All the books I read in 2018

52 weeks, 53 books.

Never again

Not that you should ever say that. I did it quite handily a few times before, the last time being 9 years ago (not coincidentally, my daughter will be 9 this year). But at times this felt like an effort when reading should be a joy, and there were things I probably should have been spending time on other than hitting this meaningless target.

And it is kind of meaningless - just look at this list, which gives equal weight to Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and Rainbow Dash and the Daring Do Double Dare - but targets help you focus and it did mean I again made good progress on the many, many unread books on my shelves (damn those 3-for-2s).

I've already started to take it easier in 2019, not just reading books but also making headway against those articles I have in my 528+ open Firefox tabs (maybe the problem wasn't the 3-for-2s).

I started the year diligently ploughing through my Christmas presents (unread gift books weigh heavier on my conscience), beginning with Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher. I find languages fascinating, notwithstanding my inability to learn them, and this exploration of how language influences thought necessarily provides many interesting and extreme examples.

The next gift was Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, a book I enjoyed a lot more than I expected. After being a big fan for quite a while I went lukewarm on his writing some time around The Graveyard Book, which I felt at the time that it seemed to have been written with adaptation in mind and was a little too formulaic and Gaimanesque. These concerns don't really affect a work like this though and possibly as a result his writing shines through; I certainly found it very nice to read.

The third and final gift, the Myrrh of my Christmas reading, was the excellent Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View a collection of 40 short stories weaving around the events of the original film mostly using incidental characters. It's very different to the traditional Expanded Universe stories, but it does what it does very well and there are some especially funny tales (An Incident Report, where the chap who got Force-choked in the conference room on the Death Star lodges an official complaint with Imperial HR about Vader's behaviour is a joy).

With obligations out of the way, the first book of my own choosing I read this year was Eugenia Cheng's Beyond Infinity. I enjoyed her Cakes, Custard and Category Theory a lot a few years back and am always up for some popular maths reading, and this is one of the best I have read, explaining mind-boggling concepts with remarkable clarity.

One of my favourite series of books, and very useful if you need short books to pad out a reading marathon, is Object Lessons. The first one I read this year was Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton. If I'm being honest, this was about a year ago and I don't remember a lot about it other than that I enjoyed it.

The next one I could hardly forget though. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Yes, he was a terrible bigot and no, you can't always separate that fact from his work. You need to keep it in mind. But his imagination and story telling have exerted a power over me since reading At the Mountains of Madness many years ago, startling images and concepts that get under my skin and lead to vivid memories. When reading the latter I still remember, for instance, sitting in the old St. Pancras station waiting for my train while I read about the giant albino penguins and the approaching unnamed horror. This time I remember sitting in the dining room at sunset while a character looks out over the town to the church where some similar horror has set itself up in the bell tower that he will soon go to face.

Born to Run is a book that had been sitting on my shelf for most of a decade after a strong recommendation from a friend, and I really should have gotten round to it sooner. One of those very compellingly written journalistic accounts of unusual people and situations. Almost enough to get me running. Almost.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was recommended to me many times by a colleague as being "the best book about software engineering" he knew, and I can see what he was getting at. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, but at the same time it feels a bit too in love with the author's pet theory which I never found fully convincing.

One author I've been meaning to read more by since reading The Ballad of Peckham Rye is Muriel Spark, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie did not disappoint. Maybe not quite as funny as Ballad but very clever and more touching.

I used to re-read books a lot up until my mid-20s but that has fallen away, to some extent due to realising my own mortality at the time and wanting to read as many different things as possible. I've mellowed a bit since then, and so for my first re-read in quite some time I picked Pride and Prejudice. This is mostly because my daughter has grown to love the classic BBC adaptation and I've been through it about 4 times in the past 18 months, so it felt like a good idea to go back to the source and not develop false memories based on scenes only on the show. It turns out that the adaptation is remarkably faithful, and the book is still great.

