Richard Farr's 3 favorite reads in 2024

The polymathic anthropologist and political scientist James C Scott, who died this year, specialized in big, brilliant tomes. (I would have included here both Against the Grain and Seeing Like a State, only I read them years ago. Two of the best works of non-fiction I have ever encountered in any genre.) Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012) is a mere slip of a thing - 140 pages - but it's as rich, funny, serious, and mind-altering as its big siblings.

Scott was not an anarchist - but this short and endlessly thought-provoking "squint at the world through an anarchist lens" is informed by the fact that, unlike 99.7% of our political chatterati, he knows the history of anarchism and respects its ideas because he understands that many of them are well buried (or enthusiastically slandered) common sense.

A typical riff: Scott tells the story of working in a small German town where the excessively rule-bound pedestrians would *always* wait for the light at an intersection where you could clearly see there were no cars for miles. He speaks of how surprisingly hard it was to break ranks and do the sensible thing - jay-walk - against the stares and mutters of disapproval. "As a way of justifying my conduct to myself, I began to rehearse a little discourse that I imagined delivering in perfect German. It went something like this. 'You know, you and especially your grandparents could've used more of a spirit of law-breaking. One day you will be called onto break big laws in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on you. You have to be ready. What do you need is anarchist calisthenics."

Scott spent his entire career studying how marginalised people resist being ruled. This has profound and unsettling implications for middle class liberal pieties about order, democracy, the rule of law, and the vital question of where human progress actually comes from. He finishes a brilliant, historically rich analysis of the role of mass revolt in causing change (usually after long periods in which even "liberal" or "left" institutions and parties did little to alter the circumstances of the least advantaged), with this: "To the extent that our current rule of law is more capacious and emancipatory than its was before, we owe much of that change to law breakers."

On every page here there is a new cold-water challenge to the political thinking of virtually everyone from the "far left" to the "far right" of the political mainstream. And it manages to be funny...

A gorgeously rich weave of apparently wholly disconnected stories across multiple places in multiple centuries; they are in fact all beautifully and heart-breakingly connected by one fragment of Greek manuscript. Like so many people, I loved All the Light We Cannot See - but I thought this was even better. Almost certainly the best novel I read in 2024; perhaps the best in several years.

Back when New York has a population of 7,000 a mysterious trader arrives from London. No one can quite work out what his business might be, and he is clearly hiding something. You have to wait right to the end - through a series of wonderful picaresque scrapes - before you find out. But you get to do so in one of the best final double-twists ever dreamed up. Thrilling and highly imaginative.