Category: Books

Reading Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People is a disturbing experience. What starts out as a non-fiction book about diet ends up as a work of cosmic horror – with some impressive touches of body horror.

I had a similar feeling from Jay Owen’s book Dust. In cosmic horror, “the characters become aware of the true scale of the universe, its hidden natures, and wrestle with the meaning of that.” In van Tulleken’s book we see how industrial preparation of food has taken over our diets, leading to horrific outcomes. The system produces massive harms but nobody is able or willing to stop it.

Chris van Tulleken (hereafter CvT) tells the story well, starting with an ice-cream that will not melt. Checking the ingredients, he sees that what he has given to his daughter is not a combination of eggs, cream and sugar; rather it’s something designed in a laboratory to produce particular sensations. Many of the ingredients are things you wouldn’t find in a kitchen cupboard.

He portrays food production as a sort of evolutionary race, with the companies trying to out-compete each other in the marketplace. The drive to reduce costs produces appalling decisions that cost lives. Several times, the comparison is made to smoking, where paid scientists obfuscated the research for their own financial benefit.

One of the most striking discussions is around Pringles – a food that markets itself on addictiveness. CvT writes about the engineering of the shape, how the flavourings work, all designed to be as appealing as possible and to undercut the body’s responses to feeling full.

CvT is an effective writer. He quotes Donald Trump’s 2012 tweet that “I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.” as he discusses how sweeteners prime the body for sugar that will not come, and may provoke cravings. He’s also clear about the effects of different food preparation – a whole apple turns out to be significantly healthier than a smoothie made of just apples and water.

The book lays down clear evidence that ultra-processed food is harmful. Sometimes CvT overeggs his cake in his desire to press his case, cherry picking the most dramatic research. This is fair enough – he sees a certain type of scientific rigour as a tool used to defend these foods, similar to the scientific defence of smoking.

CvT uses any means he can to provoke revulsion I don’t find the idea of eating bacterial foams disgusting in particular – it’s less disgusting than eating the flesh of another creature – but there’s a fantastic image when CvT talks about how fizzy drinks leach nutrients from the bones: “Drink enough and you may end up peeing out your own skeleton”. It’s a great horror image. The one that made me shudder most was around the acidity of fizzy drinks and how, if you brush your teeth after one, “you are literally brushing away a slurry of tooth enamel”.

Like in a lot of cosmic horror, there are links to the Nazis. CvT shows how they were pioneers with processed food, with one scientist making edible fats from paraffin by-products – it caused damage to the body, but the U-boat sailors who ate it were unlikely to live long enough to see problems from it.

The cosmic horror comes from how these foods have such massive effects but nobody is responsible. Terrible things happen through a diffusion of responsibility. The book talks about Nestle’s decisions around baby formula, and how it’s now working to disrupt established food distribution among remote Amazonian communities. Scientists end up paid to say things that are misleading. It’s a situation that nobody would have chosen, but that cannot be resisted.

The Tories have pushed against food regulation on the basis that it’s an aspect of the nanny state. For a long time, I thought I was at fault for some of the poor food decisions I was making. But, since cutting back on processed food, my appetite is much more manageable. The short-term impulsive decisions around unhealthy food are gone. UPFs hack the body’s responses. Is it right to put the blame on people’s decisions when these decisions are being undercut?

The most remarkable thing about this book is that it does produce behaviour change. CvT makes explicit comparison to Allen Carr’s book on smoking. He’s never dogmatic or hectoring, yet by the end, I’d also lost my desire to eat chemicals and emulsifiers. I’ve changed my diet since reading this book (I’m in a position to do this when a lot of people aren’t). Long term, I’ll have to see if this is a permanent change, but I’m already impressed how effective it was. Cutting down on UPF has removed much of my desire for it.

The arrival of a new John Higgs book is an exciting event. I held off opening Exterminate! Regenerate! until finishing work, then read the first section out loud to my housemate. It’s a gripping scene: Verity Lambert is working on a live TV broadcast when the main actor drops down dead. It’s noted that Verity is 23 years old, the book’s first appearance of the number.