I tend to be a bit of a Japanophile (while doing my best not to be a weebo) especially when it comes to craft and design; I love those elaborate lacquerware sets where boxes open out into many other boxes and pieces which nominally serve some functional purpose but are somehow amazing in themselves. The book In Praise of Shadows is a Japanese writer's reflection on the principles behind all this and fittingly is very nice to read in its own right.

My second Object Lessons book this year is Silence. As a Quiet Person the subject is close to my heart and I got a lot from this book, which for the first time made me appreciate John Cage's 4'33" as something other than a joke or curiosity.

Lingo: A language spotter's guide to Europe is my second language book of the year, and to be perfectly honest I don't remember it very well. I vaguely recall it has a short chapter on each official European language and that I didn't find it as funny as the author seemed to think it was.

One of the most memorable books I read this year was David Simon's epic Homicde: A Year on the Killing Streets. Not an easy read, but at the same time so utterly gripping I ploughed through all 645 pages like lightning and found myself missing the book when I'd done. In some ways there are as many lessons in there about software development as with Zen; I used their working practices when picking up a case to inspire our new incident handling guidelines on my team at work...

In something of a change of pace I then went to Princess Cadance and the Glitter Heart Garden, a My Little Pony tie-in novel that my daughte insist I read after she finished it. Of all the cartoons I sometimes end up watching with her MLP is easily one of the best, funny and clever and warm without being self consciously quirky, and this book by one of the show's writers captures it all perfectly and is remarkably subversive; as I described it to a friend it's basically about a delinquent young pony stealing her anti-royalist grandfather's secret seed stash and growing flowers that cause all the Ponies in Crystal City to get so high they can't get anything done. And I'm pretty sure the author knew what she was writing.

Naturally I followed this up with Tacitus' Histories, of which I don't recall very much other than his being quite witty and my struggling to keep track of all the historical figures. The kind of book I should have spent more time over than rushing to make it part of reading 52 books in a year.

I've read all of Mary Beard's books so far and they have all been excellent, as was Women and Power, a pair of essays that I believe were originally talks. Inspiring and angry, quite rightly.

The Art of Choosing is a pop-psych book that I know I enjoyed reading but I'm damned if can tell you anything about it 9 months later.

I've been missing second hand book shops since moving to Berlin (I know they exist here but my German is far from what it should be), and Gods and Myths of Northern Europe was a great find, the kind of highly readable yet serious book by a noted academic that I only associate with Pelican books of the 60s / 70s.

The Design and Engineering of Curiosity by Emily Lakdawalla was a definite highlight of the year (disclaimer: I work for the publisher), a technical and academic yet enthusiastic and gripping account of NASA's Mars rover project. I am looking forward to the second volume about the mission and science this year.

My second daughter-dictated dip in to MLP was Princess Luna and the Winter Moon Festival again by G.M. Berrow. Not as subversive as the Princess Cadence book but once again capturing the feel of the TV show very well, and Luna's introverted personality was surprisingly well written.

My third Object Lessons book this year was Burger by noted feminist Carol J. Adams. It's an eye-opener, well written, and made me hungry.

Joanna Walsh is an author I first encountered through Object Lessons with her excellent volume Hotel, and I finally got round to reading something else by her with her short story collection Worlds from the Word's End. I'd be lying if I said I remembered any of the stories in detail at this point, but I do remember enjoying it and that the hit rate was high.

Now I get into my first batch of Doctor Who Target novelisations, all finds from my old local second hand book shop in Greenwich. I loved these as a kid, and probably still know more classic Who through them than through the TV show. My Grandma, who sadly passed away this year, always encouraged me to read them and I have fond memories of her buying them for me every so often on Saturday mornings from Dillons on Nottingham's Wheeler Gate.

