This is my first full year of reading books only in Apple Books, and I set myself a (for me) lofty goal of reading 24 books over the year. I ended up reading 30 books and listening to 9 audiobooks.

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

If I’m being frank, I dearly wanted to put the big, clever Vaclac Smil book at the top of my list for this year. I read it towards the start of the year, and it stayed in the top spot until November, when I read Piranesi, which was too much of a joy to not top the list. It’s short, and gripping, and has depth and fantastic characters. It’s in the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell universe, but you don’t have to have read that to enjoy Piranesi. That’s all I’ll say about it, because it’s really best to know nothing else. Go and read it!

Energy and Civilization: A History - Vaclav Smil

Here is the big clever Vaclav Smil book, knocked down to second place, but still very good.

The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells

As a very early and original work of sci-fi, The War of the Worlds is a fascinating piece of history. But it’s also thoroughly enjoyable in its own right, even to a modern audience. It has charming prose too!

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect - Roger Williams

This is an exploration of what a post-singularity world might be like, I think it’s really good! A lot of people online find the violence to be gratuitous and unnecessary. It’s certainly gratuitous, but I think it earnt its place. I didn’t really “agree” with the ending though.

Failed State - Sam Freedman

I think Sam Freedman provides the best analysis of domestic issues in the UK. Or at least most of the issues I’m interested in (other than energy, which isn’t really his field). Accordingly, this book doesn’t disappoint.

It was rushed to the press when Rishi Sunak announced an early election, because it was always intended to be a sort of lobbying of the incoming Labour government. Unfortunately I think the government have done almost none of what is recommended. So I guess we’ll have to try again in four nine fourteen(?) years.

The Rationalists - Tom Chivers 🎧

I thought this was good, and I thought this review was good. Chivers talks about how one prominent member of the community was standoffish to him and wouldn’t speak on the record out of a fear of being stitched up by a journalist. I’m almost certain that person was Scott Alexander, and that’s a shame. I really don’t think he’d have been stitched up.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back - Daniel Dennett

I read this book from cover to cover, and unfortunately I still don’t understand consciousness. Obviously that’s not a surprise, but I’m also not sure I understand what the illusionist view of consciousness—which is to say Dennett’s position—is. But no one should be put off by this. It’s a very good book on science, evolution, and cultural evolution. I think the core idea in the book is that humans became conscious when they took the machinery they use to predict the behaviour of other humans, and turned it inwards on themselves. I don’t know whether that’s right, or partially right, but it’s certainly interesting.

That idea made me slightly lower my (high) credence in animal consciousness. But I still don’t understand why it feels like something to be me. I think maybe Dennett would have said it doesn’t actually feel like something to be me, but I’m pretty sure it does…

Not the End of the World - Hannah Ritchie

Hannah Ritchie writes really good stuff for Our World in Data (OWID), so I was excited for this book as soon as it was announced. The theme of this book is that true sustainability has never been tried. If we think of sustainability as humans having good lives while not worsening the state of their environment, then in the past we did OK at the second part, but were terrible at the first: we didn’t damage the environment as much as we do now, but people lived lives of grinding poverty. Now we do much better at the first part, while drawing down massive environmental debts.

Not the End of the World makes the case that we’re now making progress on both fronts. The human world is getting more tolerable as more people are dragged from extreme poverty, while many of the worst catastrophes are being arrested or rolled back.

Here are the two things I learnt that surprised me most. Thing the first: palm oil is kind of good actually. Or at least the alternatives to it are so much worse that trying to boycott it is probably doing more harm than good. Thing the second: I knew farming was getting more efficient, but hadn’t realised this means that global farmland use actually peaked in the early 2000s!

Reentry - Eric Berger 🎧

A sequel to Lift Off, which was about SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket, I’d assumed Reentry would just follow the development of Falcon 9. But really it covers everything up to the time of publishing, including the development of Starship, and it’s better for it!

These two books are the chronicle of SpaceX’s remarkable history, I really recommend them both if you’re interested in that. A lot of the people who cover SpaceX tend to tiptoe around Musk’s appalling behaviour, but this book doesn’t, which is refreshing. It would be a shame if this means Berger has burnt his access for the next book, but he can hold his head high if he has.

Dune - Frank Herbert

Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert

I decided to read the first Dune book before Dune Part Two came out in cinemas, and then I read the second book too. I’ve bundled them both together. They’re more space fantasy than sci-fi, but I enjoyed them. Now for my nitpick, which has spoilers: two things can’t be true at the same time. One: family atomics (nuclear weapons) are an important, and presumably rare, asset that give powerful families their power. Two: lasguns, though common, aren’t used by non-Fremen because if they hit a (also commonly used) shield they cause a nuclear-scale blast. If thing two is true, then anyone can rig together their own own arsenal of family atomics with stuff they probably already own in about five minutes!

