“The local maximum is a point in which you’ve hit the limit of the current design… Even if you make 100 tweaks you can only get so much improvement; [the design] is as effective as it’s ever going to be on its current structural foundation.”

For many tasks and activities targeted by digital services, Google search, and everything that follows (SEO, “How to do X” titles for posts, prioritisation of the freshest content etc) – represents a local maximum: a reasonable but ultimately sub-optimal approach.

Search’s influence is extremely deep. It’s what the web has been built around for the last ten years: it’s where journeys start and it’s how many commercial sites make money. It’s why content is created as it is, why sites are designed just so and its business model is what we look to. If you’ve grown up with the web and are now thinking about digital products, it’s practically in your bones. You can minimise the importance of search – Buzzfeed is one such example – but that tends to mean focussing on Social. Yet even Facebook, which is regularly touted as ushering in a post-Google world, has just deliberately moved back towards search, as though it’s a mountain it needs to conquer.

Aside from Social, Apps represent the other major challenge to a search-centric way of envisioning digital products. Perhaps as a result, apps are still regarded by many as an aberration whose time will soon end. Tom Morris’ recently circulated ‘No I am not going to download your bullshit app‘ is an ideal example of the antipathy they inspire from some quarters. It fulminates with righteous anger, and over 14 steps bangs home its one point: many apps are technically superfluous, and their functions can and should be fulfilled by the search-focussed web and its many disparate webpages.

Defenders of apps often build their arguments on the notion of focus vs clutter. The web is too busy, both visually and conceptually. When you open an app on your PC, particularly a browser based one such as Google Docs, it’s a confusing matryoshka: GDocs > Browser > OS > Computer[2]. A touchscreen device is purer: it’s a complete chamelon, transforming into whatever app you touch upon.

This is true, but in itself, isn’t the reason that apps are opposed to search – because if you have a search app, or search hardware (Chromebook, Glass), you solve the frames of reference issue.

A big reason apps are often opposed to search – and they often are, I think – is that they are the closest digital products have come to having a sensibility, a fundamental essence and set of values. Search has no essence, because it’s built on absence. Whether you’re looking for your keys or a review of a new pizza restaurant, it’s the absence which defines the activity. Online, digital search needs editorial prioritisation – I only have one set of keys, but there’s a thousand sites to tell me about pizza restaurants – but Google actively tries to surpress consideration of this, talking about fairness and faith in data instead. There is not a sense from Google that decisions are being made; instead its view is that thanks to its cleverness, algorithms and data-centers, fundamental truths are simply being uncovered.

Nowhere is this truer than the Knowledge Graph, a still ill-defined idea that Google is somehow becoming an AI/neural network/learning machine that knows how information relates to other bits of information and will therefore know what you want. It was puffed in the Guardian recently, but for many purposes it seems a very long-winded route – why teach the machine my sensibility when I know what I like, and I recognise apps which reflect it instantly? One app that I find myself using a surprising amount is the London’s Best Coffee App. It’s a collection of nice coffee shops in London, with useful information (opening hours, menus) and a map. It is entirely the kind of thing that can be done on the web, but the app does a great job both functionally and emotionally. I use it often when I’m out in the city, and what I like about it is not just that it’s focused, it’s that it delivers things I like. I can trust it, and I knew this from a thousand tiny signals, from the icon to the interface to the descriptions of the coffee shops, to the fact it includes ones I already go to. It’s a classic case of an object that I enjoy because it reflects my sensibilities.

Physical objects – and particular media objects, such as magazines – are adept at broadcasting a sensibility. Consider these two sentences and try to imagine what the person I am describing looks like:

James is 28, lives in Hackney, wears selvage denim jeans and reads GQ.
Jane is 33, lives in Bristol, likes purple dresses and often uses Google.

Your image of James is far clearer than Jane, I’d bet, even if you’ve not read GQ in years. You probably already know James has a moustache and boxy black plastic glasses, whereas the fact Jane uses Google tells you virtually nothing about her. It’s slightly above ‘She has two eyes.’ How about if I said TripAdvisor, or that she reads the Huffington Post[3]?