First up is Edge of Destruction by Nigel Robinson, one of the shorter early TV stories which benefits from having more room to breathe as a novel. Surprisingly gripping. Then we have Timelash by Glen McCoy which is... less impressive. Graeme Curry's The Happiness Patrol is truly excellent however. A vastly underrated and misremembered TV story adapted in a way that possibly realises the author's intent better than live action at the time could. In what should stand as a contrast to Edge of Destruction, War Games by Malcolm Hulke adapts a particularly long and incident-filled story and yet succeeds in doing so without it feeling at all rushed. The Mind Robber by Peter Ling arguably actually works much better in this medium. The War Machines by Ian Stuart Black may not be the finest story but it's fun and has a certain charm and I found it very evocative of London; it made me a little homesick for the place.

I've been regularly going to Sicily in the summer for a few years now, but I remember just before the first time a colleague asking me if I'd been watching Inspector Montalbano, and recommending it to me. It took me a while to follow up on this, and not having much time for watching TV I instead picked up Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories by Andrea Camillieri and read it over the course of 2018's Sicilian holiday. It's really quite charming, though I can imagine if I were Sicilian I'd be rolling my eyes much as I do when someone mentions Midsummer Murders.

The next language book is Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation by David Bellos, again with lots of fascinating examples and anecdotes though I recall finding the tone a little opinionated and arrogant at times.

Apparently I then read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, but I'd be lying if I told you I could remember a thing about it. On Twitter I claimed to enjoy it a lot, so there is that.

The next one though I remember very well, some parts vividly: Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith is a sort of pop-science journalism piece about Cephalopods; though the title focuses on the octopus it's the parts about cuttlefish which stick most clearly in my mind, not least of all the author's surprisingly moving description of being present at one's death of old age. Highly recommended. I may struggle to eat any octopus salad or fried squid on my next Sicilian holiday.

Back in Ponyville now with Rainbow Dash and the Daring Do Double Dare by G. M. Berrow, which again was fun and I somehow still remember a brilliantly set up joke involving Pinkie Pie and a name tag misunderstanding at a book club.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf leapt toward the top of my to-read pile thanks to an episode of the BBC's In Our Time in 2017 which made it sound far more fascinating than I had expected, and it did not disappoint. Very glad I read this.

Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith is, I believe, based on a some episodes of a BBC TV series on art history by Mary Beard that I haven't seen, but as usual with Beard they are highly readable and witty and insightful.

I then got a little bit bogged down in The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain by Ian Mortimer - it's a detailed look at a period of history I've particularly found fascinating since reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, but I felt it went into a bit more detail than was necessary, or at least than I wanted at the time. I seem to recall this almost derailed my book-a-week attempt.

The Object Lessons series then provided another winner with Password by Martin Paul Eve, which starts with a fascinating analogy between a labyrinth and a password and ends with some insightful writing on the concept of identity theft.

About five years ago a software developer colleague recommended my Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine and at the glacial pace I approach life I finally got round to it. Another of those great American embedded journalism pieces, it was incredibly compelling and felt surprisingly relevant all these decades later.

I followed this with something much more like work reading, 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation by Gregor Hohpe. At the time I was in an architect role, though people playing organisational politics and reshuffling took that away from me, so its relevance to my day-to-day work has diminished but I'm still glad I read it (next I should probably reread Machiavelli to avoid that kind of thing happening to me again).

Though I've only been there once, unlike Sicily, I had an excellent holiday in Naples a few years back, a city which made a big impression on me, as does the first book of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, My Brilliant Friend. I have used the word compelling a lot in this article, but none of those earlier instances touch this; time and energy permitting I'm sure I could read this in a single sitting.

For a stark change of pace I then went into my second Target novelisation binge: The Mind of Evil by Terrance Dicks is as fun as the TV version; The Time Meddler by Nigel Robinson is a great story, and one I have yet to see on-screen; The Time Monster, again by Dicks as they all are from now on, was a bit of a mess as a story but still entertaining; The Monster of Peladon is relatively weak, enlivened by some good character moments; Meglos is excellent, possibly works better as a novel than a TV serial; The Three Doctors has a lot of fun with the interaction between them and some good world-building; The Stones of Blood is one I had as a kid and was happy to reread, but it's hard to give an opinion untainted by nostalgia; The Underworld was much better than I expected, though my expectations were low. I've picked up a new pile of these for 2019, and I'm looking forward to it!

