Category: Books

Picking ten books out of the 101 books I read in 2022 was an interesting task. There are many different criteria I could have used, but this is a list of books I’m most likely to recommend to other people, or to pick up again at some point in the future. I choose ten as an arbitrary number, and some other excellent books have not made the cut, so I’ve listed them at the bottom of the page.

In alphabetical order by author’s name, here are my top ten:

Tender is the Flesh by Argentinian writer Agustina Bazterrica, is one of the darkest books I’ve read. It’s set after a pandemic has made it impossible for people to eat animals. Instead, groups of humans are bred for meat. It’s a simple idea, but one that Bazterrica pursues pitilessly, with the matter-of-fact treatment of grotesquery making it all the more shocking.

Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 weeks is a great self-help book, in that it undermines the genre’s usual hucksterish enthusiasm and admits that we’re not going to get all that much done in the 4000 weeks that we’re allotted. I wrote about this in October. It’s definitely got me thinking about my life and all the things I want to do differently.

I wrote about Ru Callendar’s What Remains in October. It tells the story of someone who was inspired to become an undertaker, and succeeded by doing things very differently. It’s a searingly honest book that refuses to sanitise death, but it also has a lot to say about the lessons that counter-culture has for mainstream life. Highly recommended.

I was definitely more interested in the Beatles sections than the Bond ones in John Higgs’ combined history Love and Let Die. It’s another good entry in John’s series of books analysing Britishness. I particularly enjoyed seeing how perceptions of the Beatles have changed over the years.

I bought Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac on a whim during a stressful period of work. It’s an account of a book tour to more than a hundred bookshops and was a delightful, cosy read. It also rekindled my love of second-hand bookshops, which had suffered from the convenience of Amazon. Ince writes “I think I love books even more than I love reading,” and he does a great job of showing why this might be.

Tabitha Lesley’s Sea State was not the book I was expecting. I’d picked it up for an investigation into the lives of oil workers, but inside was a searing account of being the other woman in an affair. Lesley described her life with vivid details, as well as a giving a powerful sense of place for Aberdeen.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb once claimed that you can learn more about politics from books than newspapers. Simon Kuper’s Chums is a good example of this. Looking at the origins of the current political class in their university days, you can see how an Oxford Union style has taken over modern politics. This style seems to be something that the current Labour leader is ill-equipped to deal with.

Ben Myers’ Under the Rock is a wonderful description of the Calder Valley’s history and landscape. In particular, the descriptions of the recent floods are vivid and shocking. This transcends the usual books in the ‘new nature writing’ genre.

qntm’s There is no antimemetics division is a short story collection in the form of a novel. It’s not perfect, but the energy of the stories here makes up for the flaws. Influenced by creepy pasta (and originally written as part of the SCP Foundation) this is very much modern horror, and it feels incredibly fresh.

Olivia Yallop’s Break the Internet was a compelling book on social media, looking at lives of influencers. It’s a topic that dozens of books have been written about already, but Yallop produced an interesting book that moved beyond the cliches and was filled with interesting vignettes. This was also the first book I read in 2022.

Also recommended:

• Nick Cave’s interview Faith, Hope and Carnage explored both creativity and grief, and continues Cave’s transformation into a spiritual figure.
• Harry Cole and James Heale’s Liz Truss bio, Out of the Blue, was a good explainer of how that disastrous premiership happened. I wrote about this in detail on my blog.
• Horror novella And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin was a clever twist on zombie stories. It did a great deal of work in a short space and was one of those rare works of fiction that should have been longer.
• When the Dust Settles by Lucy Easthope was about disaster recovery. It was a shocking book in places, but shows the care that is needed after catastrophe. There’s also some shocking discussion of what austerity has done to preparedness.
• David Keenan’s This is Memorial Device was a great novel about a band, and would probably have made my top ten if I’d given it the focus it deserved. It’s a novel that suffered from being an ebook and I will be reading a physical copy next year.
• Slug by Hollie McNish was a book of very personal poetry, structured like a gig, with discussion around the poems. It’s a beautiful and frank collection.
• Emily St John Mandel’s new novel Sea of Tranquility was beautifully written and incredibly moving, but I the auto-fictions sections felt somehow coy and didn’t work so well for me.
• Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life was just as great as everyone says – entertainingly written, and packed with crazy ideas.
• Dark Slivers by Nick Soulsby was a revelatory book on Nirvana, based around an exploration of their minor album Incesticide.
• Herve Le Tellier’s The Anomaly was a airport-novel style thriller that was also deeply weird, written with a nod to the oulippo.
• Bodies by Ian Winwood was a good book on mental health and addiction in the music industry. The discussions of Lemmy and Lost Prophets managed to go beyond the usual talking points.

