This is my annual review of the books I’ve read this year. Almost every non fiction book I read makes this list (except for very technical ones) but I generally only pick one or two fiction highlights. I really enjoying looking back on a year’s reading, as I’ve often forgotten what particular issues or topics were exercising my mind and it’s fascinating to see what themes emerge. Hope you all find something of interest in this collection.
Public policy and economics
Michael Mann is a climate scientist, whose original publication of the famous hockey stick graph of temperatures for the last 200 years brought the speed and extent of global heating to the public eye. I’ve previously read Mann’s campaigning books (his experience of being a climate scientist in the public eye has given him a deep understanding of the tricks climate deniers play in the public discourse). This book is more scentific, a round up of all the evidence of what is likely to happen (and has happened in the past) with temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations on Spaceship earth. Reading it makes you realise just how much research (from some quite amazing sources) goes into the understanding we now have of how the climate works, and what might happen as we pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. His main point, which is important, is that there is a lot we can do now to slow and even reverse climate heating, and it is worth doing!
A book that is at a fun intersection of my interests in feminism and urbanism. I came across this book from one of my current favourite podcasts – the War on Cars – and it makes you realise how many ways the design of a city is based around the lives of the classic male white collar worker. It’s probably more at the feminist end of things than the urban design end of things, with a lot of discussion of feminist issues written by an urban planner. I particularly enjoyed the discussion about how the design of public spaces has a default human being in mind . But that default human being isn’t generally looking after children or needing to sit down occasionally, or wants to sit and chat without having to pay to do so. And in particular, a few classic ways to enjoy the city – the flaneur (ese) who just wants to stroll about people watching, is generally a privileged person, rather than someone – a Black person, or a working class looking woman – who might be challenged as to their right to be there.
One of the things that annoys me about my local council area is that while there a lot of little pocket playgrounds suitable for the under 5s, there aren’t many spaces for teenagers. And this book reminded me that even the stereotypical place for a teenager – the skateboard ramp or the basketball court – is generally designed for a boy.
Whenever Michael Lewis publishes a new book, I will buy it, he is one of my favourite writers about his niche – financial disasters involving maths and models.
Lewis was already following Sam Bankman-Fried before everything went pearshaped, which meant he had amazing access to all the insiders involved. That’s both a strength and a weakness of this book. A strength because there’s even more detail about the strange personal lives of all the people involved in the insane world of FTX and crypto than Lewis usually manages. Lewis’ strength in all of his books is that observational detail about what the people he writes about that makes them come alive. My favourite vignette in this book is the moment when Sam Bankman-Fried is multi tasking with a video game at the same time as agreeing to sponsor the Met Gala in a zoom conversation with Anna Wintour.
But Lewis’s access is also a weakness as Lewis doesn’t have quite his usual distance to enable him to really nail the broad sweep of what happened. I found myself at the end still wondering what really happened to the money. And maybe it is impossible to know where all the money was frittered – or whether it actually existed in the first place. As always with Michael Lewis, a fun read into a slice of the world that is impossible to imagine otherwise.
Bruce Schneier is a computer security expert, whose security mindset seems to increase in scope every time he writes a new book. His way of thinking about the world and the tradeoffs involved in security are a fascinating different way of looking at aspects of the world like tax evasion and political rules. In his definition, a hack is “an activity allowed by the system that subverts the goal or intent of the system
As Schneier points out, hacking is what happens when people (particularly wealthy people) don’t accept that the rules apply to them. Or, at least, they believe that their own self- interest takes precedence. The result is that they hack systems all the time. And it is important that we understand that, and think about it with a security mindset that recognises the possibility when designing a system, or changes to a system. In my own field, understanding that any loopholes in incentives are bound to be subverted by someone if they are worth enough is important, and that therefore thinking about how that subversion might happen before it happens, and ways of patching up the system if someone comes up with something unforeseen is important.
