Category: Books

I read 55 books in 2024. Looking back, there were some obvious great ones that stood out. In alphabetical order by title, the ten best are below:

1. I wrote a long post on Jess Richards’ Birds & Ghosts and deleted it. Birds and Ghosts is beautifully written and technically impressive. It also made me very sad.
2. Folklore Rising by Ben Edge looks like it’s going to be a story of a man’s ‘quest’ to explore English folklore. Edge somehow salvages this unpromising concept, partly through his artwork. His accounts of folk rituals are sometimes uncomfortable – while Edge is sometimes treated as an insider, there are more occasions where he is threatened as an outsider. Edge produces a good survey of folklore and current thinking around it.
3. I didn’t expect much when starting Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’ book on Sam Bankman-Fried. I was soon gripped by the bizarre story about how quickly someone can become a billionaire, and how suddenly that can fall apart. I was most surprised to finish the book convinced that SBF was mistreated by the justice system. It was interesting to see a discussion of Peter Singer and Effective Altruism, something I want to follow up more.
4. Daisy Johnson’s Hotel was a beautiful book of fragile ghost stories set in a hotel. Despite this being a small book, Johnson finds many ways to explore the concept and the opening chapter is virtuosic.
5. Live through this by Patty Schemel was another grunge biography. I already knew parts of Schemel’s story from her 2011 movie Hit So Hard. This edition was a UK release of Schemel’s biography and it tells a horrifying story about addiction, stripped of the cliches and bravado found in many other rock books.
6. Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen is terrifying and remarkable. It lays out how bad a nuclear war might be. While it’s possible that this is a very worst case scenario, the book is an urgent warning. I’ve had nightmares since reading it, and can only hope that the forthcoming Denis Villeneuve movie helps grow a movement against nuclear weapons.
7. I tend to feel intimidated by Booker Prize winners but Paul Sampson’s Prophet Song was very readable and terrifying.
8. Translated from the Dutch, We Had to Remove this Post by Hanna Bervoets was a short, literary novel that produced a strong sense of dread as it described the lives of online content moderators.
9. Nostalgia is death, but Uncommon People is the best book I’ve read so far on Britpop. Rather than retelling the mainstream story Miranda Sawyer picks up some of the stranger elements of the genre, before its mainstream co-option.
10. Wicked and Weird by Buck 65 is an unconventional biography, full of tall tales. I’d rather read a biography where things are made up than boring.

Alongside my prose reading, I’ve been enjoying the new series from Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard, The Power Fantasy, which has completed its first arc. The book using superheroes as an allegory for nuclear diplomacy, producing a book where the characters have to avoid coming into conflict. It’s a gripping and horrifying work.

It’s been a tricky year for reading, and I’ve found myself bogged down in unrewarding books at times. My top ten feels a little weaker than recent years too, despite a few exceptional books. As ever, I need to be more eager to discard books that aren’t rewarding.

Julie Mcdowall’s history of British preparations for nuclear war, Attack Warning Red, was one of two incredibly disturbing books I read about the subject this year. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of nuclear war has receded but it’s still there. The world has around 12,500 nuclear weapons, 2,000 on high alert (source).

Attack Warning Red discussed the often-futile measures taken in readiness for nuclear war with Russia. Britain is a small, densely packed country and the fallout from even a small number of strikes would have affected most people. Much of the preparations and planning was a sham. In the 1980s, journalist Duncan Campbell calculated that the sandbagging requirements of Hull alone would exhaust the entire national supply of sand.

Mcdowall discusses the plans for forced labour crews to clear corpses from the streets and how hospitals could mercifully end lives when there was no medicine. In one health authority, it was suggested that medical staff forage for folk remedies. Toilet facilities in large bunkers were designed without doors or were too few in number to reduce the risk of suicides.

Reading this book gave me a few nightmares and left me wrestling with the horror of a world in which we casually allow an existential threat to linger. There is little comfort. I read the Wikipedia list of nuclear tests in attempts to reassure myself – we’ve exploded over a thousand of these without the world ending. I read the essay collapse won’t reset society which looked at the black death and the fall of Nazi Berlin to show how bureaucracy endures even the worst disaster. Towards the end:

U.S. government estimates predict a death toll of between 13 to 34 million people for a nuclear exchange involving 3,000 warheads, with substantial additional fatalities that would result from a lack of medical care, lack of utilities, and ensuing food shortage. But even at a final death toll of 10 to 20 percent of the total population, and infrastructure destruction similar to the situation in Germany after the Second World War, the total shock of nuclear war could likely fall within the range historically absorbed by modern economies and governments.

