Geography – let alone geopolitics – isn’t one of my strong points. I didn’t even take GCSE geography. Yet Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography had me completely enthralled. Marshall explained how geography influenced the development of nations and the political relationships between countries. His explanations were based on ten maps – maps which were enlightening in themselves to me. This sounds like it should have been dry and dull, but it was a real page-turner, full of insights and new angles on topics which had me fully engaged throughout. I will look at the world differently and with a much improved understanding as a result of reading this book.
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Ian McEwan’s “masterpiece” – The Child in Time – reflected on the loss a child and the strange flexibility of time. Despite its reputation, this was my least favourite of the McEwan novels I’ve read to date, which shows how little I know. There were sections which were outstandingly brilliant – McEwan’s writing is always absolutely incredible. But the whole thing seemed a bit less than the sum of its parts to me – I found the flashbacks and messing about with time more frustrating than meaningful. I got the intent of reflecting the way time seems to work for all of us, but, as a casual reader, I just found it frustrating.
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How Not to be a Boy was Robert Webb’s autobiography, which had a particular focus on gender roles. Robert Webb came across as remarkably candid, and parts of this book were really quite moving. I was a little struck by the extent to which some of the social commentary seemed to be extrapolating generalisations from a single experience – but that might be a bit unfairly critical given that this is an autobiography. I don’t think it helped that I read this fairly shortly after Grayson Perry’s The Descent of Man which seemed to cover similar ground in a similar way, but more successfully and concisely.
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Stephen Talty’s The Secret Agent was a short biography of Erik Erickson, the Swedish oil salesman and later Second World War spy. The book concentrated on Erickson’s contribution to the US war effort, spying on – and thereby directing bombs towards – Germany’s synthetic oil plants. I wasn’t previously aware of Erickson’s remarkable story and valiant war effort. I found this book a bit unsatisfying, though: it’s brevity meant that it was hard to fully understand Erickson’s motivations, and – while it was touched on briefly – it would have been interesting to get more insight into the later psychological impact of having profited from the Nazi regime early on.
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Nathan Filer’s novel The Shock of the Fall gave a first person narrative of mental illness. I struggled a bit with the first quarter or so of the book, because it seemed a bit heavy handed: for example, there are only so many times ‘unreliable narrator’ can be underlined, and only so much foreshadowing a reader can stand. As the book progressed, however, the authenticity of the narrative voice became stronger, and I found myself fully immersed and engaged in the plot. The first person description of the experience of mental illness was brilliant.
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I think I might have read The 39 Steps some years ago, and I’ve certainly seen a stage production, but I nonetheless picked up the first of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels this month. It was a short, punchy, thicky-plotted spy thriller, with plenty of implausibly resolved cliff-hangers to keep the pages turning. This series is often criticised on the basis that Hannay has no personality, but I rather enjoyed his 1915 turns of phrase and his dry humour. If nothing else, this book makes me want to bring back phrases like “the deuce of a mess”.
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“Most of what I know about myself, I have learned from playing Schumann… if Schumann had not existed, I would be less than whole.” So said Jonathan Bliss in his love letter to Schumann, A Pianist Under the Influence. His passion for the composer’s works was infectious, even for me – someone who couldn’t recognise a Schumann piece without his name at the top. A lot of the technical talk was beyond me, but Bliss’s enthusiasm for his subject shone through, and made this a very enjoyable read.
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The Descent of Man was Grayson Perry’s relatively light book on the heavy topic of gender, and masculinity in particular. I haven’t read a huge amount in this area beyond the typical weekend newspaper magazine features, and so I found it quite eye-opening (and, indeed, moving) in parts. I found Perry’s reflections on masculinity more interesting than his suggestions on what future masculinity should look like. If nothing else, I’ll never look at the the intricate patterns of camouflage clothing in quite the same way again.