Alan Kohler is one of my favourite economic commentators; both in his nightly spot on the ABC news but also his various spots in the press, he has the knack of cutting through the jargon and the politics and not only showing you how things work, but also making it interesting. This Quarterly essay talks about the mess that is housing policy in this country, and the many ways in which both sides of politics (but mostly the liberals) contributed to the lack of affordable housing and enough housing in Australia. Sadly, the main point (which I’ve seen before) was that given the majority of people still own homes, there is no political will for housing prices to fall or even stabilise, to enable the minority who don’t own homes to find affordable shelter.
I’ve seen Alison Pennington speak – she is a leftwing economist and very impressive. This book is her impassioned plea to her own generation (she is a millenial) to start organising, particularly union organising, but in general get more active politically, and in groups, to push back against the many ways in which Australian society is set up to make it much harder for today’s young people to put togehter a life without precarity. She starts with anecdotes and data to demonstrate how much more precarious the average person’s start in employment is now than it was 30 or 60 years ago. ANd then she talks about how collective solutions (such as unions) a much more effective than individuals trying to fix their own situation.
Indigenous Issues
I bought this book a couple of weeks before the Voice Referendum. David Marr discovered that one of his direct ancestors was part of the Native Police in Queensland, which rounded up and killed aboriginal people with impunity in the second half of the 19th century. The 442 officers and 927 troopers of the Queensland Native Police are now considered responsible for the deaths of 41,040 Indigenous people in that colony between 1859 and 1897, and approximately 3,500 in the decade before Queensland became a separate colony. This discovery, together with his realisation that they massacred far more people than even he (a journalist who had been covering indigenous issues his whole career) realised, made him write a book about it. I bought this after having read an excerpt, and then listening to David Marr talk about it. But in the end, the book was too dense for me. Surprisingly for such a good journalist and writer as David Marr there is too much research on every page. I found that the summary excerpts that made me buy the book were just about enough. I prefer Henry Reynolds‘ many books on this topic.
Megan Davis is Professor of Constitutional Law at UNSW and a former chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. And she was was instrumental in assisting the development of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, designing the deliberative dialogues. This essay is the story of why the Uluru Statement from the Heart asks for a voice to Parliament, and why it is an important reform to have locekd into the constitution, rather than a body that could be abolished if the political climate changes (which has been the fate of many aboriginal and torres strait islander representative groups in times gone by in Australia).
Travel Adjacent
I always love to read books related to where I am when I travel – this year I travelled to France and Spain and Scotland, but couldn’t find a book I wanted to read on Scotland.
Robert Louis Stevenson spend a month walking in rural France with a donkey, in 1878. His route is now a well worn walking path, and I was lucky enough to follow in his footsteps in June this year.
This book is often described as the first travel memoir. I don’t agree, I think Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters from Scandinavia were well ahead. But Stevenson’s book is much more influential. Robert Louis Stevenson was having romantic problems, so set out for the Cevennes, to walk for a month, with the aim of writing a book about it. Probably to make his book more interesting, he travels with a donkey, which carries his luggage (which includes an egg whisk, a pistol, and a bottle of Whiskey). While this is not as well known as his adventure books (Kidnapped, Treasure Island, etc) it is the reason for one of the most famous hikes in France (the Stevenson Trail) and a very well known quote:
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
The book Footsteps (below) makes it clear how much of this book was written afterwards rather than as Stevenson was walking. Much of the second half is a history of the religious wars of this part of France, which is not featured in his contemporaneous diary. Stevenson
Holmes is a biographer, and this book is a supplement to a number of biographies – it is his story of the process – travelling in the footsteps of those he writes biographies about. In this case, Robert Louis Stevenson, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and Felix Nadar (one of the first French photographers). I bought it for the Stevenson chapter, which was fascinating, as this is Holmes’ first journey in someone’s footsteps, in the sixties, well before he became a biographer, and it is just about the trip with the donkey and the resulting book. Holmes forensically dissects what Stevenson said in his diaries, and then contrasts it with what actually made it to the final book about the Cevennes.
