Reading

Reading

• Statistical Rethinking by Richard McElreath: reading it as a gentle introduction to Bayesian methods; it is great and I would recommend it to anyone with some statistical background; readable and often funny! it tackles some quite complex areas in a way that is very accessible to those of us who are more comfortable with code than equations; I’ve read that some people get a bit lost from chapter 9 but I’m on chapter 12 and it’s still going well

• Der Tod in Venedig by Thomas Mann (in German): he’s arrived in Venice but I put this down to read Pickwick Papers and need to get back to it

• Neuromancer by William Gibson; reading it on personal recommendation; it is also apparently where the concepts of cyberspace and virtual reality were first developed; read most of it but then put it down and might need to start it again

• Professional Plone 4 Development by Martin Aspeli; skimming this on and off to get a better understanding of Plone, the complex content management system that SENAITE is built on; very out-of-date and too much on insane Python package management; not sure I will finish it

Last read (reverse chronological order)

2025

• To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: recommended by my daughter; read it fairly quickly; starts as a detailed psychological account of a seaside holiday gathering of family and arty friends, then (no spoilers) something unexpected happens and you are jolted into a transformed and heightened appreciation of the novel; hard to convey the effect; very good and I will read more by her

• Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol: must have picked it from a list of classics somewhere; it’s a novel set in provincial 19th century Russia, just after the French invasion, as is mentioned several times; a well-dressed but mysterious man arrives in a provincial town and charms local society; most of the rest of the novel is him visiting a series of landowners trying to buy the titles to dead serfs; it turns out eventually that he (Chichikov) is a corrupt ex-civil servant with a scheme to get rich by somehow mortgaging dead serfs he has bought cheap (dead serfs still appear on the census and are taxable, so he thinks people will be glad to sell them); it is a penetrating black comedy about corrupt officialdom and the decadent serf-owning classes, but rich in realistic detail; it is actually quite funny in places, particularly where the character Nozdryov is involved (who reminded me a bit of Withnail and probably deserved his own book); some later parts of the book were lost or destroyed, so there are some weird jumps in the story around the time Chichikov is getting his come-uppance at the end; although the modern reader might have some qualms about serfdom (and the apparently high serf mortality rate), it is still quite an enjoyable book

• The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens: serialised comic novel by Dickens which is basically a series of long comic anecdotes, often at the expense of the central character, but develops into something with a bit more heart by the end; read it for self-edification and was surprised to enjoy the merciless, sardonic take on contemporary society and its underlying kindness

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy: historically-inspired tale of American bandits murdering their way across Mexico in the days of American expansionism to present an alternative frontier mythology; some Faulknerian vocabulary, portentous descriptions of changing landscape and weather, the character of the superhuman and mysterious “judge” and needless to say much senseless violence and cruelty create a compelling read, but I wasn’t sure it was more than the sum of its parts (or perhaps I haven’t yet tuned in to this author)

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson et al (JavaScript version): read it as part of my computer science self-education; I probably learnt the most useful stuff in the early chapters of this book, which expanded on various programming concepts I had acquired from elsewhere and partly appreciated; I will be a lot more comfortable with recursion in future, as it is used liberally here; shows how complex systems can be built with several layers of abstraction, starting from the primitive features of the underlying language; addresses object-oriented and functional paradigms, though not as much as I had expected; I did skim through some of the later parts where there are whole pages of code and lots of detail specific to the particular implementation; I am now very comfortable reading JavaScript code, though perhaps would have preferred a Python version; I can see why it is a classic

• Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee: read it because I have really liked some of his other books; it is an allegory of imperialism and complicity with imperialism; readable and of course well-written but quite dry

• Gods of Management by Charles Handy: recommended by a colleague and I’ve recommended it to other colleagues; compares and contrasts different organisational cultures, each labelled with its own Greek god metaphor; very readable; gives you a useful framework to think about your organisation (I think I’m an Athenian in an Apollonian organisation, i.e. a techy problem-solver in a role-based organisation) and seems incredibly far-sighted (e.g. seems to foretell hybrid working) for a book written decades ago

• Walden by Henry Thoreau: I’ve been meaning to read this for a very long time, as the young me (unencumbered by things like family responsibilities or the need for inhalers) fetishised the ideal of the simple, austere, self-reliant life in “Nature” and spent many school-age hours wandering the fields, woods, shores and disused railway lines of lowland Cumbria on my own; I felt I had an almost physical connection to something then, that I may have lost, but some of that austerity is still there underneath; so I totally got Walden, this classic account of a man living in a self-built hut in the woods near his town to experiment with his ideals; it is sometimes philosophical, sometimes more scientific or practical; I think it was the heartfelt descriptions of the natural environment in the later parts of the book that particularly elevated it for me

• Beloved by Toni Morrison: recommended by my wife and by my daughter, though with a warning that it was grim; beautiful and poetically written account of the experience of slavery, escape from slavery and the actions occasioned by desperate love; I think I was too in love with the language to find it as emotionally draining as my family did

