This is now the fifth year of doing this, so if you’ve read any of the previous four, you’ll know roughly what’s coming: a list, a few re-reads, and a favourites section. 2024 was my first full calendar year as Chief Scientific Adviser at DCMS, and it shows in the list below more than usual — there’s a noticeably heavier skew towards systems thinking, tech policy and the state, almost as if the day job had subtly started bleeding into the evening reading.
Where previous years leaned on committing to a long series, 2024 was more of a grab-bag: a couple of short, dense pieces of speculative fiction picked up when there genuinely wasn’t time for anything longer, a handful of old favourites revisited as audiobooks (whilst running or cycling, as ever), and enough politics/policy non-fiction in a UK general election year to make the fiction feel like a deliberate counterweight.
So, in reading/listening order for 2024:
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2017) by Donella H. Meadows
- Ball Lightning (2021) by Cixin Liu
- System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We can Reboot (2021) by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
- Cryptonomicon (2020) by Neal Stephenson [⟳, but first time audiobook]
- Digging Up Mother: A Love Story (2016) by Doug Stanhope
- Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It (2024) by Sam Freedman
- Liar’s Poker (2022) by Michael Lewis [⟳, but first time audiobook]
- A Little History of Philosophy (2014) by Nigel Warburton
- Why We Sleep (2017) by Matthew Walker
- Jews Don’t Count (2022) by David Baddiel
- The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010) by Ted Chiang
- Dolly (2016) by Elizabeth Bear
- Rainbow Six (2014) by Tom Clancy [⟳, but first time audiobook]
My favourites of 2024 were as follows:
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2017) by Donella Meadows — a deceptively short primer on feedback loops, stocks and flows, and intervention points, that maps uncannily well onto the engineering view of the world I hopefully bring into government. I now find myself reaching for it when wrestling with some of the complex socio-technical systems that policy actually has to work through. Posthumously published but still the clearest introduction to systems thinking I’ve come across; essential reading for anyone working in or around government.
- Digging Up Mother: A Love Story (2016) by Doug Stanhope — the deliberate counterweight: a filthy, blackly funny, occasionally genuinely moving memoir about his mother’s life, death and his own. Not for everyone, but exactly the kind of escapism this list needed by the time I got to it.
- And an honourable mention to The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010) by Ted Chiang — a slow, melancholic novella about raising digital minds over decades, asking harder and more grounded questions about AI, consciousness and obligation than most of the current discourse manages in book-length form. Read it in an evening; thought about it for weeks afterwards.
The tsundoku pile keeps growing faster than I can read it, which by now should surprise nobody, including me. Plan for next year, predictably: must do better. Enjoy!
Digital Society & Policy 