I’m sure I’m not the first person to point this out.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann

Reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications has convinced me I really don’t want to design data-intensive applications. If I ever find myself in a position where my database needs more than one thread (for writes, at least) I’ll know it’s time to scale back my ambitions.

It’s a really good book though, I enjoyed it. You might too, especially if you’re into that sort of thing. I won’t judge.

The Extended Phenotype - Richard Dawkins

This was the most difficult book I read this year. In the preface, Daniel Dennett says it was written to persuade an academic audience of a not-yet-mainstream idea. He also says a determined amateur can follow along, which I think I did… with a lot of asking ChatGPT about biology terms I’d either never known, or learnt at school and forgot.

It’s a slightly perverse reading experience. I felt like I was eavesdropping on an academic slugging match I didn’t really have a right to be watching. Dawkins calls out his contemporaries by name and takes their arguments apart. I don’t know if he’s right and they’re wrong. Probably? It’s fun either way. And—spectacle aside—I do think I gleaned tentative insights from this book. It felt a bit like having biology rotated 90 degrees, or like transposing a matrix. At some point I thought of an organism as being striped vertically with fully-contained genes, but it’s probably more accurate to turn those stripes 90 degrees, so that you imagine them breaking the bounds of the organism and spilling out into surrounding organisms and the environment. Genes shape, and are shaped by, what’s outside an organism as well as what’s within.

I’ve kept that deliberately vague because it would fall apart if I tried to nail it down much further. It would be nice to read more about this topic so I can do better in the future.

The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula le Guinn

I enjoyed all of the Ged trilogy of books, but this one most of all.

Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

Nice and weird.

The Farthest Shore - Ursula K. Le Guin

I loved this story, and it left me sad that I’d reached the end of the Ged series of Earthsea books. Objection and spoiler ahead: I don’t really know why, but the moral of this story is “death is good actually”. Which can be a bit jarring, because it really isn’t.

Ignition! - John Drury Clark

An account of a period after WWII when the US military was trying to explore the space of possible liquid rocket propellants (oxidisers and fuels, and catalysts in some cases) to find a combination that would give them the characteristics they thought they needed for missiles. These missiles were expected to sit around for a while, so cryogenic propellants are out, as are propellants that decompose, or are reactive enough to eat through any container they’re put in. The missiles might be sitting around in very cold conditions too, so they can’t turn slushy at low temperatures. Oh, missiles also need start reliably, so the propellants should be hypergolic. All of this is on top of normal propellant considerations like specific impulse and energy density.

Rocket propellants are always going to be dangerous, hypergolic ones especially, but the upper end of the danger spectrum in this book is just staggering. They were messing around with oxidisers that blow up if you look at them funny, and running engines that would spew out plumes of extremely toxic heavy metals… by design! I was surprised by how few people seem to have been killed or maimed in the process.

I think this book tries a little bit too hard to be funny; but it’s still funny. It’s like it was aiming for the tone of The New Science of Strong Materials, but overshot it a bit. I still thought it was very good though.

Map and Territory - Eliezer Yudkowsky

How to Actually Change Your Mind - Eliezer Yudkowsky

Ah, the sacred texts. A really good tour de force of cognitive biases, interspersed with a lot of anecdotes and facts, which keep it exciting, and written in Yudkowsky’s characteristic style, which isn’t for everyone. There are sincere, grandiose calls to action here, calls to see the world differently and to live your life differently, that may not hit for everyone, but did—to some extent—for me.

The Stranger - Albert Camus

I loved this, especially the unusual style of writing.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke can’t write a bad book.

Dark Lord’s Answer - Eliezer Yudkowsky

A really enjoyable (and very short) piece of didactic fiction, a not-particularly-crowded field that Yudkowsky is a master of.

Three Worlds Collide - Eliezer Yudkowsky

Another short Yudkowsky fiction. This one is more of a moral allegory—on meta-ethics specifically—than didactic fiction. I found it thought-provoking and interesting. There’s one very controversial bit, I didn’t really get the point it was trying to make, even after reading Yudkowsky’s explanation of the point, so I probably would have preferred it without that part, but it didn’t ruin the rest for me.

The Fall - Albert Camus

I found this more of a slog than The Stranger, but it was still good. A very uncomfortable read.

The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu 🎧

I read this, and the first half of its sequel—The Dark Forest—a few years ago, and felt like I should breeze through the audiobook to refresh my memory before starting to re-read the second book. I can confirm it’s still good fun.

The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu

I really enjoyed this book, but (spoilers ahead) I think it’s fair to say that the main character’s love interest has no personality whatsoever. None. She’s just there to be the love interest, and that’s more or less explicitly stated. Also smoking seems very popular in China.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Richard Feynman

Easier to read than the lectures—which I’ve yet to make it more than a chapter or two into. When I first started reading I thought “boy, Feynman sure writes like he talks”. then I had some vague notion that this book was put together from recorded interviews with Feynman, and it turns out that was right!

