Brian Clegg's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Janice Hallett has written three novels that shatter the traditional murder mystery form.

Her first, The Appeal, was a series of emails. And this book is a collection of notes, messages, and emails put together by a non-fiction author, commissioned to write a true crime book about a terrible event 18 years earlier.

For me, Alperton Angels is so amazing because Hallett manages to immerse us in the story, bringing out the characters of those involved in the way they communicate. With impressive twists along the way, it’s simply brilliant.

Possibly the best popular science book I’ve ever read.

Palmer explores the nature of mathematically chaotic systems and shows how we can deal better with the uncertainty they embody.

Many real-world systems, from something as complex as the weather to something as simple as a jointed pendulum, are chaotic, meaning that they are hard to predict as very small changes in the way they are set up produce vast differences in outcome.

Palmer covers a whole series of different topics, in several cases giving the best explanation I’ve ever seen. It’s not that this is an easy read. I had to go back over a couple of sections to really take them in – but it was very rewarding.

In part, this book's appeal is the author's honesty. He explores ways in which experimental psychology has been able to look into why we hold certain beliefs and how they can be influenced.

The honesty comes because, unlike many pop psychology writers, Jong (who is both a scientist and a minister) comes clean about the failings of psychology, where many of its historical findings have proved impossible to reproduce.

I've read many popular psychology books, but I've rarely felt so much that I was getting an insight into how the researchers thought as if I were able to chat with them in a relaxed environment. It's really well written.