My year in the books 2024

If there is a common theme throughout the readings of the past few years, it is that the lessons of the past are best digested through the leisure of slow reflection.

The pressure to absorb large amounts of information in the shortest possible time must be the greatest curse of modern life. This has created a generation addicted to TikTok videos and a decline in what is disparagingly called traditional media.

But getting the most out of the latest technology still depends on literacy and the ability to communicate effectively. Writers and book publishers have not yet succumbed to an apocalyptic fate.

Would Boris Johnson have attracted an audience willing to pay $495 to hear him in person if he hadn't had a book to promote? The fact that it's nearly 800 pages long, which Amazon.com calculates as 15.25 hours of reading time, is a testament to the drawing power of a book, no matter how it's presented.

For my part, I put Unchained except for summer reading with several others, mentioned later in this column.

Getting the most out of the latest technology always depends on literacy and the ability to communicate effectively.

Women's heavyweight

Ian F. Grant.

Most of my reading in 2024 was devoted to New Zealand non-fiction titles and a sprinkling of historical fiction sent to me by authors, some of whom were self-published. As middle-aged men, they found it difficult to resist the weight of female publishers and book buyers. If men no longer read fiction, they alone are to blame.

But male writers held their own in nonfiction. Ryan Bodman's social history of rugby league has been judged a winner at the Ockham Book Awards. Its class-based socio-economic approach sets it apart from ordinary sports books and suggests that other codes, affinity groups, and leisure activities could benefit from similar historical analysis.

The phrase “the more, the better” also appeared in Ian F Grant's second volume of his newspaper history, By pressingwhich covers the years 1921 to 2000. If you've ever worked on an article, you'll find it mentioned here along with numerous stories ranging from corporate maneuvers to closures and launches.

The economy has come under scrutiny under two very different narratives: Herald of New Zealand Business editor Liam Danns popularized the alphabet book Barbecue Economicsand Brian Eastons On the open sea. The latter takes his historical analysis of the economy up to the period 2017-23 under a Labor government. Originally a self-published e-book, Easton informs me that it is now available in paperback.

Fraud trial

The economic scene in the broad sense produced a surprise and NBR Exclusively, Digi-Tech founder John Reids outlines his 2004 fraud trial plus two insider stories from the Environmental Defense Society and the living wage movement. Reids Some bad men is controversial to say the least and names those he considers guilty of cover-up and corruption. Oddly, they have not responded to his damaging accusations.

On the other hand, Raewyn Pearts Environmental Defenders and Lyndy McIntyres The power to win were less passionate in their balance and their search for their respective causes.

On the political level, the only notable memoir, Derek Quigleys Challenge the status quoshowed the benefits of hindsight. He emailed me from Madrid, where he lives retired, to rebut my comment about his lack of radical zeal by attaching a recent article on defense issues in the Pacific and warning me of a next article on domestic violence. His approach on both subjects is to promote practical rather than theoretical results, which was a hallmark of his politics.

Professional men who write historical novels near retirement may be unpopular with publishers. But that didn't stop three of them from impressing me this year.

Auckland lawyer Dermot Ross chose Ernest Hemingway as his muse for Hemingways tumblera reimagining of the writer's summer in Spain in 1925 through the eyes of a contemporary and his modern-day descendant.

Dunedin accountant Christopher Worth continued his World War II trilogy The rabbit hunter with its fictional hero involved in the Battle of Crete, while Manukau District Court Judge Alan Goodwin delved into the adolescence of Britain's most famous scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, to Greene Lyon.

International scene

Big ideas and big concepts dominated the book world outside New Zealand. The most compelling business book was by Gary Stevensons. The exchange gamea true morality tale about the rise and fall of a financial trader, a self-proclaimed smart guy with a photographic memory and a gift for mathematics.

Hannah Ritchie.

The history of information networks until the era of artificial intelligence has been the subject of a Linkby Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli mathematician and one of the founders of the successful big ideas genre. Not the end of the worldby English data scientist Hannah Ritchie, provided a welcome factual antidote to climate change alarmism and showed that it was possible to achieve sustainability without sacrificing living standards.

Anne Applebaums Autocracy, Inc: dictators who want to rule the world has described an authoritarian network that poses far more danger to Western democracies than the free-market Atlas conspiracy.

For another publication I revised William Dalrymples The Gold Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. It describes how, through trade, missionaries, and sometimes conflict, India's soft power expanded across Central and Southeast Asia over a millennium and a half, from about 250 BC until the arrival of the British Raj. Dalrymple's anticolonial views make him reluctant to give credit to the scholars who discovered and preserved the artifacts of ancient India's Buddhist culture and its invention of mathematics.

The English clergyman and ethicist Nigel Biggar is at the forefront of a more balanced assessment of the British Empire. Colonialism: a moral assessment also examines the high human cost of regimes resulting from decolonization in the late 20th century.

Looking to the future

Besides Johnson's giant autobiography, I have some important reading planned for the columns in the new year. I will finish the 500 pages and more of Joséphine Quinn How the world created the Westcovering 4000 years of human history.

For potential and practicing executives, Steve Vamoss Through changes and shocks lists lessons learned working at Xero, Microsoft and Apple. Wellington KC Daniel Kalderimis has some personal thoughts on Zest: moving from depression to philosophy on how to have a more fruitful life.

I will also consult, at the suggestion of a former colleague at Victoria University, Ian O Williamsons' edited collection of academic essays on the workplace. It is part of the Critical Conversations series published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Williamson was pro vice-chancellor and dean of the Victorian School of Business and Government. He is now dean of the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine.