My 2017 through the books I read
2017 was counterpointed by 28 books
January
Hans Fallada — Alone in Berlin. The (not entirely fictional) story of a couple trying to fight the Nazis with little subversive acts has a strong appeal in this political age.
Elena Ferrante — L’amica Geniale. Fun for someone from Southern Italy. To me, however, it’s not quite the literary masterpiece everyone is celebrating.
Cormac McCarthy — The Road. Terrifying. It feels plausible.
Carl Neville — Resolution Way. More difficult to read than I expected. Equally dystopian and real, when read in London.
Donald Trump was inaugurated on January, 20th. On a personal front, January wasn’t as negative. I published my report for NHS England looking at uses of healthcare open data. It received a lot of attention, good feedback, and coverage.
February
Niki Cheong — Growing up in KL. Niki is someone I originally met via Twitter while discussing digital media, politics, and news. He’s become a good friend and someone who always manages to enlighten me when we chat. His first book is a collection of columns he wrote for a popular Malaysian newspaper about growing up in a digitally savvy and relatively liberal neighbourhood of Kuala Lumpur. It gave me a fascinating window on a world that is very far from me.
George Perec — A void / La disparition. You probably know about this book. If not, let me spoil it for you: the trick is that what’s disappeared is the letter “e”. I tried reading it concurrently in French and English. It’s very experimental, and not your ordinary commute read; it requires some concentration. Fascinatingly, some translations — most notably the Italian version — got the disappearance wrong: the letter “e” is very hard to do without in French and English; to keep a similar constraint, it should be “a” in Italian, and the translator didn’t choose to do so.
In February, we brought Open Data Camp into the Pierhead building in Cardiff. Another resounding success with over 100 attendees. I’m very proud of the community we’ve built through the camps.
March
Philip K Dick — The man in the high castle. A brilliant book, whose best bit is its seemingly passive-aggressive dedication (there’s a nice story about it):
April
Enrico Brizzi — Jack Frusciante e’ uscito dal gruppo. A youth novel set in Bologna, and very popular among Italians my age. I should have read it when I was 16, but reading at 35 has its advantages, too. “Bisogna saper scegliere il tempo, non arrivarci per contrarietà”.
Cixin Liu — The Dark Forest. The second, and least enjoyable, of the Three Body Problem trilogy. But you can’t just skip to the third.
I won the first prize in the EU-funded Energic-OD contest, describing how a chatbot infrastructure could help navigate European data for property hunting.
May
Barbara Kingsolver — The lacuna. Recommended by Guy, this is an incredibly enjoyable semi-fictional book set around Leon Trotsky’s stay with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The lead (entirely fictional) story is that of a young artist, finding himself through hard times including reckoning with his own sexuality, and succumbing to Mccarthyism.
On May 1st, my bot live-tweeting the General Election 1997 (20 years later) run its course. It was an incredible experience to me, it went viral, acquired a lot of following in the media and political spheres, and even had former MPs retweeting it attaching their own memories. The fact that a General Election was called at the same time (which, among other things, prevented the BBC from broadcasting its own programme about 1997) made it even more fascinating. A summary can be read here.
From politics in 1997 to politics in 2017: I also built a constituency swing viewer, inspired by some work by BBC Newsnight’s Chris Cooke. This also had quite a lot of feedback, making me realise there is more interest out there for political geekery than people think.
June
James Ball — Post Truth. I’ve been following James on twitter since his Guardian days, and I find him one of the most intelligent, cultured, pungent, journalists of his generation. Post Truth is his first book, making a perfect summary of the fake news era. Huge bibliography and references make it fact-checkable.
July
Stanislav Lem — Solaris. I’m still thinking about this one.
Michael Lewis — Moneyball. A must-read for all data geeks.
Alan Johnson — Please, Mister Postman. Johnson has a warmth that you wouldn’t expect from a politician. A good sequel to his debut novel, and once again a book that will open your mind about what living in poverty actually means.
Strunk & White — The elements of style. A writing manual. A good writing manual. No more. Slightly too American.
Cixin Liu — Death’s end. If you think this is “just” sci-fi (and this is an excellent sci-fi novel), get ready to be surprised. This novel will warm your heart and break it. Its stories of human relationships interrupted by hibernation and space travels, the reckoning that life goes on, the rebuilding after all is lost, are a stunning allegory of the weakness and greatness of human condition.
