It is New Year’s Day and I should be looking forward but I’ve been busy – and delayed by the flu – so I’m not yet done looking back. Listed below with potted reviews are the 23 books I read in 2014. This continues a tradition I started last year, when I decided to read less internet and more books.
I have just about managed to stick with the programme, mostly by snatching time on my daily commute in and out of London. My daughter scoffed at my paltry annual tally and you may too but there it is. As you’ll see from the list, much as I love a good novel, my predilection is for non-fiction. That might be something to do with me being a scientist but the hypothesis is untested.
1. Protein Crystallography: a concise guide, Eaton Lattman & Patrik Loll
I read this for work, hoping to find inspiration for teaching this subject to my undergraduates. It does exactly what it says on the tin but is a book for devotees only.
2. Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman is an engaging navigator through the disorientating recesses of the mind and reveals that most of us blunder through life not properly realising how we are buffeted in our decision-making by all manner of subtle and unconscious influences. As I wrote in my review in February, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow hasn’t changed the way I think – yet. But it has changed the way I think about how I think.’
3. Creation, Adam Rutherford
In a two-part book that reflects the complimentary strands of DNA Rutherford spins two breezy, inter-linked tales of genetic modification. The first looks back over four billion years to lay out our present understanding of the origins of life, while the second shows how we are beginning to use that accumulated knowledge to create new forms from nature with the emerging technologies of synthetic biology. It’s a relaxed, enjoyable ride through territory that looks set to loom large in the 21st century.
4. Carrying the Fire, Michael Collins
When I was about thirteen I met Apollo 15’s Jim Irwin at the Armagh Planetarium and asked him how they decided which of the three crew members had to remain on the command module and didn’t get to walk on the moon. Irwin’s rather banal answer was that the decision was taken early in training. Michael Collins was that third man, the CM pilot on the Apollo 11 mission that landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the dusty surface of our lifeless satellite, but his story is anything but banal. I’ve not read a better first-person account of the Apollo programme. Collins recounts the training, the technicalities, the rivalries and the sheer bloody courage of those early astronauts with disarming candour.
5. Bring up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
I had loved Wolf Hall and was captivated once again by the sounds and smells and intrigues of Henry VIII’s court as Anne Boleyn falls from grace. Mantel has an eye for detail and a skill for narrative that I find utterly convincing. I can’t wait for the third and concluding volume.
6. Curiosity, Philip Ball
This is a fascinating exploration of the development of science, refracted unusually through the shifting concept of curiosity. Ball alights briefly among the ancients but picks up the story with authoritative detail once Leonardo da Vinci arrives on the scene. Curiosity is superb – replete with historical and scientific insight. I shall be forever in Ball’s debt for introducing me to “Mad Madge”, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.
7. Stick, Elmore Leonard
My first encounter with Leonard’s superior crime fiction. Slick.
8. The Man in the Monkeynut Coat, Kersten Hall
The eponymous hero of this biography is William Astbury, one of the early pioneers of structural biology. In the 1930s his lab was the first to use X-ray diffraction to reveal clues about the internal structure of fibrous proteins and DNA. Astbury is a forgotten man outside the corridors of academia because the structural analyses that finally succeeded in deciphering his data were done by Pauling, who figured out the geometry of the alpha-helices and beta-strands within protein molecules, and by Watson and Crick, who were the first to conceive DNA’s elegant double helix. Hall’s book provides a useful historical corrective to the notion that all scientists are heroes; some of them are disappointed men.
9. Smashing Physics, Jon Butterworth
Another first-person account, not of a journey to the moon but one to the bizarre heart of reality as we know it. Jon (my co-blogger here at the Guardian) had a ring-side seat as the Large Hadron Collider came into being, stumbled when first switched on and then, after careful repairs, gradually amassed the data needed to convince the world that a 50-year-old prediction of the existence of the Higgs boson was correct. Smashing Physics is an exciting and colourful story that barrels along at pace, though happily some way shy of the speed of light. In the end I was hungry for more; I have to confess that I still can’t quite get my head around the rules governing the creation of so many different types of particle when you bash protons together (hint, hint).
10. Little Science, Big science, Derek de Solla Price
I read this with my science policy hat on. De Solla Price’s short book comprises four lectures given in 1962 that used scientific methods to sketch the size, dynamics and character of the scientific enterprise over the past 300 years, during which time it became increasingly professionalised and state-funded. Though ground-breaking in its day, the author’s themes are now well-rehearsed. One for aficionados.
11. The Strangest Man, Graham Farmelo
Farmelo’s biography of theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, whose likely autism did not prevent him becoming a central player in early 20th century theoretical physics, is masterful story-telling. Fear not the physics, which is skilfully rendered, but revel in a compelling and important piece of history.