The biography of Liz Truss by Sun politics editor Harry Cole and James Heale was mocked when Truss’s premiership ended before the manuscript had even been submitted. A dramatic rewrite took place and the book was released as “the unexpected rise and rapid fall” of Liz Truss.

I read the Kindle sample for Out of the Blue and was persuaded to buy it. The book is well-written and gossipy but it also does a good job of explaining how the bizarre recent events came to be. Mark Twain reviewed a history of a personality in the American Civil War by saying it was so good that you weren’t sure which side was going to win. There’s something of that feeling in this book. Cole and Heale do a good job of showing how headstrong and competent Truss was throughout her ministerial postings. When the whole thing falls apart so badly, it’s almost a surprise.

I’d not paid much attention to Truss on her way up, beyond her being a figure of mockery from the left. When she became Prime Minister, I was curious about how she’d gone from being an enthusiastic Liberal Democrat to being Tory. The book is good at filling in this detail, as well as providing some interesting discussion of her childhood. I can’t help but have empathy for someone who grew up programming 8-bit computers, or was a teenager when I was, with the same “grungy” look as my friends, with ”flowery trousers and desert boots”.

The book is not perfect, but is a decent first draft of history. One of the issues is that some of Truss’s contradictions are not resolved. As a student, she seems to have been mocked for being both PC and anti-PC. Throughout the book she is shown as hardworking and astute and then as a dogmatic thinker and a drunk.

For me, one of the most interesting things about this book was the account of Truss’s ministerial career. While her time at DEFRA is mostly remembered for her speech about apples, pork markets and cheese, there is some excellent detail of the work she did (I would genuinely loved to have read more about Truss’s management of the Rural Payments Agency).

The writers pay particular attention to Truss’s skills with social media. The Independent’s sketch writer mocked Truss as “the part-time minister for Instagram and full-time human GIF”, and her photos swamped the government Flickr account. Social media improved her profile and it also gave her an opportunity to comment on issues beyond her ministerial brief. She also managed to be an optimistic politician in a period where this was rare, something that played incredibly well with the Tory Party Membership that put her in power. While her Thatcher cosplay during the leadership debates was mocked, one of the campaigners responded to the criticism saying “You forget that the people that are actually going to decide the next Prime Minister, really, really, really like Margaret Thatcher.”

Gossip runs alongside the analysis – how Truss was evicted from a flat for being too messy, the impact of her affairs, the drunken sprees on ministerial visits, where she is forced to work through her hangovers.

Truss’s fall was rapid. One aspect of what went wrong was that security concerns led to Truss being forced to upgrade her phone, cutting her off from her contacts. As Cole and Heale write, “she is … a politician in a hurry who has only really succeeded when listening to advice. She turned her floundering leadership hopes around by putting herself in the hands of comms professionals for the debates, yet shut out media advisers from the decision-making processes that led to the mini-Budget blunder.”

Truss once told an advisor, “I think I would be a very good Prime Minister, there are just two problems: I am weird and I don’t have any friends.” Truss proved too weird for the markets, and like all great tragedies, her downfall was both inevitable and a surprise.

Out of the Blue has a happy ending, talking about how Truss benefitted from a strange post-Brexit configuration of the Tory party that is now tearing it apart. Leave, as an alliance between free marketers and anti-immigration right-wingers, is now splitting, and that could bring the party down with it. I’m still pessimistic about Starmer’s chances of winning an election against the Tories, but it looks like there is a very good chance of the Tories losing.

I love political biographies, and the new book by Andrew Gimson sounded like an interesting one. Inspired by the works of Craig Brown, Gimson had written a biography of Johnson (his second, or maybe third?) as a series of vignettes. In Brown’s hands, this technique works to allow different points of view. Some of Gimson’s vignettes are effective, such as an analysis of the index of Alan Duncan’s diaries.