I don’t understand how the world’s political leaders are not thinking about nuclear war all the time, and it horrifies me that nobody is trying to fix this. Wikipedia also lists military nuclear accidents and some of these are horrifying. In 1983, an order was given for a nuclear strike and refused. Eventually we are going to be very unlucky.

These weapons are so obscene that it’s hard to justify owning them, even in a defensive capacity. Trident is solely designed for retaliatory strikes, and I’m not sure it’s worth killing millions of civilians in revenge if the Trident deterrent fails.

Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X is one of the best books I’ve read recently. It features a widow investigating her wife, an avant-garde artist. Much of it is set in the 60s/70s New York art scene, with direct quotes from a number of real-life sources. The book also includes photographs which Lacey found in junk shops, repurposed for her story. Lacey even commissioned designers to make book jackets for the main character.

I love when novels mix reality and fiction. But Lacey does something incredibly strange. She sets the book in an alternate timeline where America fragmented after World War Two. One section is a dystopian theocracy, with the book set in a very liberal section of the country. Lacey used this change to allow her to write about the relationship she was interested in:

I didn’t want to get into the heterosexual dynamics of a man writing about a woman or a woman writing about a man; it had to be two women. At the same time, I wanted the novel to be set in the mid-20th century but I wasn’t interested in writing about the actual struggles a prominent lesbian couple would have gone through in that time. So my alternate history grew out of that problem. I thought, if I have an America where this female artist could exist and this couple could exist without having to justify themselves, I just need a totally different America.

I thought this level of ambition was incredible, with Lacey changing an entire world to produce a setting for the characters she wanted to write about. The result is strange and beautiful. Reading it, I longed for more novels like this one.

I read 63 books in 2023. It felt harder to concentrate on reading this year and I found myself bogged down in a few books that I should have abandoned.

Here are my ten favourite books that I read in 2023, in alphabetical order of author’s name:

Jonathan Ames’ The Come Up was an oral history of hip-hop, released for the genre’s 50th anniversary. It’s a sprawling story, and Ames managed to hit most of the important points, including giving time to neglected acts such as Above the Law and Digital Underground.

Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean was a recommendation from Tom, which I posted about back in March: “It starts out as a novel about a queer HP Lovecraft, and then becomes something even more wonderful. The book does not shy away from Lovecraft’s faults, but still manages an empathic portrayal. There are also appearances from William Burroughs and some wonderful jokes about fandom. A beautiful book about long, sad lives.”

I bought Katherine Hale’s book Slenderman expecting a dissection of Internet culture and creepypasta. Instead, I found a book focussed on the human stories in the Wisconsin stabbing case. Hale unfolds this as a tragedy, showing the appalling impacts of America’s lack of mental health care.

I was inspired to buy Catherine Lacey’s novel Biography of X by a review in the Guardian. It’s a deeply strange novel, a biography of a fictional character, but directly re-using elements from non-fiction about New York artists. And then there is the whole alternate history aspect. It’s a book that should not work, but very much the sort of thing I want to read more of.

The Art of McSweeney’s was the first book I finished in 2023, and it was a history of McSweeney’s publishing. The book goes into a lot of detail about how their magazine was published in strange and innovative formats (including one issue that was a pile of junk mail). It tells a fascinating and inspriring story about producing art.

Jay Owen’s book Dust is a mix of first-person journalism and expert summary. Arising from Owens’ pandemic mailing list, the book is full of surprising details, and some evocative descriptions of history, such as her chapter on the water of LA. It’s also unavoidably a book about the anthropocene, and as I wrote a few weeks back it works as a piece of cosmic horror.

I read Aaron A. Reed’s 50 years of Text Games as a series when it was published as a mailing list, but I also found time to read the whole book when it was compiled as part of a kickstarter. Reed foregrounds some interesting and neglected works and produces a curious history of literature in the computer age. There’s something striking about how it details forgotten artists, and shows how important literary work is not always respected at the time.

