With a handful of notable exceptions, my book reading in the past year has not been an altogether happy experience.
Micro reviews on Twitter – click for a larger image on Flickr
I worked my way through 18 titles in all, work being the operative verb in many cases. That low tally is about average for me, a cyclically unimpressive feat. My excuses are two-fold this year. First, the increasing fragmentation of my time because of changed circumstances; although I am semi-retired I’m finding it harder to carve out hours of quality time. Second, I have joined a rather nerdy science-policy book club, which means getting through tomes that are more academic and often therefore less readable.
Micro reviews on Twitter & BlueSky – click for a larger image on Flickr
While I very much liked Dan Davies’ exposé if the ills of modern organisations in The Unaccountability Machine, I was less enamoured of The Ordinal Society and The Eye of the Master, which explore different aspects of control and digitisation within our economies. My fellow book-clubbers enjoyed these latter two but I found they wandered too often into abstraction. I wanted something more concrete to get hold of. Runciman’s The Handover and Frezzoz’s More and More and More offered richer rewards for the effort of reading, but neither really set my mind buzzing with new insights.
I had a better time with Torsten Bell’s Great Britain and Sam Freedman’s Failed State, which I read not long after the change in government over the summer. Neither is exactly uplifting but their dissections of the UK’s economic and political problems were as sharp as I have come across. Grimly, it is difficult as yet to see how the Starmer administration will be able to make substantial headway towards the much needed solutions.
By far the best non-fiction title I read this year was How Life Works by the perennially productive and polymathic Philip Ball. This one did set my mind buzzing. Ball has picked his way though the baffling complexity of molecular biology – a world in which I immersed myself professionally for several decades – and come up with a daring synthesis that offers nothing less than a new way of seeing how a blundering mess of molecules can sustain the miracle that is organismal life. It is spectacularly good.
Unusually for me, nearly half the books I read this year were fiction. It’s a trend I hope to continue although here again I had a few misfires. I could not finish John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies and struggled all the way through both The Good Soldier and Flowers for Algernon. These titles have delighted other readers but they left me coldly alienated.
I had more fun with spooks and detectives in the first of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series and my old friend Raymond Chandler’s The High Window.
My two favourite novels of the year were Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, which I discovered via a wonderful New Yorker article by Kathryn Schulz, and Samantha Harvey’s Orbit. They are very different books but in both cases the quality of the writing and the acuity of the authors’ perceptions combined to deliver wholly original and heart-breaking views of the world.
For round-ups of books read in previous years, please follow this link.
I’m sorry to learn that you didn’t have a happy reading experience this year, Stephen. In contrast I had a splendid year and it was sometimes hard rot select the 10 best reads from the more than 60 I read (or listened to) – my choices are here – https://occamstypewriter.org/cromercrox/2024/12/27/my-top-reads-of-2024/
I share your opinion of Phil Ball’s book. The best read of an eclectic year for me. Happy new year!
Happy new year to you Henry! I had avoided reading your summary until now because I saw that you included Phil’s book in your top 10. I agree with your suggestion that it should be required reading for any aspiring biology student – perhaps displacing The Selfish Gene from that spot.
The Selfish Gene was deservedly influential back in our day, but matters have moved on. Aside from that, Phil’s book is much more subtle and, dare I say, more sensitively written than Dawkins’ book.