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, as my fiction reading is a lot less interesting, although I’ve got a couple of fiction books at the end that I really enjoyed. This year, possibly because we had an election here in Australia, the proportion of politics/policy books is higher than average. Looking at the year made me realise I didn’t have as much quirky history as normally makes it to this list, although there is still a bit for your entertainment.
Public policy
Butler to the World: The Book the oligarchs don’t want you to read: how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals, by Oliver Bullough
This book is a fascinating analysis of all the ways the UK, particularly London, supports the dodgiest people in the world – the title is a perfect description. The UK financial sector, the legal sector, and many other aspects of the professional classes in the UK provide, as the book says, butlering services of pretty much anything needed to support the dodgiest of people around the world – gambling, failed states where those in charge are stealing billions from their people. pretty much any set of people who need services from people who won’t inquire too closely into the source of their wealth. Hard to summarise the whole book, but the shock for me was in reading how little funding and interest there seems to be in enforcing even existing laws and treaties designed to stop evil people being able to use the financial infrastructure of the UK.
Just one example – money laundering. Here in Australia we are by no means perfect (the most egregious issue is that anti-money landering enforcement doesn’t apply to real estate agents) but having spent a bit of time working in a bank which had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for not properly enforcing anti money laundering rules, the contrast with the UK regime (theoretically signed up to the same treaties) was a bit shocking, where anti-money laundering enforcement seems to be a part time job for a wide variety of different enforcement agencies.
Britain has essentially outsourced responsibiity for stoping money laundeirng to the money launderers, and is failing to stop dirty money as a result. Much of the time the same bodies tasked with regulating professionals’financial transactions are also charged with lobbying government on their behalf, while also relying on those same professionals’membership fees to keep solvent.
There are a lot of reasons why Britain in particular has taken on this role, but the most surprising to me was the weird way in which their colonial history has left a bunch of available legal frameworks to be exploited to get access to the British legal system without too much of the pesky enforcement or regulation. From Gibraltar to the Cayman Islands and many places in between, aspects of the legal system that don’t apply in mainland Britain have been exploited to make the grey parts availalbe for shady deals of all kinds.
QAnon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults, by Van Badham
Van Badham seems a bit of a renaissance woman, I first came across her as a feminist commentator, she is also a playwright (I really enjoyed Banging Denmark a few years ago). For this book, she spent a year undercover on the internet researching QAnon, writing this frankly terrifying book about how easy it can be to fall down the rabbit hole of internet conspiracy cults – QAnon is the most well known and disturbing, but there is a whole ecosystem of strange and fantastical internet cults which suck people into their world view.
One of the earliest was pizza gate, the story of how Edgar Maddison, a father and primary carer of two daughters became so convinced that a trendy pizza shop in Washington DC was running a sex ring raping children in the basement that he drove 500km with an assault rifle with the intention of busting up the global padophile ring he was convinced was in the basement of the shop. In the search for the basement, he shot up the lock, luckily without harming anyone.
The scariest part for me about reading this book was realising how easy it can be to get sucked into this kind of internet conspiracy cults. From the outside, the story seems outlandishly ludicrous, but each individual step makes sense, particularly if you are disinclined to trust government, authority or the media to start with.
My own philosphical take from all of this is that trust is an underrated civic virtue. Creating public policy that increases the level of trust in a society, rather than treating everyone like individuals who are out for themselves, improves the whole of society in ways that are not predictable until you see the lack of them. This increase in strange conspiracy cults has come as much from lack of trust in mainstream society as it has come from the increasing availability of weird internet forums. The lack of trust across society in the US, and increasingly in Australia is terrifying to watch in so many different ways.
Big: The Role of the State in the Modern Economy, by Richard Denniss
RIchard Dennis is the former CEO of the Australia Institute, a left leaning think-tank. This book points out that the role of the state is increasing, and both sides of Australian politics need to come to terms with that and think about increasing taxes – the revenue side of the ledger, rather than continuing to pretend we can just cut back on waste and spend less.
Waiting for Gonski: How Australia failed its schools, by Tom Greenwell, Chris Bonnor
Long time readers of this blog will know that I am a big supporter of public schools. This book forensically dissects the outcomes from the Gonski report, and that public schools are in a worse funding state than ever, as the lobbying power of the private (including catholic) school sectors manages to continue to get “short term” fixes that put the sustainable funding of the state/public school sector further away than ever. My friends who are public policy professionals introduced me this year to the phrase “vertical-fiscal imbalance” – ie the problem that the federal government raises money and the state governments spend it, but the federal government often steps in with extra spending in areas of egregious failure. That tends to lead to perverse outcomes as the allocations as so many incentives exist to shift cost to the other layer of government. Education is a prime example, with public schools funded by state governments and federal governments funding private schools. Gives a great incentive for the state schools to have poor buildings and overcrowding, pushing people who can afford it into the private sector where the state governments no longer have to fund them.