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The Laws of Medicine was Siddhartha Mukherjee’s brief overview of his three personal “laws” of medicine. I particularly enjoyed the first section, where Mukherjee discussed probability in medicine, and gave perhaps the best jargon free explanation I’ve ever read of the importance of pre-test probability, sensitivity and specificity in medical tests.
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What do unpasteurised milk, 15 minute recipes and doctors working extended hours have in common? According to Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slowness, they’re all great examples of the ‘slow’ philosophy. Unfortunately, I never quite understood what the common thread was between all the disparate things Honoré described as ‘slow’. I had the impression that it was a vaguely anti-corporate notion. It evidently has nothing to do with speed – Honoré says as much, and spends many pages praising things which are unusually fast for being ‘slow’ (like 15 minute recipes, and exercise regimes one can do in 15 minutes in office wear). Essentially, I didn’t enjoy this book and I didn’t find its arguments convincing.
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Selfie by Will Storr turned out to be my favourite non-fiction book of 2017 to date. I always love Storr’s writing: he’s remarkably talented and woefully underappreciated for his ability to bring clarity to complex socio-scientific fields. I go out of my way to read his journalism because, whatever the topic, his byline guarantees new insights and connections. This book was no exception. Storr wove autobiography, anthropology, history, religion, sociology, psychology, psychiatry and public health into a compelling narrative of humanity’s increasing focus on the self. And he did it with a good dose of dry wit that brought the whole thing alive. The ground covered has big overlaps with Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus, but the execution was far better.
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Post Truth by Evan Davis never quite lived up to the promise of its subtitle. I was attracted by the idea that this book might have, as the subtitle suggested, made an argument that the world has reached ‘peak bullshit’ (and hence predicted a decline). That would have been a bold prognostication in the current political climate, but it was one that Davis didn’t really attempt to make. The book was a lot more pedestrian for that. It merely gave an overview of some of the things that drive people to lie, and expressed frustration at those who lie unnecessarily. It was concise and illustrated with interesting examples, but didn’t really say very much that was new, and came across as a bit patronising in parts.
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Luke Kennard’s novel The Transition was set in the near future, and followed a couple in a sort of life-education programme called “The Transition”. The idea of the programme was that members of an older generation take in a couple from a younger generation and teach them how to live in the modern world… though, of course, this being a dystopian novel, it wasn’t quite so straightforward. Kennard’s writing was pretty solid, and the plot moved forward well through the first two-thirds of the book. The ending, though, was strange. The whole book built to a confrontation that just fizzled away. Perhaps that’s a metaphor for something, but it’s also deeply unsatisfying.
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Going Nowhere, by The Spectator‘s Sam Leith, was a very short autobiography structured around six video games he’s been obsessed with at various points in his life. It was far better than than the premise promised. I’ve never played any of the games, and have only vaguely heard of a couple, but that didn’t matter. Leith deftly combined descriptions of gameplay with personal reflection on life’s choices and challenges, the move from relatively “normal” beginnings to the “elite” via an all-paid Eton scholarship, and the philosophical insights of great poets. There was a great deal more Latin than you’d expect in thirty-odd pages on video games, yet it skillfully avoided pretension. I really enjoyed this short book.
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Mark Earnest Pothier’s The First Light of Evening was a sixteen page tale in which a retired divorcee went on his first date after his wife left him. This short story has won awards and much critical acclaim, so the fact that I found it a bit “meh” may say more about me than the book. I found it a reasonably pleasant read, but neither particularly insightful nor particularly absorbing, and full of grammatical errors (or maybe ‘artistic grammatical choices’, who knows?) which distracted from the meaning of the text.
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Guns was Stephen King’s short essay on US gun violence. I found it difficult to wrap my mind around the logic of King’s position—which I’d inadequately summarise as ‘ban the worst guns, protect everyone’s right to have less-bad guns’. The essay was strong on the former, but weak on explaining the rationale for the latter (beyond pragmatism). King hung his position on autobiography, describing his response to a shooter who cited one of King’s fictional works as part motivation, part inspiration for his crime. This was interesting enough, but I think would have benefited from a bit more reflection on how his ability to act was influenced by his uniquely powerful position in publishing.
