Reading notes for 2024

• Scoop (Evelyn Waugh).
• In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility (Costica Bradatan)
• Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Peter Godfrey-Smith). I’m familiar with Godfrey-Smith’s influential introduction to the philosophy of science, but wasn’t familiar with his work on what you might call alternative models of consciousness. I learnt quite a lot from this book (not least about the life cycle and behaviour of octopuses)
• Asylums (Erving Goffman).
• Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Erving Goffman).
• Medical Nihilism (Jacob Stegenga). A persuasive challenge to the unexamined acceptance of evidence-based medicine discourse. Why is it that systematic reviews and meta-analyses can yield such different results while drawing on the same evidence base? Stegenga points to the malleability of the reviewing process (and scientific practices more generally), suggesting that we adopt an approach he calls “gentle medicine” (roughly, as I understand it, an acknowledgement of the limitations of medical knowledge and an associated shift towards less aggressive intervention strategies).
• Care and Cure (Jacob Stegenga)
• Philosophy of Psychology: An Introduction (Kengo Miyazono and Lisa Bortolotti)
• E-Cigarettes and the Comparative Politics of Harm Reduction: History, Evidence, and Policy (edited by: Virginia Berridge, Ronald Bayer, Amy Fairchild, and Wayne Hall). Related to the Stegenga book mentioned above, this short book maps out how a priori convictions – in this case theoretical commitments to harm reduction-based substance use policies in the UK and more prohibitionist (for want of a better word) policies in Australia – rather than evidence alone influence policy formation in situations of uncertainty.
• In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids (Travis Rieder). This was a fascinating, wide-ranging autobiographical account of the insidious nature of opioid addiction (or rather, in this case, opioid dependence).
• Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Ian Hacking). This book, published in the late 1980s, describes the sudden development (and subsequent rapid disappearance) of fuge (“mad travel”) in late nineteenth century France. Hacking presents the argument that while “real”, this short-lived epidemic of a specific type of mental illness was due to a confluence of essentially sociological and cultural factors.
• The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction (edited by: Hanna Pickard and Serge Ahmed)
• Digitising Diagnosis: Medicine, Minds, and Machines in Twentieth-Century America (Andrew Lea).
  
• How to Do Research and How to Be a Researcher (Robert Stewart)
• Politics on the Edge (Rory Stewart)
• How to Write a Lot (Paul Silvia)
• Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir (Shoji Morimoto)
• When it is Darkest (Rory O’Connor)
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Bessel van der Kolk)
• Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality (David Edmunds)
• Little Drummer Girl (John le Carre)
• Medical Language Processing: Computer Management of Narrative Data (Naomi Sager, Carol Friedman, and Margaret Lyman). Published in 1987
• Atlas of AI (Kate Crawford)
• Slow Productivity (Cal Newport)
• Ambition: How we Manage Success and Failure Throughout Our Lives (Gilbert Brim)
• The Science of Science (Dashun Wang and Albert-László Barabási)
• The Myth of Artificial Intelligence (Erik Larson]
• Losing Our Minds (Lucy Foulkes)
• Diagnostic Cultures A Cultural Approach to the Pathologization of Modern Life (Svend Brinkmann)
• Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self (Jay Garfield)
• Sleepwalk: And Other Stories (Adrian Tomine)
• Our NHS: A History of Britain’s Best Loved Institution (Andrew Seaton). An interesting account of how the NHS, unlike some of the other pillars of the post-WW2 British welfare state, adapted under the neoliberal forces of the 1980s. Illuminating discussion of “Welfare Nationalism” and racism in the development of the NHS. I was familiar with the famous quotation from Bevan (“I stuffed their mouths with gold”) when describing his negotiations with the medical union, but didn’t realize that the institution got off to such a shaky start.
  
• The Merry Wives of Windsor.
  
• A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens). I read this every year in the run up to Christmas. I’ve found that achieving a Christmassy mood is slightly more challenging in Australia due to the – for me – inverted seasons.
  
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (David Foster Wallace). The “supposedly fun thing” is a 1 week Caribbean cruise of enforced luxury, mandatory fun, and as the essay progresses, increasing alienation. One of the things I liked about this essay, in addition to the constant snark, was the extensive use of footnote asides.