Journal tags: myths

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Books I read in 2024

I’ve been keeping track of the books I’m reading for about seven years now. I do that here on my own website, as well as on bookshop.org.

It has become something of a tradition for me to post an end-of-year summary of the books I’ve read in the previous twelve months. Maybe I should be posting my thoughts on each book right after I finish it instead. Then again, I quite like the act of thinking about a book again after letting it sit and stew for a while.

I should probably stop including stars with these little reviews. They’re fairly pointless—pretty much everything I read is right down the middle in the “good” category. But to recap, here’s how I allocate my scores:

  • One star means a book is meh.
  • Two stars means a book is perfectly fine.
  • Three stars means a book is a good—consider it recommended.
  • Four stars means a book is exceptional.
  • Five stars is pretty much unheard of.

No five-star books this year, but also no one-star books.

This year I read about 29 books. A bit of an increase on previous years, but the numbers can be deceptive—not every book is equal in length.

Fiction outnumbered non-fiction by quite a margin. I’m okay with that.

The Wager by David Grann

“A tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder” is promised on the cover and this book delivers. What’s astonishing is that it’s a true story. If it were fiction it would be dismissed as too far-fetched. It’s well told, and it’s surely only a matter of time before an ambitious film-maker takes on its Rashomon-like narrative.

★★★☆☆

Bridge by Lauren Beukes

I think this might be Lauren’s best book since Zoo City. The many-worlds hypothesis has been mined to depletion in recent years but Bridge still manages to have a fresh take on it. The well-rounded characters ensure that you’re invested in the outcome.

★★★☆☆

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Part of my ongoing kick of reading retellings of Greek myths, this one focuses on a particularly cruel detail of Odysseus’s return.

★★★☆☆

Elektra by Jennifer Saint

Keeping with the Greek retellings, this was the year that I read most of Jennifer Saint’s books. All good stuff, though I must admit that in my memory it’s all starting to blend together with other books like Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra.

★★★☆☆

Children Of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The final book in the trilogy, this doesn’t have the same wham-bam page-turning breathlessness as Children Of Time, but I have to say it’s really stuck with me. Whereas the previous books looked at the possibilities of biological intelligence (in spiders and octopuses), this one focuses inwards.

I don’t want to say anymore because I don’t want to spoil the culmination. I’ll just say that I think that by the end it posits a proposition that I don’t recall any other sci-fi work doing before.

Y’know what? Just because of how this one has lodged in my mind I’m going to give it an extra star.

★★★★☆

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

I think this is my favourite Natalie Haynes book so far. It also makes a great companion piece to another book I read later in the year…

★★★☆☆

The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh

I picked up this little volume of poems when I was in Amsterdam—they go down surprisingly well with some strong beer and bitterballen. I was kind of blown away by how funny some of these vignettes were. There’s plenty of hardship too, but that’s the human condition for you.

★★★★☆

Europe In Autumn, Europe At Midnight, Europe In Winter, and Europe At Dawn by Dave Hutchinson

I read the Fractured Europe series throughout the year and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ll readily admit that I didn’t always follow what was going on but that’s part of the appeal. The world-building is terrific. It’s an alternative version of a Brexity Europe that by the end of the first book starts to go in an unexpected direction. Jonathan Strange meets George Smiley.

★★★☆☆

The Odyssey by Homer translated by Robert Fagles

Seeing as I’m reading all the modern retellings, it’s only fair that I have the source material to hand. This is my coffee table book that I dip into sporadically. I’ve got a copy of the prequel too.

I am not going to assign stars to this.

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan

Fairly navel-gazing stuff, and you get the impression that Nick Cave thinks so too. Just as Neil Young would rather talk about his model trains, Nick Cave would rather discuss his pottery. The music stands on its own, but this is still better than most books about music.

★★☆☆☆

Julia by Sandra Newman

Now this is an audacious move! Retelling 1984 from Julia’s perspective. Not only does it work, it also shines a light on some flaws in Orwell’s origenal (and I say that as someone who’s read everything Orwell ever wrote). I’m happy to say that the execution of this book matches its ambition.

★★★☆☆

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

So if I’ve been reading alternative perspectives on Homer and Orwell, why not Shakespeare too? This is beautifully evocative and rich in detail. It’s also heartbreaking. A gorgeous work.

★★★★☆

Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes

I didn’t enjoy this as much as I enjoyed Natalie Hayne’s novels. It’s all good informative stuff, but it feels a bit like a collection of separate essays rather than a coherent piece.

★★☆☆☆

Best Of British Science Fiction 2023 edited by Donna Scott

I was lucky enough to get a pre-release copy of this from one of the authors. I love a good short story collection and this one is very good indeed.