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The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance was a short autobiographical essay by Harris Sockel about teaching in the “Teach for America” programme. This scheme, much copied around the world, entices young graduates to teach in schools for a couple of years after graduation. Sockel attempted to illustrate the programme’s flaws from the points of view of the teachers, the pupils and the schools, with some success. He also attempted to provide some insight into US public schools more broadly. I was left wondering a little bit about how generalisable Sockel’s experiences were, particularly given his wealthy background which was frequently contrasted with that of the ‘regular’ teachers and his pupils, and—possibly more because of the format than the author—felt that this book left me with more questions than answers.
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In the short book The Snowden Operation, The Econonmist‘s Edward Lucas presented a short case against Edward Snowden’s leak of classified intelligence material. He also made a case for the leaks being heavily influenced by Russian intelligence services. As someone who has previously been fairly sympathetic to Snowden’s claimed motives, I found this alternative take revealing. Lucas made some great points about the disproportionate harm caused by Snowden’s actions, especially in contrast to the minimum actions he could have taken to achieve the same ends. This book also changed my mind a bit about the nature of the public debate around the intelligence services (though I don’t totally buy Lucas’s “regulate the use rather than the development of tools” approach).
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I really enjoyed Tim Harford’s latest book, Adapt. Harford gave lots of examples of successes resulting from review and adaptation, and made a good case for embracing, as opposed to rejecting, failure. He made the often overlooked and very important case for allowing variation in systems, and not expecting constant equality: something that health systems in particular are not great at understanding.
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I didn’t get on well with McEwan’s The Innocent. It seemed to be a combination of spy thriller, coming-of-age novel, absurdity-of-war satire, and a reflection on cultural politics. The prose was sublime, almost poetic, as McEwan’s writing always is – but it didn’t quite hang together for me. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood.
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A friend at work recommended Helen Russell’s The Year of Living Danishly after I recently visited Copenhagen. This book was the autobiographical tale of a well-off writer and her husband moving from London to rural Denmark, after the latter was offered a job at Lego headquarters. The stories of their experiences were mixed in with some light journalistic investigation as to why Danish people are so often reported to be among the happiest in the world. Russell’s writing was engaging but light, which made this book fun, but maybe less insightful than it could have been. Nonetheless, it was a pleasant, easy read.
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Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending has recently been turned into a film, which – guess what? – I haven’t seen. I found it to be a beautifully written book, which explored ageing and the flaws in memory. So many passages of this book were quotable that it read like poetry. I think that if the ‘revelations’ at the end of the book had been a little more mundane, then the wider observations about the reliability of memory and the incompleteness of the picture anyone holds in mind at any given time would have hit harder. But who am I to argue with a Booker winner?
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Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden was a deeply creepy book about four children hiding their mother’s corpse to avoid being taken into foster care, and then attempting to live independently. The plot was grotesque, but less so than the twisted, psychologically charged atmosphere McEwan built. I understand that this has also been turned into a film that I haven’t seen… Whatever. I found it brilliantly disturbing.
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Nick Clegg’s Politics was enjoyable mostly for his compelling account (and defence) of his time as Deputy Prime Minister. It provided real insight into what went on ‘behind the scenes’ in coalition government, and Clegg was refreshingly open about the tactical errors he made along the way. He also made a strong and coherent case for the role of liberalism in the world at large.
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The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s famed book (now a film that I haven’t seen) gave a surprisingly understandable account of the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis. Lewis gave the first explanation of ‘short selling’ that I’ve been able to understand and retain for longer than about five minutes. I was slightly disappointed that Lewis didn’t delve more into the underlying psychology of the problem: his repeatedly expressed view that the people involved acted immorally clouds the more interesting question of what drove the immorality. But I enjoyed this nonetheless.
