• Great Britain by Torsten Bell
• The Score by Richard Stark
• Bringing Down Goliath by Jolyon Maugham
• In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger
• Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe
• A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall
• The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker
• The Jugger by Richard Stark
• Always Take Notes. Edited by Simon Akam and Rachel Lloyd
• The Seventh by Richard Stark

There is some good myth busting hard facts in Bell’s book, Great Britain - but I also found it curiously lacking in ambition in some ways. There’s a whiff of incrementalism about it, rather than radicalism. That’s not entirely fair as the changes Bell proposes would make be significant but if you are seeking revolution then you might find this a rather cooling proposition.

I thought Maugham’s book Bringing Down Goliath was excellent. I had been put off reading this by some suggestion about the general tone of Maugham. Early reviews had indicated Maugham was somewhat pleased with himself, if not outright insufferable. I only picked up hints of this, perhaps largely because I was primed for it, and I regret not reading it sooner. It’s also very evident that Maugham has made a good few enemies and trodden on toes. I suspect this has bled into some reviews but I found it powerful and compelling.

I’ve read most of Junger’s work and his book on dying and death, after a close scrape himself, is as good as anything he has put together. One of things I appreciate about all Junger’s books, and this seems like a small thing, is that they are just as long as they need to be to tell the story. Too often, authors feel compelled to hit the magic 100,000 word mark and books can feel strung out and etiolated.

I had read reviews of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Thrall but I was keen to read some kind of specific book about the Israel-Palestine conflict - hence I went for Ten Myths About Israel. Now, I am fully aware that Pappe has a very particular position, but I found it incredibly helpful to sketch out the outlines of the conflict. Thrall’s book is remarkable and perhaps even more devastating, though quietly, in its condemnation.

I am now a subscriber to Rob Walker’s Substack, The Art of Noticing, and this is a lovely book, brimful of ideas and creative energy.

The BJGP Research & Publishing Conference will be held on 21st March 2025 at The Lowry Hotel in Salford. Hope to see you there.

• Another England by Caroline Lucas
• The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd
• Our Enemies will Vanish by Yaroslav Tromfimov
• Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography by Don McCullin
• Don McCullin: The New Definitive Edition
• Cuckooland: Where The Rich Own The Truth by Tom Burgis
• Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, war photographer
• The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life) by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison

Notes

Another England is excellent - though I am not wholly surprised as I find most of my views on social reform are closely aligned to Lucas’ politics. There may be a large dollop of confirmation bias here. I picked up Our Enemies will Vanish as the shortlist for the Orwell Prize was announced. There’s rarely a bad book on these lists - much like the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction.

Cuckooland came up via a book recommendation from The Rest is Politics podcast. I have found myself coming back to podcasts quite a lot in recent weeks. For some reason, my attention span hasn’t quite coped with audiobooks and I’ve had several false starts. Ironically, I did actually listen to the audiobook after the podcast recommendation… Tom Burgis, alongside people like Caroline Belton and Carole Cadwalladr, is an excellent investigative journalist that the kleptocracy would dearly like to shut up. Read their works and support them however you can.

The Don McCullin book was a birthday present and it is a heck of a book. It has an excellent foreword by Harry Evans and the images throughout are superb.

Most importantly, book of the month - in a tough field this month - is The Invisible Doctrine. Neoliberalism laid bare in all its ugliness.

Not dark blue…

Sometimes being colour blind catches me out. I’m protanopic so don’t have much in the way of the red cones when it comes to colour vision. One of the effects is that I struggle to see purple. It just doesn’t quite register with me at all.

I was in a conversation about someone at work and I was explaining that a colleague’s Outlook out-of-office indicator was on. It looks dark blue to me but it is just a little ‘off’ and I suspected it might be purple. Yes, said the person to me, it’s purple, bit like the Cadbury colour. I took a beat.

The. Cadbury. Colour. Is. Purple.

It turns out Cadbury products are purple and not dark blue. You almost certainly knew this. I did not. My gast is utterly flabbered. In turns out, that in fact, the whole Cadbury brand look is a kind of deep purple. Dairy Milk. Fruit & Nut. Buttons! All of it. I’ve been eating them for pretty much five decades and all this time I thought it was a dark blue. I just didn’t know. Weird.

