What I read in 2017

2017 was one of my favourite years of reading for some time — 28 works of fiction and 22 non-fiction, with at least one all-time favourite discovered. I’ve written a quick overview of each book, first taking non-fiction, then fiction.

Non-fiction

The best work of non-fiction I read this year, and one of the best ever, was The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (Thanks to Bill Earner for the recommendation). It’s a magisterial tour of 20th century physics and the Manhattan Project. The passage on the Trinity test towards the end is truly exceptional.

I spent a lot of this year trying to get to grips with themes around what’s happening in Anglo-American politics, so I read several books concerned with the idea of reaction and several about the future of work. The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce is a good introduction to the argument that liberal democracy is on very precarious ground today. Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind builds on this (though Lilla and Luce disagree on both the cause and cure). It’s a deep collection of essays that considers the intellectual origins of reaction and takes seriously the idea that something has been lost in the victory of modern liberalism, even if that’s a price worth paying.

This idea, and several friends, pointed me to contemporary reactionary writers. Many people would find some of this writing distasteful or offensive, but I think it’s important to grapple with extreme ideas and I’m glad I read them, even if they left me unpersuaded. Most mainstream, though still controversial, is Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (which is fiction, but fits here), a novel that explores what might happen if an Islamist candidate won the French presidential election. His answer is more complex and less clear-cut than I expected, given Houellebecq’s reputation — and to me the novel reads as at least as critical of modern French secular culture as it is of Islam.

More esoteric and far outside the mainstream — but hugely influential on the alt-right — were Mencius Moldbug’s An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives and Nick Land’s The Dark Enlightenment. Both were originally posted as a series of blog posts, but are book-length and best digested on Kindle. Both take as their premise that modern progressivism is a mistake of historic proportions. Moldbug goes out of his way to sound reasonable (unlike Land, who is often hysterical and oddly parochial — so much of his argument is US-centric, despite being a British writer) and some of his historical insights are thought-provoking, but he seems to engage with a strawman version of democracy and makes claims about the power of academia and the media that just seem at odds with reality.

JD Vance is not a reactionary, but his Hillbilly Elegy has been heralded as one of the most important books for understanding Trump’s victory. I found it excellent as a work of autobiography, but disappointing as a means of political analysis: the vast majority of the book could be about poverty in any setting — the ‘hillbilly’-specific elements seem fairly minor.

This is one of Luce’s big themes: that the failure of economic growth to increase median incomes is one of the biggest threats to liberal democracy — and this led me to reading on the future of work. The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent is a good introduction to the debate, though much stronger on diagnosis than prescription. Ruther Bregman’s Utopia for Realists is an optimistic take that advocates for universal basic income (I’ve been reading about UBI since about 2004, when I became interested in Philippe Van Parijs’s work. It was then seen as hopelessly fringe, so it’s fascinating that it’s increasingly mainstream — I wonder what else that will happen to?). Strongest of this group I found Albert Wenger’s World After Capital, which is not yet published but being updated online as the work progresses. It’s exciting to see a prominent venture capitalist make a serious and pragmatic contribution to a major public debate.

Another, somewhat related, unpublished book I was fortunate to read this year was Jamie Susskind’s Future Politics. This examines how technology is changing our most fundamental political concepts — democracy, freedom, equality, etc. The book comes out in 2018 and I think it will be a hit. It fills a big gap in the increasingly urgent debate on the impact of technology on society.

One sense I got from this vein of reading is that there is a common feeling on all sides of the political spectrum that the political and economic development of the last 200 years or so has had relatively little to say about meaning in people’s lives — and that this is a vacuum that will be filled with something, whether we like that something or not. I suspect this will be an important theme in the coming years and will be one I explore in my reading in 2018, starting with the very old-fashioned idea of virtue…

As well as the Making of the Atomic Bomb, I also read quite a lot of history this year. The Quest by Daniel Yergin is a really superb history of energy, which filled in a lot of gaps in my very sketchy knowledge, while Thunder at Twilight by Frederic Morton is an excellent narrative history of Vienna in the 18 months leading up to the outbreak of the First World War (Trotsky, Stalin, Freud and Hitler all lived there at some point in that period, as well as Franz Ferdinand and other key actors in WWI). I enjoyed John Lukacs’ Five Days in London, which brings home just how close Britain was to surrender before Dunkirk (and is worth reading in parallel to watching the film, which I thought was great). More contemporarily, Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden is a gripping account of the story of Pablo Escobar and an interesting lens through which to think about how states work (and fail).

