source I have found.
So I bought this book largely to recognise how much information and entertainment I have had from him over the past four years.
It is worth the read even without that rationale though – despite my being interested in politics for ever, this book was a real education for me in political philosophy, starting with Descartes, through John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, and then finishing with the retreat of classical liberalism in western politics today.
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I’ve reviewed this book here. You’ve probably seen Rutger Bregman before. He was the Dutch historian who provocatively asked the billionaires at Davos why they didn’t just pay their taxes instead of talking about complex philanthropic initiatives:
“Just stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes. … We can invite Bono once more, but we’ve got to be talking about taxes. That’s it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.”
Well he’s now written a very positive book which I enjoyed reading, and found quite hopeful in the current circumstances. It is enjoyable and engaging, although I do find myself arguing with the conclusions in my head quite a lot now I have finished it.
The premise is basically that human beings are generally much more positive, helpful and friendly than we generally give ourselves credit for. He argues convincingly that we have evolved for friendliness, and helpfulness, even more than intelligence.
Since reading this book, I have been looking out for positive examples. It is much easier to see the negatives – examples of humankind at its worst. I thought of listing some, but I’m sure you can think of your own that make it hard to believe in humanity’s basic goodness. So how do we help ourselves and our fellow humans bring out the best rather than the worst? Bregman does have some quite nuanced thinking about this.
Humanity’s biggest weakness comes in our need for social validation. And if the validation comes from a group seeded with sociopaths, then we will follow them. But in the right circumstances, which are very broad, humans will revert to our fundamentally helpful, friendly and supportive natures.
So what is the call to action? It is to trust more, and accentuate the positive. We are a species that ultimately is friendly, and looks to the positive. We rise to expectations, and lower to them, in many fields, including friendliness, and trustworthiness. If we assume that people are untrustworthy, they will live down to our expectations surprisingly often.
So the more we accentuate the positive and trust each other, the more of us will rise to those expectations, creating a better society for all of us.
Recommended.
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This book is by my favourite economist author, about how to think about numbers, and how to use numbers to communicate what is really happening in the world.
Harford is passionate about using numbers to illuminate rather than conceal, and this book is a set of rules about how to use numbers and statistics to scrutinise the world. While statistics can be used to mislead and conceal, they are also illuminating and helpful. How to tell the difference? This book will help.
I’m not going to summarise all ten rules (you need to read the book for that, and it is worth it) but my favourite rule was rule Eight – Don’t take statistical bedrock for granted. As Harford points out, it is easy to take for granted the statistics collected by governments, until they aren’t there. The numbers produced by government statistical agencies (here in Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics is the peak body, and there are many others). Harford has a number of stories of places where statistics have gone wrong, and some truly impressive cost benefit analyses of the benefits of accurate statistics.
Public discussion of data science tends to take all this information for granted. But the statistical analysis of data that is all the rage these days is impossible if the data doesn’t exist to be analysed.
Recommended.
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This is a great book about making decisions, and how poker helps you think about it. Konnikova is a writer with a doctorate in psychology, who decided to learn to play poker at world championship level to understand how to make decisions better. Because of her background, she manages to persuade some seriously amazing poker players to teach her.
Because she has studied psychology, and in particular decision making, the lessons she learns along the way about poker, and its applicability to life are very insightful. It is hard to summarise, but here are a few quotes:
“Even terrible players make the plays they make for a reason and its your job to figure it out… Don’t judge them. Don’t berate them, even in your head… Just try to figure out the why behind it.”
“Our thinking about luck has real consequences in terms of our emotional well being, our decisions, and the way we implicitly view the world and our role in it… Do we see ourselves as victims or victors? A victim: The cards went against me. Things are being done to me, things are happening around me, and I am neither to blame nor in control. A victor: I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control…. Sure you can’t actually change the cards, and the variance will be what it will be – but you will feel a whole lot happier and better adjusted while you take life’s blows, and your ready mindset will prepare you for the change in variance that will come at some point, even if that point is far in the future.”
“Never feel like you have to do something just because it’s expected of you – even if you’re the one who expects it of you. Know when to step back. Know when to recalibrate.”
Konnikova is an engaging writer, and weaves decision theory, psychology and general good sense into this story of becoming a poker player.
Recommended.
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Philippe Sands is an international lawyer. His Jewish family comes from the now Ukrainian city of Lviv (also known as Lemberg, Lvov and Lwów, as it changed hands eight times in the years between 1914 and 1945), and a visit there made him realise how central that city has been in the evolution of International Human Rights Laws. Two key lawyers, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, who together are the key originators of the concepts of the crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity, spent their early lives there, and Sands’ own grandfather was born there and got out (unlike most of the rest of his family) to Vienna before World War II.
Sands expertly weaves the story of the Nuremburg trials with the story of these two lawyers, their families, and his own family, as well as some of the key Nazis who were tried at Nuremburg in the period leading up to and during World War II.
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I read this book in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests, just to remind myself of the complexity and tragedy of the aboriginal experience in Australia. Stan Grant is one of the very few regular Aboriginal faces on TV in Australia, a long standing TV journalist and current affairs host. He writes extraordinarily eloquently about Australia and his own experience being descended from people who were at both sides of the first encounter between British and Aboriginal people in Botany Bay.