On Reckoning, by Amy Remeikis
Amy Remeikis is a Guardian journalist. This book is hard to describe, an incredibly well written description of the experience of many women on learning about Brittany Higgins’ accusation of rape and the political and media response. Probably the single best description is rage, but Remeikis is an incredible writer, so it is a small book chock full of statistics and thoughts on public policy a well as a personal description of the feelings of someone reporting on a story when they are also reliving their own sexual assualt experiences.
Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, by Laurie Penny
I follow Laurie Penny on twitter, and at their best, they are an amazing short form writer on feminism and politics. Penny’s longform piece in GQ on the Tory party conference in the UK of 2022 is some of the best journalism I’ve read about the Tories in the UK. But I didn’t find this book that original, compared with some of the thoughtful magazine pieces (and Remeikis’ book above) I’d read about sexual assualt, consent, and feminism in the post #Metoo era. I enjoyed the book, but it was as original as I had hoped.
Politics – Election specifically
In a year in Australia with a federal election, I found myself reading a fair bit on politics, both before and after the election itself. For my non Australian readers, the federal election was held in May, and the Liberal/National party government of Scott Morrison was thrown out of office by a combination of the incoming Labor government led by Anthony Albanese, and a record number of newcomers from neither of the two main parties – “Teal” independents, (independents with a broadly common platform of action on climate change, integrity in politics, and respect for women), the Green party and a few unclassifiable others.
Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s fall and Anthony Albanese’s rise, By Nikki Savva
This book, is really for people who wanted to read a bit more about all of Scott Morrison’s flaws. It is a blow by blow description of the tactics and strategy of the election campaign, with interviews from most of the key insiders from the losing Liberal National Party. Unsurprisingly after a loss, many of them wanted to point out how badly Scott Morrison had run the whole thing.
Lone Wolf: Albanese and the New Poltics: Quarterly Essay, by Katharine Murphy
This quarterly esssay was probably the mirror image – insiders’ views of the election from the victorious Labor party. It is dressed up as having more to it – why the incoming Albanese government is trying to reset government to be less about the media cycle and more about medium- long term policy, but it is still mostly about the campaign.
The Big Teal (In the The National Interest), by Simon Holmes à Court
This is one of quite a few books looking inside the success of the “Teals”. Simon Holmes à Court started Climate 200 – a venture capital style way of thinking about politics – it solicits donations from those who would like to support candidates for election who are pushing better climate policies, and then hands them out to selected candidates who look as if they might have a chance of winning, and are supporting broadly appropriate policies.
I ended up door knocking and handing out how-to-vote cards for one of them, Kylea Tink, who won, so I found this book a bit more interesting than stories of the campaigns I watched from the outside.
I didn’t find a book describing this year’s politics from the greens angle, so instead I listened to the podcast Serious Danger. Not an official greens podcast, but there were several episodes with interviews with victorious Greens candidates from Queensland. Listening to their description of the campaigns there was quite a lot in common with the Teals in the level of community involvement, and the wide range of people who got involved in the political process for the first time.
History
Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession and Genius in Modern China, by Jing Tsu
A history of chinese writing and how people in China tried to adapt it to the modern age of typewriters and computers sounds a bit dry, but it is a fascinating lens through which to view the history of modern China. I’ve always had a very amateur interest in language and linguistics (despite my inability to speak any other languages) plus I feel I should know a lot more about Chinese history so this scratched both those itches for me. In addition, it gave me a new appreciation of the importance of chinese writing to chinese culture. I still wonder whether it would have been possible to create a more alphabetic system of writing that still looked chinese (the way the Koreans did) but most chinese languages are phonically very different from european languages, so the roman alphabet is really not that easy to use to represent chinese languages.
It took me a while to get into, but I really enjoyed this book, and while I can’t quote particular anecdotes it was one of the better books I’ve read on modern Chinese history.
A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel to the Car to What Comes Next, by Tom Standage
Standage has long been fascinated by cars, and I suspect that twenty years ago, this book would just have been a history of the car. But now, as cars seem increasingly unsustainable, it is a history of how we humans have used the wheel to transport ourselves, which makes it a much more interesting book, particularly as that mean it also touches on city design, the long diversion in European history where wheels were just for the working classes (rich people went on horseback) and of course, the bicycle.
