Books of the Year 2022

I read 33 books this year, some astonishingly good, with a very clear winner in the "Fiction" list, Olga Tokarczuk's "The Books Of Jacob", an absolute masterpiece of modern literature, one that is beyond category and a must-read. The winner in the non-fiction list Joseph Henrich's "The Secret Of Our Success", a fascinating book about the interaction between nature and culture, and how the distinction has become irrelevant in humans because of their mutual influence. The fiction list contains for once some more French books, but that is the result of the holidays in France. 

Not all the books on the list date from this year, of course, as we did some catch-up reading too. 

Fiction

1. Olga Tokarczuk - The Books Of Jacob *****
2. Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease To Understand The World *****
3. Douglas Stuart - Shuggie Bain ****½
4. Damon Galgut - The Promise ****
5. Fernanda Melchior - Paradais ****
6. HP Lovecraft - At The Mountains Of Madness ****
7. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr - La Plus Secrète Mémoire Des Hommes ****
8. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo - Le Fils De L'Homme ****
9. Hervé Le Tellier - L'Anomalie ****
10. Georges Perec - Les Revenentes ***½

Non-Fiction

1. Joseph Henrich - The Secret Of Our Success *****
2. Nicholas A. Christakis - Blueprint - The Evolutionary Origins Of A Good Society ****½
3. Daren Acemoglu & James A. Robinson - Why Nations Fail  ****½
4. David Graeber & David Wengrow - The Dawn Of Everything ****½
5. Bart D. Ehrman - Heaven And Hell - A History Of The Afterlife ****
6. Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist ****
7. Steven Pinker - Rationality ***½
8. Oded Galor - The Journey Of Humanity ***½
9. Philip Matyszak - Vergeten Volkeren ***
10. Russell Blackford - The Tyranny Of Opinion ***

Daren Acemoglu & James A. Robinson - Why Nations Fail (Profile Books, 2012) ****

"Why Nations Fail" is "brilliant in its simplicity" we read on the cover, and in a way this is a good description of this excellent book, even if this 500-page book is more complex and richer than the quote might suggest. 

Acemoglu is Professor of Economics at MIT, and James Robinson a Political Scientist and Economist at Harvard University. 

Their core message is simple: 'inclusive institutions' such as democracy and citizen participation in decision-making lead to prosperity, whereas 'extractive institutions' in which the elites rule with autocracy, poverty is the eventual result. They give good examples of situations where culture is identical, but the political organisation of the country leads to different outcomes. One is the town of Nogales, divided by the border between Mexico and the United States, which results in a totally different level of prosperity for its inhabitants on both sides. Another example is the divide between North-Korea and South-Korea, in which the former is led with dictatorial rule, and where, despite the ruler's rhetoric, only the elites experience prosperity, and in which the former, thanks to its democratic institutions, have economic growth, creative enterpreneurship, global trade and prosperity. 

Yet other factors play a role too, such as centralised government which can ensure longer term stability, rule of law and other aspects of organising society. In fact, you need both to be really prosperous, as history shows. He gives examples of highly succesful increases in production when centralised government takes over (as with the Bushong in pre-colonial Congo or with the early Soviet-Union), but this is doomed to fail in the context of an 'extractive economy', where the wealth is distributed very unequally. 

They counter the wrong assumption that economic wealth is the result of cultural, geographic, or meterological differences. 

Both authors give a myriad of examples throughout history - the importance of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution - and geographically, with a lot of attention to the United Kingdom, but also covering the entire globe, with attention to South-America, the Middle-East, Africa and Asia. 

Another aspect is the need for 'creative destruction', a term once coined by Joseph Shumpeter, in order to make change possible. You need different voices, different perspectives, and especially new and disruptive technologies to change the current state. 

What both authors write does not come as a real surprise. We all know that people are better of in democracies than in dicatorships. We also see that wealth is better distributed in democracies than in autocratic states. The value of the book is that they provide the framework for it, and with lots of evidence. Now that the patterns are clear, the only depressing conclusion is - of course - that there is no clear recipe to move from an 'extractive' situation, where the elite oppress the masses, and possess all the wealth of the country, to an 'inclusive' state, where democracy and rule-of-law reign. 