The rest of the time, it feels like a mess. I love the format, but it doesn’t always serve Gimson well – the writing is not tight enough to make each section perfect. Some vignettes go nowhere, feeling like sketches for a better book that he couldn’t be bothered to finish. The language is sloppy. Gimson sometimes uses the vignette format as a postmodern device for directly addressing the reader, but this comes across as clumsy. The pro-Johnson boosterism also goes beyond Tom Bower’s interesting discussion to petty triumphalism.

The book was reviewed by Sonia Purnell, who wrote her own excellent book on Johnson (and said that she “would rather pull out my teeth than do it again”). Purnell has little time for Gimson’s defence of Johnson’s lies as demonstrating the “eye of a caricaturist”, pointing out Johnson “he was prime minister at a time of grave national peril, not a standup comic”.

It’s interesting to see Gimson defend his subject, and it does sometimes manage a good job of explaining Johnson to a reader that loathes him. But Gimson’s ill-thoughtout swipes at Corbyn are not needed and even had me, as someone unimpressed by Corbyn, feeling irritated. Gimson is a writer for Conservative Home, and occasionally he plays to that gallery, which is kind of annoying. He’s not as funny as he seems to think he is. At least Johnson is entertaining when he’s being disagreeable.

Gimson also defends Johnson’s father. He accuses Tom Bower (whose book I’ve also read) as being clumsy and a ‘hatchet man’ in his treatment of the vile Stanley Johnson – when Stanley Johnson is an abusive, wife-beating piece of shit. Taking an axe to Stanley Johnson’s reputation is something that should happen more often, given how often he’s brought out in politics and entertainment as a charming figure of fun.

One good point is that Gimson takes Johnson’s speeches seriously, and it’s interesting to see Johnson’s words in a larger context than given by a soundbite quote. It shows how persuasive Johnson can be, but Gimson often adds too much snide commentary. Still, it is interesting to read someone approaching Johnson from a different background to the mostly centrist/left-wing commentary I read. For example, I learned that the phrase ‘levelling-up’ was not invented by Johnson, but turns up in a statement of Conservative aims published in 1976.

One section will give an idea of how clumsy Gimson is in this book. He discusses Cummings’ accusation that Boris Johnson was distracted at work by his wife Carrie’s fury following a story in the Times that their dog Dilyn was going to be put down. Johnson had to decide about bombing Iraq and setting up quarantines, but he was being interrupted by this domestic crisis. Bowers writes, “One sees here Cummings’ limitations. He thinks that to be accused of wishing to get rid of one’s dog is ‘completely trivial’.” Bower seems to consider Carrie Johnson’s injured pride as more important than the life-or-death matters she stopped her husband working on. A letter was sent to the Times, but “Johnson declined, however, to sign this letter, which he felt would make him look ridiculous”. So, either this incident was trivial, or it was not, Gimson tries to have it both ways. A decent editor would perhaps have smoothed this section out. But then a decent editor would have told Gimson that the vignette format didn’t work for him, and he should finish writing a proper book.

The main outcome of this book is to demonstrate what a good writer Craig Brown is, by showing how badly a format he excels at can be mangled. The book comes across as notes to a biography, with some of the scenes trailing off. When it does work, it’s excellent, such as an interesting discussion of Theresa May’s premiership. When it fails it’s like reading the draft of the book Gimson would have written if he had more time.

We learn that Gimson was offered £100,000 by Johnson to drop out of his first biography. If Johnson had done the same for this volume, it would have been a service to Gimson.

This is a blog post that got lost in my drafts. I originally wrote it in 2021 after seeing Adam Curtis’s documentary series Can’t Get You Out of My Head, which had a bleak view of modern politics.

It’s hard to believe that The Future Starts Here came out in 2019 – that seems so long ago now. I actually unpacked my copy of the book this week, and am thinking of re-reading it. The optimistic message is still plausible and even more necessary now. As difficult as the last few years have been politically, economically and emotionally, there are strong underlying reasons for hope.

