2024 Book Review

I was wary of this book initially. There’s a flourishing subgenre of books at the moment that can best be described as ‘non-experts speculate wildly on the AI doom and/or utopia that is coming based on what they’ve read in The Guardian’, and a brief glance at this book’s blurb did set off some of those alarms initially. Set against that however was the fact that Yuval Noah Harari is almost always a safe pair of hands.

It was well worth giving a chance. Not necessarily because of its insights into what is coming, but because the book is largely a historical account of how information networks have developed over human history, and the effects they have had on the development of civilisations and the relationship between government and governed. He has a way of painting broad historical trends in a way you've never considered them before, and that alone makes it a worthwhile read.

I read this in the Spring, and while it didn't leave a huge impression on me at the time, I've found myself thinking back on it quite a lot as the year progressed. It's one of those books that subtly affects how you look at some pervasive aspect of society.

Each chapter is one person's experience of some component of our housing system - social housing waiting lists, squalor, no-fault evictions, and the ever receding prospect of home ownership except by inheritance. There is a huge amount of stress, anxiety and unhappiness being quietly experienced by an increasing proportion of the populace, as housing becomes more unaffordable, more scarce, and less well-maintained, and the book very effectively shines a light on that.

I did find that the author has a tendency to attribute the runaway inflation of core housing costs to a vague human evil, and is coolly disinterested in the underlying structural and economic reasons for why these costs are rising so much. It's also hard to escape the sense that her ideal vision for UK housing is a huge expansion in social housing, rather than property ownership.

That being said, this book has been on my mind a lot since I read it, and likely will for some time to come.

This book tells the story of the IRA’s attempt, in 1984, to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet by planting a bomb in the Brighton Grand Hotel. Told from the perspective of both the bombers and the security services, it successfully weaves together the different strands into a gripping narrative as they gradually come together. Just the right amount of detail, and just the right breadth of focus, to give a sense of the scale of both the plot and the ensuing manhunt, while keeping the cast to a manageable number.

For me, a particular shock was learning that Plan A had been to attack the previous year, which would have meant blowing up the Imperial Hotel Blackpool instead, the site of the 1983 Conservative Party Conference. As this hotel is not only in my hometown, but is where I worked my first ever job for some years (and is where I am writing this review from right now), this was an unexpected personal connection to the story that oddly made the events feel much more real, and made the atrocity that did happen much easier to imagine.

There's a certain category of book that you like to tell yourself you are interested in and that you'll enjoy, but yet never really manage to actually enjoy in practice. Autobiographies, especially celebrity autobiographies, are the opposite of this. I rarely think to buy them and don't feel especially drawn to them, but whenever I do actually read them I find them oddly worthwhile.

Bob Mortimer is a British comedian and while I've enjoyed some of his stuff, I wasn't an especially huge fan beforehand, and didn't know much about him - the main draw here was that the audiobook was narrated by him. But what followed was well worth the time spent. While the story of his career and rise to fame is interesting, I was much more drawn to the telling of his early life, the death of his father, his struggles with loneliness and shyness, and his narrow and oddly circumstantial escape from a life of a dwindling social circle into success and fame. I think almost anyone could take something from this book.

I've always been fascinated with dreams and the process of dreaming, so in a way this book was never going to have a hard time making it to this list. I think anything that identifies links between chemical/physical processes in the brain and the ephemeral conscious experience of dreaming is impossible not to find fascinating.

There are plenty of such tidbits in this book, such as the biochemical mechanism by which memories of dreams are removed on waking to prevent them interfering with real, autobiographical memories, and the way dreams' tendency to follow fixed recurring patterns has its roots in clusters of neurons being stuck in self-reinforcing activation patterns. Even where the explanation isn't (yet) possible to give at that base level, the theories and explanation for things like lucid dreaming, and the way dreams change over a lifetime, are fascinating.

There's always a particular kind of satisfaction in stories that reinforce your sense that some difficult decision you'd previously made was the right one. I've never particularly regretted dropping out of medical school after just four months, as I did when I was 19, but if I did this book would be an excellent antidote.

This book is Adam Kay's account of what it is like to be a Junior Doctor. It's funny, engaging, occasionally moving - and so well written it never becomes a hard read, even when it's a 'hard read'.