The book is not really an eye-opener, but it substantiates what many already assumed. We can only with that its content can be read more widely across the world, and do its tiny part in educating people to fight autocratic and theocratic regimes, allowing people to choose their own destiny. 

HP Lovecraft - At The Mountains Of Madness (Design Studio Press, 2020) ****

Despite having a - very selective - interest in good science fiction and horror movies, I never read anything by HP Lovecraft, one of the fathers of science fiction horror writing. The story "On The Mountains Of Madness" dates back to 1931, and gives the report by one of the scientists participating in an antarctic expedition, and discovering an ancient civilization that actually largely predates even mammal evolution. 

The novella is reprinted here in its full length - this is not really a graphic novel in the strictest sense - and illustrated with the spectacular drawings by French artist François Baranger, who is a concept designer for movies and games. When my wife first saw the drawings from a distance, she thought they were photographs, and I think that is not only because of the detail of the drawings, but also because of the amazing play with light, darkness and shadows. 

It reflects the story well in that respect. The Antarctic expedition ventures in this world of light with ice and snow landscapes with a sun that does not set, with a scientific mindset that is all for observation and academic clarity and that is suddenly confronted with the impossible, with the irrational, with darkness, mystery, evil and death. 

As said, it is the first time I read anything by Lovecraft and I understand now what the attraction is. The novella is written in the first person, as a journal or report of a scientific expedition that nobody will believe. Lovecraft's style is at the same time full of scientific facts, and minute observations (biology, physics, meteorology, archeology, architecture, ...) while at the same time full of subjective emotions about what he and his colleagues are witnessing, ranging from admiration, wonder, suprise, dread and existential angst. The ancient creatures they encounter are referenced from the mythology that Lovecraft created in other novels before this one. 

The most stunning feature of his writing is his capacity to create a universe without so much as a plot. Nothing much happens, apart from encountering something that defies reason. At the same time, your eyes can relish the fantastic drawings, whose lines of inspiration are each time written in italic in the text, so that you know what it actually refers to (although that is not so difficult to assess). 

Both the writing and the illustrations together make this an unforgettable reading experience. 

Fernanda Melchior - Paradais (Fitzcarraldo, 2022) ****

One more success novel published by Fitzcarraldo, and their blue covers come as a quality label for good literature. 

"Paradais" by Fernanda Melchior clearly fits in this list. It is the story of two boys, one rich and one poor. The former, Franco or Fatboy, lives in a luxury gated compound with shared swimming pool, and is very much in love with the wife of the neighbours, and the latter, Polo, is the pool boy and gardener's assistant. Both live in completely different worlds, but they share the adolescent's anger, uncertainty, lust and black-and-white vision of the world. They want to move forward, have their endeavours rewarded, to be taken seriously, to be men, to be recognised, to do meaningful things. In their free time, they make schemes to achieve their material goals: sex and money, inspired by the alcohol they steal from Fatboy's family. 

Fernanda Melchior deals with her story brilliantly. Because you can anticipate how it is going to end, like any Greek tragedy, but still the story is captivating, and despite the evil intents, despite the foul language and brutal fantasies of the two boys, you empathise with them, with their situation, their rejection, and you want them somehow to succeed, even if you know that's impossible, and even if you know that it would be morally rejectable. 

She writes like the boys testoron rages through their bodies, full of energy, with no pause, with no moment of relief, just the endless need to move the narrative forward through intense dialogues, raging interior monologues complaining about the cruelty of other people and the world, and fantasies, dreams and more fantasies. 

