Every year I do a review of my reading for the year, with recommendations for my favourite books. As usual, I’m only reviewing the non fiction here, with one token fiction book. This year I’ve managed during all those lockdowns to read a lot more books generally. This time I’ve grouped them together into themes – History, Women in Australian public life, Covid19, Australian Politics, Personal Development/Leadership and the rest (including one book of fiction, just for fun). I’ve emphasised my top recommendations, but really, I’d recommend almost all of them if it is a subject that would interest you.
History
Looking back over my annual posts, there is always some popular history in my lists. When it is done well, the popular history book brings to life part of the human experience that the author has spent their life thinking about and has managed to summarise for us. There are a lot of this category published every year, and I’m generally quite careful about triangulating the recommendations, so I loved almost all of these.
How much insight can you get about today’s cities from looking at those that have been abandoned over history? Annalee Newitz looks at what we know about four very varied cities -Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia that stood beside the Mississippi River where East Louis is today. Çatalhöyük is the oldest known archeological site that could be called a city (about 20,000 people), and like Angkor and Cahokia, was gradually depopulated for reasons that are hard to discern from looking so many years later. It is fascinating to see what you can learn about how people lived just from the objects they leave behind – Çatalhöyük was before any real writing, and similarly Cahokia didn’t really leave behind a written record, but there is still a surprising amount that you can find out about cities.
The most interesting insight for me was when Newitz looked at the decline of all these cities – while the reason for Pompeii being abandoned is well known, the others gradually became less important – with it being hard to tell at what point they could be described as “abandoned”. Angkor seems the most relevant to us today, as it was gradually abandoned when the complex water engineering required to support the city and its food and water supply stopped working effectively, through a combination of bad climate and bad engineering.
The good test for a book is whether I find myself sharing snippets with my family – this one definitely passed that test.
A little bit of a cheat, calling this history, but it is really the history of mortality. I loved this, but that’s not surprising because it is the perfect intersection of my actuarial life and my historical interests. Johnson is a broad non fiction writer, having written on many different aspects of modern life. This book is much more numeric than his usual topics, which meant I liked it even more. Broadly, it looks at how humanity got from the prehistoric position, that the median human would live for around 30-40 years (life expectancy), to the modern position, where life expectancy is nearly double that.
The most fascinating section for me was Johnson’s ranking of what has really made that difference. He talks about three breakthroughs that have saved billions of lives: Artificial fertilizer, Toilets/sewers and vaccines, and then another five that have saved hundreds of millions: Antibiotics, bifurcated needles, blood transfusions, chlorination and pasteurization. But most traditional medical interventions only saved millions of lives. The book is organised around those big breakthroughs, and why they made such a difference, and it is a good reminder that vaccines were one of the big three. Particularly against smallpox, but against a whole lot of deadly diseases, vaccination has saved billions of people for a long and productive life.
I’ve long found the Vikings fascinating, and this is one of those great historical books that wears its scholarship lightly but at the same time gives great confidence that it really is looking at what the best scholars understand about what really happened. Both this, and my next book, reminded me of how so much of the history I read is biased towards western europe, compared with the rest of the world. The Vikings had a massive impact on Russia, Eastern Europe and even Constantinople, but the popular culture I see is often just about the Viking invasions of parts of Britain.
I bought this as a present for a friend who knows far more than me about this history, and she loved it so much I had to buy it for myself.
The thesis of this book is that the (surprisingly) short time that Napoleon was in charge of France changed the global landscape as much, if not more than it changed western Europe. South America’s independence movements, for example, made great strides because of flow on effects from what was happening in Europe (especially Spain, of course). And much of Asia, especially India, Iran and neighbouring countries were also very much impacted by struggles between Britain, France and Russia that ended up playing out in their own countries.
I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if it didn’t have quite so much detail about the battles in it. The global political history was fascinating; the detail of the Battle of Austerlitz less so. But given the title, it is hard to complain, I just wish the author had written a different book.
Ever since I visited Iceland 10 years ago, I’ve loved to read about it, and so when I came across this book, I had to give it a go. It was a fun read, a history of the world through the contributions of Iceland, but you had to be interested in Iceland!