Apps do a better job of having a sensibility and telling you about their values. If I told you Jane is an avid user of Foursquare then that mental image of her is probably coming together a bit more. Apps generate a tighter, more graspable sensibility than websites do, and they do it faster. This is not to say sites can’t – from Reddit to This Is My Jam, they clearly can, it’s just the exception rather than the rule. 

Since search doesn’t really hook into the app ecosystem, can’t send apps traffic, and isn’t how people discover apps, they’ve been free to rethink a lot of what with the web is done in a certain way. Implicit in my critique of Quora is the idea that the site hasn’t chosen the right sensibility – it hasn’t recognised the best way to solve many of its problems, instead just lazily absorbing Google’s approach (and a bit of Facebook’s too).

Apps are able to be more expressive both through features and visual style because they get more of a user’s attention and have more control of a user’s device. And this can be useful – because sometimes, what we as people want, is driven not by a search query, but something more fuzzily defined, and sensibility appeals to that. How many people buy GQ because it answers a specific query? (“Are blue ties in”) vs the people who buy it because it matches their sensibility, or even more hazily defined, what they want their sensibility to become (“I want to be a bit cooler”)? Sensibility is where many of the world’s biggest and most successful brands operate.

What matters with apps is not whether the job they do can be technically done on a webpage; it matters whether that is really the best way to approach the problem. Search requires us to be able to formulate every desire into a query – but that’s far from easy and far from the optimal thing to make your users do.

–

[1] It is also one of the most humane ideas, because it hints both at the limitations of perspective that have been part of perception since the year dot (“can’t see the wood for the trees” isn’t that far off the above) – and of course, the divine inspiration and creativity that can solve it.

[2] There is a great blog post on this, written, I think by Dave Addey or Matt Gemmell and I cannot for the life of me find it right now.

[3] You could argue that these websites are used by many more people than than read GQ, so perhaps I should try and find a digital service with a comparable audience – but a website with 131,000 unique users a month is relatively obscure. Websites struggle to become brands until they are massively accepted services. And is it really just reach that makes Google and the sites it has inspired/driven bland? It’s also, I think, the decentralized, task-orientated, atomised nature of them.

There is some truth to this, but of course the story is more complex than that.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with our CTO and head of PR, both to look at the ABC figures and to talk about the massive increases in digital reading we’re seeing on our websites and in particular, our apps. We went through our analytics and got together some figures showing big gains, including the fact we’ve served 4 million issues via apps in 2012, wrote up a press release… and failed to get any interest from the media press whatsoever.

“It’s just another milestone,” we were told. Which of course is exactly what the ABCs are. Only the ABCs will be used as if they offer some terrific insight into an entire industry comprising thousands of radically different businesses. It’s a classic case of confirmation bias: the decline of print is a well-established story, and what we’re saying doesn’t fit into that.

But I think it’s also that we’re not just trying to brag about a big number – the second part of the press release talked about the fact that over 75% of these issues were served via apps on our COPE system (Create Once, Publish Everywhere), and this is a pretty complex story to talk about.

My view here – and to be honest, it’s my view with a lot of digital stuff – is that we’re not talking about a straightforward decline of one thing and the rise of another. The fetishization of “disruption” blinds us to the fact the Facebook is just as likely to be disrupted by the iPhone as CNN. Mobile in particular is a nuanced area with a lot of shades of grey.

COPE is a set of tools and designs developed both internally by the in-house emerging platforms team I run, Dennis Media Factory, and by a small number of trusted agencies supplying key pieces of technology. Linking together customised Drupal CMSes for each magazine, bespoke HTML5 templates, native app code and subscriptions logic, COPE is a set of strategic directives and the product of two years of learning that let us publish to a wide range of tablets and phones.

For those titles using COPE, where we have excellent analytics, we can see a lot about changing patterns of readership: as well as serving 3.13 million digital issues to readers worldwide via these apps, they’ve attracted 445,000 new users, racking up 7.6 million reading sessions. This is for titles such as The Week, Men’s Fitness and Auto Express. All three are great examples of well-established print brands that are finding both a new audience via apps, and that are forming stronger connections with their existing audiences as well. We’ve done a lot of really difficult work on both the technical and UX side of combining print and digital subscriptions, and what we’re seeing is that print users who take digital spend more time with the content and have much higher renewal rates.