I read John Higgs’ book about the future, The Future Starts Here shortly after it came out. One afternoon, I took it with me for a walk on Brighton seafront. As I sat reading on a bench, a seagull shat on me. Birdshit splashed across the pages. John Higgs never saw that coming.

Despite that omission, it’s a good book, and it’s still relevant after Covid-19. That’s not bad for any pre-pandemic book about the future, but it’s even more remarkable for a positive one. Being pessimistic is easy, but this book rallies against the sort of learned helplessness we’re taught by the media. If we cannot see a positive future, then there is little point doing anything other than having mindless fun until it ends.

At one point John Higgs briefly refers to Francis Fukyama’s book The End of History, using that as an example of being blind to the future. Most references to The End of History are negative, and it is easy to mock Fukyama now. But doing that misses how plausible and welcome that idea was in 1992.

I grew up in the 80s, where life was overshadowed by the threat of nuclear war. Even children’s comics had serials set in irradiated hellscapes. It was a grim time. Then the Berlin Wall fell. Liberal democracy had won. Sure, life wasn’t perfect, but we could move beyond the battle of superpowers. It was a period when no two countries with McDonald’s restaurants had ever been at war. In last five years, I’ve felt assaulted by history. Instead of Fukyama’s dream of a safer and blander world delivered by democracy, politics has felt confusing and threatening. I miss the idea that history could end.

Which is an obscenely long preamble to my excitement about the new Adam Curtis show, which came out in February. It was trailed by an epic interview in the New Yorker. In the interview Curtis talks about the idea that elites across the world are trying to “manage the world without transforming it”. As Curtis says:

There isn’t a big story. And that’s true in China as much as it is here. Everyone’s just trying to manage the now and desperately hold it stable, almost like in a permanent present, and not step into the future. And I don’t think that will last very long. . . . Because if you’ve got a story about where you’re going, when catastrophes like 9/11 or covid or the banking crisis hit, they allow you to put them—even though they’re frightening—to put them into a sense of proportion. If you don’t have a story about where you’re going, they seem like terrifying random acts from another universe.

One of the points Higgs made in his book which resonated most was that we don’t have many positive visions of the future. Science fiction has become haunted by totalitarism, killer robots, even fake worlds, where media lies have become absolute. But there are reasons to hope. Talking about the pandemic, Curtis says:

If science can bring out a vaccine within seven months, you can change the world—you really can… my instinct tells me that people are fed up with that feeling of helplessness. They’re beginning to realize that it doesn’t just come from inside them—that maybe they are weak for a reason, and not because of themselves.

In many ways, Can’t Get You Out of My Head felt like a missed opportunity, Curtis’s equivalent of a Vegas set, playing the hits and a few crowd-pleasing new ones. There were some interesting ideas, such as Curtis’s response to Dominic Cummings (from a recent interview: “I had time for Cummings because compared to other politicians he actually had some ideas”) and the meaning of Brexit. And, you know, it would have been more interesting to watch a film about how to get out of the current situation rather than wallow in it. The show started and ended with that great quote by David Graeber:

The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.

What type of future do we want?

Over the years, I’ve read every major book published about Kurt Cobain. As time has gone on, it’s felt like there was nothing new to be said about him; but in the past year I’ve encountered two remarkable pieces of writing.

Emma Frankland’s zine, All Apologies, which is based on her stage show, claims Kurt as a trans woman. It’s audacious and thrilling, and made me excited about listening to Nirvana again.

A more conventional work is Nicholas Soulsby’s Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide. I first learned of the book from Danny Goldberg’s biography Serving the Servant. An entire book on Incesticide sounded like a waste of time – I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to the record all the way through. But I downloaded the Kindle sample, checked it out, and quickly bought the full thing.

