![\"Montage](\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/54238320370_51f8cb5be6_z.jpg\")
<\/a>Micro reviews on Twitter – click for a larger image on Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n
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>, 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.<\/p>\n Micro reviews on Twitter & BlueSky – click for a larger image on Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n While I very much liked Dan Davies’ expos\u00e9 if the ills of modern organisations in The Unaccountability Machine<\/em>, I was less enamoured of The Ordinal<\/em> Society<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Eye of the Master<\/em>, 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<\/em> and Frezzoz’s More and More and More<\/em> offered richer rewards for the effort of reading, but neither really set my mind buzzing with new insights.<\/p>\n I had a better time with Torsten Bell’s Great Britain<\/em> and Sam Freedman’s\u00a0Failed State<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n By far the best non-fiction title I read this year was\u00a0How Life Works<\/em> by the perennially productive and polymathic Philip Ball. This one did<\/em> set my mind buzzing. Ball has picked his way though the baffling complexity of molecular biology \u2013 a world in which I immersed myself professionally for several decades \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> and struggled all the way through both The Good Soldier<\/em> and\u00a0Flowers for Algernon<\/em>. These titles have delighted other readers but they left me coldly alienated.<\/p>\n I had more fun with spooks and detectives in the first of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses<\/em> series and my old friend Raymond Chandler’s The High Window. <\/em><\/p>\n My two favourite novels of the year were Norman Maclean’s\u00a0A River Runs Through It<\/em>, which I discovered via a wonderful New Yorker article<\/a> by Kathryn Schulz, and Samantha Harvey’s Orbit<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n For round-ups of books read in previous years, please follow this link<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With a handful of notable exceptions, my book reading in the past year has not been an altogether happy experience. I worked my way through 18 titles in all, work being the operative verb in many cases. That low tally … Continue reading ![\"Montage](\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/54237909281_0dc1c81831_z.jpg\")
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