• Scotland: A Short History by Christopher Harvie: I think I was looking for a potted history; this is more thematic than chronological and perhaps assumes more pre-existing knowledge than I had; covers the many contributions of the people of Scotland but skips over some bits where I would like to have heard the story; well-written and a good read but I still have lots of gaps

• Symposium and the Death of Socrates by Plato: starts with a drunken dinner party of Athenian greats debating love (oodles of homoeroticism) and the next part is about the condemnation and dignified death of Socrates; I came away still unsure about what Socrates’ philosophy was apart from sarcastically cross-examining and taking apart other people’s arguments

• The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett: read it out of curiosity about its popularity and I’m still curious; it is funny and there is some essential kindness to relate to but I am still wondering if I am too old for it

• Henry IV, Part Two by William Shakespeare: read Part One for O Level English in 1984 so this was unfinished business; read it plain in a non-academic version without footnotes (and enjoyed it more that way); I expected the transformation of Hal into a king and the renunciation of Falstaff, so I think what most struck me was the power politics and the nobility of the rebels

• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino: postmodern, metafictional, literary experiment, a novel about writing and reading novels, playing with the ideas that, all literature being recursively derivative, the sense of the novel is created or constructed by the reader more than by the author (“la mort de l’auteur” notion of Roland Barthes); disjointed structure made up of the beginnings of several novels, with disorienting passages about various readers and authors; kind of fun in a nerdy way, at least at first, guessing what popular genre is currently being pastiched (bit like watching Community), but the changes in perspective, where anything that seemed true in the world of the novel is again and again proved illusory or false, become repetitive to the point that you wonder if he is even parodying postmodernism itself

• Adam Bede by George Eliot: read it because I had enjoyed her other novels; found it harder to get into than the others, possibly because I’ve been a bit tired and unwell with a prolonged ear infection, and possibly because most of the action takes place in the final third of the novel; the first two-thirds is nostalgic world-building in an imagined rural Midlands community of previous generations; there was definitely the same nuanced and wry narrator’s voice that is perhaps more developed in later novels, but the characters and the story didn’t quite hang together for me until the novel started to read itself for me in the final tragic sections

• Upanishads by Unknown: possibly the oldest extant collated work of Hindu (or any) philosophy/cosmology, asking the question “what is reality?” and responding with the intuition that there is a higher, infinite, eternal reality, that is one with the self, from which all things arise, and which is cryptic and imperceptible to most, but which can be reached through sacred knowledge, penance/austerity/self-renunciation, meditation/yoga, sacrifices and ritual, leading to bliss, freedom from care and escape from the cycle of reincarnation; interesting for differences from other religions - the highest level is beyond gods, beyond good and evil; also as an example of the religious experience, which I (though a “non-religionist” according to my Pakistan visa) find fascinating; something about the renunciation of worldly passions or ambitions made me sense the fellowship of 50-something blokes from thousands of years ago

• Another Country by James Baldwin: set in 1940s New York, describing with brutal honesty the complex and often painful relationships, romantic or other, of the main black and white characters; hard to summarise so many themes of racism and sexuality in a bullet point, but undoubtedly deep, and I found the writing very powerful and affecting; it felt a bit more like an important novel than a great novel, but wow he was a great writer

• Les Marana by Honore de Balzac (in French): set during French invasion of Spain in 1811; a career courtesan from a dynasty of courtesans (the Marana) tries to improve her daughter Juana’s life chances by lodging her with an old couple; unfortunately Juana is seduced by a French officer (Montefiore) and has to enter a marriage of convenience with another soldier (Diard), who she does not love; Diard is unsuccessful in business and, meeting Montefiore by chance much later, kills and robs him; Juana then kills Diard but gets away with it; I feel like I am going through the less good stuff from Balzac at the moment

• L’auberge rouge by Honore de Balzac (in French): set during the post-revolutionary French occupation of part of Germany, told in flashback; a dinner guest relates the tale of a French doctor executed injustly for murder, but gor blimey! the real perpetrator is at the dinner; the narrator is however more interested in his cute daughter

• Le requisitionnaire by Honore de Balzac (in French): forgettable tale of a mother waiting in vain for her royalist son to come home after a failed counter-revolution

• La vendetta by Honore de Balzac (in French): two cute young people fall in love, but gor blimey! there is a Corsican feud between their families; does not end well

• Un episode sous la terreur by Honore de Balzac (in French): reading as part of my lifetime plan to get through the oeuvre; instantly forgettable novella about a priest, in hiding during the French Revolution, who is asked to perform mass for a mystery royal visitor

2024

• Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth: recommendation from a friend; historical novel of a slave ship from Liverpool in the triangular trade; well done, occasionally reminiscent of Joseph Conrad, and probably a historically accurate account of the slave trade of the times, with its pursuit of profit and casual cruelty, but for me it lacked something in human or literary terms that would make it a great novel

• A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett: a very nice present; I’ve always been curious about his popularity, though never read any - I’ve never been sure they weren’t the sort of thing I would have enjoyed best as a teenager; this is an enjoyably quirky collection of early published short stories that had been thought lost; I’m still not sure but I am planning to read one of his novels next year

