We are what we read
by Paul Miller
In advance of World Book Day 2003 on Thursday, I thought it might be interesting to nominate our most important books of 2002/3... I'm not going to be any more restrictive than that. Post your ideas in the Comments section.
crabtree crabtree
Book of the year? Surely book of the hour? Check out www.allconsuming.net for recently mentioned and discussed books. (Currently 'Linked' is at number 3, and features regularily along with the other twenty odd near-identical books about networks published last year). But given that much of what appears on such sites is neophilia of the smart mobs variety, i expect very little of it to be remembered in a few years. That said, I'd plump for The Shield of Achilles. Ok, i haven't /quite/ finished it all yet, but those few hundred pages i have struggled through weighty and provoking enough for inclusion.
Helen McCarthy
The book that blew me away in 2002 was Rachel Cusk's 'A Life's Work', an extremely painful autobiographical read about her first year of motherhood. What's the significance for policy wonks? Well, with contributions from both Demos' Gillian Thomas and IPPR's Matthew Taylor (et pere) filling the broadsheets, the meaning of children has risen to prominence in recent months; I would highly recommend reading the lesser-known-to-policy-circles Cusk alongside these two books, to get an up close and personal account of how sprogs utterly transform the career path-dependence of the (admittedly white and middle-class) childless singleton. The post baby-boomer, post Women's Lib generation is caught between the modern, individualist desire for personal fulfilment and the often painful interdependencies of family life. Cusk's memoir dares to make the observation that whilst having children is the most rewarding human experience of all, we also lose something special in the mix; becoming a mother therefore is as much a process of mourning the life you've lost as it is celebrating the new life you've brought into the world. Somehow we have to come to terms with that ambivalence. Now there's a lesson for the wonks responsible for family policy...
Lydia Howland
As a newcomer to Network Theory I have really enjoyed 'Linked' by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. It manages to be both informative and accessible and has thrown up all kinds of interesting questions about the politics and ethics of the ways in which we collect, collate and distribute information and knowledge. I think this should be on the required reading list.
On the fiction side, quite apart from being a really compelling and beautifully written story, 'The Life of Pi' offers a clever, almost subliminal, examination of the role of narrative in religion and the construction of belief.