It's also one of many books that offers a sometimes uncomfortable reminder that society only functions even remotely reliably because so many people are willing to work harder at jobs that are more unpleasant and (relatively) less well paid than many of us could really manage. I could never have done almost any of what Adam Kay describes in this book, no matter how much medical training I had, and it's extremely fortunate indeed that so many people are made of sterner stuff than me.

Technically four books, I read these interspersed throughout the year. It’s Churchill’s history of first England, then Britain, then Britain along with the various English speaking offshoots around the world.

In a lot of ways Churchill’s history writing is a forerunner of today’s History podcasts - the appeal is not in its rigorous academic analysis or fine-tuned detailed knowledge, but in the viscerally apparent joy the author finds in history, its unapologetic love of narrative history over Deeper Trends™️ history, and the warmth and almost conversational tone that comes from occasionally abandoning the pretence of objectivity. If this means he dwells on some characters because they happen to be his ancestor, or spends a truly bizarre amount of time and detail on the American Civil War, it's well worth it.

It is also a multi-volume appeal to one of his lifelong beliefs: that the predominantly English speaking countries (Britain, its Commonwealth, and the United States) share a set of common values and institutions that set them fundamentally apart from their respective geographic neighbours. This is an appeal that few would have the civilisational self-confidence to make now, but I don’t think it's an idea that deserves to be left entirely in the past.

I'd put this off for a while out of a vague squeamishness about cancer, which is the subject of this book. Or rather, our ongoing war against it is the subject. The book takes a chronological approach to explaining cancer - explaining it to you as we as a species came to understand it. This timeline-based approach to explaining a field is one I wish more authors would do. It explains how we know what we know so much better than the usual approach, and it makes these advances feel real and even emotionally salient, and less just an automatic process. And it helps that Mukherjee is able to write in such a way that every case study and every hard-won fight is written in such a way to feel real and affecting, as well comprehensible in the context of what has been explained so far.

It also generally gives you a vague sense that you are definitely going to get cancer, and indeed that you probably already have cancer, and are going to die. But you get over it.

There is something innately refreshing and invigorating about a book which argues that one of the core beliefs we’ve come to accept is wrong, and argues it well. Boom argues that while stagnation and a slow gradual decline from our late twentieth century zenith may be our current trajectory, it is not inevitable in the way that we have all subconsciously come to imagine it to be, and that the same marshalling of human ingenuity, risk-indifference and belief that the future can still be built that broke us out of previous ravines can still break us out of the current one.

In a word, the distinguishing feature of Boom is optimism. Not the vague, wishful optimism that comes from thinking that maybe it will turn out alright anyway, but the purposeful, determined optimism of looking to our collective accomplishments of the last century and knowing that we still as a species have it within us to defy the Malthusian limits of nature and engineer the future we need.

There is a certain sniffiness about techno-optimism today. Those advocating radical technological solutions to problems are dismissed as naive tech-bros who don't understand that it's Much More Complicated Than That. They're not always wrong. But as Boom argues, this belief that technological advances have taken us as far as they can and that there is nothing new left to feasibly do except make do with less, is not one that is going to break us out of our current funk.

Despite them not making an appearance on this list until now, I did read some Fiction this year. They ranged from OK if forgettable (Speed of Dark) through famous but disappointing (The Man in the High Castle) all the way down to 'worst thing I've ever read' contender (White Nights). However one of them was the best book I read all year.

From the author of The Martian, this is a book about humanity's response to a sudden, existential, extraterrestrial menace. As it's pretty 'hard' sci-fi, these aren't aliens in spaceships, but rather interstellar bacteria that threaten to blot out the sun if not dealt with. It combines realistic scientific problems and plausible solutions with likeable (if a little under-developed) characters, and a real sense of joy at the development of the (extremely) unlikely relationship between its two main characters. Once the story hits its stride, it is genuinely hard to put down - which is more than can be said for many of the even high-ranking books on this list.

And like a few others listed here, this is a book that is greatly enhanced by consuming it in the audiobook format, as a certain character from later in the story is brought to life in a way I can't imagine being done in a purely written form.

It was a close thing, deciding between this and Boom for the top spot, and I think ultimately they contain the same core message of techno-optimism about our collective capabilities when properly marshalled. That if there are limits to the problems we can solve or to our reserves of ingenuity, they are still very far off indeed.