• Les Chouans by Honore de Balzac (in French): post-revolutionary France and some of the western regions have risen in revolt against the new republic; a quick, enjoyable read (had to look up a few antiquated terms and some military slang); even if you think the impossible love story part is a bit nuts there is plenty to enjoy in the tense insurgent atmosphere, the descriptions of various bloody skirmishes/massacres and the realistic historical and geographical setting; quite a promising young author I would say

• Beowulf by Anon (Seamus Heaney translation): Anglo-Saxon poem that inspired Tolkien (and all imitators) and which my daughter read recently; a paean to selfless heroism and acceptance of fate, and a glimpse into a long-ago world

• Tidyverse Skills for Data Science in R by Roger Peng et al: read this in fits and starts to try to address avoidance issues with the tidyverse; very basic and I ended up skimming it; probably should have read Advanced R

• Inside Indian Indenture by Ashwin Desai: family recommendation; academic take on the movement of workers from India to South Africa (Mauritius is often mentioned too) in the 19th century; outlines the many abuses but also the individual stories of adaptation, resistance or success as far as the documentary record allows

• Bildung (Alles, was man wissen muß) by Dietrich Schwanitz: opinionated treasury of (largely) European history, literature, intellectual thought and general knowledge in German; over 600 pages long; I have been reading this slowly for years and restarted it more than once; the initial history sections are great but I gave up twice previously in the literature and art history sections, where the language got more difficult for me; Schwanitz argues that this common cultural knowledge and the associated ways of thinking (Bildung) are important for society and for individuals, and are perhaps neglected due to things like scientific/technical education, TV and other popular media, and the various “isms” (I am guessing the author has conservative views); he has great admiration for the British and American democratic traditions and a mixed view on Germany, which produced great minds like Goethe but didn’t develop similar early traditions; my German reading ability has taken a step up but I will definitely pick a shorter German book next year

• Post Office by Charles Bukowski: another breakthrough novel; I read several Phillipe Djian (he wrote the book they made into Betty Blue) novels in my twenties and loved them; Djian occasionally refers to the American authors who influenced him, among whom was Bukowski; it’s a social-realism, semi-autobiographical account of a drunken low-life womanising postal worker who’s just about getting by; read it in a day or so as it’s short and simply written; it does capture something compelling about ordinary American lives of the era

• Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis: since picking up one of his books in a shop years ago and being traumatised by the little I read, I have avoided this author but I do like to read an author’s breakthrough novel so I thought this one might be OK; it is mainly an immersive account of the brain-dead lives of rich American college kids during a holiday; you slowly get numbed to the perversity and excess, as are the characters - but then he hits you with something so despairingly horrible and awful that it can stop you getting to sleep that night; brilliant in its sick way I suppose

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt: been wanting to read this for ages, read it a couple of months ago and don’t recall enough to summarise it now; it was well done, but for some reason I kept comparing it unfavourably with AS Byatt’s Possession which was much better

• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky: I initially connected with the innocent benevolence and ethical goodness of the principal Myshkin character, derided as an idiot when he returns to Russian society after a long convalescence abroad, and that kept me reading even though the other characters were less interesting and the story drags on a bit; Crime and Punishment was much better

• Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (Arden version): trying to remedy my lack of knowledge about Shakespeare; it’s slightly weird reading a play, and I should probably see it (I have found a version on YouTube) for a fair assessment, but it was a bit like reading Shakespeare at school again: some of the language is very poetic and quotable but a lot of it is obscure or difficult to understand without frequent recourse to the footnotes, the story wasn’t that interesting and it wasn’t the funniest comedy I’ve come across; I suspect I should read it more like poetry to get the full value

• Fluent Python by Luciano Ramalho: although I used Python in preference to R for a few years, it was mainly for data analysis, and mostly using the pandas package, so I only have a part-understanding of more advanced Python programming topics; I saw this book recommended in several places as an excellent bridge into more advanced topics, and as I am now likely to be using Python for more general-purpose programming, it seemed like a good time to read it; and it’s great! I actually looked forward to my 20 pages each day; it dips into a lot of more advanced areas with amazingly clear explanations, as well as lots of worked examples and pointers to more in-depth reading; I will probably need to read the later chapters again

• Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris: read it because I hadn’t read anything by Jan Morris, and am also interested in Trieste; personal and admiring account of the history, human geography, architecture, culture and personalities of this unique and fascinating city, former cosmopolitan port of the Habsburg empire, meeting point of Western and Eastern Europe and home of literary exiles (hence “nowhere”); lovely writing

• The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie: accessible book on developments in causal inference; read it because it wanted to be aware of any implications for epidemiological data analysis; very engaging and readable; richly illustrated with examples and diagrams; I probably would need to read it again (especially chapters 8 and 9) to be sure I understood everything; my notes are here

