The books I read in 2018

One of my resolutions for 2018 was to read books, rather than articles and… stuff… on social media, and although I had a few months where I barely read anything, I did finish a few more books than normal — in total, not included re-reads, I got through around 50.

Of the 30 novels I read, almost all were fantasy and science fiction. In non-fiction, the main themes were, predictably, tech and politics, although towards the end of the year I branched out and read more… economics. I know: wild.

Taking inspiration from Matt Clifford’s annual posts, I thought I’d write up what I’d learned, starting with the non-fiction.

Non-fiction

This year, like last year, the best non-fiction book I read was by Robert Caro. Having finished Master of the Senate, the third volume in Caro’s giant (and still unfinished) biography of Lyndon Johnson, I went back to the beginning with The Path to Power, which covers Johnson’s life up to his failed Senate campaign in 1941. As a character study, it’s astounding, but what makes Caro so exceptional is his depiction of places and institutions. His portrait of poverty in regions of Texas which didn’t have electricity until the 1930s is a masterpiece of compassionate indignation.

The other book which made a big impact on me — although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as a “good read” — was a collection of essays by University of Manchester academics, which I read when I was working on a big feature about procurement in the early part of the year. Most of the public conversation on this issue is framed around the debating topic: “is outsourcing good or bad?” What A Waste: Outsourcing and How It Goes Wrong moved beyond this false dichotomy to answer a pressing (and Caro-esque) question: why is a broken system maintained as if it’s working?

I also got a great deal out of Ryan Holiday’s controversial book on the assassination of Gawker by Peter Thiel. Based on in-depth interviews with Thiel and Gawker founder Nick Denton, Conspiracy begins by making the case for calculation and plotting; yet by the end it’s clear Thiel would happily unleash chaos if it served his cause. (I discussed this contradiction with Holiday on my WIRED podcast.) Thiel is such a fascinating character that I was moved to read his book, Zero to One. Some of its arguments were provocative, but it’s scary to see such thin philosophy applied on a grand scale. I also read another book on startups, Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which, perhaps because it focused on company building rather than investing, was more modest in its claims. Zero to One was the better book, but I’d rather take advice (and funding) from Horowitz any day.

For all its flaws, at least Conspiracy merited book-length treatment, whereas far too many non-fiction books feel like magazine articles stretched beyond their limits. Machine, Platform, Crowd by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson fell into this category. So, ultimately, did Alyssa Mastromonaco’s record of her time as deputy chief of staff for operations in Obama’s White House, Who Thought This Was A Good Idea. The premise — that any organisation, but especially a political one, is maintained by unseen work, often performed by women — was promising, but the raw material and Lean In feminism simply couldn’t sustain it.

In the middle of the year I moved from written media to broadcast, so to prepare I read Andrew Marr’s short history of British journalism, My Trade. Despite being written in 2005, it hadn’t really dated, and its reflections on the various branches of journalism left me wishing that, as journalists, we reflected more on our craft. Relatedly, I enjoyed Alexander Starritt’s satirical novel The Beast, set in a loosely fictionalised Daily Mail, which was sick, funny, and, at least in my experience, pretty close to the truth.

I read several excellent memoirs this year. Rebecca Stott’s In the Days of Rain was a captivating, moving, and at times shocking portrait of an ultra-religious Christianity I didn’t know existed in the UK. Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk was sad and piercingly uncanny, although it didn’t really come to any conclusion. David Sedaris’s Calypso is his best book yet, and I don’t say that lightly. Whereas with most writing, I can see the scaffolding, Sedaris achieves effects that leave me wondering how on earth he managed to do that.

Having heard him talk many times on the topic of life and death, I was delighted to read my friend Robert Rowland Smith’s intellectual memoir, AutoBioPhilosophy. Robert is one of the most original and surprising thinkers around, and this was a wonderful reflection of his philosophy. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Working on a (now defunct) writing project, I read a number of books about Google, including I’m Feeling Lucky by Doug Edwards, an engaging account of the early days with Larry, Sergey and the gang. The best, despite being the earliest, was John Batelle’s The Search. It was instructive to compare that with Stephen Levy’s In the Plex, which had the air of an authorised biography — lots of detail, few surprises.

