This year, as with most years, I’ve been busy on my Kindle. Here are some of my reading highlights from the past 12 months (books not necessarily from 2024, but purchased and read this year).
Fake Heroes: Ten False Icons and How they Altered the Course of History Otto English
This is a great book, the retelling of the not-so-heroic life stories of some of popular culture’s real-life heroes. It’s also where I learned the term apophenia (from the chapter about JFK) which turned into something of a word of the year for me.
Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shogun and Zen: The Extraordinary Story of the Land of the Rising Sun
Jonathan Clements
This summer, as a family, we visited Japan. It was a magical holiday. This book gave me some context to the history and culture of the place most of which I had not a clue beforehand. Like why it’s call the Land of the Rising Sun, for example…
Cracking the Menopause: While Keeping Yourself Together
Mariella Frostrup
This was recommended to me by someone I met for coffee, and a helpful primer to understand what might be going on when important women in your life reach a certain stage of life.
Working Assumptions: What We Thought We Knew About Work Before Covid and Generative AI – And What We Know Now
Julia Hobsbawm
A compendium of Julia’s essays from Bloomberg and other places on themes of work, workplace, the impact of the pandemic and the increasing impact of Generative technologies.
British Rail – the making and breaking of our trains
Christian Wolmar
The UK’s leading train expert, and a former Labour Party prospective parliamentary candidate, Wolmar traces the history of British Rail from its formation in the post-war era to it’s eventual breakup before what turned out to be a fairly miserable privatisation.
The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding
Dan Sperber, Hugo Mercier
The core message I took from this book was fascinating. If you are familiar with Kahneman’s Fast and Slow thinking, Sperber and Mercier argue that there is no such thing – everything is fast thinking and sometimes we have time to post-rationalise our initial thoughts which we think is slow, logical thought but they argue is nothing of the sort.
Connect the Dots: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck
Christian Busch
This is a book about serendipity and at core the message is that if you are open to the opportunities that serendipity might present, you’ll find you get lucky coincidences happening. Some people are, some people aren’t.
It also, serendipitously, contained one of the loveliest lines I read all year: A love story can have a happy ending even if the two people involved don’t end up together.
The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
Maria Konnikova
The story of how a psychologist taught herself to become a poker champion and, along the way, learn that poker is not a game of chance but is a game of skill, particularly in bluffing.
The first in a number of books coming up about randomness in one form or another.
Everything Is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World
Tom Chivers
An exploration of the history behind the man and the work of Thomas Bayes who set in place the foundations for the study of probability.
The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
Leonard Mlodinow
To a great extent an exploration of why, after a few hundred years, we are still mostly not very good at understanding the way in which Bayes’ Theorem can help us to understand probabilities.
Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain
Ed Gillett
Starting with the free festivals and reggae soundsystems of the 1970s, this is a social history of dance music in the UK.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Best Investment Guide That Money Can Buy
Burton G. Malkiel
Regularly revised, this book has been around for decades and was the first time on paper that someone described how the best stocks investment strategy is to just get index-linked funds for a reasonable length of time. Everything else is either finger-in-the-air speculation or insider dealing. The day-to-day values of a stock are basically random.
The Cliff House: One hen weekend, seven secrets… but only one worth killing for
Chris Brookmyre
I’ve loved Chris Brookmyre’s work for years, and this is another very well crafted murder-mystery. Not exactly taxing, but good holiday reading fun.
Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an unknowable future
Mervyn King, John Kay
A fascinating insight into how many of the decisions we need to make can’t be based on prediction methods that predominate 21st Century business thinking.
A particularly powerful idea was that whilst we could have predicted the 2020 Covid Pandemic, if we had been able to specifically predict how Covid emerged we would have done things to stop that particular outbreak from happening and yet there still would have been a pandemic of some sort at some point.
The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper
Roland Allen
People I tell about this book fall into two categories. Those who can’t think of anything more dull than a book about the history of the notebook, and those who buy it immediately. It’s a delightful book and with many different angles explored to create the cumulative history of note taking.
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the race that will change the world
Parmy Olson
A history of the people behind OpenAI, Deepmind and others, building the technologies that have captured the zeitgeist in the last few years. I left unable to get out of my head the idea that some of the founders behind some of those companies might be more than a little bonkers.
The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World
Randall E. Stross
My last purchase of 2024, I was interested to learn about the original tech bro, Thomas Edison. The parallels with modern day technology evangelism aren’t hard to spot…
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