I also enjoyed the Mary Wollstonecraft chapter (which is about her time in France during the French revolution) as Mary Wollstonecraft is a hero of mine. It did annoy me a bit, as Holmes feels he needs to point out how much of the story of Wollstonecraft’s marriage is based on her version of the story, rather than his, and he is not as enamoured of her feminist writing as I am. But the detail of that time of her life is fascinating as well as tragic, and I loved to understand it a bit better. The Shelley chapter was way too much on Percy Shelley’s side in that marraige for me – Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft) is not written very sympathetically, and I felt Holmes should have tried harder to be fair to her, given Percy Shelley had written most of the history (in contrast with Mary Shelley’s mother).
Thorpe is an english writer who lived in a tiny village in the Cevennes (in Provence in France) and then reluctantly in Nimes when his children had to go to high school. The book is written very much in the tradition of many a book by an englishman in France, but it feels as if he is more a genuine part of the community than is often the case. And Thorpe is a very evocative writer as well, so I did enjoy this. I bought it for the Cevennes as a recommendation from one of my fellow walkers, but found the Nimes part excellent as well, as we spent a bit of time there and I loved the city.
The other walk I did this year was the Tour de Mont Blanc. So I also I read this history of mountaineering in the area, and how gradually a bunch of people, sometimes with a lot more money than sense managed to successfully get to the top of Mont Blanc (the tallest mountain in Europe) and many more even harder mountains nearby. The fascinating thing for me was how much this history was dominated by the British – reading the contemperaneous accounts they had the same stereotype then as American tourists often do today – fairly intolerant of local customs, and throwing their money around because they were lucky enough to come from a rich country and could afford to buy up much of the local economy. Their base was Chamonix, which is still a local centre of mountaineering, which these days includes a lot of hiking, trail running, mountain biking, etc, as well as the traditional mountaineering. This book was a great comprehensive history, which filled in a lot of the gaps from the various plaques dotted around the mountainside.
The area is extraordinarily beautiful, and while I have no desire to risk my life “conquering” it, the interest of those early explorers has helped to develop the tourist infrastructure which doesn’t do too badly balancing the need to preserve the beauty but make it accessible.
Professional
Erica Thompson is a physicist and climate scientist by background. She has taken her background of trying to understand climate atmospheric models (with massively different outputs) for her own research into a broad and rigorous understanding of models – what they can do, what they can’t do, and how to use them most effectively. The title “Escape from Model Land” – is a guide to the philosophy underpinning this book.
I loved this book, so much so that I reviewed it for the blog when I first read it here.
Thompson concludes with five principles for responsible modelling, which should be up on the wall in any modelling team:
- Define the purpose – What kinds of questions can this model answer? What kinds of questions can it not answer?
- Don’t say “I don’t know” – the model generally has a point to it, even it is not a perfect representation of reality. if we give up on the prospect of perfect knowledge, what can this model show us about the situation? Does it help us understand tradeoffs between decisions?
- Make value judgements – All models require value judgements. If you can’t find any in your model, look harder, or find someone else to look, who might be affected by the outcome. For example, a model that only looks at economic outcomes of a decision is implicitly not valuing non economic outcomes (such as time that is not paid for by someone).
- Write about the real world – the model builder needs to think about how to translate the outcomes into the real world, not just stay in model land.
- Use many models – this is the principle I found hardest – I instinctively look for the “right” model. But it really does depend on the purpose the model is built for. In particular, using more than one model makes it easier to expose the implicit value judgements that have gone into the building of each one.
The one sentence from the book that sums up the thesis is this one:
Although all models are wrong, many are useful…. The future is unknowable, but it is not ungraspable, and the models that we create to manage the uncertainty of the future can play a big role in helping to construct that future.
I first came across Ros Atkins and his explainers on the BBC during the Australian black summer of 2019, when his explanation of just what was happening and why the whole country was angry was by far the best of everything I saw (and I was devouring the news at that point). This book is his distillation of a lifetime of explaining things on the BBC, often from a standing start of knowing very little about whatever subject it is. He is superb at the distillation of the key points and the explanation. Reading this book makes you realise just how much work and craft goes into each 5-10 minute explanation. While I find it hard to imagine putting that much effort into a single explanation, even adopting a surface skim of the advice in this book will make anyone a better communicator.