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Peter Doherty, Nobel Prize winning virologist, has been incredibly relevant this year. Not only is he an expert on viruses, he is also a popular science writer, and patron of the Doherty Institute, which has been at the forefront of Australia’s (and in some cases the world’s – they were the first scientists outside China to isolate the virus and make it available globally) response to Covid19. I was privileged to interview him for the Actuaries Institute’s virtual conference this year, and so I read this book and his more recent one (below) in preparation.
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This book is all about how to work out what is real and what isn’t when all around you people are talking about fake science and fake news. Peter Doherty talks about how to go beyond the headlines to understand what the underlying science is saying about important topics like climate change, vaccination, and many other scientific issues in the headlines. If a famous scientist opines on something, how do you know whether they are talking in their area of expertise, or just jumping on a bandwagon? If a newspaper talks about a number of scientists with a new and contrarian opinion, how can you best go and look at the scientific consensus without relying on a newspaper’s search for novelty, or worse, partisan view of what they would like the science to be?
If you like Peter Doherty’s writing (and I do) you can also read his weekly column at the Doherty Institute, which has been an excellent source of understandable scientific information this year.
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When this came out, Julia Gillard was on all the podcasts promoting the book, and I was a bit sceptical about it – as I always am about books from former politicians – but it was very insightful. Gillard and Okonjo-Iweala interview eight world leaders (plus each other) about their experiences of being a woman in leadership. And then they analyse those interviews into carefully chosen categories, and compare the view of the real leaders they’ve interviewed with what the research says about women in leadership more broadly. Gillard is Chair of the Global Institute for Women’s leadership, and the research background really shines through the book.
In the context of many people pointing out how successfully women have led countries through the pandemic, they point out that women face quite a tightrope of acceptability between being ‘man’ enough to do the job and feminine enough to not be viewed as unlikeable, or even held in contempt. A woman who has managed to be in the right place on that tightrope does seem to have the right skills for managing this pandemic – the ability to listen, and be empathetic, but at the same time to be decisive.
This was true of Ellen Sirleaf, President of Liberia during the Ebola pandemic.
A horrific disease requiring courageous decision-making…. Elle is convinced that the fact women leaders do not tend to be viewed as likeable is a benefit, not a burden. It means they are more likely to do what is right rather than care about burnishing their image
The very high level conclusion that I took away from all of the thoughtful interviews and research was that women as a gender are not necessarily better at leadership, but those who make it to the top jobs probably are better leaders on average, because the filtering process to get to that job is so much tougher than it is for men, in general, but also specifically for a more balanced profile that is advantageous when actually doing the job .
Recommended.
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This book would have been more useful for me in 2019 than 2020, where the total distractions were fewer (because I wasn’t working full time). But that said, in a year where so much of our life, connection and content was consumed virtually, this book had lots of good advice. For me it boiled down to the advice to choose what you wanted to achieve (better connections with your friends, perhaps, or engaging with great fiction), and then choose the tools (such as facebook or instagram or something more oldfashioned like telephone calls or letter writing or reading paper books) to help you achieve them, rather than starting with the tools and giving yourself excuses for using them.
As a result of this book, I removed facebook from my ipad (but couldn’t quite bring myself to ditch it entirely) and changed my day around to give myself more book reading time and blogging time, rather than defaulting to scrolling social media in my spare moments.
This is a good companion to Digital Minimalism – Julia Baird’s memoir of all the ways she has sustained herself through hard times. I found it a great reminder this year to look for beauty – Baird talks about the importance of awe – while looking for the awesome in the every day doesn’t take away the hard things in our lives, it does reduce their impact.
And Baird’s search for actual phosphorescence by journeying around Australia, and then finding it at her local beach is a great metaphor for paying attention to what is around us.
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The title essay in this collection is the origin of the word mansplaining – Solnit describes the experience of talking to a man at a party about her latest book, and having him describe it back to her as the definitive book on the topic, without him realising that he was talking about her book!
Solnit is a great essayist, and this collection is lots of fun to dip in and out of. I do always try and read her pieces when I see them, so it was nice to have them in concentrated book form.
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With incredible timing, this book was published in February this year. It is a book about virality – but not just diseases – everything. Why some things spread virally, and how to take advantage of that spread (or not). It is not so much about diseases, but about everything else behaving like diseases, which meant it wasn’t quite as much a book about the zeitgeist as I expected, but still very much worth reading as the Covid19 pandemic gathered pace around the world.
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This short book (from 2017) describes why, even when we know disasters are plausible, their low probability means that we underprepare for them. Reading this early in 2020, when it was clear that the authors were completely correct about the world underpreparing for the particular disaster we found ourselves in was insightful, but not as surprising as it might have been when it came out. Definitely worth reading as we think about other disasters we might find ourselves under prepared for – notably everything that is likely to come with climate change.