A classic historical read on something obscure that is at the same time important. Not quite as well written as the classics of this genre, but still had a whole lot of interesting snippets that I’d never thought about before. It was surprisingly recent that people organising libraries and lists of things suddenly realised that alphabetical order could be useful. Before that, for example, closeness to God was sometimes used as an organising principle in monastic libraries.
Covid19
The next theme that I spent way too much time on was books related to Covid.
In this set, I’m recommending the The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis. 
Of these, I would only recommend the Michael Lewis book.
Women in Australian public life
I read quite a few books about women in public life in Australia this year – even before Brittany Higgins’ rape allegation and the womens’ marches around Australia, the conversation about how and why women in political life were being silenced, not supported and bullied out of having voices was increasingly loud. But Brittany Higgins, Grace Tame and Chanel Contos between them changed the conversation, and not before time. Brittany Higgins’ story led to marches of women around the country, calling for serious change, particularly for the recommendations from the 2020 report into Sexual harassment in the workplace to be adopted.
The Reckoning traces what led to the conversation about women in (especially) public life in 2021 looking at how the international Me Too movement came to Australian shores. Quarterly Essays are not a full book length – which makes this a good summary of the whole story, particularly if you are not quite as obsessed with it as I was this year. If you are interested in a high level view of the whole issue of women in public life, their/our harassment, why are we not better represented, read this one.
But if you want to read another one, I recommend the next book on my list, by Kate Ellis:
Kate Ellis was an Australian Federal Labor politician. and a minister in Julia Gillard’s government, until she decided she couldn’t be both a parent to primary school aged kids and a senior parliamentarian who was away for half the year. In this book she interviews current and recent past female politicians about those experiences. Ellis had already written this book when Brittany Higgins’ allegations burst onto the political scene, so it was incredibly timely. Her reflection once she got out was to realise just how bad the Australian parliamentary culture is:
I’ve seen how much the culture in parliament is behind the rest of society. It is outdated, toxic, and often unfair, particularly for women. That cannot be the right environment in which to set the laws that impact us all, and nor does it reflect our values.
This is an insightful book, and a campaigning one. And I hope that everyone who has the ability to influence that culture of the place that makes laws for our country has the chance to read it and reflect on how they can change it.
This book was Julia Baird’s PhD thesis – which means reading it took me back to when Australia had the Democrats instead of the Greens as its third political party. It was a major source for Annabel Crabb’s Ms Represented series, in which Annabel Crabb interviewed as many women representing “firsts” in Australian parliament as she could find. Many of those women had first told their stories to Julia Baird, so it was interesting to see those bookends.
I enjoyed this book more than I expected, partly because the author is more similar to me than I expected Julia Banks had a very successful professional career as a corporate lawyer before going into politics, which gives her great insights into the contrasts between the Australian corporate world, where sexism exists, but is officially unacceptable, and the Australian political world, where sexism seems to be both expected, and part of the way the game is played, particularly (but not only) on the conservative side of politics.
Mehreen Faruqi is much more impressive than I had realised before I read this book. She is a Greens Senator from NSW, and has a fascinating career as an environmental engineer and adult migrant from Pakistan before her current role in Australian Federal parliament. Its not as strongly feminist as the others, partly because Mehreen Faruqi, being an immigrant and a muslim, has a few different intersectional identities that lead to marginalisation.
Australian politics
Now into some more general politics. In a pandemic, when public policy matters enormously, my already high interest in Australian politics went up a notch (also helped by one of the university students in the house studying politics). It’s hard to pick one from this list to recommend, but I suspect Dead in the Water by Richard Beasley is the book that most people reading this won’t have heard of, and it is a great read.
Dead in the Water: A Very angry book about our greatest environmental catastrophe… the death of the Murray-Darling Basin, by Richard BeasleyThis book is quite different – a very funny, but also angry, book about the Murray-Darling Basin by the Counsel assisting the Royal Commission into the Murray-Darling. Despite the fact I’ve never really been there, I’ve been fascinating by the way our river systems work since friends of mine lived in Broken Hill many years ago. Outside Australia, the Murray-Darling is often held up by market economists as a great example of using price signals to manage a river system. Inside Australia, almost everyone knows that the Murray Darling is broken, possibly beyond repair. This book goes through how we got there, and, to some degree, apportions blame. The price signals aren’t completely the villain, but they have largely been applied incorrectly, by successive governments who didn’t want to do anything not supported by their stakeholders. The local indigenous people, and the natural environment, were rarely included in anybody’s stakeholders.