Judge for yourself: 

"That was the kind of grief Polo woke up to each day, before the sun had even appeared at the window, just as the neighbour's cockerel was clearing its throat to com­ pete with his mother's phone alarm. Polo would grumble and toss and turn on the floor, on the sweat-soaked petate, his mouth dry, his eyes glued together with sleep and his temples throbbing with the headache that now never went away, no matter how many Alka-Seltzers he drank. He would aim to get up and out as early as he could - Lord knows he tried to avoid his mother's sermons - but she al­ ways got their first, when he was still on the floor battling his exhaustion, and she would launch straight in: wasn't he ashamed, crawling home in the middle of the night and creeping in to his own house like a thief, and all for a piss­ up! Don't lie to me, you little creep, don't you dare lie to your mother! I can smell the stench of booze on you from here, you useless drunk! It's only Wednesday and you're already out getting leathered, just look at the state of your face. Seriously, who do you think you are, Leopoldo? Who the hell do you think you are, you little shit?
There wasn't a day Polo didn't ask himself the same thing, every morning, with a bread roll and a mug of luke­ warm coffee in his belly, which, on a good day, he would manage to reach the bridge without chucking up, his overalls laundered but still grubby thanks to Zorayda's in­ept hands, his face dripping with sweat and the salty wind spray that he pedalled against on his way to Paradais. Who was he, really? A little shit, his mother would say. But her little shit, at the end of the day, the 'little miracle' of the girl who got shafted yet still worked her way up in the world. He had her thick lips, the same amber eyes and wiry hair that went coppery in the sun's rays, and now he too was at the service of the same family of sharks. The muchacho as the residents called him, that's who he was: the lawn waterer, the tree pruner, the turd scooper, the car washer. the chump who appeared the second those assholes whis­ tled for him: the dogsbody. How had he sunk so low? he asked himself, without an answer. And how the fuck was he going to get out of there? Again, he didn't know. He had nothing, not a single thing to call his own. Even his salary went straight into his mother's pocket, every last peso, exactly as she'd dictated: Polo owed her, to make up for his colossal fuck-up, the opportunity he'd gone and pissed down the drain. Now it was his turn to work like a bitch, to follow Urquiza's ridiculous orders; his turn to sleep on the floor like a filthy animal while the money he earned went towards paying off his mother's countless debts and feeding the baby growing inside Zorayda's hor­ rendous belly, while that slob spent her days lounging on the rocking chair, watching cartoons - with the fan on, of course - instead of taking care of the house and cooking their meals, as they'd agreed. From the start he'd tried to reason with his mother, make her see how unfair it all was: first, it wasn't his fault his cousin couldn't keep her legs shut. Why did he have to give her his bed and sleep on the floor, on the hard concrete floor with only a thin petate under his aching body and a rolled up old t-shirt for a pillow? Why didn't they send Zorayda packing instead? She was a total pain in the ass, a freeloader, a conniving bitch who felt no shame waddling around town with a gut like a pregnant cow as if she'd been blessed with that 'little miracle' who could belong to just about any guy in town, genuinely any of them; if only Polo's mother would listen to the shit people said about her, how the little prick tease would fool around with the bus drivers, the delivery guys who stopped by Dona Pacha's store on Tuesdays, the loan sharks who passed through town on their way to Pado de Toro, and even with the boys who delivered tortillas on their mopeds, there wasn't a single one of them she hadn't rolled about with on the mucky floors of truck cabins, or on the back seats of cars, or standing bent over like a bitch in heat behind the storage rooms and animal sheds, or wherever the urge happened to take her. Why didn't his mother leave her to sort out her own shit? The little skank had asked for it. Why didn't she send Zorayda back to the aunts in Mina, let them clean up her mess? But his mother wouldn't hear it. (p. 41-42)

Every sentence is full of rebellious anger, of revolt, of lack of perspective, lack of understanding and dreams, opportunities, and fantasies being blocked and stopped. 

It's not a long story, only 118 pages in this edition, but a real joy to read. 

Her longer novel "Hurricane Season" is said to be even better. Can't wait to get my copy of this one too. 

Ottessa Moshfegh - Lapvona (Jonathan Cape, 2022) **½

I liked the basic storyline when I read the inside cover of the book. I like its cover art and its publishing quality. 

The story takes place in medieval times, in a fictive town. This level of abstraction brings us to a more symbolic plane in which the events could reflect today's society. And to a larg extent it is. The lead character, Marek, is a deformed boy who lives with his father outside the borders of the town, but with some contacts within the town, especially the son of the lord of the castle, Villiam, who is a ruthless ruler who couldn't care less about the drought that hits the land and impoverishes all his serfs, and who is aided by Barnabas, the priest. 