• The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith: written in the early 60s; densely researched and readable history of the period around the wholesale failures of the potato harvests in Ireland (focussing on 1845 and a few years afterwards), due to potato blight, resulting in deadly famine, disease epidemics, evictions, emigration and longstanding bitterness; depicts the dramatic effects on a growing and impoverished rural population living in squalid conditions, often under an absentee landlord; for most, life depended on a potato diet, with other crops sold to pay rent; the early British government response was inadequate to the point of cruelty, shackled by laissez-faire ideology, and the later response almost absent because of economic crisis, prejudice and annoyance at Irish rebelliousness; assassinations of landlords and half-hearted, disorganized uprisings led the British government to increase troop numbers in Ireland; emigration, often to Canada then the US, sometimes on deadly “coffin ships”, barely improved the prospects for many migrants; grim reading; did finally make me start researching my Irish antecedents (which was much easier than I thought)

• White Teeth by Zadie Smith: read it on a personal recommendation; was expecting to classify this in light London-based fiction (like Capital) but it is more than that; it’s a bit like Dickens and a bit like Infinite Jest, describing the multicultural London of recent history with humour and detailed, overlapping stories

• The Nine Lives of Pakistan by Declan Walsh: bought it because it was there when I was spending my Xmas book token present and because of my interest in the country (I have previously read Pakistan: A hard country by Anatol Lieven and The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience by Christophe Jaffrelot - I remember a quote from one of them about Pakistan: something like “… a conservative country assailed on one side by Westernisation and on the other by radical Islam”); this one covers more recent events than the other books; written by a journalist based in Pakistan for years; it starts with him being expelled as persona non grata and then very readably compresses the history of Pakistan and its many complexities around his accounts of interviews with several major political personalities; at some point, reading any book on Pakistan, your head will start to hurt, but this one is a relatively painless introduction to this fascinating country

• Unruly by David Mitchell: a very nice present; an account of the kings (and occasionally queens) of England; interesting, funny (his usual comic shtick); learnt a few things despite an inherent lack of interest in royalty

• Middlemarch by George Eliot: read it because I had enjoyed The Mill On The Floss and Silas Marner; why did I wait so long to read this book? all books should be like this; tells the stories of the inhabitants of a provincial town in the 19th century with sophisticated understanding and omniscient, knowing irony; the author seems able to step outside her era for a better viewpoint; the writing is superb, amusing and an absolute delight to read; I laughed and I cried; Adam Bede is going on next year’s list for sure

2023

• Children of Men by PD James: read it because of an interesting review somewhere (possibly of the film actually); dystopia centred on Oxford in an alternative timeline where the human race is dying out through (male) infertility; there’s a politely British rebellion against the dictator in power but not much else happens; will check out the film

• Le Père Goriot by Honore de Balzac (in French): read it because I enjoyed Le Colonel Chabert and because this is the first book in a famous roman-fleuve that could keep me going for decades; centred on the surpassing (but somehow vulgar) love and self-sacrifice of a father for his two daughters; he used his entire self-made fortune to marry them well into high society, while himself living and (spoiler alert) ultimately dying nearly alone in poverty; introduces some other characters who will apparently reappear, perhaps many times, such as Rastignac the social climbing law student, Bianchon the medical student, Vautrin the charismatic gay criminal and Goriot’s high-maintenance daughters; fairly bleak about contemporary morality, social conditions and human decency; surprisingly light and readable

• Das Buch von San Michele by Axel Munthe: read it because my parents bought it for me when they were on holiday somewhere; it is an interesting (seemingly autobiographical, though likely embellished) account in German of the life of a well-connected Swedish doctor who after a turbulent childhood spent in Sweden trained as a doctor in Paris, worked with Pasteur (seeing cases of rabies), became a society doctor in Paris where he saw poverty, syphilis and diphtheria outbreaks, fought a duel, fell out with Charcot, got some dead bodies mixed up, went mountaineering and got avalanched, met various celebrities (Guy de Maupassant does not come out well), bought and restored a property with lots of Roman archaeological artefacts on Capri, lived there with a menagerie of animals including a monkey, worked as a doctor in Rome, witnessed the cholera outbreak in Naples, visited Lapland where he nearly died, witnessed the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Messina (Sicily); really interesting, sometimes whimsical, a bit more serious at the end; he had some unorthodox views for the time, was kind to children and the poor, not religious, not particularly flattering about doctors (except himself), well-off but not particularly driven by money, and he had an amazing life

• The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan by John Man: had to read it with a title like that; reiterates the life story of Genghis Khan, slightly less sympathetically than the other book; evaluates his achievements in light of modern leadership theory; the potted version is:

  • control the narrative; influence others
  • show emotional intelligence
  • have an inspiring vision
  • have integrity
  • dedication and sacrifice for the cause
  • know your own limitations and hire smart people
  • reward loyalty
  • set rules which are clear, fair and universal
  • base your military strategy on clear intelligence and adaptability not wishful thinking or stock solutions
  • in peace train for war
  • be a role model and a symbol
  • plan your succession; develop others
  • use brutality and surprise when required to create terror
  • be intellectually curious
  • “blend humility with intense professional will”

• A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James; read it after my wife recommended it after seeing the author speak at a literary festival; set mostly in Jamaica, with each of several characters taking turns to recount events around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley (who is never directly named); enjoyed it and learned more about that period of Jamaican history; grimly violent in parts

• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford: impulse purchase at Book Cycle Exeter; OK he killed millions, but it was just business, and he had some progressive ideas for that time, such as freedom of religion; very readable book (glossing over issues such as lack/veracity of sources, in favour of readability) about a period of history I didn’t know much about; I hadn’t realised the huge extent of the Mongols’ conquests and contacts with the Christian, Muslim and Chinese worlds; his reputation was always a bit exaggerated (it was good propaganda) but has been rehabilitated to some extent as a great figure of history

• Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach by James Kurose: read it because I am teaching myself computer science/cybersecurity; took me two or three restarts before I managed to finish it (I’ve been reading this on and off for a few years, and when a new version came out I bought that and started again), but (if you are highly motivated to learn and don’t mind reading a textbook) it is very accessible; it doesn’t assume much prior knowledge about computers, though you have to be comfortable with simple mathematical notation, binary and hexadecimal numbers and simple Python code or pseudocode; has a big focus on the functioning of the Internet; explains its layered structure of services (each with protocols and algorithms), starting at the top with the applications that run on the Internet, and then progressively going down; there are some quite deep areas, particularly where networks act as complex dynamic systems (e.g. congestion control, routing, error checking) and some dry areas (e.g. packet queueing) but it definitely filled in several large gaps in what I had learned from tinkering with web servers etc and it is really good on some areas like cryptography which are important for cybersecurity

• Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer: read it because I bought it for my wife after reading a review but she never read it; it is actually two short books, the first an account of a journalist at the Venice Biennale, with lots of art, sex and booze; the second about (probably) the same person during a prolonged stay in Varanasi where he finally goes a bit mad; it was quite funny at times but I can’t think of much else to say about it

• Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser: I had heard the author’s name somewhere and slightly randomly downloaded this from the Gutenberg site as an e-book; it seems like a rather un-American tale of the hardscrabble poverty and hardship of an immigrant family, focussing on the beautiful daughter with a noble soul and what happens to her; there were similarities to Dickens or Zola, or perhaps to Anna of the Five Towns, or to films like Bicycle Thieves; easy to read and moving at times, and I think there is a social message in there somewhere, but most of the characters never really came to life for me

• Cities of the Red Night by William Burroughs: totally random read (someone had left it behind in the place where I stay in Islamabad); seemed like a very weird but inventive and interesting book; a mixture of the occult, human sacrifice, transmigration of souls, time travel, space travel, homoerotic fantasy, clashes between ancient civilisations, a noirish private detective following up missing persons through spiritualism and pagan homosexual rites, references to the ancient and modern cultures in all the places where Burroughs lived and even a bit of epidemiology related to a “radioactive virus”; even a visit to Spetses where I once taught epidemiology; all non-linear, “cut up”, sometimes just consisting of broken phrases; it ends on a bit of a “… and it had all been a dream or a bad trip… or had it?” note; I slightly gave up on it towards the end as it became so cryptic and fractured and there was so much gay sex, but he was definitely a talented guy and it has made me more interested in his (crazy) life and the Beat Generation more generally

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe: I’d seen this book recommended a number of times, but it sat on my shelf for years before I actually read it; it describes a period in the life of a family in a village in today’s Nigeria around the time of the scramble for Africa and the sudden transition from traditional African society to imperial administration and Christian proselytism; all human life is here in this short book: what it is to be a man, what it is to be a woman, struggling for existence, vying for status, expectations and disappointment, social structures, customs, superstition and religion, conflict and violence, random ill fortune, power relationships and powerlessness, human cruelty and stupidity, human kindness; deceptively simple (but actually highly lucid) narration, all conveyed without sentimentality; the characters existed for me to the extent that I took the end of chapter 7 very hard; read this book

• Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor: bought it for my wife and she recommended it; anyone who still thinks that Britain was a benign or benevolent coloniser should read this; Tharoor provides extensive evidence that in the big things India’s British rulers were usually greedy, stupid, cruel and/or racist, creating lasting problems for India; highly intelligent and well-written

• Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: read it because it was on our shelves for some reason; fictional account of the Biafran War in Nigeria, a civil war on ethnic lines; fascinating and I learned more about Nigerian history

• Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse (in English; translation by Creighton & Sorell): read it because it was banned by the Nazis and celebrated in the 60s and yes OK the Nobel Prize; lonely, depressed, middle-aged litterateur (Orientalist?) with failing health and a failed marriage (i.e. autobiographical thus far - written by Hesse at a time of personal crisis), as alienated from both the proto-fascist and licentious sides of Weimar German society as a wolf from the steppes (the recurring metaphor for the self-destructive “sickness of the soul” part of him) meets tragic free spirit Hermine and transcends suffering through free love, drugs and dancing; pretty wild for something published in 1927, ending with a climactic hallucinatory sequence that allows for multiple interpretations; I’m not sure what lessons the book has, but it did make me think deeply about my own (much happier and more “bourgeois”) life and other paths not taken

