(I’ll try to get my 2021, and 2022 posts up soon too.. totally forgot to write them!)
Firstly, my reading has really declined this year! Though I continue to work from home, I have struggled this year to find gaps to do much reading. I do most of my reading during lunch, or in little pockets throughout the day. This year however, I did not do a good job of actually taking a lunch at work. Something to be addressed in the new year for sure…
[Links below do point to Amazon, since I’m a Kindle reader, but these are simple, direct links without any tracking, etc.]
The first book I read this year was ‘Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage‘. This was a fun read and was telling some old stories about the early days of submarine based espionage. Things like cable taps just off the shore of Cold War Russia, or trying to salvage a sunk Russian sub. It was an interesting read for sure. The author makes it clear that much of what is included in the book has never been told before so there aren’t a lot of corroborating sources to read. But, assuming it’s all true, it’s pretty wild. Before I was born my dad was a Submariner in the Navy, so it was an interesting perspective. Beyond the tales told, details of everyday life were also fascinating. For instance, the US Navy only banned smoking on submarines at the end of 2011. Can you even imagine?
Next up, it was ‘Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World‘. I’m a fan of trains, and having been on some long distance rail trips in recent years, had found a few books to help me better understand how the world went so quickly from horses to trains. Many of these books are discussing angles of that transformation but none have yet helped me understand the practical side. This was a solid book, and one I enjoyed. It certainly spent considerable time talking about rail in England and in the US, but also talked more about international railway development than other books I’d read. It was an interesting book, and instead of telling the story in a linear way broke it up into geography. The story of railways, and the industrial revolution, is certainly a global one, but it impacted each country, each region, uniquely.
My next read remained non-fiction, but veered far more into the high-tech world I live in than the first coupe. It was ‘Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet‘. This was a surprisingly practical book retelling how the internet literately started. The book included lots of interesting details about the tech behind how it all worked, but it was never too dry. There aren’t passages in the book discussing actual computer code or anything like that, just the concepts. And, the authors did a great job bringing the personalities of the various people involved into play. I knew I would enjoy the content of this book, but I didn’t expect to enjoy the story of it so much too!
After this, based on a mention by a rail journey YouTuber (Yes, I know), I picked up ‘The Last Zephyr‘. This was a fictional story about the Amtrak California Zephyr which survives a massive volcanic eruption by luckily bring inside the Moffat tunnel at the time. I did not enjoy this book. Some of the characters were OK, but too much of the story was just unbelievable to me.
After this, it was back to my usual murder mysteries. We watched the Britbox show ‘Karen Pirie‘, and as is so often the case, it was based on a book series. I went and looked up Val McDermid, and the relevant book series and dove in! First I read ‘The Distant Echo‘. This is the story that the first series of the TV show is based on. No spoilers, of course, but while the main thread of the story remains the same the main character of the first book is not Karen!
I enjoyed the book, and then started the 2nd book in the series ‘A Darker Domain‘. This was another winner and even featured Karen to a much larger extent.
The TV series took some liberties, of course, with the content of the first book but the actual books were very enjoyable and I expect I’ll read more of them in the new year.
And, finally, I rounded off the year reading ‘Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters‘. I have long been fascinated with nuclear energy and it would seem the most popular books about the subject deal with their noteworthy missteps more than their more common daily operations. This was a good book, if somewhat biased against nuclear energy. It covered some disasters I’ve read about before, but it also included a good section about Fukushima, which I’ve not read very much about. The book begins with disasters in the early days of nuclear testing, before the technology was used for peaceful means, and ends with the disaster in Japan. And, as the author makes it clear in the final chapter, it’s unlikely to be the final disaster in store for us. Not perhaps the most cheery book for the Christmas season, but well written all the same. I expect I’ll be looking for more books about Fukushima in the coming year…
Happy reading!