It makes it clear just how difficult it is now to get back to a healthy river system, at the same time as showing how at every turn successive governments have failed to take the tough decisions, and made things worse.
Of the others, the best of these books is 
In his Clark lectures, Forster put forward a theory of literary characters: there were two sorts: flat characters and round characters. Flat characters were sometimes called ‘types’ or ‘caricatures’, and were constructed around a single idea or quality. They could be described simply, captured in a sentence or two. Isn’t this a fine description of Morrison? When he became prime minister, we did not know much about him. Quickly, he set about helping us to know him, by making himself a flat character. We were given just a few details; we were given them over an d over again. These details gave us clues to other parts of his character, but, crucially, none that complicated the portrait.
There are many other fascinating insights into Scott Morrison and the political process in this book. If you are at all interested in the person running our country, this is highly recommended.
A quick read (because it is not a full book size), but only for the aficionados.
In a somewhat similar vein, 
And finally, given we are still arguing about the meaning of Australia Day/Invasion Day, Henry Reynolds was the first historian to look at what Australia’s written record really says about what happened to the Indigenous people during the settlement of Australia. All of his books are carefully written examinations of the historical records in different parts of Australia. This one looks at the legal background to Australia’s settlement and makes it clear that the white people on the ground exceeded their authority and the accepted legal position at the time in the way they took the land from the Indigenous people. There was no peace agreement, no treaty, no finish to an undeclared war.
In the context of the Uluru Statement, this is really useful background for to understand why the Uluru Statement starts by calling for a Voice to Parliament, and then a process of agreement making between governments and First Nations.
Personal development/leadership
This next section is fairly loosely related, a bit of personal development/leadership/memoir. They are broadly in order of my recommendation, but very different to each other, so your mileage may vary!
In going back to my library to write this, I realized I had highlights all over this book. It is hard to summarise but it is about the power of reflection, even in the middle of a crisis. How do you work out when to rethink your initial preconceptions, and why does it make sense to question your initial thoughts? We tend to stick to our initial preconceptions through a combination of cognitive laziness and the discomfort of changing your mind. The part of the book I can see myself going back to is the part where Grant looks at how to help other people rethink their preconceptions. How do you engage with someone who thinks differently from you politely and constructively? How do you work out which parts of your thinking should be abandoned without abandoning the identity that goes with them? It’s hard to summarise the many interesting insights I gleaned from this book, but I definitely recommend it if you like that kind of thing.
Yves Rees is a non binary historian from Melbourne, and has written a memoir about their transition. As a historian, Rees is an excellent writer and sprinkles history, legal background and a whole lot of fact and philosophy into this memoir of their very personal journey of understanding their transness to being a public non binary trans person. A bonus for me, as someone who probably spends way too much time thinking about feminism, Rees has also specifically studied feminist Australian history, which makes them an excellent person to think about the relationship between feminism and being trans, particularly non binary and trans.
This is a book about storytelling from a feminist perspective. There were many really interesting insights for me in this book. I’ve long been interested in how story telling is a much more effective method of communication than a recitation of facts (notably when talking about scenario testing in risk management). But this book goes further from a feminist perspective, which was fascinating. For example, a small section was about our language – even the metaphors we often use are military – how often during a pandemic have you heard discussion of the front lines, or of vaccines as a new weapon against Covid? What about instead talking about cooking up a nourishing vaccine? rather than a weapon?
Rachael Robertson has built a leadership coaching business on her experience on running Australia’s antarctic station through a full winter season. I’ve seen her speak in person and she is very insightful. During the various Melbourne lockdowns (she lives in Melbourne) I started following her on twitter, which was a great intersection of my interests in leadership, covid and politics. As a small return, I bought and read this book. While I didn’t think I got an extra book worth of insights from reading a second book she had written, there were enough different angles on her insights that I found this definitely worth dipping into her thinking again. My favourite leadership story of hers is when she talks about the bacon wars during her time in Antartica – the whole station was nearly melting down over whether bacon should be cooked crispy or soft.
