Book Review: Reading from 2019

Note: This is an edited version of my (sort of) weekly newsletter 5 Things for Friday. If you’re curious please email me (here) and I’ll add you to the mailing list

Welcome to this brave new decade (n.b. pedants see here for discussion of whether this is a new decade).

2019 was an unusually good year for in terms of reading actual books. I gave up with my weekly New Statesman subscription, which had the double benefit of reducing my political anxiety and giving me more time to read long-form. The 20 (full list below) books I managed were a split of non-fiction and fiction. There were a few of the small ones that clutter up bookshop checkouts. I made a conscious effort to read more about the climate emergency.

Here are the 5 Things from 2019 that stood out for me. I hope you enjoy.

Note: I haven’t included Nathaniel Rich’s excellent Losing Earth because I’ve already written about it at length.

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

This was both the best and the worst thing I read this year. I bought it immediately after listening to David Wallace-Wells on Talking Politics but it took me six months to muster the courage to open its deceptive plain covers.

This was the highpoint of my ambition to read more about the climate emergency in 2019. With startlingly, often lyrical, aplomb Wallace-Wells tells the story of what might happen to us as the planet warms. As essentially an optimist about the arc of history it was a chilling read. What felt different about this book is that it isn’t about climate science. Sure it’s informed by all the science and the first section has a lot of truly terrifying numbers on topics such as “Heat Death” or “Unbreathable Air”. But fundamentally this is a story about how climate chaos will irrevocably transform the way we live. Beyond all measure. Almost beyond imagining.

It’s not really possible to do justice to the power of this book in a couple of short paragraphs. Instead I’ll just quote the two things that stayed with me from near the end of the book. The first is Wallace-Williams’ devastating view of what “history after progress” might feel like for those in it:

“[O]ur grandchildren could be living forever amongst ruins of a much wealthier and more peaceful world… the dark ages would arrive within one generation of the light — close enough to touch, and share stories, and blame.”

That is not what any new parent wants to read. The last sub-clause just hangs there like a barely veiled, existential threat.

The second passage was his more call to arms (of sorts) as the book concludes. The climate emergency, he concludes:

“counsels both human humility and human grandiosity… [t]he climate system that gave rise to the human species is so fragile that it has been brought to the brink of total instability by just one generation of human activity. But that instability is also a measure of the human power that engineered it, almost by accident, and which now must stop the damage, in only as much time. If humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it.”

Better get started then.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

This 2015 novel does not, on the surface, sound like it is going to be much more fun that David Wallace-Wells’ apocalyptical “story of the future”. It is about a young, blind girl living through the horrors of Nazi occupied Brittany.

But it isn’t actually about that at all. It is about childhood, and familial bounds, and courage, and the imagination, and most of all about how people find solace in other people at their most profound moments of need.

Most movingly, and impressively, of all, it is a story about a girl who can’t see the world but through whom the author paints vivid, poetically descriptive visions of life. It was the best fiction I read last year and I would recommend it to anyone.

9 Lessons in Brexit by Ivan Rogers

If All the Light is set in a moment of European crisis but about something else, then Ivan Rogers’ short but devastating critique is firmly and only about crisis. Despite sounding kind of Christmases it is anything but festive.

It is the printed version of a series of lectures that Rogers, the former ambassador to the EU, gave about how Brexit might actually work — or not work. In a year subsumed by discussion of Brexit I found it a refreshingly, and infuriatingly, clear sighted account of what was going on. The political narrative may well move on to pastures new in 2020 but the things Rogers talks about are not going away and we urgently need proper answers to them all.

I also read Ian McEwan’s somewhat different take on all things Brexit in The Cockroach. Up to you which you find more enlightening.

The Wall by John Lanchester

Another of my climate reads was John Lanchester’s Booker nominated novel The Wall. It is hard to say very much about it without spoiling things.

It is set in a warmer, wetter, version of the UK that has, as the title suggest, taken its hostile immigration policy to a whole extra level. As fiction Lanchester has the luxury of being as imprecise as he wants about what has led to that place and as detailed as he can be about how it feels to occupy it.

It also has a really good twist.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Sometimes it is nice to not feel devastatingly bleak about the future of humanity. One good way to do that is to spend some time in the company of Hans Rosling. I only really discovered Rosling around the time of his death in 2017. Luckily for me he has left a remarkable legacy of extraordinary material.

I’ve used my newsletter before to talk about how much I love the website he founded (Gapminder.org) all way back in Issue #11. And in Issue #23, I delighted in how much I enjoyed his posthumously published book Factfulness: “With characteristic joie de vivre Rosling demolishes ten instincts that radically distort the way in which people understand people. And he has all the charts to prove it. It sounds dry — it’s anything but. For anyone who likes knowing stuff and thinks people are worth knowing about, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.”

I’d stand by that and I found myself thinking back to Rosling’s world view more than once as 2019 unfolded.

Congratulations (and thank you) to anyone who made it this far. I hope you found something in there that you might enjoy. If not, or it you’re just curious what else I was up to here is the full list of books I read in 2019 (in the order I read them):

1. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
2. Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
3. The Wall by John Lanchester
4. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre
5. 9 Lessons in Brexit by Ivan Rogers
6. Factfulness by Hans Rosling
7. Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change by Nathaniel Rich (full review here)
8. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
9. Lethal White by Robert Galbraith
10. Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
11. The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
12. Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris
13. Ten Cities that Made an Empire by Tristram Hunt
14. Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls
15. Where Power Stops by David Runciman
16. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
17. The Cockroach by Ian McEwan
18. The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
19. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
20. Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch