Stephen Curry
The Silk Roads; Inferior; Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race; Lila; Mr Shaha’s Recipe for wonders
Some of my favourite reads of 2017 were a reminder that even in this information-flooded age there are books that can invert the map of the familiar. Peter Frankopan’s new history of the world, The Silk Roads, did that more or less literally for me – an important book for our Brexit-obsessed times. Inferior, Angela Saini’s coolly forensic assembly of the evidence of how science has for too long had the mis-measure of women, both within and beyond its ranks, was no less timely and no less powerful in its challenge to preconceptions that remain far too widespread. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s anger at the status quo might be hotter than Saini’s but the revelatory case she lays out of the pervasive effects of structural racism in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race was every bit as compelling. It was the most necessarily disturbing book I read all year. By the end of the first page of Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, the third installment of her Gilead trilogy, I knew I was back in the company of a trusted friend. I don’t know anyone who writes with more compassionate insight into the fragility and strength of human life and love. As for next year, I cannot wait to introduce the children of friends and family to the experimental delights of Mr Shaha’s Recipe’s for Wonder, by the eponymous and multi-talented Alom Shaha.
Nathalia Gjersoe
On the Move: A Life; Gut; The Signature of All Things; The River of Consciousness
The book I enjoyed most this year was Oliver Sacks’ autobiography On the Move: A Life. Predictably, it is woven throughout with his brilliant intellectual curiosity, his humanity and respect, and his well-renowned humour. What I hadn’t anticipated was how inspiring the story of his life would be, how it would feed into excitement about my own work and spill over into my teaching. Gut, by Giulia Enders, was wonderful and fascinating in equal measure. I took from this book that we are basically meat machines and gut-bacteria are the midichlorians that control us, and give us special powers. I was blown away by Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, a leap from her previous autobiographical texts to the exquisitely described frustrations and delights of the early 19th Century botanist, Alma Whittaker. What am I looking forward to next year? There seem to be a number of books with octopuses on the cover, which pleases me. But I am most looking forward to finding time for Oliver Sacks’ collection of essays, The River of Consciousness, narrated to his partner and published posthumously
Peter Campbell
Scale; Killers of the Flower Moon; The Odyssey; Women & Power
From crimes of the past to rekindling a classic, 2017 has produced extraordinary books. There are hidden rules that govern life, cities, and industry according to physicist Geoffrey West in Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Famous for his TED talks, West explains how creatures and ideas scale through understandable (and often entertaining) examples of the limits of growth, from human ageing to how much LSD an elephant can ingest. Recent events in the United States have put a spotlight on the mistreatment of indigenous peoples. David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI exhumes one of the most grisly periods in American history. The Osage tribe was once the world’s wealthiest community, but were murdered for their oil revenue by white Americans. Emily Wilson wipes the dust of ages from Homer’s prose in her new translation of The Odyssey. Accessible and entertaining, she provides an elegant rendering of the classic. I look forward in 2018 to Mary Beard’s Women & Power: A Manifesto. Highly regarded for her writing and keen insights about the past, Beard takes misogyny head-on by examining its cultural origins. The book could not be more timely, as the #MeToo movement brings justice to men abusing power.
Jenny Rohn
The Last Days of Night; The Last Pilot; Snowball In a Blizzard; La Belle Sauvage
Great inventors (and egos) Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse battle for intellectual supremacy in The Last Days of Night, a gripping novel about the invention of the electric light bulb. Staying close to real-life historical events, author Graham Moore’s action follows a novice lawyer who finds himself defending the impossible side in the biggest US patent dispute ever recorded. In Benjamin Johncock’s The Last Pilot, we fast-forward to a group of aviator engineers vying to break the sound barrier in the Mojave Desert. Every perilous flight might be a man’s last and family relationships suffer. Worse, their jobs become redundant when the first astronauts start going into space: if the pilots can’t beat them, should they join? On the more quantitative side of risk, Snowball In a Blizzard by Steven Hatch takes a forensic look at how certain the medical profession should be when assessing patient risk. The short answer is: not very. Diagnosis is an inexact science and many times we really don’t know the best way to treat a wide variety of ailments. Waiting patiently on my 2018 pile is Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage; is it humanly possible to top the genius beauty of His Dark Materials?