• The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor: how (and why) the Soviets took Berlin in WW2, thereby ending the war in Europe; read it because I hadn’t read anything by Antony Beevor; as I expected it is the story of the various battles between the Russian and German armies, with walk-on parts for the Allies, the colossal sacrifices on both sides, the privations of civilians, including rape on a massive scale, the crazed leadership of Hitler, the paranoia and manoeuvring of Stalin which ultimately led to the iron curtaining of Europe, the not always impressive roles of Churchill and Roosevelt, the desperate battles for the final key buildings, the suicides of Hitler and other Nazi officials; quite readable but no surprises

• Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (in English): in retrospect I could have read this in French but expecting it to be difficult (and being faster in English) I read it in English; quite a long book with a few major sections; I adored the first part which is an exquisite account of childhood summers spent outside Paris in a small rural town (this is at least partly autobiographical); the main character is a highly sensitive, bookish, artistic soul and the writing is superb at conveying both natural beauty and human psychology (I can see why some people re-read and re-read Proust); the famous theme of the power of memory comes out clearly from here; having introduced some important characters who will appear in later sections, this section ends with an account of the author’s painful unrequited infatuation with the daughter of the neighbouring Swann family, and then we have a lengthy flashback to the years before in Paris, when the somewhat libertine gentleman Swann falls rather tediously in love with the faithless courtesan Odette; there’s a lot on the snobbery of the social circles they move in; Swann eventually gets very jealous and stalkery, and the relationship seems to end, but at the end of the book we flash forward to see that they have married (though Odette still “doesn’t let the grass grow beneath her feet” as my dad would put it); Proust just sees and responds to and finds art in so much detail of life that while I wouldn’t rush into another one just yet I can see myself reading more

• Capital by John Lanchester: readable but insubstantial novel about various Londoners in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis; not usually the sort of thing I go for but I read it because I enjoy the author’s articles in the London Review of Books; you will probably enjoy it if you know more about London than I do

• A West Pointer with the Boers by John Y. Fillmore Blake: an alternative perspective on the Boer War (aka South African War), from an Irish-American fighting alongside the Boers; read it slightly randomly after browsing the Gutenberg site; interesting for how hated the English/British were by many (not least by Irish nationalists) for this war of aggression, motivated by the Transvaal goldfields; also for how badly the British fought, the unconscionable treatment of civilians and the extensive use of propaganda/press manipulation; as you might expect gives a very favourable account of the Boers and little attention to any indigenous peoples

• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (in English; Lowe-Porter translation): read it because of the Nobel Prize; I had previously read Mann’s Lotte in Weimar, expecting it to be some sort of sequel to the exhilarating doomed love story in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and was a bit disappointed; the summary of this book (the declining fortunes of a bourgeois late 19th century North German family of grain merchants) doesn’t do it justice; it is actually an affecting humanistic portrayal of real men, women and children trapped by the expectations of their caste and society and trying unsuccessfully to stifle their true natures to do their duty; it is also a detailed ethnographic description of a group of people in a specific period of German history, with wars and revolutions lightly sketched in the background; now I have tuned in to Mann I look forward to reading his other books

• The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham: condensed account of the competition between colonial powers in Africa during 1876-1912 (when seven European countries carved up 90% of Africa); read it because I enjoyed reading his book on the Boer War (while on holiday in South Africa); mostly written from the perspective of the European (and particularly British) protagonists, and based on extensive reading of published and unpublished European sources; fairly honest about the varying mix of mercantile greed, racial superiority, religion and national rivalry that motivated colonialism, under the cover of (sometimes genuine) good intentions to e.g. stop slavery, and the cruelty and countless atrocities that resulted; engagingly written, it succinctly covers a lot of ground in the nearly 700 pages, but in a popular history book like this there’s little room for deeper inquiry; massacres and forced labour are given less prominence than European politics; disappointingly, despite the author’s generally ironic detachment throughout the book, it ends on this note, as though the ends justify the means, that there were no conceivable alternatives, and that freedom and human dignity were exclusively European aspirations:

Yet how many Africans would wish to turn the clock back to the 1880s? The steamers and airlines of the world now bring material benefits to the forty-seven new states of the continent on a scale undreamt of a century ago. Best of all, Europe has given Africa the aspirations for freedom and human dignity, the humanitarian ideals of Livingstone, even if Europe itself was seldom able to live up to them.