What we’re actually seeing is that a shift in reading patterns, made possible by smartphones and tablets, presents a big opportunity to media companies, both for new projects and for existing magazine brands – provided, of course, that you’re willing to work on the UX and that what you’re selling is based on a fundamentally sound proposition.

But of course, print is dying, so you know, whatever.

At this point, I’m starting to understand why Jeff Bezos has said that one of Amazon’s key strengths is that they are “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

Oh, and yes, I am aware it’s somewhat ironic for an ex-journalist to complain about the press. Somewhat.

Their announcement of a blogging platform this week is a good illustration of how lost they are. Quora hasn’t given a compelling reason for it to exist, so it looks like the main motivation was the momentum behind Medium and Branch. It’s a shame Quora feels so lost, because part of what has been created there – by both the team and community – is brilliant. I also think Quora is worth studying because it exemplifies both the thinness and the brilliance of many shoot-for-the-moon start-ups with digital products.

“Quora connects you to everything you want to know about,” says the site’s About page (though they just changed it to “Quora is your best source of knowledge”).

Lofty. That’s shooting for the moon. And of course, a terrible curse to place on your product.

Let’s consider three things I might want to know about.

1. How to bleed a radiator
2. The pitfalls and advantages of various digital magazine platforms
3. What it’s like to have synesthesia

The first is knowledge at its purest and least subjective. There is a correct way to bleed a radiator. It’s easy to structure a question to ask for this piece of information, and easy to get a reply. It’s also a very dull piece of knowledge – apart from when you want to bleed a radiator.

Question two is a much less distinct kind of knowledge; it’s not a simple question to frame and the answers are likely to be somewhat subjective.

The final question is the softest of them all; it is a kind of knowledge, but there’s no right or wrong answer. I want to know what it’s like – emotionally, descriptively – I want someone with knowledge of the situation to tell me a story that takes me there, and allows me to experience it vicariously. This is knowledge which is mostly empathy.

The weird thing about Quora is that the site’s design is hugely biased towards serving the first type of query whereas the best content on there are the answers to the third type of queries.

Here’s the radiator question on Quora. Terrible; Google’s results are much, much better – a way better selection of information (including a video) than Quora, where the question has been answered very briefly and not particularly clearly by a guy who’s a video technologist. Er, great.

Google’s results are much better because Google doesn’t attempt to directly create and structure the pages which hold answer. Quora attempts to provide a location for both the question and answer but because it’s a bit of functional information which excites little curiosity from either the asker or the answerer, it does a bad job of this. Why would anyone go on Quora to answer this question? Other than alturism, or the fact they were just passing through, which is why I assume Konstantitnos the video man has done it.

And here’s the synasthesia question. Wonderful – first person accounts from people who have this intriguing condition. They’re raw, detailed and humane, and there’s plenty for me to learn. They’ve put real effort into their explanations and I think it’s because the core of Quora’s design – attributed written content, with a nice easy voting system offering rewards/praise, for the general reader – encourages empathetic connection.

However, almost every other part of the site’s presentation and structure works against this flicker of empathy and it’s because of the site’s thin view of what knowledge is, and thinking everything ought to be treated like query 1. Consider:

* There’s a big search box at the top of the site – ideal for people with simple, direct queries like my one about the radiator, not great for softer queries. I bet you found the synasthesia post interesting, but how many people would think to search for it?
* There’s a series of related questions displayed close by so I can refine my search. Not good for the synesthesia question – they look spammy, and really, as a general reader, how many synesthesia questions do I need to see?
* In fact, the entire site feels like it’s built out of SEO friendly designs like topic pages, and not out of human friendly editorial design. Just look at how much better Medium’s treatment of text is.
* And then there’s the social/follow/notifications stuff, which makes no sense to me at all. Give topics to people? What is that?
* The site’s bone-dry, picture-less design means there’s little to get you interested or guide your eye around. There’s no sense that this is a place for reading; there’s no fun and no sense of story.
* The entire design is dry, texty and academic. There are no images, and when they do appear, they look out of place. There’s lots of clutter: buttons and sub lines about details. Edit buttons so you can jump on errors. The site does its best to look authoritative and serious.