There are a lot of stories about Feynman being smarter than the people he meets. Which obviously he mostly would be, and a lot of cancellable stories. It’s good fun! By far the highlight is the last chapter—Cargo Cult Science—which is lifted from a commencement address he gave in 1974. In it he warns against allowing the trappings of science to be mistaken for science, which is at least as relevant now as it ever was.

The Inimitable Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse

Yeah, good fun!

Marx: A Very Short Introduction - Peter Singer

My take away from this is that Marx pulled quite a lot of his thoughts out of his arse. Though not as much as Hegel—on whose work he built—he really made a career out of pulling stuff out of his arse.

Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett

Last year, after reading Mort, I said

When I Was a young teenager, I heard about Terry Pratchett books, and for some reason, probably partly because the author’s name was Terry, decided they sounded lame, and put them in the same bin as Doctor Who. Unlike Doctor Who, Terry Pratchett got a reprieve.

Unfortunately Terry Pratchett is back in the bin. At least partially. Reaper Man alternates between the story of Death, and the story of a Wizard called Windle Poons. I really enjoyed the Death chapters, but the chapters about Windle Poons… Well, to start, I think the reader is meant to find the name Windle Poons funny, and the humour in this story kind of stays on that level for the rest of the book.

Going Infinite - Michael Lewis 🎧

This is largely a character study of Sam Bankman-Fried, who is interesting enough to be worth a character study. It’s a bit of an insight about the weird people who surrounded him, the people the book calls Effective Altruists, which they were (probably genuinely), they’re interesting too.

The first act has a lot of interesting insights about Jane Street and this would be worth reading on its own for anyone who’s interested in that sort of thing. I didn’t find it hard to follow the audiobook at 1.5-2x, so I’d recommend that. I’d also recommend Scott Aaranson’s reivew.

Age of Em - Robin Hanson 🎧

Intentionally written as a concrete picture of the future. I think this is an unusual and worthwhile way of writing a book, and it was done well here. The core premise, that we’ll get whole-brain emulations before we get human-level artificial intelligence, would probably have seemed uncertain to me in 2016 when this book was published, and is all but inconceivable to me now. AI 2027 is an attempt to write a concrete picture of the future on the assumption that AI comes first (and comes soon) and I think the authors probably had this book in mind when they wrote it.

The Blazing World - Dr Jonathan Healey 🎧

A history of England in the 1600s, which was apparently a time and a place where (to us) trivial religious disagreements caused an awful lot of violence. It plays an appropriately small part in this book, but towards the end you can start to see the dawn of the enlightenment.

Bad Buying - Peter Smith 🎧

Somehow I was surprised that this was written for people who work in procurement. I’d assumed it would be targeting the market of people like me, who don’t work in procurement, but are still curious about how you’re meant to do it properly, and want to gawp at case studies of it going horribly wrong. But I guess that market must not be as big as I thought.

Still though, there were stories to gawp at. Like the story of Schlitz beer tanking itself by buying bad ingredients, ruining 10 million bottles of beer, and never really recovering.

Genius Makers - Cade Metz 🎧

I felt a bit dirty for listening to this when I realised Cade Metz is the guy who doxxed Scott Alexander. Still, it’s a good history of how the deep learning revolution took off. Though others are available.

His Master’s Voice - Stanislaw Lem

Another pretty solid Lem book.

Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine - Andrew Roberts and David Petraeus 🎧

An interesting account of a lot of modern conflicts, written by the Tory lord with all the well known biographies, and David Petraeus, who lead the CIA and US Forces in Afghanistan. The main message I came away from this book with is that winning wars requires serious commitment, and commanders are often stymied by fumbling politicians who don’t have the chutzpah to sufficiently commit. On the one hand, this seems likely true, and there probably are instances where righteous wars were needlessly lost for this reason. On the other, every branch of government that gets reined in is probably going to have similar complaints, and I don’t think “more war” is often the right solution to anything.

There’s a chapter about Afghanistan that seems to mostly have been written by Petraeus, as you’d expect. In that chapter, he talks a lot about SAS raids without mentioning that it seems quite a bit like the SAS might have just been murdering random people during these raids. I guess for someone in his position, saying so could have caused quite a lot of political fallout, which kind of illustrates the double edged sword of books by insiders. Presumably there’s aspects of their expertise that are irreplaceable, but it’s also partial.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas S. Kuhn

This book is Very Influential in the philosophy of science. It was drier than I’d expected, and to an extent it felt like its thesis about science working on paradigms, and only really advancing by paradigm shifts was stating the obvious, but I think that’s literally because the paradigm paradigm is the current paradigm of philosophy of science.

The Swift Programming Language

I got into native macOS/iOS development this year, so I decided to read Apple’s book on Swift. Reading it from cover to cover (minus all the pages that just specify the syntax) rather than treating it as a reference was a bit of a mistake to be honest. I probably would have been better off reading some chapters properly and skimming the rest, rather than slogging through the whole thing. In the future I’ll try to notice when I’m flagellating myself for diminishing gains, and adjust accordingly.