I attended the GOTO Berlin conference in November where Simon Singh gave a keynote speech, and I impulsively bought a signed copy of The Code Book directly afterwards. It's one I'd been meaning to read anyway, and is an excellent and entertaining introduction to cryptography, with the clearest explanations of RSA, PGP, etc. that I've ever read.

Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim is pretty much work-reading, but if you work in software in any role then it ought to be necessary; a look at development practices especially with respect to DevOps backed up with real research. Something surprisingly lacking in this industry.

My second space science book this year is Chasing New Horizons by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, about the long-running Pluto mission from pre-history to the days following the historic fly by. Inspiring.

I finished the year with a book that has been in my to-read pile, following me from home to university to work to a new country, since I was a teenager: Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters. As an Expanded Universe novel it's a very different kettle of fish to the often darkly humourous A Certain Point of View, with a tendency to earnestness and attempting to make some of the bounty hunters too sympathetic; indeed, the story that probably works best is Bossk's tale which is told from the point of view of some new characters, eliciting no sympathy and adding some tension.

The full list

1: Through the Language Glass - Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher 2: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman 3: Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View by various 4: Beyond Infinity by Eugenia Cheng 5: Object Lessons: Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton 6: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P.Lovecraft 7: Born to Run by Christopher McDougall 8: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig 9: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark 10: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 11: In Praise of Shadows by Junichirō Tanizaki (trans. Thomas J. Harper & Edward G. Seidensticker) 12: Object Lessons: Silence by John Biguenet 13: Lingo: A language spotter's guide to Europe by Gaston Dorren 14: Homicide by David Simon 15: Princess Cadance and the Glitter Heart Garden by G.M. Berrow 16: The Histories by Tacitus (trans. W.H. Fyfe and D.S. Levine) 17: Women & Power by Mary Beard 18: The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar 19: Gods and Myths of Northern Europe by H.R.Ellis Davidson 20: The Design and Engineering of Curiosity by Emily Lakdawalla 21: Princess Luna and the Winter Moon Festival by G.M. Berrow 22: Burger by Carol J. Adams 23: Worlds from the Word's End by Joanna Walsh 24: Doctor Who - The Edge of Destruction by Nigel Robinson 25: Doctor Who - Timelash by Glen McCoy 26: Doctor Who - The Happiness Patrol by Graeme Curry 27: Doctor Who and the War Games by Malcolm Hulke 28: Doctor Who - The Mind Robber by Peter Ling 29: Doctor Who - The War Machines by Ian Stuart Black 30: Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories by Andrea Camillieri (trans. Stephen Sartarelli) 31: Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation by David Bellos 32: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Michael Hulse) 33: Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith 34: Rainbow Dash and the Daring Do Double Dare by G. M. Berrow 35: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf 36: Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith by Mary Beard 37: The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain by Ian Mortimer 38: Object Lessons: Password by Martin Paul Eve 39: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder 40: 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation by Gregor Hohpe 41: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (trans. Ann Goldstein) 42: Doctor Who - The Mind of Evil by Terrance Dicks 43: Doctor Who - The Time Meddler by Nigel Robinson 44: Doctor Who - The Time Monster by Terrance Dicks 45: Doctor Who and the Monster of Peladon by Terrance Dicks 46: Doctor Who - Meglos by Terrance Dicks 47: Doctor Who - The Three Doctors by Terrance Dicks 48: Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood by Terrance Dicks 49: Doctor Who and the Underworld by Terrance Dicks 50: The Code Book by Simon Singh 51: Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim 52: Chasing New Horizons by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon 53: Star Wars - Tales of the Bounty Hunters by various