And as she points out, the underlying issue was nothing to do with bacon, but about everyone on the station respecting each other.
I thought this was going to be another insightful look at a neglected part of the human condition, like a similar book which I loved about Sleep and its importance. But despite the subtitle, I found this to be a bit less about the science, and more about looking into some fairly non scientific experiments about the importance of breathing. As a singer, I’ve noticed about myself that the breathing exercises we do during choir practice are great for centring myself, and getting myself out of whatever stressful thing has happened that day. So I do believe that thinking about our breathing is important. But I wasn’t entirely convinced by some of the more extreme stories from the book.
Kenneth Cukier is a senior writer at the Economist, and this book is about Framing – a different way of thinking about how we think. The central thesis is that framing a question differently is a big part of the human thinking advantage.
While it all made sense, I didn’t find it as new an insight as I expected. A fun read, but not something I’ll be rushing back to.
Unclassifiable
Finally, a few odds and ends that really don’t fit into any of those categories.
A very thought-provoking consideration of cultural differences between the US and Australia, by a NY Times Australian correspondent. He and his family wholeheartedly joined the nippers, and were taken aback both by how much risk everyone was willing to take in the sea, but also the much more community minded culture of collective action that came with it.
Australia’s experience [of Covid19] has been very different because, I came to understand, its approach to risk is very different. In general, the response had been more collaborative, careful, collective and nimble.
Long before the coronavirus hit, I was fascinated by the tension betwen individualism and collectivism in Australia and in the United states. Two colonial frontier nations settled with the same langauge and British backstory seemed to have diverged. …the US prioritised personal freedom and competition while Australia chose another path to what – communitarianism? Fraternalism? Democratic Socialism?
Cave is one of those overseas commentators who loves a lot of what makes Australia different. But I found myself reading this feeling as if much of what he was admiring was fading fast. I hope that we can keep that stronger sense of community, and pragmatic approach to risk that Cave admires, but even within Australia, he realised that the community he admired in upper-middle class Bronte wasn’t nearly as strong in poorer and differently diverse parts of the country.
Michael Mann is a climate scientist and now more of a full time climate science commentator. He was one of the scientists who was responsible for the “hockey stick graph” in the late 90s – showing the likely path of temperatures without action. Of course every prediction he made them has been proven to be accurate, but at the time, he was pilloried, trolled, and his university massively attacked.
He seems to have managed to come out of that experience intact, and this book goes deep into the strategies of how to achieve climate action, and, now that it has become clear to almost anyone that climate change is definitely happening, the new tactics of those who don’t want to take any action to stop it. Mann has recommendations for anyone who wants to take action, personally, professionally or as an activist, and his ultimate message is one of hope.
Don’t forget, once again, to emphasise that there is both urgency and agency. The climate crisis is very real. But it is not unsolvable. And its not too late to act. Every ounce of carbon we don’t burn makes things better. There is still time to create a better future and the greatest obstacle now in our way is doomism and defeatism.
Shaun Bythell owns a bookshop in a small town in Scotland. This book is a diary of how he runs it, including daily income and visitors. I felt bad reading this book on my ipad (as an electronic kindle copy) given he spends quite a lot of the book ranting about Amazon and electronic books. And it made me wish, again, that there was a way to get income to my local bookshop instead of just giving it all to amazon. But the form factor, for me, of reading an electronic copy is so worthwhile, that even if someone gives me a physical book, I often find myself buying the electronic copy so that I will read it within a reasonable timeframe.
I loved the slice of such a different life, and Bythell’s stories about his eccentric customers and even wilder staff members.
Token Fiction
This is the one fiction book that I’m putting in this post this year. This is a book set in the nearish future, when climate change has definitely already happened, and not nearly enough political action has been taken or is being taken to stop it. Many climate change people would hate this book, as it normalises the idea of climate change action by polluting the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide BUT it is a rollicking good tale, full of fun characters and excellent science.
Neal Stephenson is always original, and the bits of science he’s obsessed with a generally interesting to me, so I’ll always be lining up for his books.