Philosophical.

• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
• Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns
• The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman
• Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story by Caroline Lucas
• Lord Foul’s Bane: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Book One by Stephen Donaldson
• The Illearth War: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Book Two by Stephen Donaldson
• The Power That Preserves: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Book Three by Stephen Donaldson

Notes

It’s my second go around with Four Thousand Weeks and it’s well worth it. There is some classic productivity advice here but it’s leaning more towards being a popular, accessible philosophy book than a self-help.

Limitarianism and Another England are both excellent but I found The Coming Wave tedious. I then went on a little nostalgia trip and got through three fairly decent sized novels written a few decades ago - the first three Thomas Covenant books. I read them back at the tail end of the 80s when I was still in my teens. The arcane vocabulary is verging on parody at times and the central protagonist is deeply unlikeable for all sorts of reasons. These are definitely not for everyone.

Substantial.

• The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
• A World Without Email by Cal Newport
• Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Nuclear War: The bestselling non-fiction thriller by Annie Jacobsen
• Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future by Ed Conway

April update

I read the Sutherland book as I wanted an overview of the ‘scrum’ approach to the agile methodology. Sutherland is, of course, a huge advocate but there are some limitations that never quite get addressed. However, anyone engaged in a big long-term project is likely to take plenty from it. As it happens, and I didn’t recall this until I read it, Cal Newport’s book A World Without Email spends a section looking at how the scrum approach could work at an individual level.

Dune scarcely needs an introduction and is a good chunk of a book. I have to admit I felt my interest waning rapidly as I got to the last quarter. I also have decided I’m not that into the omniscient third-person viewpoint so much either. It seems to leach out a good deal of the tension from the narrative.

The cover of the Baldwin book on Starmer has a quote from Matthew D’Ancona: “This will be the most important political book of the year”. Yes, he’s very likely to be right. Very readable and often surprised me.

I have to mention Nuclear War which I picked up and bought on a bit of a whim then read through it at speed. Not quite a ‘one-sitting’ effort, as that never quite happens with me nowadays, but about as close as I get. It is compelling and horrifying in near equal measure. It could well give you nightmares and, arguably, should bring us all out in a cold sweat. Essential reading but I was left wondering - what can I do at this point? There are some obvious places to go - CND° being the one that comes to mind.

Best book this month, bar none, is Ed Conway’s Material World. This is far more than a sterile tale of the science behind the materials, though you will find that here. It is a very human story. It’s essential, er, material to understand how we got to where we are, the future challenges of climate change, how our economies function, and even the geopolitical tensions that tug at us. It’s marvellous.

The Man With the Getaway Face was also available as a 24-page $2 graphic novel/comic by Darwyn Cooke.

• The Last Colony by John Scalzi
• Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
• Hunter by Richard Stark
• The Man With the Getaway Face by Richard Stark
• The Wager by David Grann
• The Outfit by Richard Stark
• The Mourner by Richard Stark
• Deep Work by Cal Newport

End of March update

I just wasn’t in the mood for much non-fiction in March so kept myself amused with some frothy fiction. I used to read a lot of crime fiction and realised I had never got to any of the Stark books. They are quite short - probably not even 50,000 words - but I think that is a huge plus. The standard length of a book, especially genre fiction, is generally around 100,000 words yet there is no real logic to this. It’s mostly just about expectations these days and the sheer physical size of the book demanded by publishers. I’ve read a lot of these 100k books that only had 50k worth of story.

The Wager is an excellent audiobook and it has been very popular, though I found it ever so slightly weird that this tale of British sailors had an American narrator, Dion Graham. And, as planned, I read Slow Productivity by Cal Newport.

• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
• Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
• Making Books by Simon Goode
• Artemis by Andy Weir
• Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
• So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
• The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Starry Messenger by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Mid-Feb update

Time for a mid-month (ish) update on my reading. I’ve been on a sci-fi jag for a few weeks, taking a break from the non-fiction political type book that I often lean towards. I like to vary my reading and some sci-fi in the grey months of January and February is welcome.

