Summer reading

Lionel Barber
Editor of the Financial Times

Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia (Atlantic) is a gripping narrative featuring TE Lawrence, the adventurer, archaeologist, Arabist and spy whose exploits in the first world war helped to shape the modern Middle East. Anderson sets the Oxford man alongside three other larger-than-life characters, an American oilman, a German diplomat-cum-provocateur and a polyglot Romanian Jew who helped found the state of Israel. It is a novel approach but Lawrence and his own contradictions ultimately capture the day. A must read for anyone trying to understand the region.

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Eimear McBride
Author of ‘A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing’ (Faber)

Nothing I’ve read this year has affected or disturbed me as greatly as CB Editions’ timely reissue of The Notebook by Agota Kristof. In an unnamed country at the end of an unnamed war, the central characters – a pair of eerily self-disciplined identical twins – force themselves through a carefully planned programme of dehumanisation. Drawing understated parallels between acts of private, collective and state-sponsored violence throughout, Kristof’s chilling indictment of totalitarianism in all its forms reads like an alternative – and equally dread-inducing – eastern European Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both stylistically inventive and politically incisive, this is a book to worry readers for years.

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Lucy Kellaway
FT columnist

Literary people can be snooty about Donna Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch (Abacus), yet this is a book written for the reader’s sheer pleasure. There is plot – and then some. There are memorable characters. There is sharp writing. There is even a deep philosophical bit at the end. Indeed, the book was such a treat that I am left bereft on finishing it. I have turned to Philip Roth, knowing he hardly ever disappoints. But halfway through American Pastoral, I find the sacrilegious thought crossing my mind: couldn’t he take a leaf out of Tartt’s book and write more for the reader and less for himself?

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Eric Schmidt
Executive chairman of Google and co-author of ‘The New Digital Age (John Murray)

An economist wrote in 1971 that, “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else . . . ” Now, our senses are overwhelmed by multitasking, information and stimulation. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (Allen Lane) concludes that attention is everything but with focus we can tunnel and miss things. The authors apply the rules of scarcity to all of our activities, even love. They explain why scarcity begets scarcity. Winners in this world have better patience and control over impulses. This is a book to read – but not while you are watching something else at the same time.

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Simon Schama
FT contributing editor and author of ‘The Story of the Jews’ (Bodley Head)

“He could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones . . . why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid . . . ” Nothing else you read this summer will come close to Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (Penguin). Do not read it out of memorial piety. Read it to understand what the language animal can do at the height of his powers. Read it to see the world with sharpened sight, drink a deep draft of sensual passion, sweat in the Caribbean heat, and laugh at the malice of a lethal parrot.

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Karl Ove Knausgaard
Author of the ‘My Struggle’ six-book cycle (Vintage)

When a book opens like this: “I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing” – you can’t let it go, you have to read on, don’t you? Brain surgery, that’s the most remote thing for me, I don’t know anything about it, and as it is with everything I’m ignorant of, I trust completely the skills of those who practise it, and tend to forget the human element, which is failures, misunderstandings, mistakes, luck and bad luck, but also the non-professional, everyday life that they have. Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by Henry Marsh reveals all of this, in the midst of life-threatening situations, and that’s one reason to read it; true honesty in an unexpected place. But there are plenty of others – for instance, the mechanical, material side of being, that we also are wire and strings that can be fixed, not unlike cars and washing machines, really.

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Danah Boyd
Author of ‘It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens’ (Yale)

Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (University of Chicago Press) brilliantly deciphers the cultural logic of American black men’s relationship with law enforcement, revealing why black communities respond the way they do to policing culture. Today’s poor youth are trying to navigate a system that is unfair and disempowering. The lesson many take away is to trust no one. On the Run is an eye-opening book, full of beauty and sorrow, that challenges most people’s assumptions about policing and inequality in America.

Business
Andrew Hill

Economics
Martin Wolf

Politics
Gideon Rachman

History
Tony Barber

Science
Clive Cookson

Sport
Neil O’Sullivan

Film
Antonia Quirke

Art
Jackie Wullschlager

Architecture
Edwin Heathcote

Classical
Andrew Clark

Pop
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

Fiction
Rebecca Rose

Fiction in Translation
Ángel Gurría-Quintana

Poetry
Maria Crawford

Science Fiction
James Lovegrove

Crime
Barry Forshaw

Young Adult
Suzi Feay

Children
James Lovegrove

Picture Books
James Lovegrove

Literary Non-Fiction
Carl Wilkinson

Travel
Tom Robbins

Food
Tim Hayward

Gardens
Jane Owen

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Kwasi Kwarteng
MP and author of ‘War and Gold’ (Bloomsbury)

I have enjoyed many books this year but one that stood out, partly because of its unusual nature, was Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (Little, Brown) by Richard J Evans. Counterfactuals are the kind of guessing game we play when we wonder what would have happened if, say, Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo. Evans’s book reveals how much of our modern thinking about history is dominated by counterfactuals. For example, in the last 20 years, many novels have featured lurid depictions of a Britain conquered by the Nazis. Altered Pasts is a good read, which stimulates further reflection about the nature of history.

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Joshua Ferris
Author of ‘To Rise Again at a Decent Hour’ (Viking)

My favourite novel of 2014 is Zachary Lazar’s I Pity The Poor Immigrant (Little, Brown). Lazar is part of a new wave of writers – I’d include Rachel Kushner and Dana Spiotta with him – who have taken up the mantle of Didion and DeLillo in their preoccupations with the elusiveness of truth and the historical forces that shape, whittle, destroy the individual. I Pity The Poor Immigrant is the multilayered story of, on the one hand, the writer Hannah Groff’s investigation into the murder of David Bellen, an Israeli poet, and on the other, the mid-century Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky and his crimes. But it’s the telling that’s most thrilling. Deploying narrative techniques ranging from memoir, essay, photography, and journalism, Lazar shows how history is an act of storytelling and how storytelling is constructed bit by bit from our desperate and limited human perspectives.

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Ha-Joon Chang
Author of ‘Economics: The User’s Guide’ (Pelican)

An Officer and a Spy (Arrow) by Robert Harris is a remarkable fictionalisation of an extraordinary historical event, the Dreyfus Affair, but it has a chilling resonance for our time. I firmly believe that actions by the state can promote “the greater good”, but the book powerfully reminds us that the notion can be abused by a self-selected elite as an excuse to wield arbitrary power, to intimidate and discredit whistleblowers, and to distort the very notion of what is “good”. The book forces us to confront similar issues of our time, ranging from the dossier on the Iraqi WMD to the NSA files.

Illustration by Chris Wormell