• La Route des Flandres by Claude Simon: read it for no other reason than because the author won a Nobel Prize; had to get used to the unpunctuated Nouveau Roman stream of consciousness style, where most narrative conventions are rejected in favour of a fragmentary accumulation of memories, imaginings and fantasies, which in this book are related to the pointless wartime death of a close relative, which encapsulates the entire futility of war and the humiliation of France; events partly mirror the author’s own experience as a soldier and prisoner of war, down to the details of the smells, the sounds, the dirt, the rain, the fatigue; not an easy read; sentences run over multiple pages, with disorientating segues or overlaps between speakers or scenes (or between reality and imagination); it is also the first book I have read in French for a while; but in summary a deep, poetic and emotionally authentic work

• Typhoid Mary by Anthony Bourdain: short account of the life of the unfortunate (but reckless) typhoid carrier Mary Mallon, written by a fellow cook; sympathetically tries to understand her motivations (there is little to go on) and historical context to counter previous more sensationalistic accounts; other than revelations such as overworked cooks not always washing their hands probably adds little new; fails to find much controversy; people did repeatedly die due to her actions, though he sometimes seems to be minimising this: Two people were said to have died; her deprivation of liberty, though ethically difficult, was legal, humane and justified by what she did when released the first time

• Auto da Fe by Elias Canetti: read it I think because someone gave it to me; set between the wars (but published after WW2), it is the story of a reclusive Austrian Orientalist who lives only for books and scholarship; an account of his slide from eccentricity into madness and self-destruction, told through the interior self-justifying monologues of the main character and those who seek to exploit him; the obvious symbolism is that if we each follow our internal obsessional logic to its extreme then it ends in violence and destruction of people and culture; one of those books (like later Beckett) which makes you feel slightly insane while you are reading it

• Democracy On The Road by Ruchir Sharma: a journalist’s personal account of the last twenty years of Indian democracy; read it because of a personal recommendation; Sharma is a US-based journalist, originally from India as covered in the first chapter; fascinating picture of Indian democracy: hundreds of political parties, first-past-the-post system, shifting alliances and unstable coalitions, increasing importance of state elections, voting along caste lines, anti-incumbency bias, sympathy votes for politicians who have been to jail, ingratitude to seemingly successful governments, the decline of political dynasties, routinely illegal campaign funding, pork barrel spending, and much more; yet democracy seems secure, and strong (or unpredictable) enough to withstand the rise of a Putin or Erdoğan strongman figure, whatever the concerns about recent developments; however India’s democracy notably doesn’t prevent the atrocious sectarian mob violence that periodically arises; Sharma travels thousands of miles in convoys with fellow journalists, visits numerous political rallies and interviews many major political figures, while also chronicling the uneven economic rise of India, most apparent to the travelling journalist in the quality of roads and hotels; probably not a book to read without any prior knowledge of Indian history and geography, but insightful and well-written

• Enderby by Anthony Burgess (a single volume containing the first three Enderby novels): read it because I had read a couple of his earlier novels (The Doctor Is Sick, which I had picked up randomly in a bookshop, and later A Clockwork Orange, which is somewhat different from his other novels) and liked his fascination with language; this one is about the (supposedly comic in the vein of Tom Sharpe) misadventures of an ageing poet, with some features familiar from his other books such as unhappy relationships, lapsed Roman Catholicism, two-dimensional female or foreign characters, excessive drinking and erudition, and a fascination with the seamier side of sex among the working class or foreigners; the main character (or perhaps the author?) seems to despise the sociocultural innovations of the 1960s, as perhaps the wartime generation did, and is also an unreconstructed racist and misogynist; there is a lot of bad poetry (I mean a lot; if it is a joke then it wears thin); it was possibly regarded as edgy in its day but really hasn’t aged well

• The Art of War by Sun Tzu, translated by Thomas Cleary (no relation): short, aphoristic manual on warfare, with supposedly relevant messages for today e.g. The Way means inducing the people to have the same aim as the leadership, so that they will share death and share life, without fear of danger.; read it because it has come up in various “great books” lists such as this one and also because I am increasingly expected to take on leadership roles (despite reluctance on my part) and thought this might help; there is something relevant on the roles and qualities expected of a leader (e.g. formlessness - I like that term), but a lot more on having a better strategy than your enemy (or competitor) which might be more applicable in a business setting.

• Moby Dick by Herman Melville: a book I felt I should read but was not expecting to enjoy; finished it while slightly delirious from yet another viral infection, which undoubtedly heightened the later chapters; even if you haven’t read it you probably know that it is a story of fatal obsession with a whale, but the book is actually a mixture of an adventure narrative with lengthy disquisitions on subjects like cetology and worldwide ocean travel, and other writing of a more metaphysical nature - it is like Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin took turns writing the chapters; it is not an easy read but the actual story is interesting and ultimately gripping, despite the high-flown archaic language (lots of words that usually mean something else today!) and the inevitable, much-omened outcome; with other books fresh in mind I thought I saw stylistic playfulness and some classic Orientalist stereotypes; overall I would encourage others to read it but not expect to enjoy it, and they will probably get more out of it than they expected. See also this review.

• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace: read it I think because I came across a Reddit thread about it; took me a while and more than one attempt to get into it, as it’s rather “non-linear”; it’s also huge, over 1,000 pages including many footnotes; IJ is a detailed (and sometimes very funny) dystopian vision of the future USA, as seen from the 90s, following the fortunes of quite a few seemingly disconnected characters from elite tennis juniors to government officials to terrorists to various colourful characters with (or recovering from) addiction and mental health issues; if I’m honest I probably enjoyed the bits about the addicts most, which I understand were informed to some extent by personal experience, and it rang true from my own experience (of working with addicts rather than addiction per se); he is unsurprisingly insightful about suicide (the author later committed suicide); there is joy for the reader in his deft humorous touches, playful language and brilliant descriptive flair, but he does make you work for it (apparently deliberately); if I live long enough to read it again (and I might) I would use the extensive footnotes and the wiki for the full experience.