Religion and power rule, and the characters in the book try to live despite this unholy alliance. Despite some strange plot twists, the characters remain rather flat, with little opportunity to really feel empathy with them. They act, they do things, but you never really get under their skin, as is often the case in literature from the Middle Ages, but then at least the author could have used more stylistical technique to recreate the literary context about which she writes, but she doesn't. I will not disclose the ending, in case you might still be interested to read the book, but that too is disappointing. None of the characters are interesting, the story meanders too much, and there is not much joy to be had from the writing itself, and in the end, what is the moral of the tale ... I am not sure there is one. 

Philip Matyszak - Vergeten Volkeren (Omniboek, 2021) ***

 It's interesting to understand the quirks of history. Why did some people and tribes continue to exist, and why did others vanish? And how did they vanish. In English the book is called "Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World". It's furthermore a nice publication, that I could not resist to buy when I saw it in the bookstore. There are full-page maps for each tribe, with nice pictures of archeological finds and other visuals. 

The book covers a wide time span, from 2700 BCE to 550 CE, and includes overview of fourty different tribes, some of which are known, such as the Amorites, or Hethites, the Philistines or the Medes, some are less known, such as the Bactrians or the Catuvellauni. 

It's more a reference manual than a book you would actually read from A to Z even if I did that. The summary is short for each tribe, but well documented. Although I think it is bizarre that often the Bible is mentioned as the reference, without actually emphasising that the Bible is not a reliable source of historic information, as if it was one more factual source next to academic archeological or historical findings. 

That being said, it is instructive and broadens our perpsective on history. 

Haruki Murakami - First Person Singular (Vintage, 2021) ***½

Any new Murakami book is a treat, even the ones that are less ambitious than his greater works, such as this one, a collection of eight short stories bundled together with no intrinsic relationship, except that all stories are written in the first person singular, and possibly Murakami's voice is more personal and the topics closer to his real life, or at least they could be. 

Like in all Murakami stories, something unusual happens to ordinary people in ordinary settings. The atmosphere is friendly, intimate even, but alienating. For instance, in "Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova", the narrator explains that - in his youth - he wrote a review of a Charlie Parker album that did not exist. Until so many years later he finds a copy of exactly that album in a jazz record shop in New York. Murakami's love for music, and then especially jazz and classical music is omnipresent in the book, and one story is about a Beatles album. 

The weirdest story is possibly about a speaking monkey (no spoiler alert - the story basically begins with this), and even if this is highly unusual, as the narrator will tell you, it also appears not to be surprising or disturbing either. The narrator and the monkey have long conversations. The actual unexpected event happens later in the story (and I won't tell you that). 

It is fun, it is deep too, despite the mundane and ordinary contexts. The stories are about 'what makes life' and 'what choices do I make in life' and 'who am I actually in this weird place'. Murakami's light and elegant style, his repetitive presentations of options to be decided, are actual challenges for the rationality of our thoughts, about probabilities and plausible things. He makes us wonder why things - and people and animals - are what the are and what they might mean to us (or him, as an individual). And by doing this, he is also sufficiently the literary craftsman to make it captivating, to keep the attention going, putting the reader for the dilemma to speed up things to know what's going to happen next, or to read very slowly and relish his beautiful dialogues and sentences. 

It is surely not one of his major works, more a kind of in-between publication, but any Murakami fan will enjoy this one too. 

Allaa As Aswany - The Yacoubian Building (Harper, 2007) ***

The Egyptian author, Allaa As Aswany, is an dentist by training, educated in Chicago where he lived for seventeen years, is possibly better known as a political commentator and founder of a political party. His articles have appeared in numerous international newspapers. 

In "The Yacoubian Building", he describes Egyptian society in a form of satire. All characters live in this building - that actually exists on 34, Talaat Harb Street in Cairo - and have completely different backgrounds and levels of wealth. There are servants, officers, an editor-in-chief of a French-speaking newspaper, a very wealthy business man, a lawyer, a poor young woman, a wealthy ageing playboy and his dominant sister, the son of the doorkeeper, a Christian shirtmaker, the corrupt secretary of the Patriotic Party. 

