Books I Read in 2018 – non fiction

I’m back to being able to comfortably call myself “a reader”. Over the last few years I’ve been blessed with a short commute and I didn’t read as much as I wanted to, or as much as I felt I should. But halfway through the year, I changed job and the silver lining of spending over 2 hours a day on the tube is that I have more reading time. With the exception of frustrating days when the tubes are misbehaving and making things difficult, I genuinely enjoy my commute because it gives me a window to read in, without feeling guilty for not working, doing chores, or even fighting the backlog of TV to watch.

Thanks to that, I’ve read 60 books this day, not quite my record of 66, but a very satisfying total. I’m also quite pleased with the mixture of books I’ve read – some of my favourite authors, some classics, some random experiments. I’ve maybe not challenged myself particularly, I’ve deliberately avoided anything that looks too depressing, or really challenging as I’ve been trying to manage my stress levels so I don’t feel too bad about it.

The numbers:

60 books, way up from 22 last year. All of them were new to me which is quite rare, I usually have a series I want to re-read or return to something for comfort.
19,000 pages (give or take a couple), 52 pages a day, so I happily met my 40 page target, on commuting days I’d regularly clear 100 pages a day.
49 different authors, all either British (68%) or American (28%) and one Swede, I need to get a bit more variety in there.
39% female authors – which is disappointing, but if I consider the number of books (rather than the number of authors), it improves to 47% of the books being written by women.
9 books (15%) on Kindle, which remains an excellent way to read books, particularly on busy tubes. However I don’t like the experience of buying books for it, much preferring to browse a bookshop. As a compromise, I got 11 books out of my local library, which is a wonderful thing to rediscover. If you’re looking for something specific it likely won’t be there, but it’s a good source for random picks and some classics.
28 books (47%) are what I’d call new, published in 2018 (13 books) or 2017 (15). 44 (73%) are from the 2010s and the rest are scattered over the previous 6 decades, then a couple in the first half of the 20th century and one published in 1850.

Non Fiction
18 non-fiction (30%) covering subjects from economics, history, media, and formula 1, and quality from high to low. There are 5 I consider outstanding and would highly recommend to just about anyone.

The best all round non-fiction book of the year was Factfulness – by Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling it very successfully covers all the necessary elements a non-fiction book must deliver, informing and educating by providing both tools and examples, while also being entertaining with anecdotes. All of these are also very well done by the runners up, Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy by Tim Hartford and Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular by Derek Thompson, but Factfulness edges into the lead because it is also inspiring and actually makes me feel a bit better about the world. I also want to call out In Cold Blood by Truman Capote which almost doesn’t count as non-fiction because it’s really written as fiction, utterly compelling and beautifully eloquent.

There were two absolute clunkers that I’d warn people away from. Steven Fry’s Mythos was astonishingly dull and dry considering the author, while How to Watch a Movie by David Thomson was both boring and uninformative.

Somewhere in the middle ground there are 12 other books. They’re neither amazing nor terrible, but they’re all missing something to make them outstanding.