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Yuval Noah Harari’s highly acclaimed Homo Deus didn’t do much for me. It had very well-written prose, with an occasionally astonishing clarity and precision of expression, but the central thesis seemed confused to me. One of Harari’s central theses is that humans (and all animals) are biological algorithms, responding in predictable ways to stimuli. He also spends a lot of the book talking about ethics and morality, particularly around treatment of animals. But how can something be judged ‘immoral’ if the actor is simply following an algorithm?
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Exploring broadly similar themes, I enjoyed Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen’s Human Universe far more than Harari’s book. Cox did a good job of giving enough of the detail of the physics to be interesting, without becoming overwhelming and uninterpretable. In fact, even in the most technical parts, it remained compelling and engaging. This celebratory book left me feeling inspired and full of wonder.
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Edit (on day of publication): I see that I’ve included The Big Short two months in a row… luckily saying much the same both times. I’m not going to correct it, because I’m not bothered enough to re-edit the header image…!

The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz was a series of case histories collected by a psychoanalyst, with an interwoven theme of coping with loss. While I’ve doubts about the psychoanalytical methods described (and some of the connections between thoughts and experiences were outlandishly fanciful), I was drawn in to reflecting on the conclusions and perspectives Grosz presented. I enjoyed this collection despite myself.
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The same can’t be said for The Road to Character, David Brooks’s best-selling work which argued that the modern world prizes “CV virtues” (essentially listable achievements) above “eulogy virtues” (those people are remembered for). The logical flaw was that Brooks illustrated the apparent importance of “eulogy virtues” by presenting mini-biographies of historical figures remembered for “CV virtues”, demonstrating that CV virtues have, contrary to his central assertion, long been prized. Coupled with a very confused position on religion and a tediously loquacious writing style, this was a slog to get through.
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The Big Short by Michael Lewis is now a major motion picture that I haven’t seen – I’ve mentioned before that I’m rubbish on films. I liked the insight this book gave into the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis, which was rendered understandable even to a fellow like me, with no knowledge of markets or financial instruments. However, I was disappointed that Lewis didn’t delve more into the underlying psychology of the problem. Lewis’s repeatedly expressed view that the people involved acted immorally clouded the more interesting question of what drove the immorality. But that’s a slightly unfair criticism, as I don’t think he ever intended to answer that question, and the book is great nonetheless.
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Sarah Hall’s The Beautiful Indifference was a collection of short stories featuring female protagonists, each of whom had an initially hidden ‘dark side’. I rarely enjoy short stories, and these were no exception. I don’t know why I keep buying short story collections. But the most irritating thing about this collection – and I write this in full acceptance of how pretentious it sounds – was Hall’s punctuation choices, and most particularly of all, the decision not to correctly punctuate direct speech. Combined with her sparing use of any punctuation beyond full stops and commas, the text became leaden and borderline uninterpretable. Rather than finding myself transported by the narrative, I found myself frustrated by having to figure out the literary puzzle of words scattered on a page.
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Booker Prize winner The Sellout, by Paul Beatty, opened with a black man brought before the Supreme Court accused of reinstating slavery. Flashbacks told of the narrator’s strange childhood as a subject of his father’s socio-racial experiments, and connected these to the narrator’s later work to reintroduce racial segregation. Despite the subject matter, this was a funny book. Beatty skewered racial stereotypes and political correctness, but did so in a way that made me reflect and realise how little I understand of the world, and how much my own prejudices affect my thinking. I found the experience of reading this a little exhausting: Beatty rarely paused for breath, and I found myself getting lost in some of the sub-sub-plots. But nevertheless, this was a memorable read.