Good as the the “what is it like to be” questions are, there’s an even better type of Quora thread: discursive questions where someone sets an unaswerable but fun conundrum to ponder. Consider this one: “what is the most important human decision ever made?” Before you click, think of what your answer might be – after all, this classic Friday-night-in-the-pub kind of musing.

The obvious responses – Hitler, nukes – are all present and correct, but the fun stuff starts with the second to top answer. Vikings, says Jameson Quinn, arguing that had the Vikings tried to live in peace with the Native Americans, European colonization of North America would have been drastically different. It’s a cogently argued and nifty “what if” point; later in the thread there’s some balanced discussion of the role of Constantine, and both Christianity and Islam’s role in shaping Western power. It’s a great combination of the punchy and the rambling with a reserved, non hysterical tone that makes it relaxing to read in the way that can’t be said of much internet discourse.

What’s enjoyable about Quora is what’s enjoyable about the best kind of people-focussed journalism, the kind you get in the Sunday papers or big magazine features: a sense of looking into someone’s world and spending time among their thoughts. By its nature, this kind of knowledge is somewhat subjective, incomplete and personal. It’s got empathy at its core; the writing is connecting you the reader to the person on the other side. But Quora is better – or at least different – to that kind of journalism. It’s unfiltered, more direct, and more specific. It can cater to niches in the way the internet has always excelled at - for product managers, getting an informal Q&A from Amazon’s Ian Macallister is really intriguing.

So why doesn’t the site embrace this kind of editorial, empathetic content? Some  thoughts:

1. Its culture. Quora is a Valley start up, and editorial products are not valued by technologists or VCs. Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti: “I had several VCs say they were interested in investing if we could figure out a way to fire all the editors and still run the site. I’m not joking.”

2. Changing course to focus on editorial would require culling huge amounts of cruft (features, UX, design) from the site. This would be traumatic for existing users and the staff themselves. Editorial is not seen as a big mission.

3. Quora was not built as an editorial product, but as a combination of search and social. It’s trying to be Yahoo Answers with a social layer and decent UX, really. It’s a Silicon Valley thing that’s tone deaf towards words and treats content as just stuff. The lofty aim is not to have great content, but to solve a problem.

4. …Fundamentally, the problem doesn’t exist in a solvable way. “Being connected to knowledge” is so vague as to be meaningless, especially when it leads you to quantify knowledge in such a thin way as Quora does. The kind of empathetic knowledge which flourishes on Quora – stories – resists easy structuring and programmatic investigation  because these things often rob stories of their emotional richness.

So, what should you take from Quora if you’re a digital product designer and manager?

1. Their voting system works really well. The core mechanic of Quora – ask a question, vote up the good stuff – is great, and yields excellent quality content from users. It’s hard to imagine a newspaper site with as well mannered and interesting a community as Quora.

2. Concepts matter, they are your foundations. Quora is undone by its thin conception of “knowledge”, and this dictates poor design, UX and product decisions.

3. Be aware of how hard change is. Quora has a smart team. They are not blind to this, and I would be very surprised if they’d not thought of all this stuff – but they can’t make the changes. Probably because of how destructive they’d need to be.

Quora’s design treats answers as solutions. Its community treat answers as ideas. Its readers – well, this reader – want them to be stories.

Every now and then in London, you catch yourself, suddenly aware of the volume of people. All sense of it: noise and mass, an endless surge. You can stand back from the tube platform and watch train after train sweep people in and sweep people out, and endless flow. They are almost never empty. If you’ve ever got on the tube and wondered who are these people, where do they come from and why they’re wearing their expressions, then Craig Taylor’s book Londoners is perfect – it feels like you’re peeking inside the millions who pass you every day, as it’s a series of interviews with a wide range of people linked to the city, brilliantly paced, arranged and edited. It starts and ends with a pilot, talking about the descent and ascent from Heathrow, and in between are, it seems, all the multitudes who share the streets, all talking about who they are.