12. Beyond Bibliometrics, edited by Blaise Cronin and Cassidy Sugimoto
This weighty and scholarly tome considers whether there are ways to assess the quality of research by quantifying its outputs and impacts. I read it dutifully as a member of a working group that is currently examining possible roles for bibliometrics in UK research assessment for the Higher Education Funding Council of England, and wrote a review for Research Fortnight. This is a topic that warrants wider attention among the research community but my guess is they would prefer a snappier, cheaper digest.
13. The Great University Gamble, Andrew McGettigan
It is astonishing that the present coalition government has foisted on the UK a scheme for funding undergraduate students that has not been properly costed or debated in parliament. McGettigan’s book drills relentlessly into the detailed backstory of a policy that is still coming home to roost. His thoroughness means that The Great University Gamble is hardly an easy read but it deserves attention, not least because this is an issue that will preoccupy the government due to be elected in 2015. I hope that McGettigan will continue to provide informed comment on his blog.
14. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
Mr Singer is a deaf-mute who becomes an important figure for a variety of characters, each struggling with their own troubles in Georgia in the 1930s. The 1968 film of the novel, starring Alan Arkin, is the saddest I have ever seen. Though I came late to the book, it did not disappoint.
15. Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik
Materials scientist Mark Miodownik has constructed an imaginative romp through the marvels of everyday stuff: steel, paper, concrete, chocolate, foam, plastic, glass, graphite, porcelain and engineered tissues. Well, mostly everyday stuff. Miodownik repeatedly pulls novelty and surprise from familiar things which, along with the personal touches woven deftly into his narrative, makes for a joyful read. It is no surprise that the book has been winning awards.
16. Roger Bacon: The First Scientist, Brian Clegg
I know enough history to be wary of claims that this or that person was the first to define a new category of human endeavour, but Clegg makes a strong and measured argument on behalf of the 13th century scholar, philosopher and Franciscan friar.
17. The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson
Robson threads his own anxieties through an investigation of psychopathy that starts with a puzzling manuscript sent to scholars around the world and leads to encounters with a strange cast of academics and psychopaths. Ronson is a brilliant storyteller – I was immediately hooked and breezed through the book in a couple of days. Strangely, by the end I found myself wondering if he might be too brilliant, too … manipulative? Maybe that’s just the side-effect of being too long immersed in madness?
18. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
A dying pastor, having married late, recounts his life in a letter to his young son, still a boy. Beautifully written by an author in supreme control of her art, Gilead might at first seem beguilingly simple but it has a complex and fully human heart. This was the best novel I read all year.
19. Science and Government, CP Snow
My second science policy excursion, this time with a story focused on the war-time clashes between high-ranking government advisers Henry Tizard and Frederick Lindeman. Snow’s book remains a salutary warning of the importance of understanding the impact of personality in the machinations of government administration of science and resonates even today.
20. Risk Savvy, Gerd Gigerenzer
Risk Savvy is a interesting complement to Kahneman’s book (see No. 2 above), even if the two authors don’t see eye-to-eye. It’s an easier read than Thinking Fast and Slow but no less interesting for all that in its analysis of how we so readily mis-calculate risks and probabilities. Gigerenzer also takes a more practical approach, frequently suggesting techniques for countering our mis-intuition.
21. The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets, Simon Singh
Ever since I heard Homer chastise Lisa for building a perpetual motion machine: “Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!” I had suspected there was a rich seam of nerdiness running through The Simpsons. Singh mines it for all the scientific and mathematical gems worked into the show (and into Futurama) by the eclectic mix of writers. Mind-bendingly good fun.
22. The Quest for a Moral Compass: a Global History of Ethics, Kenan Malik
Malik’s book is hugely ambitious in scope, tracing the development of moral thought around the world over the past four thousand years. I found it absorbing and magisterial. I wish this book had been around thirty years ago and suspect that I shall be returning time and time again to tap into its wisdom.
23. Star of the Sea, Joseph O’Connor
This much-lauded novel, the story of a ship of refugees fleeing to America from the famine in Ireland, had sat on my bookshelf for several years. It was a crushing disappointment. I could not get past the artifice of O’Connor’s narrative construction – the book is supposedly assembled from documentary fragments by one of the main characters. Nor did it help that so many of the characters remained as flat as its four hundred pages.
@Stephen_Curry is a professor of structural biology at Imperial College, vice-chair of Science is Vital and a director of CaSE. A collection of his blog posts, ‘A Thousand Nothings’, is available in book form.