Dean Burnett
The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology; This is Going to Hurt; Becoming Johnny Vegas
For reasons I’ve yet to work out, my 2017 reading habits tended towards brutally honest portrayals of real life. Firstly, despite it not being the done thing to recommend a book by friends or colleagues (or so my friends and colleagues tell me), it was gratifying this year to see the release of Chris Chambers’ The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology. It provides an excellent warts-and-all summary of the state of play in modern psychology, but also (and refreshingly) offers many practical solutions for the myriad and persistent problems that seem to be plaguing the field. But for ‘warts and all’ real-life portrayals, you can’t do better than Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt, a simultaneously hilarious-and-tragic depiction of life as a doctor in the modern NHS, one which clearly resonated with countless people. And, despite having read it numerous times, I kept coming back to Becoming Johnny Vegas, Michael Pennington’s side-splitting but searing autobiography about his metamorphosis into his larger than life comedy creation, which features more intricate psychoanalysis than a warehouse of textbooks. As for books coming up in 2018, none come to mind sorry. Not one. None at all... *cough*...
Suzi Gage
Ad Astra, An Illustrated Guide to Leaving the Planet; The Element in the Room; Tamed; Built
I have a bit of a problem sometimes when I read, I just can’t slow down – I race through books. With Ad Astra, An Illustrated Guide to Leaving the Planet it was different. Dallas Campbell has written a masterpiece, and from lunar geese to tales of zero-gravity contraband sandwiches, it’s a delight. The images that go with it have been painstakingly selected, and are almost as beautiful as Campbell’s stories. I found myself slowing down the further through the book I got, because I didn’t want it to end. Very unlike me. The Element in the Room is another book of joy. Hilarious and informative, it’s written by Helen Arney and Steve Mould, who are two thirds of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd. This is a perfect gift for anyone even vaguely nerdy, and will be a great book to unwrap on Christmas day, although the urge to wow everyone with facts and try out the easy-to-run practicals could interfere with festive preparations. Alice Roberts has selected 10 species of plant and animal to chart our history in her book Tamed – from apples and dogs, to horses and potatoes. She explores the complex interplay between genetics and culture that has shaped us, explaining for example the links between mutations and arable farming that made dairy products common in Europe but not Asia. Tamed is beautifully written and absolutely fascinating.
The book I’m looking forward to reading next year is Built by Roma Agrawal, an engineer and brilliant science communicator. Her book is about the history of construction, all the way from mud huts to skyscrapers.
James Wilsdon
Post-Truth; A University Education; Big Mind; Inventing Ourselves
In a year when the dance between evidence, lies and democracy has dominated headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, we’ve seen a clutch of books trying to make sense of the “post-truth” phenomenon. I found Matthew D’Ancona’s short but arresting Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back the best of the bunch. You don’t have to agree with every policy choice he made in government to enjoy David Willetts’ A University Education. Blending serious scholarship with reflections on his time as a minister, it’s a tour-de-force by a politician who starts with a confession: “I love universities”. In the present climate, I wish we had a few more like him. Geoff Mulgan is one of the most persistently creative policy thinkers of the past twenty-five years, and his latest offering Big Mind is no exception. It charts the emergence of the new field of collective intelligence, which is harnessing human and digital capabilities for collaborative problem-solving on an unprecedented scale. It’s an argument with profound implications for the way we organise science, universities, businesses and governments. Looking ahead, as a dad to one current and another almost teenager, I’m particularly looking forward to Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s Inventing Ourselves: the secret life of the teenage brain, which is out in March 2018.
Susannah Lydon
Earth’s Deep History; 11 Explorations into Life on Earth; The War of the Worlds; What a Plant Knows
When the world is getting you down, there’s nothing like contemplating the irrelevance of human existence in the bigger picture of Earth history to take the edge off. Martin Rudwick’s Earth’s Deep History: How it Was Discovered and Why it Matters is a scholarly but thoroughly readable history of the idea of deep geological time and our place within it. Likewise, 11 Explorations into Life on Earth: Christmas Lectures from the Royal Institution by Helen Scales tells the story of how communicating the science of the natural world to a popular audience has evolved over the last hundred years. Blow-by-blow accounts of the lectures are interspersed with updates to the science and other asides. It includes the memorable (for evolution and palaeontology fans) lectures by Richard Dawkins in 1991 and Simon Conway Morris in 1996. Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds has been a (terrifying) part of my life for as long as I can remember, and 2017 was the year when I finally got around to reading the original by Herbert George Wells. The War of the Worlds is a vivid and exhilarating romp through the near-annihilation of humanity. A book I am looking forward to reading in 2018 is the updated and expanded edition of What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz. The first edition was packed with fascinating examples of how plants perceive and respond to the world around them. I hope that the new version will be even more persuasive in changing people’s perceptions of how plants work.
Collected and edited by Stephen Curry
