The best idea ever—bar none—is that games are really important, actually. And that idea will be embedded in your head after reading Kelly Clancy’s Playing with Reality. Clancy, a neuroscientist, ranges across history—from Renaissance mathematicians’ experiments with dice and cards to artificial intelligences’ adventures in chess—to show that these things so often dismissed as fripperies have actually had a significant effect upon the world. Play on, as Duke Orsino once said.
But what if the AIs keep on getting better at chess? The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil is a follow-up to his 2005 globe-shaker The Singularity is Near. Kurzweil’s grand predictions have barely changed in the intervening years—he still reckons that computers will be as clever as people by 2029, and that they and we will merge into cyborg-superbeings by 2045—but they are lent more power by the greater proximity of those dates. This is one of the best books to read to understand the urgent now.
David McWilliams’s Money tells an older story—but not one without modern-day relevance. This history of money itself, from many thousands of years BC to the crypto-future, is both economically literate (McWilliams is a former employee of the Bank of Ireland) and, more surprisingly, literate-literate (he also knows how to turn a phrase). There’s currently a vogue for millennia-spanning histories—Money is one of the most enjoyable.
The Story of Nature by Jeremy Mynott also spans millennia but may be even more ambitious. Here is an attempt to grapple with the idea of nature itself—and how we have approached it throughout history. Do we belong to nature? Or is it apart from us? And what implications follow on from the answers? Mynott wears his scholarship heavily, but perhaps that is only right for a subject as complicated and under-written-about as this.
Questions of nature and humanity also arise in Kapka Kassbova’s Anima. The author spent time with one of Europe’s last pastoralist communities, in Bulgaria, moving sheep from mountaintop to mountain valley, and writes both wistfully and incisively about the experience. James Bradley’s Deep Water is a more straightforward read, though no less poignant, as it catalogues how cruelly we have treated the oceans.
Do not despair, however. Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World is a bracing, optimistic response to our planet’s various environmental crises—but not because it is denialist. Ritchie, a data scientist who is lead researcher for the Our World in Data website, highlights oft--ignored, long-term positive trends, not so that we might be complacent, but so that we can concentrate on what’s needed and what works.
In an age of degrowth and Marie Kondo, there is something iconoclastic about Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small, a collection of essays organised around the principle that we need a bit more excess in our lives. Though Rothfeld doesn’t mean materialistic excess so much as she means artistic, literary, emotional excess. Her range of reference—from Moby-Dick to Troll 2—is immense, as is her intelligence, though it’s all leavened by a wonderful sense of humour.
The academic Richard Sennett also wants more art in our lives—specifically in our public lives. The Performer, his latest book, is cast as a sort of riposte to the performance-politics of Trump and other modern populists; how can others use artistic techniques for the good? In truth, the text that follows is less a manual for progressives and more a discursive ramble through the history, philosophy and sociology of performance, and is all the better for it. We look forward to the next two books in Sennett’s proposed trilogy on art in society.
And we can only genuflect before the ambition of William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels. It takes three terrifyingly great minds—those of Immanuel Kant, Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Heisenberg—and explores how they all prodded at the bounds of human knowledge and even at reality itself. What can we know? Everything and nothing, it turns out.
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Books of the year 2024: Politics & Reportage
Books of the year 2024: Lives
Books of the year 2024: History