There’s no real theme for the final six non-fiction books. Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments is an interesting and often persuasive encapsulation of my favourite blogger’s political philosophy (and pairs well with this excellent podcast on prioritising the far future). I also enjoyed Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning, though this is certainly best read as autobiography rather than instruction manual. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s Extreme Ownership is a rare valuable business book, though the most interesting bits are the parts most remote from business and vice versa. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli is short and beautifully written, but goes to show that you really can’t learn much about physics in seven brief lessons... Medieval Monsters by Damien Kempf and Maria Gilbert is short and great fun, especially if you’re a sucker for medieval manuscripts.

Finally, I was very lucky to read the manuscript for Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh’s Blitzscaling, which comes out in 2018. This is the single most helpful thing I’ve ever read about scaling startups and will become a must-read for founders. If you like Masters of Scale, you’ll love this.

Fiction

The novel I enjoyed most this year — with the caveat that you have to have some familiarity with his other work to really enjoy it — was John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies. It’s gripping, clever and an important meditation on how we think about the sins of the past. I read this back to back with Ben MacIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends, which is non-fiction, but as gripping as the best novels, as he traces the story of Kim Philby and the Cambridge Spies.

One of my goals for 2017 was to read more science fiction, which is a genre I don’t know well. I fell into this via The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin in 2016 and the sci-fi I enjoyed most this year were the sequels The Dark Forest and Death’s End. Both are full of vast ideas, deeply explored. I also loved A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller, a haunting and horribly plausible story about science, knowledge and nuclear war.

I wanted to read some sci-fi classics, so I read Imperial Earth by Arthur C Clarke, Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov and The Moon is a Hard Mistress by Robert Heinlein. I’m not sure I could say I loved any of them (and found the first half of the Heinlein a bit of a grind), but you can certainly see their authors’ influence in all subsequent sci-fi. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card was fun, as was Neil Stephenson’s Seveneves (though the first third, especially the final “hard rain” scene, is by far the best bit, unless you’re really interested in orbital mechanics). I also read Change Agent by Daniel Suarez, as it was advertised as a vision of a CRISPR-meets-cryptocurrency future, but while very readable it’s ultimately a bit silly.

I enjoyed two not-quite-sci-fi books, David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus and All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. I wasn’t sure I would like the latter, but it ended up very touching and one of my favourites of the year. Lindsay was very influential on many writers I admire and Voyage is a fascinating, if extremely odd, novel.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgarov is a mesmerising, often bizarre, novel about the Devil, Pontius Pilate and Russia (!), which I enjoyed a lot. I also liked The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry, which I’m not sure I’d have read if I’d known what it was about, but was glad I did — it’s a beautifully written Victorian love story. Similarly, a Christian apologetic may seem an unpromising premise for a novel, but CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is a clever, interesting story and a fascinating window into a particular mindset.

I wanted to love Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, and was glued to it, but ultimately found the resolution unsatisfying — which was similar to my response to A Case of Curiosities by Allen Kurzweil: the set up and writing is brilliant, but you’re left feeling that the whole plot was a Macguffin. The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami was other way around for me: about a third of the way through I was worried I didn’t care enough, but the story and characters get better and better.

As usual, I couldn’t resist some detective novels, the best of which was probably Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers. Perhaps Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez doesn’t quite count as a detective story, but it’s brilliant and compelling. The Madman of Bergerac by Georges Simenon and 13 Guests by J Jefferson Farjeon are readable stories from the golden age of murder mystery, but not classics. Sleep No More by PD James is an excellent collection of short stories by a master of the genre, some much darker than her novels.

Continuing last year’s Robert Harris binge, I read Pompeii (best enjoyed on holiday a few miles from the volcanic town) and Munich, which is a page turner, but slightly suffers from the fact that you know the ending (it covers the 1938 Munich conference, from which Chamberlain came back proclaiming “Peace in our time”).

It was a good year for Brandon Sanderson fans, as Oathbringer, the third in the Stormlight Archive series, was published. At 1,200 pages, it’s a serious commitment, but well worth it, especially the last quarter. In a similar genre, I read Fifth Season by NK Jemison, but didn’t find it as gripping, and enjoyed Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (I’ve not seen the play, but it reads very well as a script).

***

This was a great year of reading for me and, alas, likely to be the last at this volume for some years. My wife and I are expecting a baby on 15th January and I hear that babies and reading are a tricky combination… So for 2018 I’ve resolved to be more ruthless and selective in my list — I’m starting with some classic novels and following up some of the threads in 2017’s political reading. Wish me luck!

You can follow me on Twitter at @matthewclifford.