It’s a testament to how good a year in reading 2012 was that such a great book wasn’t the best thing I read. In short, 2012 was probably my best year in books since I started tracking what I was reading on this blog in 2007: I gave seven of this year’s choices five stars. Of course, I don’t really write full reviews and scoring books seems pointless, so really five stars is just a shorthand for “books I will buy over and over as presents, apologies, reminders and inspiration.”

So it was with Pulphead and The Art of Thinking Fast and Slow. Pulphead seems to have had a fair bit of success, which is great because it’s not the easiest sell in the world: it’s a book of essays and longform journalism primarily linked by brilliant writing. So far, so dull: superlatives are so weak these days. But if it could be summed up easily, well it wouldn’t have needed a full book. This is writing where none of the words are wasted. A favourite passage:

‘It took me several months to make it back, and he grew annoyed. When I finally let myself in through the front door, he didn’t get up from his chair. His form sagged so exaggeratedly into the sofa, it was as if thieves had crept through and stolen his bones and left him there. He gestured at the smoky stone fireplace with its enormous black andirons and said, “Boy, I’m sorry the wood’s so poor. I had no idea I’d be alive in November.”’

Much of what makes Pulphead thrilling is right there: there’s an exaggerated simile about stolen bones that’s high risk, high visibility, like a pirouette – but it’s such a brief flourish, in such a controlled setting, that it’s easy to miss its real purpose. It sets up the speech perfectly, which comes in low and strong, sad and plain. Everything about Pulphead is a pleasure to read.

The Art of Thinking Fast and Slow is not quite as thrilling to read – indeed in places it’s dense and complex – but it is as much a revelation. In it, Nobel prize winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman summarises much of his career and research. It focusses on how little we know of ourselves and our thinking; how easily tricked we are, how easily our perceptions detach from reality. It’s full of incredible examples and gives you a much better understanding of the pitfalls and problems that exist in thinking and understanding. It was really important for me at work; it helped back up many of the processes I wanted to implement when it came to digital product design, something I talked about in some of the presentations I gave last year.

The novels I read, old and new, were the equals of these three though: Graham Greene’s Quiet American was pure pleasure, just as complete and well weighted a literary construction I can imagine.

Hillary Mantel’s brand new Booker winner, Bring Up The Bodies, deserved its praise and deserves to outlast our current fascination with the Tudors. Its first chapter is incredible; I would have been jealous of how good it was, had I not enjoyed it so much. It’s a dark and claustrophobic book though, as bleak as the midwinter weeks in which I read it.

Londoners is non-fiction, but I also read a great book about the other place that has defined my life in 2012: Mordecai Richler’s Montreal-set Barney’s Version. It sees an ageing raconteur looking back on his life; regret and outrage and justifications flow as he writes his story. The final page twist is lovely.

Speaking of the passage of time, Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room handled it really well. It can seem gimmicky to switch the focus of a book from its characters to an object (a house in this case) but it works because the building embodies the hopes of the people far better than they do. It holds a tough mirror to them, outlasting them as it does.

All of the above books are excellent and well worth your time; if I had to pick a favourite I think it would be Pulphead. Perhaps it’s the writer in me, admiring just how much pleasure there is to take from its words, but I don’t think so: it’s just genuinely a really pleasurable read, one that feels light but lands heavy punches.

And while I felt like the number of books I read dipped in the second half of the year, I actually read the same number I usually get through – 27, a book every couple of weeks or so. So much for my attention span getting shorter.

11th July – 21st July. The Glass Room, Simon Mawer. I’m sure me describing this as a WW2-era story with a house as the hero does absolutely nothing to make you read this book, so ignore that and focus instead on the fact that it’s a beautiful and brilliantly executed story about about the way people build lives and how the passage of time can take those lives apart. It’s about a perfectly conceived, artistically daring Modern house, constructed in the early 1930s in Czechoslovakia, and the people who live in it, are exiled from it, and who eventually return. Beautiful.