All the characters interact because they live or work in the same building (some in luxurious appartments, some on sheds on the roof). The characters are relatively 'flat' in the sense that they do not really evolve in the course of the novel, and many of them are of course caricatures of the groups they represent. 

The novel itself is not of high literary value in my humble opinion, but its real power lies in As Aswany's courage to address topics are that are rarely addressed in Egyptian or even Arabic literature: sexual abuse of women and homosexuality. He also tackles the hypocrisy of those with power and education, and his compassion for the people with limited perspectives on life are not new to Arabic literature, yet they reach a quite essential level in "The Yacoubian Building". 

In short, it's interesting but not great. I can applaud his courage to denounce social injustice. 

If you have not read anything by an Egyptian author, I can recommend to start with Naguib Mahfouz and Nawal El Sadawi. 

Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease To Understand The World (Pushkin, 2019) *****

Please read this: 

"In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring's fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court. This was not easy. When the Allied forces caught him, the Nazi leader was dragging a suitcase with more than twenty thousand doses, practically all that remained of Germany's production of the drug at the end of the Second World War. His addiction was far from exceptional, for virtually everyone in the Wehrmacht received Pervitin as part of their rations, methamphetamine tablets that the troopers used to stay awake for weeks on end, fighting in a deranged state, alternating between manic furore and nightmarish stupor, with overexertion leading many to suffer attacks of irrepressible euphoria. "An absolute silence reigns. Everything becomes alien and insignificant. I feel completely weightless, as if I were floating above my own airplane," a Luftwaffe pilot wrote years later, as though he were recollecting the silent raptures of a beatific vision rather than the dog days of war."

 Or this: 

"The night gardener used to be a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing. He told me that he had had the beginnings of a brilliant career but had quit altogether after encountering the work of Alexander Grothendieck, a world-famous mathematician who revolutionized geometry as no one had since the time of Euclid, and who inexplicably gave up mathematics at the height of his international fame, leaving a bewildering legacy that is still sending shock waves through all branches of his discipline, but which he completely refused to discuss, right up to his death in 2014. Like the night gardener, when Grothendieck turned forty, he left his house, his family and his friends, and lived like a monk, holed up in the Pyrenees. It was as if Einstein had given up physics after publishing his theory of relativity, or Maradona had decided never to touch a ball after winning the World Cup."

Two random pieces of text, extracts of this amazing book - part literature, part science, part biography, part history - that brings us five stories - five texts if you want - on topics that are related to science. Labatut's texts are little symphonies of factoids, linked together in an incredibly powerful prose, balanced, surprising, disciplined and at the same time luxurious and fast. 

The first extract above comes from the first story, "Prussian Blue", the history of cyanide. German scientist Fritz Haber managed to extract nitrogen from the air, which was used afterwards on a commercial scale as fertiliser, savings millions of lives, yet he also upgraded it to develop Zyklon B, the gas that killed millions of Jews in concentration camps during World War II. The first story is also 99% fact according to the author. 

As we move forward, the reality of the historical figures become more literary, with fiction starting to creep in, in the form of dreams, unwritten thoughts by the scientists, dialogues that never happened. 

The other stories are all about the real boundaries of science, the tipping point of understanding, but also the tipping point of some dark and unfathomable danger that could wipe out mankind. 

In the second story, the mathematician and soldier Karl Schwarzschild solved the field equations in the theory of general relativity in 1915, and writes this to Albert Einstein from the front, but when Einstein answers, the soldier is already dead.

The third story is about the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki and the German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. The mathematic challenges and the discoveries by both men of course elude me, as they do with possibly 99% of all mathematicians, but the story is about what Grothendieck discovered at the heart of mathematics and never wanted to discuss, terrified by the horrors his findings might cause.

Of course we also have the fight between Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg over the right perspective on quantum physics. They too fundamentally changed our view of reality, while at the same time also providing the physical insights that led to nuclear weapons.