It’s not too challenging to see how Old Man’s War is regarded as a classic - on Amazon UK it has nearly 25,000 reviews at an average of 4.4. You really don’t need me to tell you how good it is, but I will anyway. It’s one of those books that you slip into without any effort and, before you know it, you are absolutely immersed in the world. Perhaps the best quote is from Cory Doctorow: “Gripping and surpassingly original. It’s Starship Troopers without the lectures. It’s The Forever War with better sex. It’s funny, it’s sad, and it’s true.” Genius quote, fabulous book.

Similarly, I picked up on Project Hail Mary from the absolutely staggering number of reviews - on Amazon UK it has nearly 114,000. Not every book works well as an audiobook and I do try to pick carefully for that reason. I did listen to this one and it is hard to imagine a book better suited to the medium.

For the rest of the month, I’m going to read the next one by Scalzi in the Old Man’s War series then I am going to re-read some Cal Newport°. His new book, Slow Productivity, is published on the 7th March (in the UK) and I want to re-visit some of his earlier work before then.

The Anti-Magnus Magnusson books

This is the section devoted to books that I have started and not managed to finish.° This is often down to me, it’s just the wrong book at the wrong time. Sometimes, stylistically, it doesn’t suit. As I’ve got older, I’ve become much more willing to give up on books, and not go back, but I will return to these three.

So far this month I’ve had three books that I have struggled to finish. More accurately, I’ve started but not managed to continue…

• I am about 100 pages into Vernon Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and I’ve had to put it down. It gets fantastic reviews but somehow I just can’t quite engage with it. This is one where I will try again.
• Justice for Animals by Martha C. Nussbaum. I really want to read this and I planned to read the updated version of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation after it. Nussbaum has a number of academic tics in her writing. She does that thing where academics tell you what they are going to say, say a single thing if you are lucky, and then tell you what they’ve said. It also seems to be a feature of American non-fiction. It makes for some extraordinarily tedious prose and makes my teeth itch.
• Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health by Nick Dearden. I will certainly read this but, to be honest, it was making me too angry and I needed some escapist reading. Right book, wrong time.

UPDATE: End of Feb comments

I have updated the top list with all the books for February. Not much else to add at this point - though I thought Starry Messenger by Neil deGrasse Tyson was abject.

I’m just making a quick note of some recent writing.

I published a new post on the Antidotum Substack which reported on a recent paper on urine drug testing in people who use drugs.

• Vol.9: Shall I get a urine test before you see this person?°

I’ve also had some new posts about colourblindness on my 1 in 12 Substack. Those are:

• Everyday colourblindness: the blinking problem of red-green LEDs°
• Is Boris Johnson colourblind?°
• Stars and stripes - getting it wrong with football kits°
• Bladder cancer and colour vision°
• Colourblindness and cricket°

In the February 2024 issue of the BJGP my Editor’s Briefing:

• Patient perspective: the ghost in the machine°

• Finding Your Comic Genius by Adam Bloom
• Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World’s Most Secretive Industry by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
• Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

A couple of quite different books to kick off the new year. Adam Bloom’s book is a fascinating insight into the mechanics and practice of stand-up comedy while Dead in the Water offers a revealing glimpse into another morally flexible global industry.

No prizes for noting I then went on a Douglas Adams spree. As you might guess given my vintage I have read these books before but it has been more years than I dare even try to remember. I have to admit I started them on a whim. At the University, we have to get new posts through the Vacancy Oversight Group (VOG). It’s not always the most straightforward of processes. It is not, as far as I know, staffed by Vogons.°

“They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous.”

It made me laugh though. And, rather happily, I went and enjoyed Douglas Adams’ wonderful books again. That, in turn, brought me to some more science fiction. After making a pratt of myself in a meeting where I managed to half remember the title of Liu’s book, I decided to give it the read it merited. (Actually I should say, ‘two-thirds’ remembered as I called it the two-body problem. Muppet.)

I am also now in the process of reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir°. I am halfway through the audiobook and it is superb in that format.