Euan Lawson
February 2020 reading list
A quiet month here on the blog, especially notable when the last post was January’s reading list… I’ve been busy enough reading and here are the books for the past month:
- Watching the Door: A Memoir 1971-78 by Kevin Myers
- Pills, Powder, and Smoke by Antony Loewenstein
- How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay
- Still You Sleep by Kate Vane°
- The Socialist Manifesto by Bhaskar Sunkara
- Rose’s Strategy of Preventive Medicine by Geoffrey Rose
- Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
- Mindf*ck by Christopher Wylie
- Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein
- The Growth Delusion by David Pilling
I’d have to say that my top recommendation from this month would almost certainly have to be _Mindf*ck_ by Wylie. The importance of the Cambridge Analytica story can’t be under-estimated and I’m very relieved to have stepped back from Facebook et al. Watching the Door was remarkable. I learned plenty from Impossible Conversations, though I don’t think the format is ideal for audiobook as it would be better to absorb the book over a longer period. Bregman was excellent and thought-provoking and Klein’s Why We’re Polarized opened up another window to see our current political landscape. If you are a fan of Ha-Joon Chang (I am) then Pilling’s The Growth Delusion is similarly excellent and you’ll never listen to broadcasters talk about GDP again without shouting at the television or radio.
Monthly Reading List Scribbles