There have been a number of books written about or using LLMs, but by far the best I’ve read is from poet Hannah Silva. My Child the Algorithm starts out similar to other such books, but becomes a beautiful account of Silva’s life and experiences raising her son. It’s a book that deserves more attention than it has been given.

Studio Moniker’s all the minutes is very much an avant-garde novel, produced for 2014’s NaNoGenMo, an annual competiton to generate novels using software. I reviewed this novel in July. The book is composed of tweets, one for every minute of the day, and produces a striking and moving portrayal of the Internet’s emotions. It’s also a reminder of the sort of things we lose when platforms are not open.

I posted about Darcie Wilder’s literally show me a healthy person back in May. It’s a twitter novel but somehow managed to feel as vivid and messy as Twitter used to be. It’s a brisk read, but an enjoyable one.

I recently finished Jay Owen’s Dust. While the book is non-fiction, it felt like a work of cosmic horror, as it made me uncomfortably aware of the scale and fragility of the world.

The main marker of cosmic horror is that the characters become aware of the true scale of the universe, its hidden natures, and wrestle with the meaning of that. This book shows that dust affects us on a massive scale. Soot from forest fires can fall on glaciers, changing the albedo and speeding up their melting by making them absorb more heat. The Amazonian rain forest relies on phosphorous blown on the wind from Africa. And nuclear fallout from weapons tests will be with us for unimaginable lengths of time.

Inevitably, the book wrestles with the nature of the Anthropocene and the huge changes that are being thoughtlessly produced by humans through dust. Owens is a good guide, travelling from the stolen water of Los Angeles to a rave at the lost Aral Sea, and I loved reading this.

The problem with computer-generated books is that they are almost never as interesting as human-written books. Most examples so far have been remarkable more for being made with software than because they are compelling works of literature. However, there is one computer-generated novel that I’ve read cover-to-cover and loved, and that is All the Minutes (which only appears to be available via the Internet Archive).

This book is built up from 1,440 tweets, one for each hour of the day. The makers looked for tweets that began with the time, and printed them in sequence. We’re not following a single person and skip between timezones, but the text still flows. It begins:

It’s 6:00AM and I’m wide awake. Good friday morning peeps. Its 6:01am and im sleepy… It’s 6:02am and I’m still up. I have no life. It’s 6:03am and I can’t sleep I think I might have insomnia and if I don’t than I messed up my sleep track.

Seeing the tweets in aggregate means certain patterns become obvious. Sleep is a particular obsession. One voice recurs, repeating how ‘Michigan still sucks’. There is mourning: It’s 1.28am and now officially the year anniversary of my friend Daniel Degale’s death. RIP hun xx. There’s a lot of booze and a lot of shaming people about the things they drink, alcoholic or not: It’s 1.30pm and I’m craving bubbles. Christmas has officially broken me :-S. Its 1:31pm and I just woke up lmfao. It’s 1.32pm and I’ve just seen two girls walk past me with a can of lager! Classy Plymouth.

Using an API to gather the data allows fragments of meaning from across the whole world to be brought together. It’s a chorus, but there’s also an impulse to see this as a character.

It’s 4:21am and i just got out of a meeting that started at 5:48pm. It’s 4:22 AM and I am up! Ready to leave baltimore. It’s 4:23am and the first “normal” passenger just showed up for the 6:05am flight we’re hoping to get on. It’s 4:24am and I still haven’t slept. I have been so sick all night. This is the most sick I’ve been in years. It’s 4:25am and the birds are already tweeting outside.

I read All The Minutes from start to end, just like any other book. I found it enthralling, and it also reminded me of Peter Manson’s long poem Adjunct. Being made up of social media posts, this book had the same raw energy as Darcie Wilder’s excellent Twitter novel literally show me a healthy person (which I reviewed in May).

All the Minutes captures a particular feeling of reading Twitter, how the site ebbed and flowed as the world turned. It would not have been easy to produce something like All the Minutes without the open APIs that Twitter was built on. These allowed artists and creatives to build interesting bot and works based on the site. Now the APIs are no longer free but costs an astronomical price to access. Works like this cannot happen now. Open systems and the gift of an API are incredibly important