22nd July – 12th August. Darkmans, Nicola Barker. Depending on what point during reading this 800 page novel you found me, you’d have heard completely different opinions. I was alternately bored by the lack of story, pulled on by the brilliantly realised characters, entertained by the dialogue and frustrated by the lack of emotional heft. I’ve seen it elsewhere compared to Tarantino and that’s a good call; stacked stories, intercut timelines, rich in reference, studious and daringly callous – but never real and never near to your own life, always a distant thing.

13th August – 20th August. The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst. The writing is not quite as achingly beautiful as the Line of Beauty, but it’s a gripping move through the 20th century that’s well handled, and avoids being melancholy. I always thought the appeal of books with time-shifts, where you see characters grow old and die, was the way they brought out the sadness of the passage of the time, like a patina in the wood, but The Stranger’s Child seems immune from that: it is nostalgic, but not sentimental.

21st August – 5th September. Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan. Very fine book of essays; the piece on Southern writer, Andrew Lytle, just sparkles. I was glad to read this on Kindle as I saved a bunch of highlights.

6th September – 16th September. Any Human Heart, Wiliam Boyd. Melancholy and affecting story of a writer’s life; successfully manages to intersect with 20th century history without seeming too much like a tourist’s guide to Big Events, and with a tangible emotional pull.

16th September – 10th October. Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon. I just didn’t get on with this.

20th – 28th October. Building Stories, Chris Ware. Terrific, multi-book graphic novel about… well, the life of one woman, and the inhabitants of one building in Chicago. An excellent discussion about it on The Onion.

29th October – 13th November. Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil. From the laze and daze of Opium to the desperation and decay of heroin in Bombay. Terrific and beguiling start, but it unravelled as it went on, because there’s not really any story to hold it all together, and in the end, it dissolves quietly, making little impact.

10th – 20th December. Jerusalem, Guy Delisle. His best yet; long, involving but subtle and lightly done, you learn something on every page.

21st December – 28th December. Bring Up The Bodies, Hillary Mantel. Disturbing and fully realised portrait of a society that’s vicious and dangerous, and intensely conservative, even as it moves through radical events. Liked the way patronage and traditional roles were shown as restrictive, reductive…

As usual, I’ll follow this up with a considered post on the best books of the year.

‘It took me several months to make it back, and he grew annoyed. When I finally let myself in through the front door, he didn’t get up from his chair. His form sagged so exaggeratedly into the sofa, it was as if thieves had crept through and stolen his bones and left him there. He gestured at the smoky stone fireplace with its enormous black andirons and said, “Boy, I’m sorry the wood’s so poor. I had no idea I’d be alive in November.”’

That’s a stellar paragraph I clipped from Pulphead, the widely praised collection of essays by US journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan. The essay in question – Mr Lytle – can be read in full on the Paris Review website. I’ve still not finished the book itself, but it’s really terrific, each essay a well crafted story with sentences that confound the reader in the best possible ways. Recommended.

So, here I am, back on the blog. After the jump, books from the first half of the year, summary verdicts and mistake filled summaries.

1st Jan – 8th Jan. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst. Marvellous writing; there are passages which are flawless, original and daring yet so incredibly true and right his words seem like the only way to say it. And yet, the narrative is so weak and few of the characters engaging. At time it seems a cliched and heavy handed reduction of the 80s; the strength of the prose saves it, but when something is only beautiful and doesn’t take you anywhere, it can’t help but feel slightly disappointing.

8th Jan – 11th Jan. Before I Go To Sleep, S. J. Watson. Page turning thriller with a great twist, about a woman who forgets the past twenty years every time she sleeps.

12th Jan – 3rd Feb. The Ipcress File, Len Deighton. Stylishly written, but I found it hard to follow, and given that the ending is basically three chapters of solid exposition and explanation, I wasn’t the only one.

4th February. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Volume, Kevin O’Neill and Alan Moore I loved volumes 1 and 2, but while this “sourcebook”, a patchwork of stories and ephemera, scripts and visuals, is an innovative idea, for me, it never became more than a lifeless pastiche.

4th – 14th Feb. C, Tom McCarthy. An interesting take on modernism, telling the story of Serge Carrefax – enthusiast of early radio and photography, WW1 pilot, 20s heroin fiend and Egyptian explorer. It’s a rich mix and McCarthy doesn’t go for a complex, complete synthesis – so in some ways it’s a bit disappointing (the plot is thin) but it’s good to see a writer taking on technology’s impact.