Labatut said in an interview that "This book is about what happens when we reach the edges of science; when we come face to face with what we cannot understand. It is about what occurs to the human mind when it pushes past the outer limits of thought, and what lies beyond those limits". 

This is a work of fiction, but based on some of the most advanced and terrifying scientific discoveries. 

Labatut's prose and writing skills make this an exceptional reading experience. 

I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

Virginie Despentes - Vernon Subutex 2 (Grasset, 2015) ***½

This is part two of the trilogy. Vernon Subutex, the record store owner disappeared in the first part and became homeless. Now, his former friends and other people, with less honest interests, find him back among the other homeless people (Charles, Olga, Laurent). Despentes keeps adding characters and all of them get the same depth of exploration. To her credit, they are all interesting, recognisable, genuine. She digs in their pasts, creating a very broad canvas in which the original plot - the search for the lost tapes of Alex Bleach the rock star - becomes a little bit too distant, yet her writing is so energetic, fast and politically incorrect, that as a reader you stay glued to her narrative, that rushes forward in the present tense, in a language and vocabulary that is young, and makes you feel part of what's happening. 

Her characters, often relatively marginal to what is happening in society, are often more honest than the world around them, the world of fast food, fast sex, fast culture, fast money. 

I had wanted to read the third part this year too. It's waiting on the shelf. 

Steven Pinker - Rationality (Allan Lane, 2021) ***½

In "Enlightenment Now", Steven Pinker advocates for better use of rationality and scientific thinking in our everyday world, which leads to progress for all thanks to better technology, better decision-making and more democracy and humanism. 

In "Rationality" he gives a course in rationality, with all its different components: logic and critical thinking, probability and randomness, Bayesian reasoning, rational choice and expected utility, signal detection and statistical decision-theory, game theory, correlation and causation. This interesting overview will of course not bring much new to scientists or other highly educated readers who are familiar with the basics of our rationality. 

To me, the content of this book, together with some deeper insights in cognitive sciences should be compulsory in any school curriculum. 

"We should be creative in changing the rules in other arenas so that disinterested truth is given an edge over 'myside' bias. In opinion jour­nalism, pundits could be judged by the accuracy of their forecasts rather than their ability to sow fear and loathing or to fire up a fac­tion. In policy, medicine, policing, and other specialties, evidence­ based evaluation should be a mainstream, not a niche, practice. And in governance, elections, which can bring out the worst in reasoning, could be supplemented with deliberative democracy, such as panels of citizens tasked with recommending a policy. This mechanism puts to use the discovery that in groups of cooperative but intellectually diverse reasoners, the truth usually wins. 

Human reasoning has its fallacies, biases, and indulgence in my­thology. But the ultimate explanation for the paradox of how our species could be both so rational and so irrational is not some bug in our cognitive software. It lies in the duality of self and other: our powers of reason are guided by our motives and limited by our points of view. (...)  So, too, is impartiality the core of rationality: a reconciliation of our biased and incomplete notions into an understanding of reality that transcends any one of us. Rationality, then, is not just a cognitive virtue but a moral one".

One of the biggest unresolved issues in the use of rationality, and a topic that has rarely been investigated, also not here by Pinker, is the fact that people use all the methods of rationality in concrete and non-complex tasks. It is only when a certain level of abstraction and complexity has been reached, that our rational tools no longer seem to work and that other factors start interfering, such as emotions, beliefs, ideological values, self-interest. We have the tools, we just don't use them all the time. So the question remains how we can extend these tools to all our thinking and decision-making. 

In any case, the book is a worthwhile overview of all the aspects of rationality, but for most highly educated readers, it will come as a confirmation of existing knowledge rather than as an eye-opener. 

Oded Galor - The Journey Of Humanity (The Bodley Head, 2022) ***½

Oded Galor is Professor of Economics at Brown University and the founding thinker behind the Unified Growth Theory, which seeks to uncover the fundamental causes of development, prosperity and inequality over the entire span of human history.