• Orientalism by Edward Said: read it probably because it was mentioned in relation to TE Lawrence who I have previously read a lot about, e.g. Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Setting The Desert On Fire by my friend James Barr; Said was a Palestinian-American literary academic who made the case that the “Western” (meaning mainly UK, France and US) view of the “East”/“Orient” (his main focus is probably Arabs and Islam, but India, China and Indochina are also mentioned) has often been a useful (or harmful, depending on your viewpoint) caricature, often or even particularly in academic studies, and that that has fed into colonialism, conflict and cultural disdain. The first edition came out in the 70s around the time of the Six Day War and consequent oil embargoes. It is beautifully written and erudite and seems surprisingly fresh and relevant today. I found his arguments coherent and compelling, though did occasionally wonder if he was reading too much in e.g. the sexualised language he detects in texts about the “East” (penetrating the Orient), particularly towards the end where he is describing modern Orientalism and seems occasionally less detached and perhaps even angry. His solutions: humanism; intellectual exchange; see the individual diversity not the the monolithic distancing abstractions/stereotypes. He had a fair few critics (if not enemies) and there have been misinterpretations of his work (e.g. that it is anti-Western; that he is selective with sources; that he wants to make Orientalism a dirty word) but he defends his thesis persuasively in an afterword and preface written later. Thoroughly recommended for anyone looking at the “East” from the “West”, or thinking of penetrating the Orient.

Pre-2023 (mainly 2022 as I read hardly anything in the two years before that)

• Public Health Informatics: Designing for Change - A Developing Country Perspective by Sahay et al: probably the most relevant book to my current job; my notes and reflections here

• Erewhon, or Over The Range by Samuel Butler: Victorian-era adventure story/thinly-disguised critique of contemporary society; read it because it apparently prefigures artificial general intelligence; starts well but some chapters hard-going if you’re not living the hypocrisy of Victorian mores.

• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein: read it because it is where the geek word “grok” (as in deeply understand) comes from; 60s science fiction tale of a human born on Mars returning to Earth with supernatural powers and creating a hippie religion; interesting at first but the emphasis is very much on the hippie religion later on.

• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami: recommended by friends; austere style, mostly conversations; didn’t really care what happened to the characters.

• Peeling the Onion by Günter Grass: read it as the first part is his account of the war years (when he joined the Waffen SS; he seems honest about his complicity with some of what was going on in Germany); the rest is a less interesting account of his early artistic career post-war.

• Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett: read it because I live in Stoke-on-Trent; early 20th century novel set in the Potteries; interesting to learn about the period but the story is unmemorable.

• A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: read it for contemporary resonances and there are lots.

• The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers: hard to describe but I enjoyed it; all about friendship and loneliness.

• Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton: again hard to describe (another “slice of life” book) but touching and sad; enjoyed it.

• A Gentleman of Leisure by P.G. Wodehouse: read it because my Dad always recommended him but I need more than flashes of witty sarcasm and arch conversation.

• HTML5: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald: the edition I had was probably a bit out of date, as this kind of book quickly becomes, so skimmed through some bits; most interesting where it summarises the history and controversies of the development of web standards.

• Arsène Lupin by Maurice LeBlanc and others: read it after watching the modern TV adaptation; thought I was reading the first book in the series but it turned out to be a play originally, rewritten as a novel by someone else; mainly driven by the battle of wits between the detective and the audacious thief, but you can see what’s coming a long way off; maybe I should try another one.

• My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell: possible re-read, because I read one of his when I was in my teens and loved it; also because I was on holiday in Corfu; not as funny as I remembered

• Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev: read it because my first-year room mate at university used to quote Turgenev (while I was studying anatomy and wishing I was studying French); a student invites his disagreeable nihilist friend from university to his home in boring rural Russia, at a time of massive social change; you’re not sure which side the author is on (e.g. old versus young, science versus tradition), though one protagonist does seem to question his own beliefs and then die later on; a gloomy read but made me a lot more interested in the historical context.

Books I want to get back to

• Geschichte Europas: Von der Völkerwanderung bis zur Reformation by Henri Pirenne: similar long-term project in German; Belgian historian who was interned during WW1 and gave lectures on European history from memory, later basing this book on them; another big book covering the period from the Dark Ages to the Reformation, highlighting the many continuities rather than seeing it as a total collapse of civilisation; got a couple of hundred pages in but have lost my place and definitely need to restart.

• Statistical Inference by Roger Berger and George Casella: was drawn to it as it covers several fundamental areas I felt I only partly assimilated during my MSc; also it holds your hand on the maths more than other books I could mention; I think I read the first chapter but the dodgy second-hand print copy I have is badly printed and has bits missing.

At a rate of 16 books per year (approx. 20 pages per day) I can read 528 books before I die at the predicted age of 88, assuming reasonable compression of morbidity.