Chan is an Australian journalist who has lived in the country (NSW) for a lot of her professional life and this is her analysis of how both major political parties have failed the country, why country people are choosing populist politicians (One Nation, Shooters Fishers and Farmers), the things that make country life different, and what can and should be done to improve the way the government supports and deals with country issues.
One of the insights that resonated with me is that country people are not nearly as segregated by class (economic and social) as city people – while city people think that their lives in whatever suburb they live in is representative, country people are much likely to know someone significantly richer and/or poorer than they are.
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Beard is a public academic in the UK, often found explaining Roman history on the BBC. She has also been massively trolled online for being a woman in public who doesn’t conform to stereotypes of how women should appear on TV. This short book is a great exploration of how history and the present day has treated powerful women, and asks the question – if women aren’t perceived to be within the structures of power, isn’t it power that we need to redefine?
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October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, by China Miéville
This is a great one volume account of the Russian Revolution, by a British (mainly) fantasy author. Because Miéville writes novels, he writes a great story, which carries a casual reader, like me through the complex technicalities of exactly who was betraying who and the shifting loyalties of all the key players through the stirring events of 1917. This book was written for the centenary, but I found it looking for something to read to help understand the Russian Revolution – one of the most important events of 20th century history. It comes up top of most lists of one volume histories of the Russian Revolution.
Because the book finishes in 1917, before the Russian Revolution turned decisively to tyranny, it did make me feel quite revolutionary myself, as I contemplated how difficult it is to change even quite small things about how Australia works – compared with what seemed like a much bigger canvas that our politicians were writing on in the late 19th century when they came up with the constitution we now have.
My revolutionary fervour has died down a bit, but still a great read.
Recommended for the history junkies.
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I’ve reviewed this book here. Rebecca Solnit is most famous for her essay Men Explain things to me, which was the origin of the word mansplaining (also worth a read, as it is very entertaining). This book is quite different. It is an analysis of the way in which people around the world, from very different origins, will organically form communities to help each other and everyone around them, when a disaster breaks down the normal way in which people stick to their own community, profession, and role in life.
Solnit tells story after story of people stepping out of their every day lives, when they didn’t know their neighbours and kept to themselves, and creating and contributing to a new community. Many look back on this time of community as one of the most fulfilling times of their lives.
But this isn’t what you will read about disasters, most of the time. The stories that are reported are of looting, of selfish behaviour (or currently, of small groups protesting about rules for the majority). So it is a story that is rarely told. That can, of itself, create worse outcomes by pushing official responses in the wrong direction – when officials expect poor behaviour, they prioritise action against it, rather than against building with and helping the spontaneous sharing and helpful behaviour that almost always arises.
Opportunistic theft and burglary are, historically, rare in American disasters… Some such opportunism happened in Katrina. The first thing worth saying about such theft is who cares if electronics are moving around without benefit of purchase when children’s corpses are floating in filthy water and stranded grandmothers are dying of heat and dehydration? .. the answer is, apparently, quite a lot of people, including those who first determined the priorities and public face of the disaster,
A better understanding of how people really act in disasters would probably mean better responses from authorities – working with the spontaneous helpers, rather than assuming the worst. So the call to action is to look for those examples, both as a reader and a reporter. Reading each story in the book gives great hope for humanity, and has helped me to look for those positive stories, even if they are harder to find, often than the negative stories that are told more often.
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Fiction
Each year, I add a fiction book to this post – my favourite fiction of the year. This year, when I did a lot of fiction reading, compared with my average read, I’m giving you three – each one was a book I read to transport myself into a different place. Whenever I go travelling, I do love to read a book set where I am going to be – and this year, I’ve read a few books set in places I’ve been to remind myself of some of my past travels.
This book is the first of a series set in Shanghai in 1990, just at the beginning of post communist China. It is a classic police procedural, with the policeman starting to come up in the world, at the same time as trying to work out what to do about the corruption he is finding as he investigates what seems at first to be an ordinary murder. I really enjoyed this glimpse into the interior lives of a world both strange and foreign, but full of humanity.
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Another police procedural, this time set in the south of France, in the Dordogne Valley. I spent some time there ten years ago, and it was one of my favourite parts of France, so this series of books was a great way to transport myself back there.
Unusually, for the hero of a detective series, Bruno doesn’t have many flaws – he is a great cook, organises sport for the local children, and seems to be beloved by everyone. Martin Walker is a journalist, foreign correspondent, and a really good writer. Unlike some other detective series set in picturesque places, he isn’t quite so breathless about the local culture, but manages to immerse his hero in the best parts of the south of France, without romanticizing it too much.
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This is a political thriller, set in Tasmania, Australia. That seems a pretty far-fetched idea, and it is, but it is a rollicking good read, so the improbability of the story doesn’t seem that obvious while you are reading it.
As for my other two picks, this book transports you to its setting – in this case Bruny Island, off the coast of Tasmania, and has a bonus of quite a few thinly disguised portraits of local politicians and personalities. If you lived in Tasmania that part would be even more enjoyable, I suspect.
I was lucky enough to actually visit Bruny Island after reading it, and it certainly put me in the mood for the beauty of Tasmania’s beaches and wilderness.