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In Susan Hill’s celebrated The Woman in Black, a young solicitor travelled out to a small English town to set in order the affairs of a recently deceased elderly lady who lived in an old house on a causeway, regularly cut off by the tide. Some spooky stuff happens. I’m rarely gripped by horror novels, and this was no exception. The tale was entertaining enough, but this wasn’t really a page-turner. This seemed to me to be a ‘ghost story’ in the classical sense: designed to scare, without much more to say. Since I rarely find myself involved enough by tales of ghoulish things to become scared, there wasn’t really a lot for me in this book, save for the enjoyably tight, precise style of writing.
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Jane Gardham’s The Man in the Wooden Hat was the sequel to Old Filth, which I read last year. Old Filth was a fictional biography of Sir Edward Feathers. The Man in the Wooden Hat was the story of Feathers’s marriage, told largely from the point of view of his wife. It had much the same overarching theme, exploring the tensions and excitement that lie behind a “bland” exterior of socially acceptable relationship in the upper classes in the mid-1900s. I have to admit that I didn’t find this quite as engaging as the first volume, possibly because the story behind relationships is a much more commonly visited literary theme than the story behind a professional exterior. But this was still suffused with Gardham’s gentle humour and fantastic writing, so it was still an enjoyable read.
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Tim Shipman’s mammoth book about last year’s EU referendum, All Out War, was a completely extraordinary book: the best I’ve read on any modern political event. It was balanced, thoroughly researched, funny, thrilling, and gave deep insight into both sides of the referendum campaign, warts and all. I already knew that Shipman was a talented journalist before reading this book, but his ability to combine a lightness of touch with absolute accuracy of reporting, including pointing out where bits were single-sourced or where there were conflicting accounts, proved truly remarkable.
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The titular character of Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton spends the duration of the book in hospital recovering from an operation and subsequent complications. While she’s there, her somewhat estranged mother comes to visit. The two gossip and reminisce, and Lucy tries to unpick her complex relationships and feelings through her own memories of childhood. There were a number of outstanding, poignant passages, but the whole book didn’t quite hang right to me. The contrasts were a bit heavy handed at times (‘Cookie’, ‘Button’ and ‘Wizzle’ versus morally dubious shootings and AIDS). There was a lot of writing about writing, which I think was meant as some kind of allegory to psychology, but stuck me as unnecessarily self-indulgent in such a short novella. And while I think the reader is supposed to “fill in the gaps” in Lucy’s partially described life story, I found the lack of exposition meant that I didn’t really come to care about her.
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I was disappointed by Steven Pinker’s A Sense of Style. I was under the impression that it was a light and somewhat comedic on writing style. In fact, it was a rather heavy and detailed examination of grammar, diving far deeper than I was interested to venture into the philosophy of categorisation of parts of speech, sentence diagramming, and all sorts of things that go way beyond my level of interest. To my mind, the book would have benefited from more directly actionable advice, and less sniping at grammar sticklers before listing “rules” that the author themselves happens to be a stickler about.
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On the other hand, I was blown away by Julian Barnes’s novelised biography of Shostakovich, The Noise of Time. This tight, quiet and darkly humourous novel explored morality, art and power. It talked quite a lot about the use of irony to undermine power through art, which is something I’ve never really thought about before, and which I found fascinating. Basically, this thoughtful book was chock full of moral ambiguity, difficult personal choices, and imposed boundaries of professionalism. It was right up my street, and I loved it.
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As I write this, I’m struggling to think how best to describe Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice: I’m not sure it was really a novel, and it wasn’t really a collection of short stories. It was a very slim fictional book structured like a verbal reasoning multiple choice exam. It should have been utterly ridiculous and gimmicky, but was somehow completely brilliant. This book made me reflect on how much our own self-editing and the choices we make in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves alter our memories and feelings. It made me think about how opinions can be shifted, and stories can be transformed, by simple changes of single words. And I also gained insight into the recent history of Chile, from the population’s perspective. Goodness only knows how Megan McDowell pulled off a translation of a book with so few words, in which every single one is infused with so many layers of meaning.
