2024 Reading List
Some highlights of what I’ve read this year. I’m a painfully slow reader, but if I manage to get through anything else before January, I’ll update this.
Read so far:
- Chip War - Chris Miller
- Dracula - Bram Stoker
- Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari
- Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Weaving the Web - Tim Berners-Lee
- The Bees - Laline Paull
Chip War
by Chris Miller
I heard an interview with Chris Miller on Ezra Klein’s podcast and had Chip War on my reading list since. I started this as an audiobook, which was a bit heavy going.
On paper, it rattles along through the post-war changes to the world economy and how these increasingly tiny chunks of silicon - the eponymous ‘chips’ - were shaping that economy.
Essential reading to understand Russia through the Cold War (and perhaps some of its doctrinal weaknesses in Ukraine today), and why China might eventually increase hostilities towards Taiwan.
Chip War does a great job of framing the semiconductor supply chain - illustrating many of the perplexing bottlenecks and immense technical challenges in the manufacturing process that puts impossibly small microchips into the latest iPhone or the next Google Pixel.
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
Dracula is probably something I should have read as a teenager. Each passing chapter felt like the birth of new horror tropes and gothic motifs. Reading it I finally understand countless cultural references and those slightly weird spin-off movies Van Helsing and Renfield. Thinking about it, the character of Renfield is as engrossing (emphasis on gross) now as it must have been in 1897, when Dracula was published.
Iconic, and makes me want to take a trip back to Whitby.
Homo Deus
by Yuval Noah Harari
I didn’t find Harari’s follow up to the incredibly popular Sapiens quite as easy a read, struggling to find the through-line as intuitively. There’s a perspective changing portion on evolution and free will that I found made the book though.
Children of Time
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I turned the final pages of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time on the last day of my week long solo holiday to the tiny Greek island of Ano Koufonisi - quite swift reading for me.
One of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read - and I’m not a newbie. Tchaikovsky’s purposeful arachnid world-building here is elevated through themes of evolution, intelligence and enlightment. Not for the spider phobic!
Weaving the Web
by Tim Berners-Lee
From one type of web to another - completely unintentionally. I acquired this from a charity shop and it’s been silently situated on my bookshelf for a decade. Perhaps because of a particular presentation I’ve been giving at work recently, I’ve finally started acquianting myself with this old account of the birth of the web.
It’s not the most poetic prose, reading, at times, more like 90’s diary entries. However, it’s a perfect time capsule of a different, exciting era, pubished the same year the first Matrix movie released. There’s a chapter which references this new thing being worked on, the Document Object Model (DOM), which scrambled my head a bit - I can’t imagine a time without that.
Berners-Lee is generous in sharing the credit with his contemporaries, and his vision for what the web is and could be is genuinely inspiring. Important study in modern times of tech billionaires, social media misinformation and privacy regulation. Themes, coincidentally, that inventor of the web wrote on with piercing clarity a quarter of century ago.
The Bees
by Laline Paull
Jen has been urging me for a while to start this, but for whatever reason I felt disinclined. A few chapters in though, and I had wished I’d began The Bees ages ago.
It’s an interesting companion piece, albeit a very different genre, to Children of Time. Paull’s characterisation of the hive and home of honey bee Flora 717 and her experience of a world steeped as much in dogma and authoritarianism as it is in wax and nectar is a sensorial treat. Easy reading, but that’s perhaps because the imagery is painted with seeming effortlessness.
I watched an interview recently with Laline Paull where she cited Richard Adams’ Watership Down as inspiration. That has been on my bookshelf for as long as Weaving the Web, but The Bees has put it somewhat higher on my reading list now.