In this book he explores how humans have been able to escape from the 'Mathusian trap' (whenever societies managed to bring about a food surplus through technological innovation, resulting in increase in living standards and reduction of mortality, but only temporarily since the ensuing population growth would deplete surpluses, and so living conditions would revert to subsistence level), by looking at all the factors that could have played a role in the sharp rise of population growth and inequalities between nations. 

He looks at aspects of geographical location, technological development, population diversity, population size, cultural and institutional factors. He goes back to the early days of homo sapiens with a broad perspective to our modern day era, to conclude that 

"the long arc of human history reveals that geographical characteristics and population diversity (...) are predominantly the deeptest factors behind global inequalities, while cultural and institutional adaptation have often dictated the speed at which development progressed in societies across the globe" (p. 232)

The graph below explains this process, as well as giving an outline of the boook itself. Galor's reasoning is well-substantiated, and a much better book than for instance "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari for the dual reason that Galor has evidence for each topic he covers without the need to have strong value judgments or political views on the subject of his research. The fact that he is less value-driven makes his book all the more valuable. 

David Diop - At Night All Blood Is Black (Pushkin, 2020) **½

"At Night All Blood Is Black" is about the fight of two Senegalese brothers, of which one is adopted, in the French army against the Germans in World War I. When Diop is deadly wounded, and begs to be killed to stop his pain, Alfa cannot do it, yet this fact drives him slowly crazy, and requiring the ritual of killing Germans at night, re-enacting what he couldn't do to Diop, and taking each time a chopped of had as a relic, which terrifies his comrades at the camp. He slowly starts turning mad and becoming a demon in the eyes of his friends. 

The first person narrator tells the story of his raids, of his village and home, of the war, of death, of the army ... His tone is incantational, with rhythmic sentences and the endlessly repeated interjection "God's truth", but then so often that it becomes irritating and even childish. Take out this interjection, and the flow of the narrative is not less mesmerising or fluent.

The book received a lot of international literary awards, including the International Booker Prize, and that is a mystery to me. 

Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist (Da Capo, 2007) ****

"The Portable Atheist" is a collection of texts written by famous atheists about their lack of belief in any religion or god. 

You have 47 texts by different authors questioning the existence of god since antiquity, starting with Lucretius and working through history up to our modern times. Texts are from Benedict de Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, H. L. Mencken, Albert Einstein, Victor Stenger, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq. Interestingly, also fiction authors such as Mark Twain George Orwell, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, George Eliot, ... 

As the title says, this is a book with all the noteworthy essential texts on atheism, many of which I already read in the books of Harris, Dawkins, Sagan or through other books. 

It's a great reference book, not one to read in one go, and useful for atheists. With books like this one, I also hope that religious people will read it, preferably with an open mind, but I doubt this will ever happen. 

Douglas Stuart - Shuggie Bain (Picador, 2020) ****½

This book has been widely appreciated and awarded in the last years, and there's nothing I can add to that: it is worth every accolade it received.

It is the story of Shuggie Bain, a boy who grows up in a poor and dysfunctional family in Glasgow in the eighties. The father of the house lives elsewhere but is still a presence, the mother is an alcoholic, his brother cares for him, but has his own challenges, and his elder sister is more pre-occupied with her own life. We follow the family over a long period of time, long enough to get to know each of them in detail: their life dreams, their mishaps, their continued courage to move forward despite the hardships, the gossip of the neighbourhood, the progress and the relapse, the anger and the love. 

Shuggie tries to zigzag his way through these chance events, trying to get some control over what is happening, or at least over his own life in this context of repeated setbacks. Yet to Stuart's credit, this novel is not a long complaint about social injustice and human hardship, it is also a book of love, of hope, of dreams and of human warmth. The characters are likeable, charming even, and you wish all of them to succeed and to do better in life. Stuart brought a fictitious family to life in a way that's rarely been done in literature. 

On the downside, the book is long and often repetitive, obviously somehow needed to depict the Sisiphean struggle against poverty, but I think it could have been a lot shorter without losing its qualities. 

I also learned about the religious football divide in Glasgow, with Rangers supporters being Protestant while Celtic fans supporting the Catholic Church.