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I read books aloud for the use of people with visual problems or other disabilities which prevent them from using printed books. I’ve been doing this for Calibre Audio Library for a few years. I don’t choose the books I record for Calibre; they are assigned to me, which makes the whole enterprise that little bit more fun. This month, I’ve just finished off my recording of Sally Gardner’s The Door That Led to Where, a novel aimed at the teenage or maybe young adult market. It takes quite a novel to stand up to the repeated reading and re-reading that narrating an audiobook requires, and this book certainly meets that standard. This was a fairly complex tale that juxtaposed authentic descriptions of deprived teenage life in 21st century London with those of young men in London in the 1830s. It was noticeable how dominated the book’s action was by male characters, but then most fiction aimed at this market tends to be quite heavily gendered. Nevertheless, this was definitely one of those books that reminded me what wonderful, well-written imaginative fiction there is around for young readers today.
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Conclave, by Robert Harris, was a political thriller set among the College of Cardinals as they elected a new Pope. A real page-turner with plenty of twists and turns, this novel also had lots of complex layers underlying the surface plot, and a good dose of moral ambiguity. I especially enjoyed the well-written dialogue, in particular the set piece speeches. I’ve no idea how true to life this description of events might be, but this felt like a real insight into the political machinations of the Catholic Church.
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Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan, was a charmingly woven tale of a 24-hour bookstore, the relationship between its owner and newest nighttime clerk, a mysterious secret society, typography, and – oddly enough – Google’s desire to digitise information. The ideas were so eclectic and the plot so fantastical that it really shouldn’t have worked; and yet its warmth and charm held it together perfectly. I’d have liked to see more of the ending played out rather than relegated to the brief unsatisfying epilogue, but testifies to how beguiling I found the characters and their contexts, many of which will live long in my memory.
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In Cockpit Confidential, commercial pilot Patrick Smith gave his personal take on modern commercial passenger aviation. The book was structured around common questions about flying and occasional longer essays on a variety of aviation topics, often with a historical bent. The questions are varied enough to keep the book interesting throughout (from logistics to customer service to the science of flight). I’m confident that those with a deep interest in the topic will find much to disagree with, but this was pitched perfectly for me as a general reader. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help but laugh at occasional appearances of a comical US bias (“Most people have never heard of Tenerife… “), but given that this was written for the American mass market, that was probably a little cruel.
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In The Memory Illusion, South Bank University’s Julia Shaw gave an accessible account of the neuroscience of memory, with a particular focus on false memories. The book had just the right pace to maintain interest, and just the right amount of detail. Unlike many other popsci writers, Shaw commendably pointed the limitations of her analogies and simplifications, shielding the casual reader from over-interpretation and false conclusions. Before reading this book, I thought I had a terrible memory. After reading it, I think everyone else does too!
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Marc Levinson’s acclaimed book The Box provided a fascinating insight into the history of the shipping container and how it transformed the world economy. I gained a new appreciation for the wider impact of logistics in general and transport logistics in particular, but felt that this book was a bit too long and detailed for my passing interest and, as a result, a little bit dull in parts. For example, I could have managed without the detailed expositions of the exact measurements of competing standard box sizes!
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In 1980, Frank Abignale published his reportedly autobiographical tome Catch Me If You Can… and 36 years later, I got round to reading it. Abignale’s exploits seemed utterly unbelievable: successfully impersonating a wide range of professionals (including a pilot, a doctor and a lawyer) for prolonged periods while cashing fake cheques. While his adventures happened a long time ago now, and it’s possibly unfair to judge with 21st-century eyes, the book seemed absent of anything that weighed in favour of its veracity. I felt like Abagnale was trying to con me. In addition, I felt there was far too little insight into Abagnale’s motivation: his oft-repeated line was that this was a fun challenge. But there are tangential references to people losing their jobs and livelihoods over his activities, which one might reasonably expect to at least give him pause. The degree to which this book is interesting and enjoyable seemed to hinge completely on its believability, and I didn’t buy a word of it.
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