The book sets out a case for taking Incesticide seriously – incredibly seriously, in fact – and not just as a filler designed to attract the 1992 Christmas market. Soulsby has thought very carefully about Nirvana. He has tables and maps to track the evidence. Very early in the book he had made some points that I’d missed:

• “Incesticide was the only Nirvana album that didn’t come stamped with Kurt Cobain’s seal of disapproval”. – Soulsby quotes Cobain dismissing Bleach (“too boring”), Nevermind (“sell-out”) and In Utero (“I wasn’t really interested in listening to it). The idea of Incesticide as a ‘true version of Nirvana’ is an interesting one.
• Soulsby emphasises the scale of Nirvana’s success as a punk band – none of the bands that inspired Nirvana came close to their sales. – “Even Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols took a decade to reach Gold and didn’t hit Platinum until 1992”
• In a fascinating piece of research, Soulsby shows that, in the last two and a half years of his life, ”Cobain’s… productivity amounted to just fourteen songs wholly written after the release of Nevermind”. Indeed, “80-90% of Kurt’s known songs were written by September 1991”. It’s interesting to see how long the gestation period for some of the later songs was; and tragic to see how creatively exhausted Cobain was compared to his earlier work-rate.

The most important thing in Soulsby’s book is his analysis of the contradiction between Cobain’s punk ethics and his commercial drives. Cobain spoke frequently about punk ethics in his interviews while some of the decisions he made undermined this (examples being signing to Geffen, his relationship with MTV, and the handling of the band’s publishing royalties).

Soulsby argues that Cobain was most interested in being left alone, and that his compromises with the mainstream were about finding security for himself, and later for his family. He provides examples from early in Cobain’s career where he struggled to be undisturbed while working on his art and music. Soulsby suggests that the impossibility of finding peace was what drove Cobain to his tragic ending. There is a lot of subtlety to Soulsby’s arguments, but he’s the first writer who has explained Cobain’s contradictions without undermining his commitment to punk ethics.

I still can’t really get into Incesticide. For me, Nirvana’s great album was In Utero. But by looking into what I always saw as a marginal work, Soulsby has produced some amazing insights into Nirvana’s career.

In my early 20s, I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The book describes a complete system for organising your life, and I soon felt more in control. I stopped being late and – mostly – remembered things. It did me a lot of good.

The problem with GTD is that it works by capturing everything. Every possible project was in the system somewhere. I had whole lifetimes-worth of things I might do, research or make. GTD captured all my fleeting thoughts, even the ones I should let go of.

Now, twenty years later, I’ve dropped most aspects of GTD, but the principles are there. Fleeting thoughts go into colourfully-covered moleskines, and are written up into a huge scrivener file. For a long time, I used a Google Keep note as a calendar. It worked. Moving to Yorkshire has helped, as for a time I had fewer things competing for attention than I did in Brighton. I adapted GTD into something that works for me, but I’ve never found a good answer to that question of choosing what to let go.

Four Thousand Weeks, the recent book from Oliver Burkeman, is the antidote to other productivity books. The title refers to the length of a British lifetime. Expressed as 4000 weeks, it sounds a lot shorter than eighty years. Life is too short to do everything we might want to, so productivity is better approached as a choice of what to pay attention to rather than trying to do as much as we can.

With this acceptance of incompleteness, Burkeman turns the usual productivity advice on its head by admitting that there will never be enough time, and we will never feel on top of all our workloads. “Productivity is a trap,” Burkeman writes. “Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.”

Burkeman uses this idea of conscious choice to recontextualise some familiar ideas. He sees trying to do more than one thing at once is a way of avoiding dealing with the choice. Distraction needs to be managed. Hard choices about what we focus on need to be made consciously. “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

Burkemann also writes interestingly on the idea of distraction from social media. Most people writing on this topic focus on the idea of Silicon Valley stealing our attention, whereas Burkemann looks at this as a choice in what we pay attention to.

Consider the archetypal case of being lured from your work by social media: it’s not usually that you’re sitting there, concentrating rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against your will. In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing, in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a feeling not of reluctance but of relief. We’re told that there’s a ‘war for our attention’, with Silicon Valley as the invading force. But if that’s true, our role on the battlefield is often that of collaborators with the enemy.

Burkeman is also particularly good when he talks about the need for community, and how we should not be optimising these things out of existence. He points out how easy this is to do in an efficient world, with deliveries and no-contact airbnbs. Some friction is good where it brings us into contact with other people.

For me, the most powerful thing is this acceptance that clearing the decks will never succeed, and will only make things worse. Trying to ‘make time’ for the things we care about by clearing away other tasks means we never get around to what matters.

The big test of whether a book like this works is what changes it produces in the reader. I am letting go of a lot of things – better to succeed at a small number. To stop trying to do too much. “The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.”