There are superficial similarities between this book and the previous one, Love and Let Die, where Higgs looked at Bond. Both Bond and the Doctor emerged in the early sixties, both have been played by multiple actors and both have changed to fit the times. Higgs tells the Doctor’s story well, producing a brisk, fascinating account. But this is a stranger book than simply a history of a TV show.

During the course of the book, Higgs builds a case that the Doctor is alive: an incredibly successful memetic lifeform. He queries the difference between “something that is a living thing, and something that just acts like one”, and talks about how this creature functions, and the ways it attempts niche construction.

I didn’t recall the word egregore in the text, but that is what we’re talking about here. Doctor Who, more than almost any other 20th century fictional character has begun functioning independently. The only character that has come close to this is the somewhat more obscure John Constantine, who keeps slipping into reality. Other science fiction characters and superheroes seem different to the Doctor – there’s something grounded about him that allows him to interact with our world with some level of autonomy. The TARDIS allows him to function in many types of stories, whereas superheroes often rely on a static, unrealistic background setting.

Higgs talks about the Doctor as “the most perfectly evolved story-creating entity that there has ever been”, keeping itself alive by generating new narratives. I’d not realised how many stories have been released by Big Finish Audio alone – hundreds of them, filling in different eras. “Doctor Who had been a living progression of adventures, but now every moment along that timeline was fizzing with potential and capable of generating new stories. Doctor Who had become fractal.”

Along with the discussion of the doctor, there is an interesting observation about the time lords, and how they represent the show’s editors. There’s an interesting parallel here with the function of the crisis in DC comics, and how these keep occurring to fix editorial issues (many of them created by the first DC crisis).

I loved reading this. It’s full of interesting asides and diversions, as well as a very provocative theme. And, if you accept the book’s conclusion that Doctor Who is alive, what else can you do with that idea?

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to prefer learning about current affairs from books rather than newspapers. I think this idea originally came from reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb; but it’s more useful than ever. The news media currently optimises for short-term attention-grabbing rather than explaining the narratives underlying our world. Books are now better for understanding.

Rather than following the day-to-day gossip about Elon Musk, I read Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. It’s very much an anti-Musk book, telling the story of Musk’s ill-fated Twitter purchase.

Musk is a fascinating person – both as the richest man in the world, and for the Tony Stark super-genius persona he cultivated. There’s a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in seeing this supposed genius doing baffling and incompetent things. We are told that the super-rich have earned their rewards through reaching the top of meritocratic capitalism – but how does that explain Musk’s peculiar mix of genius and stupidity?

There’s one view of Musk as someone with lofty, amazing goals: “Elon just wants to do what benefits humanity.” And pushing the uptake of electric cars can only be a good thing; as can bringing internet to remote communities. But set against this are the moments of blundering fuckwittery. Musk’s involvement in the Thai cave drama was ridiculous, offering assistance that would not work – “Never mind that Musk’s submarine had not arrived in Thailand until the rescue was well underway, and eight of the twelve boys had already been freed.” There were his vocal claims in March 2020 that “the coronavirus panic is dumb,” and that the USA would have “close to zero new cases” by May. The book is filled with examples of idiocy.

The restrooms became a particular problem, as Musk’s piling of people onto fewer floors caused the toilets to constantly be in use. In New York, the stench of the bathrooms overwhelmed some parts of the office, while some employees complained about cockroaches flitting in and out of drains.

“That is why I bought Twitter,” he once wrote. “I didn’t do it because it would be easy. I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love. And I do so with humility, recognizing failure in pursuing this goal, despite our best efforts, is a very real possibility.”

How did this idealist end up as someone who thought it would be funny to make a Nazi-style salute from a public platform? Who rowed with prominent Jewish groups? Character Limit suggests that the pandemic was what changed Musk.

This was an interesting book, and one that paints a shocking picture of Musk. Various scenes in Character Limit feature Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson, and I now want to read his book to see what positive case can be made. I’d love to know how the world’s richest man can be somebody so petty and vain that he cheats at video games.

PS – One of the highlights of the book is when Musk is turned away from Berlin nightclub the Berghain, after being forced to queue with other visitors. Some things money cannot buy.

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.