I went to Cyprus and loved it. It was maybe a little too warm, but swimming — by chance — next to a massive turtle really left me in awe.
August
Andrew Roberts — The Aachen Memorandum. A prophetic book? Written in 1995, its author described it as “a dystopian vision of what Britain might turn into if it became a minor satrapy of a vast protectionist, illiberal anti-American, politically correct EU”. Roberts also admits that the novel “attempted to be a whodunnit, a futuristic dystopia, a thriller and a comedy all at once, and failed so badly on all levels that I now beg friends not to read it.” Although it’s a pretty bad book, it makes for a hilarious reading in the year of Brexit. John Redwood heads the “Free British Office” in Oslo, while Iain Duncan-Smith and Michael Gove lie in prison for being anti-federalist. William Mountbatten-Windsor is king of New Zealand.
Oliver Sacks — The Man who mistook his wife for a hat. My first Sacks’. It describes neurological disease with curiosity and compassion. Certainly an encouragement to read more.
Herman Melville — Bartleby, the Scrivener. If you have nightmarish colleagues, but wonder what might be behind it, this short story is for you.
Luigi Pirandello — Il turno. Do you ever feel you’re just waiting in line for your turn?
August was most definitely a month for reading. But I did a little writing, too, about my experience trying to enter the Senior Civil Service, which received some attention by hordes of civil servants.
September
George Orwell — The road to Wigan Pier. Everyone on the political left should read this book.
Peter Korn — Why we make things and why it matters, and
Gem Barton — Don’t get a job… make a job. Two books for crafty makers, that also include a philosophical discussion on why it’s good to build things.
My work on calculating the average face of a UK MP went viral, and got me to work for the BBC, doing the same calculation for the US Congress with video coverage from the Capitol, and some interviews on the international press.
October
John Medhurst — That option no longer exists: Britain 1974–76. Medhurst is firmly on the left of the political spectrum so this is hardly a ‘balanced’ view of history, but the story he tells here — how incompetence and vested interests conspired to stop a potentially positive radical transformation of industrial relations — strikes a chord in 2017. A good present from my friend Davide.
David Benedictus — The fourth of June. A controversial account of life at Eton. Curiously, I discovered it after following this thread:
We delivered a second Open Data Camp, this time in Belfast. I have not enough good words to describe it both in terms of quality of the event — with a 50:50 split of locals vs people who travelled, and a fantastic venue in the Computer Science Department, QUB — but also for the warmth, friendliness, and interest we received. For the first time, the camp was attended by a Permanent Secretary.
November
Sara Pinborough — The Language of Dying. Suggested to me by Gareth, a friend who’s a newly qualified doctor. As I have lost friends and relatives to cancer, as many others surely have, I cannot hide the fact this is a brutal book, but it is so rich of reflections about life, dying, and death, that I warmly recommend it to everyone, and more importantly to anyone working in the healthcare sector.
Yuval Noah Harari — Sapiens, a brief history of Humankind. The marketing of this book is wrong: presented as pop-sci, it is in fact a philosophical reflection on the state of humanity and its humanity. It isn’t great at the former, but succeeds magnificently at the latter.
In November, I published another report, this time for Power To Change UK, investigating how local groups use data to design and deliver their services. In over 70 pages, Mark Braggings and I describe our findings — it was brilliant to engage with so many different groups:
For the third time, something politically geeky I made received quite a bit of attention: a viewer of division votes in the House of Commons. It’s still beta, but the idea is there:
After all these experiences with data, politics, and media, I can now argue that open data — currently no longer mainstream in Government circles— will be “saved” by data journalists.
December
André Aciman — Call me by your name. A book that will give you a burst of nostalgia about your first teenage crush. You’ve really read all of this post? Here’s a little reward, then: an odd personal confession. Reading this book I did feel nostalgic, but… this is only partially warranted. I was way past my teenage when I kissed someone for the first time. I was kinda slow, wasn’t I? I cannot feel nostalgic of something that never was. But there is one thing of which I’m very proud, as it’s very representative of the utter nerd I am: my first kiss happened while watching Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs” (unfortunately, not during this scene).
Have a great 2018 ;-)
