LSE blogs regularly feature book reviews of the latest publications from across the social sciences and humanities. But which books were LSE blog editors gripped by in 2024? In this list, six LSE blog editors recommend some of their favourite reads of the year.
The Maniac. Benjamín Labatut. Pushkin Press. 2024.
AI and talk about AI have become hard to avoid in higher education and research communication and I will make no attempt to do so here. One book that has stuck with me in 2024 is Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac. Written in two parts, the book focuses on the life of polymath and pioneer of computer science John von Neumann and seemingly incongruously, the defeat of the world’s leading Go player, Lee Sedol, to AlphaGo computer program in 2016.
Some may find Labatut’s blending of historical fact with poetic license a distraction. However, I found the book’s deft handling of the interplay of the scientific and the personal, much as in his previous book When We Cease to Understand the World, an engaging way to explore the troubling mathematical and psychological complexity and dual uses of the ideas that shape our world. Von Neumann’s contemporaries were struck by his unfathomable intellect and cognitive skills, the idea that in AI we see an echo of this is particularly troubling, given the former’s unscrupulous role in the creation and strategic use of nuclear weapons.
Recommended by Michael Taster, Managing Editor, LSE Impact Blog
Think Again. Jacqueline Wilson. Bantam. 2024.
So, whether or not I was blinkered by nostalgia, I loved this book. I was nervous: it’s a throwback to a book for teenagers originally published in 1997, which was never going to be easy because when have girl friendships ever been portrayed in a way that feels healthy or accurate to everyone reading it? But I loved Think Again for how it kept the strengths of character of three completely different girls who stay friends with each other from childhood to adulthood, through their vast differences in style, social class, background (I’ve profiled Magda as Eastern European for no reason other than I want her to be), jobs, relationships, and everything else. This year the researchers in my unit have been exploring things like the endurance of women’s friendships, and pluralism in big cities, so maybe that’s why Think Again felt quite philosophical to me.
Recommended by Flora Rustamova, Editor, LSE Religion & Global Society Blog
History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity. Roman Krznaric. W.H. Allen. 2024.Politics can feel quite hopeless at the end of 2024. That’s where Roman Krznaric’s book History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity comes in. It revisits episodes from history as a way of triggering our political imagination and seeing our contemporary challenges in the light of a long history of political struggle. It also helps to disabuse us of the impression that we occupy a unique place in history, with unique political problems. We might think the corrosive effects of social media and the challenge of regulating of AI are uniquely 21st century issues. But as Krznaric argues, go back to the invention of the printing press (and even earlier to Roman times) and you’ll see that that some problems like clickbait and the spread of misinformation, are nothing new. Of course, as Krznaric himself admits, “There are no iron laws of history, there are no fixed patterns that cross boundaries of geography and time.” The past can’t offer us unaltered recipes for how to solve today’s problems. What it can do is offer inspiration and a sense of hope. Still, at the end of 2024, that’s more than enough.
Recommended by Alexis Papazoglou, Managing Editor of LSE British Politics and Policy Blog
You don’t have to have a dream: Advice for the incrementally ambitious. Tim Minchin. Ebury Press. 2024.This book is short but pithy – it comprises the texts of three of polymath Tim Minchin’s addresses to university students on the occasion of an honorary doctorate, plus some more of his recent essays around them. The most famous of his speeches is ‘Nine Life Lessons’ which has gone viral on social media since 2013.
The book is full of life lessons that are useful for anyone of any age, but particularly young adults. It offers advice on “thriving in a meaningless universe”, critical thinking and nuance, creativity, and compassion (“respect people with less power than you”). All expressed with his trademark wonderful, clever, funny turns of phrase.
My favourite advice is “Define yourself by what you love” and “Be pro-stuff, not anti-stuff”. We could all do with a bit more of that these days! I shall be buying it for the young people in my family this Christmas!
Recommended by Alison Carter, Editor, Department of International Relations Blog
Intervals. Marianne Brooker. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2024.
I only finished reading this book last month, but I have recommended it to friends more than any other this year. Penduluming between tenderness and rage, this book tackles the painful questions surrounding end-of-life care from the position of a daughter supporting her mother as she navigates advanced multiple sclerosis (MS). Intervals situates her mother’s case in the wider context of UK austerity, the degradation of the NHS, and the reality of existing as a low-income and disabled working class person in the UK. But this is not solely a political work, it is simultaneously a portrait of a creatively enterprising, colourful and humourful woman, which holds the weight of complexity, contradictions, frantumaglia, and griefs. Considering the ongoing discourse around the assisted dying bill, this book is an essential document of experience which presents the evidence and demands compassion and empathy for low-income people navigating end-of-life, whose options are unfairly limited.
And the Walls Became the World All Around. Johanna Ekström transl. Sigrid Rausing. Granta. 2024.
I was lucky enough to find an early proof of this book in my local charity shop, and was excited to dive in, having read Rausing’s 2017 memoir on addiction and familial ties: Mayhem. Originally published in Sweden in 2023, this newly published English translation is a formally innovative response to Rausing’s close friend, writer Johanna Ekström’s 13 journals; gifted to Rausing shortly before she died. Rausing reproduces these edited diary entries, starting before her diagnosis up until the end of her life, writing an introduction and occasionally including italicised comments between entries, especially when she herself features in Ekström’s entries. The strength of this work is the extent to which it is self-conscious. It is a writer writing for survival; in search of meaning, for the love of writing, and for the love of life; and the extent to which the illness – cancer of the eye – influences the writing, is curious to both the reader and the writer herself. Change occurs, issues pale into insignificance, priorities are understood. Arresting and life-affirming, this is an incredible work.
Spent Light. Lara Pawson. CB Editions. 2024.
Spent Light lit up my bleak January evenings with literary luminescence. A quote from the Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, sets the agenda for the novel: “The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object.” What follows is a tasting menu of objects coupled with a screenplay of their significances – memorial and functional. The narration is dreamy and distracted, switching between micro and macro lenses; from the historically monumental to the personally arbitrary, with playful indecision. As a lover of the work of Samuel Beckett, this book was a fantastic reminder of Beckett’s most beloved preoccupations which compel readers and audiences to ask why? Pawson answers, “Because, as he himself said, nothing is sayable. Because everything in this damned world call for indignation. Even a magnet clinging to a fridge.”
Recommended by Elinor Potts, Communications Coordinator at LSE Press and Editor of the LSE Press Blog
Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? Leah Cowan. Verso. 2024.
I had the chance to read several excellent books published this year and to interview some of their authors, including Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves (Born to Rule), Naila Kabeer (Renegotiating Patriarchy), Sarah Kerr (Wealtherty) and Jane Cholmeley (A Bookshop of One’s Own). But my stand-out book was Leah Cowan’s Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? which examines how carceral attitudes have shaped British feminism and argues that it’s time we reject them. Cowan points out that “progress” for women is often reduced to milestone legal wins like the right to vote (initially a classed and racialised privilege) or the criminalisation of violent acts. But, she argues, these actions address the gendered symptoms of violence under an oppressive capitalist system, not its cause. She reminds us that the campaigner Gina Martin who catalysed the criminalisation of upskirting has since adopted an anti-carceral stance, and that Sarah Everard’s murder epitomised law enforcement’s complicity in violence against women, belying the idea that it works to keep us safe. Drawing on the work of Black feminists and abolitionists, this is an urgent, gripping history of feminism’s entanglement with the law and a radically hopeful vision for an anti-carceral future.
Recommended by Anna D’Alton, Managing Editor, LSE Review of Books
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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