The overarching theme is that most innovations have unintended consequences, the car most of all, so replacing the internal combustion engine with electricty, and a driver with a computer (as seems to be the hope of the technonerd crowd) is likely to lead to a whole lot of problems we haven’t even thought of (even though he thinks of a few that hadn’t occurred to me.
This being a history, there are also a few diversions into early parts of car culture that seem very familiar – the jitney phase of the 30s seems uncannily the same as what happened to our cities when uber started taking over, for example. I also loved the complexity of Standage’s descriptions of quite a few paths not taken (Los Angeles removing the trolley car for example). Most of them are not the simplistic stories of corporate villains that I expected. Sure there are corporate villains, but sometimes some town planning standard, or some politician’s idea to improve safety can have unexpected consequences.
Another great example of a history of a small thing that illustrates the world from an unexpected angle.
Giles Tremlett wrote one of my favourite books about Spain, Ghosts of Spain, travels through a country’s hidden past. So when I was looking around for a longer history, this was my pick. I never have much success with this kind of single volume history, as they unavoidably cover a huge amount of territory. They often become lists of dates and facts and sadly this was also the case for this one despite Tremlett’s valiant efforts to create an overarching theme of Spanish history involving a strange mix of openness to the world and insularity, often as a series of waves in each direction. It’s a good summary, but not a riveting room.
The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks, by Steven Johnson
I realised this year that while Steven Johnson has been one of my favourite non fiction writers for a while, I had never read one of his first books – the class story of the cholera epidemic of London and the famous Broad Street pump. Johnson tells the story of the gradual discovery that cholera is a water-borne disease – not something that hangs around in bad air. There are two key characters – John Snow, an impressive figure who doesn’t just do the epidemiology to figure out what was happening with cholera, but is also one of the key people who works out anaesthetics. But the person I hadn’t heard of was also key – a neighbourhood priest called Henry Whitehead. Whitehead thought that Snow was wrong about the water, but they both were instinctive scientists who collaborated in collecting all the information they could find about the cholera outbreak and following the data to where it led.
After reading the cholera story, I thought I should read more of Johnson’s work, so tried this one – a rollicking story about a pirate, Captain Every, and one of the biggest hijacks in pirate history – of a Mughal treasure ship in 1695. who predated Blackbeard by 25 or so years. He has a great story, but there isn’t all that much documentation to build a whole book around, particularly as Captain Every’s true name and upbringing is still a matter of conjecture. The capture of the treasure ship was successful, and my favourite parts of the story are from the trial – as many of the successful pirates were rounded up and put on trial, so there is a great written record of the whole event. I particularly liked the story of John Dann, who carried his profits more than ten thousand miles in the form of a thousand Turkish coins sewn into the lining of his jacket. Sadly for him, a maid sorting out his clothes noticed how heavy the coat was and he was reported and thrown into the local jai in his hometown of Rochester.
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez
I came across Janina Ramirez through listening to her on my favourite History Podcast – You’re Dead to Me, which pairs a historian with a comedian to discsuss a particular aspect of history – in an episode about the Beayeaux Tapestry. They were talking about the Bayeaux Tapestry, and Ramirez was talking about the women who probably made it, in Kent, and a woman who may have commissioned it, Edith, the wife of Edwards the Confessor (the King of England before Harold).
This book is full of stories of mediaeval women, both those who had influence on the fate of nations, but have been forgotten, and those who had more mundane lives, like those who wove the Tapestry, but still fascinating ones This is the kind of book I love, but I have realised the more of these I read, the more I may have heard the stories before as I keep seeking them out. Which is probably the point, eventually the view of history that all of us consume will be less about a few famous men, and more about the sweep of history, picking out more people as ways of illustration than just the boring Kings in battle.
Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks, by Chad Orzel
A brief History of Timekeeping is a virtual journey through the science that grew up alongside centuries of human efforts to measure the passage of time. Starting with marking the solstice and then going all teh way to modern atomic clocks, this book illustrates a good part of the history of science through a journey of how to measure time. I was surprised just how long humans have worried about time, but of course if your food depends on the natural world, keeping track of the seasons is pretty important, even before you get to agriculture. I still don’t really understand how we ended up with a seven day week, though. It seems a strange number, to me, but one which we have been using for a very long time.
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder
I notice I bought this on February 24, 2022, I think it was the top recommendation for understanding recent Ukrainian history from the New York Times or somewhere like that. My first flush of enthusiasm didn’t last for me to read the whole book, as it is quite dense. But writing this makes me think I should try and find a less academic book about the recent history of Ukraine, as the war continues towards its second year.
