The best and the worst of a year that gave me an unusual amount of reading time.
- Green Mars – Kim Stanley Robinson
- For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
- The Truthful Art – Alberto Cairo
- World War Z – Max Brooks
- Leviathan Wakes – James A Corey
- Humble Pi – Matt Parker
- Making Comics – Scott McCloud
- Liberty in the Age of Terror – A C Grayling
- Lords of the Desert – James Barr
- Massive Change – Bruce Mau
- Sick Puppy – Carl Hiaasen
- Invisible Women – Caroline Criado Perez
- The Windup Girl – Paul Bacigalupi
- Failure is Not an Option – Gene Kranz
- Cigarette Girl – Masahiko Matsumoto
- Telling Tales – Ann Cleeves
- Blame! (vols 4 and 5) – Tsutomu Nihei
- Statistical Rethinking – Richard McElreath
- Understanding Japan: A Cultural History – Mark J Ravina
- I Am a Hero (vol 7) – Kengo Hanazawa
- Making Sense of the Troubles – David McKittrick and David McVea
- A Very British Coup – Chris Mullin
- Pattern Recognition – William Gibson
- 20th Century Boys (vols 8, 9, 10 and 11) – Naoki Urasawa
- No Place to Hide – Glenn Greenwald
- The Casual Vacancy – J K Rowling
- The Imitation Game – Jim Ottaviani and Leland Purvis
- Daemon Voices – Philip Pullman
- Introducing Semiotics – Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz
- Kraken – China Miéville
- Foundation – Isaac Asimov
- The Descent of Man – Grayson Perry
- Spook Country – William Gibson
- The Square and the Tower – Niall Ferguson
- Death’s End – Cixin Liu
- Chernobyl: A History of a Tragedy – Serhii Plokhy
- The Science of Energy – Michael E Wysession
- Batman: Hush – Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee and Scott Williams
- Cassandra Darke – Posy Simmonds
- My Family and Other Animals – Gerald Durrell
- Fing – David Walliams
- A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
- The Functional Art – Alberto Cairo
- The Second Sleep – Robert Harris
- The Cloudspotter’s Guide – Gavin Pretor-Pinney
- Popes and the Papacy: A History – Thomas F X Noble
- A Game of Thrones – George R R Martin
- Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky
- The Black Death – Dorsey Armstrong
- The Vanishing Point – Val MacDermid
- Identity – Francis Fukuyama
- Reinventing Comics – Scott McCloud
- Zero History – William Gibson
- Rage – Bob Woodward
- Weapons of Math Destruction – Cathy O’Neil
- The Cuckoo’s Egg – Clifford Stoll
- Martyr City – Jack Schlenk
- Childhood’s End – Arthur C Clarke
- Justice on Trial – Chris Daw QC
- The Art of Living – Epictetus / Sharon Lebell
- Microeconomics: A Very Short Introduction – Avinash Dixit
This was, in a lot of ways, a pretty sucky year (you might have heard something about it in the news). And so when I came across William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and thoroughly enjoyed it, I did myself a favour: I relaxed my usual rule of not reading multiple novels by the same author in one year and bought the rest of the Blue Ant trilogy. The loose follow-up to Pattern Recognition was the equally excellent Spook Country. The third instalment, Zero History, was the weakest of the three. While I’m sure its story was the least engaging, I wonder how much it mattered that this one I read rather than listened to. There’s something about the cadence of Gibson’s writing that lends itself to being spoken out loud, I think.
I’d read Foundation when I was quite young, and on re-reading it I was surprised by how boring it was. Death’s End, too, was exhausting, and I didn’t make much of Kraken. Schlenk’s a talentless hack whose book was riddled with typos; plus he has a silly name. The Casual Vacancy was excellent: flawlessly observed, brutal in its emotional realism. I couldn’t get into My Family and Other Animals: it dwelt too much on themes of love of nature and quiet appreciation of the world’s beauty; it was unhealthily wholesome.
Robert Harris’s book was interesting. It was gripping, as one would expect from an unrivalled master of slow-burning suspense; and yet the overall feeling was of an accomplished writer of thrillers making a foray into science fiction without having done his genre homework. As a thriller, excellent, but as science fiction, it was let down by missteps in its world-building that a real sci-fi writer would not have made.
Overall though, the year’s best novel was Children of Time, a riveting clash of civilisations story in a fascinating remote future. This was world-building done right, featuring a society as convincing as it was alien, and a final conflict that had me rooting for both sides.
In comics, Naoki Urasawa’s note-perfect storytelling continues to impress in 20th Century Boys. Scott McCloud’s books made me want to pick up a pen and start drawing. Cigarette Girl was sweetly understated. The Imitation Game, a retelling of Alan Turing’s life, was rather flat, with dialogue full of Americanisms that made no historical sense.
Some excellent non-fiction this year. For the top spot I’m torn between Philip Pullman’s essay collection on writing, the excellent Daemon Voices; and Chris Daw’s book on criminal justice reform, which was harrowing in places and completely convincing. The best history was Making Sense of the Troubles. Gene Kranz’s autobiography was superb, its descriptions of putting people on the Moon utterly thrilling. Dorsey Armstrong’s lecture series on the Black Death was excellent, and worryingly topical. Invisible Women was magnificent, necessary, enraging. Identity was fascinating and insightful; The Cloudspotter’s Guide whimisical and gentle.
If you read just one hard-core textbook on statistical theory next year (well, you might…), I can’t recommend enough McEllreath’s magnificent Statistical Rethinking. The project is an exciting one: a complete statistics course, including even the very basics, taught from an exclusively Bayesian perspective. By the end of it, the Bayesian approach is so intuitive that it feels surprising that stats could be taught any other way.