And here we are again: another year, another list. Previous years are in the category tag.

I won’t lie: this year’s post is a trio rather than a list, but not because I haven’t been reading. On the contrary. Nine out of twelve months of this year were taken up by my master’s dissertation which, much to my own surprise, ended up being the backbone for a further two-year research degree as opposed to a final project. So that was nine months of constant intense reading of…a lot, all of which went into my dissertation and my ongoing workplan.

This did mean that any reading outside of my dissertation really didn’t interest me. (Nor would it interest most of you.) I enjoyed a bit of leisure reading during a university-enforced break, and goodness me you want a team in your life who force you to shut your brain off for a few weeks, but then I went straight back into academic focus mode and didn’t come out until the moment I TurnedItIn.

Now that I’m on a much more reflective workplan, I am able to make up for lost time. The Pile has been restocked to its proper waist-high elevation. Hallelujah.

For now, though, here are three non-academic books which captured me this year.

But first…

If we’re talking about reading, I have to be crabbit (ahem) about the Ofcom Specs. The what? you ask. Well.

As I might have mentioned a few dozen times, my professional obligations have required me to read every godforsaken page of every document which Ofcom and UKGov have produced on the Online Safety Act, whether that is a draft SI, the law itself, a consultation, a code of practice, correspondence, or anything in the middle, since the initial green paper in 2019. This has probably toted up to be, and this is no exaggeration, over 20,000 pages so far. And yes, I do have to read every page; the tiniest footnotes, or passing sentences, are where the trouble lies. You can’t AI that.

The problem is that Ofcom insists on publishing everything through old-school PDFs. No extensible text formats or anything like that. Just PDFs. Page after page. Of PDFs. They never stop. You think you’re done. You think you’re free. And then they drop another 2000 pages for funsies. You rock back and forth in the corner for a while and then get back to the task. It never ends.

So it was perhaps inevitable that the day came when those PDFs looked…off. Slightly blurry. Blurry, in a way that did not go away with a good night’s sleep. Blurry, in a way that managed to render the laser-sharp laser eye surgery I had in my early twenties null and void. Blurry, in a way which meant I am now in a relationship with Specsavers.

So here I am, typing this post in my reading glasses, which I prefer to call my Ofcom Specs.

Yes, I am a victim of a tangible offline harm caused by the meta-online harm of poorly chosen document formats.

Screw you, Ofcom.

Book of the year: nonfiction

For the Human Rights and Digital Technologies course in the MSc – another five-star production by Dr Birgit Schippers, now my MPhil advisor – I chose to write my final essay on the state of play regarding digitally preserved evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine, in the political context of the US’s current favoritism towards Russia and antagonism against the international justice system.

This was Martha Gellhorn’s doing; several passages from Eichmann and the Private Conscience seared themselves into my memory the very first time I read it in the 1990s. That’s why I started the essay with them, coming full circle in a way. But if Martha set the scene, Victoria Amelina was its north star.

Looking At Women Looking At War: A War and Justice Diary is one of the hardest books I have ever read in my life, but I say that as the highest possible praise.

There are three reasons why.

The first reason is the subject matter: the author committed herself to documenting human rights violations in Ukraine, following the full-scale invasion in 2022, in a way which centred the humanity of those impacted over the technicalities of the legally-required processes; the book, and not the bureaucracy, was her goal. This meant choosing to immerse herself in the worst things it is possible to imagine. There were days when even I (of rhinoceros skin) could only get through a few pages of the book and no more. Yet that is the point: these things happened, and you cannot look away from them.

Equally remarkable is the fact that the book is not a translation: she committed to writing in English in order to reach the widest audience possible.

The second reason this book eats you inside is that you, as the reader, know what the author did not. She herself became the victim of a war crime, murdered in a Russian missile strike on, of all the obscene places, a pizza restaurant where she’d stopped for dinner. (Yes, the fuckers knew the pizza place was popular with HRDs, which is why they targeted it.) She was 37 years old.

So the third reason is that she did not live to finish this book. Her friends and colleagues lovingly pieced it together from what they found on her MacBook after her murder. Imagine stepping away from yours, right now, not knowing that you would never come back to it. What would your friends make out of your draft posts, your in-the-queues, your ready-to-publish, the jottings in your Notes app? How would they honour what you left behind?

Victoria’s friends did the right thing: they left it as she did. There are essays which end mid-sentence and go no further. There are random sentences from her notes app. There are things which are finished and there are things which are fragments. There is no embellishment or creative license taken. What is left is what she stepped away from. We have all of her that there is.

Like Gellhorn writing from Jerusalem, Victoria Amelina would not want her writing to be viewed as passive history. She would want it to be used as an active to-do list.

Anyone in a position to make good on that needs to read this book.

Book of the year: fiction

On a far more cheerful note, I struck gold in a used bookstore. This is one for the purists, to be sure, but that is a very enjoyable club to be in.

A Pleasure to Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories is an anthology published in 2010 of Ray Bradbury’s iterations which eventually became 451, including published short stories and discarded side quests. We all know the legend, of course: that he sat down at a coin-operated typewriter and the final novel poured out of him like water. Yes, well. The truth behind the legend is contained within this book. These stories are the journey he had to travel before he sat down.

Yes, some of the pieces in here are nearly verbatim, with tiny semantic changes which are only visible to those of us who stand in the shower obsessing over the order of clauses in a draft sentence. That’s how we refine and edit, in our heads, before we go near the MacBook or a coin-operated typewriter, and you know what, I would love to own an antique coin-operated typewriter. Now there’s a side quest.

For those who care about the writing they create, this book is a gift. There’s something healthy about being reminded that greatness takes time. There’s something wonderful about being reminded that it’s okay to iterate and edit and kill your darlings and rein in your side quests. And there’s something very liberating about being reminded that you can just publish things if you take the view that hitting the button is the beginning of the story and not the end.

The book was published before Bradbury’s passing in 2012, which means he would have had a role in it. It was sheer luck that I found it 13 years after that. He really does keep on giving, long after he’s gone.

Book of my heart

I end on a warmer note with Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story of War, Exile, and Hope by Olia Hercules.

This is not an impartial review, as Olia is someone who means the world to me, and yes, she knows that. I am a visibly healthier and happier person for having her (and her cookbooks which are now held together with sticky tape) in my life, and yes, she knows that too.

Strong Roots is about what it is like for her to carry generations of her family’s trauma – and no Ukrainian generation has ever known peace – within her DNA, only to find a new war repeating the cycle and passing itself into her own children. And that makes this book so much more than a memoir or a war diary; it is transcendent and even a bit spiritual.

Which is how this summer, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, I witnessed something profound happening in the audience while she was discussing the book. I will leave what that was in the tent, but believe me when I say that Olia is doing exactly what she needs to do, whether she realises it or not.

I hope she knows that.

Header photo by me from my summer writing retreat: the library in the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. If you think that room looks good, you should imagine how amazing it smells.