Life and leadership
Four Thousand Weeks: Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count, by Oliver Burkeman
This is definitely my pick of the productivity genre that I’ve read in the last few years. Oliver Burkeman is a recovering productivity book addict, with a profoundly different way of thinking about productivity – coming back to the philosophers of how you can think about living your life.
The title is really the introduction to his thesis – four thousand weeks the average length of a human life these days. It is strange that that seems so much shorter than 80 years. But the key point of that is that time management shouldn’t be about how to get more little things done (like getting to email zero). It should be about how you decide how to spend those four thousand weeks. So this book is a great intersection of the Getting Things Done style books and big picture philosophical books. And it turns out that the toughest skill of all is deciding not to travel all the paths. How do you decide to choose what to do with your time, and more importantly, what not to do.
His point is that you should be thinking about what you are deciding to do, rather than how to do as much of it is as possible. You will never do everything you want, so take a step back and think about the big picture of how you are spending your life. Too many of us are waiting for something to happen before we take charge of what we want to do.
A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional – as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future, just over the horizon, and your life in all its fullness can begin as soon as you’ve put it, in Arnold Bennett’s phrase, ‘into proper working order’. Once you’ve cleared the decks, you tell yourself; or once you’ve implemented a better system of personal organisation, or got your degree…. that’s when you’ll feel in control at least, you’ll be able to relax a bit, and true meaningfulness will be found.
This is a book that bears rereading, particularly if you are feeling overwhelmed, as it is provocative, but at the same time philosophically calming.
Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, by Johann Hari
This is a bit in the genre of trying to stuff more into your time (rather than working out how you want to spend your time). But it quickly becomes a study of all the systemic issues with modern life that make it hard to focus on anything in particular. From the phone app developers, using behavioural science to work out how to get you addicted to their app, to the rise of unpaid overtime and the culture of working until you have got everything done, many aspects of modern life conspire to make it hard for you to focus on anything for more than a few minutes.
Hari does some radical things to try and get on top of his own lack of focus (most radically, he switched off the internet entirely for three months) but in the end realises that individual action (which he has three main reommendations:)
- Pre commitment to switching off alternatives (eg locking your phone away for stretches of time)
- Respond to distraction by seeking out a flow state, rather than beating yourself up
- Take chunks of time totally off social media
But these individual actions can only take you so far (he reckons around 15-20% improvement), what needs to change is fairly fundamental to society, in particular his call to action is to build a movement for what he calls Attention Rebellion – modelled on extinction rebellion. He isn’t really clear about what he wants this movement to do specifically, although he does say that constant desire for economic growth is probably the main reason we have got ourselves into this mess.
What’s Wrong with Boards: Rethinking corporate Governance, by Fred Hilmer
Fred Hilmer wrote Strictly Boardroom nearly 30 years ago. This year he decided to revisit Australian Boardrooms after a wave of corporate scandals where the popular view was that Boards were missing in action. He generally agrees with this, but also points out how hard the role of the Board director can be, with the classic mistakes made almost being opposite from each other. Hilmer argues that there are four major sources of failure:
- Failures of performance – the acceptance of marginal perforamnce – or in otherwirds the failure of Board to generated long-term returns that meet investor requirements and community expectations;
- “can-kicking”, or a deliberate unwillingness to confront failures in an existing business model or strategy. In short, this governance error is the equivalent of ignoring a problem in the hope it wil go away.
- Unethical conduct – acting unethically towards customers and suppliers can be a route to increased rewards for both firms and executives, and these rewards can last for some time.
- Clearly illegal activity, such as deliberate concealment of problems by management from the Board. While most manager take their duty to properly inform the Board extremely seriously, there are times when management conceals performance issues it wasnts to keep away from the Board. This can happen when there is a perforamnce or accounting problem that management hopes remedial action will fix
Hilmer argues that most suggestions for improving governance amount to more-of-the-same. And much of this involves asking Boards to improve governance by focusing on confirmance matters, in increasingly prescriptive detail. So his recommendations are somewhat nuanced, and depend on the issues facing a firm at the time.
- Jettison the notion of best practice – and substitute the idea of “best fit”. Different firms are facing different challenges, and so the best governance for each company is unlikely to conform to one idea of best practice.
- When doing that – look at a number of other potential governance models that aren’t the classic listed company view of an appropriate Board, and think about which one is most appropriate right now
- Focus vs delegation – it is impossible to do both, so be quite rigorous in choosing which topics and areas need focus vs delegation to management
- Consider carefully the role of the Board chair, and choose someone who can guide the organisation through the choices above.
The Fish Rots from the Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director, by Bob Garratt
As I move into a new professional phase of being a Non-Executive Director I am realising that despite my many years reporting TO Boards, being on the other side of the relationship does require different skills and ways of thinking about companies. This was the first book that was recommended by a steady stream of people. It is a great introduction to role of the Director n a company, and the big differences between that and the role of the management team and executive. Garratt is a longstanding director and consultant to directors and companies, and this book was first published in 1996 (I read the third edition, which has been completely updated with new examples).
The book is not easy to summarise, but I found it added well to my thinking once I had joined a few Boards, and I will probably need to reread it every few years, as it is one of those practical books that makes more sense the more experience you have. After doing the AICD Directors Course, it takes for granted the technical undersatnding of legislation and accounts, but is more insightful about culture and the way in which a Board should add value to an organisation.
The Improbably Entrepreneur: A story about the other 99.9% of startups, by Ilan Leas
Ilan Leas is, as he describes himself, a much more typical startup entrepreneur than the entrepreneurs you read about in books. His startup is not a unicorn, but it has made enough money that he has been in business for five years, and is now a fixture of his chosen niche. His chosen niche happens to be very specifically related to my own work – he has created a new way of buying life reinsurance in Australia. So although he changes the name of every single person described in the book, I was able to recognise nearly all of them, which made it quite an enjoyable read for me. Not sure how interesting it would be if you didn’t spend time in that very specific niche, though.
Memoir and other odds and ends
The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay & Disaster, by Sarah Krasnostein
I’ve been wanting to read this book for ages, as every review I’ve read raves about it. It is the story of Sandra Pankhurst, who runs a trauma cleaning business. But that bald statement doesn’t cover the ebulliance of this book which shifts from depicting the disgusting consequences of years of hoarding, and how to navigate the cleaning when the hoarder is still in residence to the extraordinary life of Sandra herself, a trans woman who was adopted, as a replacement for a dead child, but then basically rejected when her parents had another two children, forced to live in the backyard and scrounge for food. Hers has been an incredible life, and Krasnostein illustrates the elegance of Sandra Pankhurst, but at the same time her ruthlessness at maintaining the life she has now.
A summary is impossible to write, but I loved this book, and wish I had read it sooner.
Don’t be Too Polite, Girls: A memoir, by Wendy McCarthy
I was lucky enough to see Wendy McCarthy interviewed about her life and this book this year, which made me buy it. McCarthy has been a feminist fixture of Australian public life for decades, most recently being a key part of Allegra Spender’s election win in Wentworth in the Federal Election. While her first paid job was as a teacher, she has campaigned for abortion law reform since the 70s, was a co-founder of the Womens Electory Lobby and has an unclassifiable career combining many forms of paid and unpaid work including running the AUstralian Bicentnial Austhority and being Deputy Chair of the ABC. A wonderful memoir from an inspirational woman, with much of the inspiration coming from how much fun she has clearly had along the way.
Caught in the Act: A memoir by Courtney Act
After watching Courtney Act (Australia’s favourite Drag Queen, alter ego of Shane Jenek) and doing some interviewing on the ABC, I realised she is very thoughtful on quite a few topics, particularly gender. While some of the stories of reality TV (Drag Race in particular) left me a bit bored, the way in which Courtney has used her platform to help humanise the LGBTQI+ community is quite amazing and impressive; I hadn’t realised the wide variety of what she had done in many different forms of public advocacy – both just being herself, and also in very effective advocacy .
Token Fiction
And my token fiction. This year I couldn’t decide on one favourite, so self-indulgently I have three. All of which I really enjoyed, once I took a deep breath and dived in.
Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
This is unclassifiable, but probably closest to fantasy, but with a side order of philosophy and mythology. I found myself unable to put it down after the first half, so I have been recommending it to people right left and centre. My friend Naomi recommended it to me during one of our periodic book zooms this year.
Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel
This was written a few years ago (pre Covid) but presciently is about the aftermath of a sudden pandemic that kills 99% of the population. But the pandemic is mostly in the background, as a mechanism to make the book happen. It is the story of how people live after society has collapsed, told through a variety of threads, around a travelling theatrical group. Again, this was a book I found hard to put down, even though some of the pandemic parts were quite tragic.
Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr
I had previously read All the Light we cannot See, also by Doerr, and my friend Fiona who had recommended it to me, told me about this new, quite different, but equally rivetting book This one is a set of parallel stories all told in different historical periods, from the Ottoman Empire to the near future centred around some related characters including (almost a character on its own), a single book. Again, very hard to describe, but a delight to read, even with tragedy imbued in a few of the parallel stories. And quite amazing how the whole thing comes together by the end of the book.