I’m a big fan of William Boyd. Late last year, I went to the Wimbledon Book Festival to see him interviewed and talk about “Gabriel’s Moon,” his new book. The event wasn’t just about the book, though he did read the prologue. I was predisposed to like him, of course, but I thought he came across well. Smart but not pretentious, aware of his success but hadn’t let it define him. Although I hadn’t planned to, I bought a copy of the book and got it signed.

As Tim Minchin cynically notes in the prologue [affiliate link], universities hand out honorary degrees for good PR. As a well known, articulate, and talented individual, Minchin has received a number of them and this book is the transcript of the speeches he gave when accepting three of them.

If you’ve seen any of his live performances, you’ll be able to hear him speaking as you read through. Each has that easy flow that makes his work so good. Of course, anyone who has written or performed knows that kind of “easy flow” takes a lot of work. Effortless is difficult.

After exceeding my goal of twelve books last year, I went in completely the other direction in 2024 with only five books completed.

I did, however, read an unusual mix by my standards. Only two of the books were non-fiction. So, even with the smaller number, I still managed to read more novels than I normally do. And the standard was high, too. I don’t think any of them were classics but I enjoyed them all. Not bad result!

You can’t say this book [affiliate link] lacks ambition. Jon Alexander describes the next phase of organising a society.

The challenge is that some of the definitions are quite subtle. They’re well argued in the text, but if you asked me to relay that information, I’m not sure I could. Or at least, it wouldn’t be concise or easy to digest.

He starts by defining what a Citizen is. It’s not about the country you live in, or voting or paying taxes. Rather, it’s what comes after the Subject Story (ruled by monarchs) and the Consumer Society (ruled by choice).

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I’m surprised this didn’t get more of a response when I posted it on Mastodon, to be honest. A while ago I was talking about sci-fi books with a colleague. He was amazed I had a copy and practically begged to borrow it. (Unlike Peopleware, I did get it back!)

It is the definitive collection of cyberpunk short-stories. Much of what I wrote about Neuromancer could be written about Mirrorshades [affiliate link], so I won’t repeat myself.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I lent “Peopleware” [affiliate link] to a friend at some point but never got it back. I supposed they valued it as much as I do. I should probably buy the newer edition at some point.

I’m not sure if this book was the epiphany or it just happened around the same time, but at worst it was a major influence. The epiphany was that the really hard challenges in computer science were not the technical ones but the ones around people. It doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable to work on technical problems or solve them. But the challenges organising and getting people to communicate and work together effectively and build the right thing (rather than the interesting thing that we want to build) are also important, possibly more important.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

“Neuromancer” [affiliate link] probably needs no introduction. I may not reference it as often as Hitchhikers Guide, but if you know anything about me, I doubt you’d be surprised that I include it here.

When I first read it, I’d not used, maybe never even heard of, the Internet. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to plug my brain into a computer but the idea of a global computer-based hallucination is something we now all experience every day. Maybe not exactly as Gibson wrote. Well, hopefully not.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Sadly, another one of those “what happened to the author” books. As much as I don’t want to be a gatekeeper, Dawkins might well have been better sticking to evolution rather than branch out into religion and trans issues (the former in which he’s forthright but not original and the latter where he’s just wrong).

But whatever happened since, “The Selfish Gene” [affiliate link] itself is a classic. It’s where the word “meme” came from, and memes are everywhere these days! It’s well written and makes a difficult subject understandable. It refined my thinking about evolution, the scientific process and science writing in general.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

The concept is right there in the title: Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. Is it possible to use a machine gun to create a jet pack? How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge from London to New York? How high can a human throw things?

In that sense, “What if?” [affiliate link] is another one of those “backwards” choices. The book itself is only ten years old but I think my love of taking absurd questions seriously goes back much further. I do it often when my kids ask silly questions, but Munroe is able to do it with a lot more scientific and mathematical rigour. I love the concept, and it’s executed pretty much perfectly.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I was an atheist long before the four horsemen arrived on the scene in the mid-2000s. Their writing did clarify my thinking and made me consider aspects that I’d not come across before. Like How to be a Liberal, it also gave me names for concepts that I had previously been aware of.

I probably could have put any of the Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens or Dennett [affiliate links] books in the list, but there’s something about Hitchens takes-no-prisoners writing that pipped the others to the post here. (I found Dennett’s a little disappointing, to be honest. Probably a good thing I never did philosophy at university.)