All year, I was searching for a book about the political economy of data, a follow-up to one of my favourite books of last year, Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism. I read two books called Big Data, by Timandra Harkness and Brian Clegg, useful introductions, but not really what I was looking for. I didn’t find the right academic work on the topic either: The Everyday Life of an Algorithm by ethnographer Daniel Neyland and Blockchain and the Law by Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright both showed why data is not destiny, without explaining precisely how it shapes society. (Having said, that I highly recommend De Filippi and Wright’s history of the bitcoin bubble, the best account I’ve read of that fascinating episode.)

Instead, I began reading more contemporary economics, which led me to Ann Pettifor’s The Production of Money, a short, bracing book which helped explain a lot of ideas coming from modern monetary theory, such as the universal jobs guarantee — a proposal I tend to prefer to universal basic income. I also read Robert Skidelsky’s book on Keynes, The Return of the Master. To my own surprise, I’m increasingly convinced we need the equivalent of a central bank for data, an idea I’m sure I’ll return to in 2019.

Fiction

The outstanding work of fiction I read this year was Madeline Miller’s Circe. I adored her previous novel, The Song of Achilles, but that was a retelling of a well-known tale; this went far beyond Homer’s original material, with luminous results. It inspired me to re-read Christopher Logue’s prose-poem War Music, which was somehow even better than I remembered.

Another brilliant adaptation of a traditional story, this time Rumpelstiltskin, was Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver. Novik not only drew out the fairy tale’s feminist themes, but also, more unusually, its Jewish ones. Her previous novel, Uprooted, was equally gripping, but I found Spinning Silver richer and more satisfying.

The final chapter of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, set in an Irish village devastated by environmental collapse, was one of the most powerful pieces of writing I read all year, but the rest of the book was hugely frustrating. Mitchell is so talented you feel he could do anything, yet he seems obsessed with reworking his previous books, in a way that actually undermines their integrity.

All those novels are fantasy, of a kind, and as usual this year I read, and reread, a ton of that genre. Ben Aaronovitch’s Lies Sleeping updated his Rivers of London series without quite hitting the heights. Francesco Dmitri’s The Book of Hidden Things was atmospheric but glib and trashy. Through Jo Walton’s blogposts about reading, collected as What Makes This Book So Great, I found Lois McMaster Bujold’s lovely, dreamlike Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls, although I probably shouldn’t have read so many of the follow-up Penric novels. Reading endless series is a bad habit of mine — this year I went through prequels and sequels by Terry Brooks, Tamora Pierce, Allison Croggan and Patrick O’Brien, a total of 14 books according to my Kindle, which is definitely an enabling factor in my binge-reading.

I also read quite a bit of science fiction, including Christopher Priest’s strange and inventive Inverted World, Roger Zelazny’s frankly bewildering Doorways in the Sand, and CA Higgins’s tense space thriller Lightless. However, by far the best work of science fiction I read this year was A Long Way From A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, along with the sequels, A Closed and Common Orbit and Record of a Spaceborn Few, which told a series of linked stories in a multi-species universe. A lot of science-fiction authors are exploring the politics of identity at the moment (see also: Ann Leckie); away from the exhausting social media debates, they’re a welcome reminder of the scope and generosity of that movement.

After a year in which I barely touched any literary fiction, in December I read The March, E L Doctorow’s panoramic account of the American Civil War. Nothing is more tired and off-putting than “great American novels” — yes, I am talking about Jonathan Franzen — but The March was a reminder that sometimes, in the right hands, they can be pretty great after all. In 2019 I’m going to make more of an effort to read outside my favourite genres.

Whether or not I will do so is another question, as the books on my bedside table at the moment are all called things like The Positive Birth Book and The Baby Whisperer. I’m having a baby in April, which I’m told isn’t generally great for reading — but I’m sure in this case it’ll be fine…

If you’ve got any suggestions on reading material, or thoughts on the above, let me know: rowland.manthorpe@sky.uk. Only a third of the books on the list were by women, mainly thanks to the preponderance of non-fiction by men, so I’m especially looking for recommendations of non-fiction by women.

Anyway, that’s enough. If for some reason you’ve made it this far and want to hear more of me, then I’m on twitter: @rowlsmanthorpe.

Have a good 2019!