15th – 17th Feb. The Quiet American, Graham Greene. Absolutely terrific story of a love triangle in a pre-American war Vietnam. Complex and layered, but beautifully compact.

17th Feb – 25th Feb. Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene. Written only a few years later than The Quiet American, and with some of the same concerns – western agents in foreign climes, the end of many empires – only this time, it’s a satire and a gas, comedy rather than tragedy.

25th Feb – 3rd April. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman. An absolutely amazing book, full of very powerful insight into the way we think. Written with a perfect balance of clarity and complexity by a Nobel prize winner. Amazing – and made a real difference to my thinking at work, too.

4th April – 22nd April. Beijing Coma, Ma Jian. The tragedy of Tiananmen told by a student in a coma. Overlong but brilliant.

22nd April – 26th April. Cuba and the Night, Pico Iyer. He’s a great writer, and parts of it feel incredibly real – but it’s a patchy novel, with ropey dialogue.

26th April – 20th May. Life And Fate, Vassily Grossman. I admit it, I admit defeat. 400 pages into this nearly 900 page novel about Stalingrad and every emotion that went into it, and came out of it, and it’s time to say I just didn’t connect with it. Too many characters (new ones are still being introduced on page 300!), and I found it weirdly lacking in movement, with flat dynamics. That said, I am prepared to admit that with this one, I think I just lost the thread.
DNF

21st May – 28th May. Londoners, Craig Taylor. Terrific collection of interviews, all told in a direct, first person way, from many different people who have a connection with London. Some of the individual stories are real standouts – the East End mortician changing to keep up with immigration by doing deals with Polish undertakers, the pilot who begins and ends the book – but others are distinguished by what they add to the symphony of voices who love and hate the city equally. Recommended.

29th May – June 8th. Barney’s Version, Mordechai Richler. Just brilliant, right down to the twist in the very last line.

9th June – 15th June. Light Lifting, Alexander MacLeod. Widely praised short story collection that I failed to engage with. To me, it showcased some of the worst aspects of short stoires: stories that are more tricks than stories, full of gotcha! moments, where you’re reading and there’s not a story but a build up to an aha moment. Other stories end mid-flow, confusing leaving the reader hanging with asking a profound question.

16th June – 22nd June. At Last, Edward St. Aubyn. Better than Mother’s Milk, which felt like a mis-step, and there are still some terrific passages, but it’s a book of conclusions, of repetitions finding their consumation, rather than newness. Beautifully executed though.

23rd June – 27th June. Racing through the dark, David Millar. Compelling autobiography of a pro cyclist who doped and recanted. Excellent on the excitement, technical challenges and physical demands of road racing.

27th June – 10th July. Money, Martin Amis. It made me laugh out loud, and the writing is full of energy – as if it’s held together by forward momentum, and if it stopped, it wouldn’t make sense. Sags because there’s no real plot though.

It’s called Malevolent Aesthetic Bacon Takedown, just so I can prove SEO hasn’t won. That, and I’ve had the name on the shelf for too long. Take a look, daily updates, pretty pictures, it’ll be great.

A photo from this time last year, taken inside Montreal’s amazing Biosphere. Designed by Buckminster Fuller and built in 1967 for the World’s Fair, it’s a geodesic dome, strong, light, and enclosing a huge amount of space. It’s a beautiful building – full of benign faith in the future.

“This isn’t just false humility. It’s false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.”

Michael Lewis’ speech at Princeton has some great one liners wrapped around a really interesting point, and one that’s come up in a few things I’ve been reading recently: the importance -unfashionable and anti-individualistic though it is – of luck. Or positioning, or being on the right side of big shifts. I think about it a lot when it comes to my work (digital product design), and the decline of print. I think about it when it comes to success and attention, and politics too, given the UK’s current government, and their desire to reduce the reach of the welfare state.  And I like Lewis’ speech especially because it’s not just about recognising the role of luck and saying, “yes, luck helped me”; it’s where he takes that message:

“Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with  luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.”