History and other odds and ends
Slavery is a fascinating and horrible part of the history of the world. This animated map shows the documented history of the Atlantic trade; but this book shows just how much of the economic history of the world is bound up in slavery. Walvin started by looking at single caribbean islands, as a historian, and this book goes from there, and then zooms out to look at the whole world. To give just one small example (which is how I started going down this particular rabbithole of history enough to read a whole book about it), Lloyds estimates that “Slavery-related business overall accounted for between one-third and 40 per cent of premium income of Lloyds of London in the second half of the 18th century. The insurance of the slave-voyages themselves accounted for an estimated 5-10% of total marine insurance premia at Lloyds. Of more financial importance to the insurance business were the ships sailing directly from Britain to the Caribbean and back, accounting for some 30% of total marine insurance premia paid.”
Once you’ve read this book, you’ll never look at sugar in quite the same way again.
I do like a book about the broad sweep of history. And the British Empire is pretty broad. This is probably of more interest to a British person, who probably doesn’t think much day to day about how Britain came to be as it is. I like to think that those of us who live in former colonies have a better understanding than that, but of course we understand our own nation the best. This book is written largely from an Indian perspective, which is probably the right way to think about which former colony has had the most influence, and so I learned a lot about the back and forth and just how much of the riches of Great Britain came from exploitation of the riches of British colonies, particuarly India. The author tries but fails to put a value on all of that value extraction, but it is very clear who came out best from the various exchanges around the world.
A great book to help understand modern Britain, and also much about former British colonies.
One of my favourite books of this year. Darryl Jones is an urban ecologist, and this is a memoir of many of his experiences of helping humans and birds live better together, as well as how he figured out the lives of birds in urban areas. There are many great stories in here. My particular favourite,as I gradually watch the brush turkeys take over my local streets, is the story of how brush turkeys live in wilder areas, and how they have adapted to conquering suburbia in great numbers, despite it being much harder to raise individual chicks. Other notable birds are the magpie – even smarter than I thought, and I thought they were pretty smart – one magpie demonstrably remembered a particular individual ecologist from a brief interaction five years earlier – and the rainbow lorikeets, who love bright lights at dusk.
Possibly a bit of a depressing book, but continues my interest in all things medical. This is the story of how we humans have gradually learned to understand cancer, and get better at treating it. Mukherjee is a cancer doctor, so has seen much of this first hand. There are some sad stories in here, but also some uplifting ones. The aspect I found most interesting though was just how much more effective prevention is in reducing cancer suffering. While I am very glad that doctors understand a lot more about how to treat cancer once it is diagnosed, the unsung heroes are the public health analysts who have figured out so many different things that can cause cancer, and campaigned for their reduction or removal from normal life. The tobacco story is the most well known but story of radium in the 20s (people used to put it on clock hands to make them visible in the dark) and other chemical cancer causing agents are stories that should be better known.
Public health isn’t as glamorous as cancer surgery, but it generally saves more lives.
Fiction
My fiction highlights for the year share a few of these themes – colonisation history and environmentalism in beautiful places.
This is a great companion piece to Empireland – a colonisation history that I also read this year. It is an alternative history of the Industrial Revolution, if it was powered by translators from around the world (rather than coal and other natural resources). And it is told through the eyes of prodigies from around the British Empire who are trained up as translator keys to that power of the Empire.
So much of the theoretical objections to colonisation I had read came to life through this book, understanding the contradictions inherent in the colonial experience through the eyes of those at the heart of it. And a bonus, the authors love of languages shines through the pages, so if you’ve ever had an even passing interest in linguistics, or translation then you’ll love this book from that perspective as well.
Birnam Wood is the story of some environmental revolutionaries and their tussle with a billionaire American prepper in New Zealand. Gripping, terrifying, and alarming, it is set in the rural South Island of New Zealand, the kind of place that probably features as a backdrop to Lord of the RIngs. A great combination of thriller and political commentary