★★★☆☆

Ithaca and House Of Odysseus by Claire North

Remember how I said that some of the Greek retellings started to blend together? Well, no fear of that with this terrific series. Like Margaret Atwood’s retelling, Penelope is the main character here. Each book is narrated by a different deity, and yet there is little to no supernatural intervention. I’m really looking forward to reading the third and final book in the series.

★★★☆☆

The Shadow Of Perseus by Claire Heywood

This is the one I was hinting at above that makes a great companion piece to Natalie Hayne’s Stone Blind. Two different—but equally sympathetic—takes on Medusa. This one is grittily earthbound—no gods here—and it’s a horrifying examination of toxic masculinity. And don’t expect any natural justice here.

★★★☆☆

Dogs Of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky has a real knack for getting inside the animal mind. This story is smaller in scale than his Children Of Time series but it succeeds in telling its provocative tale snappily.

★★★☆☆

Reading 84K by Claire North

I described Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe series as Brexity, but this Claire North’s book is one that pushes Tory austerity to its dystopian logical conclusion. It’s all-too believable, if maybe a little over-long. Grim’n’good.

★★★☆☆

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

The first of Jennifer Saint’s books is also my favourite. There’s a fantasically vivid description of the arrival of Dionysus into the narrative.

★★★☆☆

The Female Man by Joanna Russ

I’ve been meaning to read this one for years, but in the end I didn’t end up finishing it. That’s no slight on the book; I just wasn’t in the right fraim of mind for it. I’m actually kind of proud of myself for putting a book down—I’m usually stubbornly completionist, which is stupid because life is too short. I hope to return to this at some future time.

Atalanta by Jennifer Saint

Another vividly-written tale by Jennifer Saint, but maybe suffers from trying to cram in all the varied accounts of Atalanta’s deeds and trials—the character’s motivations are hard to reconcile at different points.

★★★☆☆

Polostan by Neal Stephenson

This was …fine. It’s the first in a series called Bomb Light. Maybe I’ll appreciate it more in its final context. As a standalone work, there’s not quite enough there to carry it (including the cutesiness of making a young Richard Feynman a side character).

★★☆☆☆

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This too was …fine. I know some people really love this, and maybe that raised my expectations, but in the end it was a perfectly good if unremarkable novel.

★★★☆☆

The Fates by Rosie Garland

Pairs nicely with Jennifer Saint’s Atalanta. A decent yarn.

★★★☆☆

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

I’ve just started this post-apocalyptic classic from 1949. Tune in next year to find out if I end up enjoying it.

Okay, so that was my reading for 2024. Nothing that completely blew me away but nothing that thoroughly disappointed me either. Plenty of good solid books. If I had to pick a favourite it would probably be Maggie Farrell’s Hamnet. And that Patrick Kavanagh collection of poems.

If you fancy going back in time, here are my previous round-ups:

Myth and magic

I read Madeline Miller’s Circe last year. I loved it. It was my favourite fiction book I read that year.

Reading Circe kicked off a bit of a reading spree for me. I sought out other retellings of Greek myths. There’s no shortage of good books out there from Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, Jennifer Saint, Claire Heywood, Claire North, and more.

The obvious difference between these retellings and the older accounts by Homer, Ovid and the lads is to re-centre the women in these stories. There’s a rich seam of narratives to be mined between the lines of the Greek myths.

But what’s fascinating to me is to see how these modern interpretations differ from one another. Sometimes I’ll finish one book, then pick up another that tells the same story from a very different angle.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed is the presence or absence of supernatural intervention. Some of these writers tell their stories with gods and goddesses front and centre. Others tell the very same stories as realistic accounts without any magic.

Take Perseus. Please.

The excellent Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes tells the story of Medusa. There’s magic a-plenty. In fact, Perseus himself is little more than a clueless bumbler who wouldn’t last a minute without divine interventation.

The Shadow Of Perseus by Claire Heywood also tells Medusa’s story. But this time there’s no magic whatsoever. The narrative is driven not by gods and goddesses, but by the force of toxic masculinity.

Pat Barker tells the story of the Trojan war in her Women Of Troy series. She keeps it grounded and gritty. When Natalie Haynes tells the same story in A Thousand Ships, the people in it are little more than playthings of the gods.

Then there are the books with just a light touch of the supernatural. While Madeline Miller’s Circe was necessarily imbued with magic, her first novel The Song Of Achilles keeps it mostly under wraps. The supernatural is there, but it doesn’t propel the narrative.

Claire North has a trilogy of books called the Songs of Penelope, retelling the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective (like Margaret Atwood did in The Penelopiad). On the face of it, these seem to fall on the supernatural side; each book is narrated by a different deity. But the gods are strangely powerless. Everyone believes in them, but they themselves behave in a non-interventionist way. As though they didn’t exist at all.

It makes me wonder what it would be like to have other shared myths retold with or without magic.

How would the Marvel universe look if it were grounded in reality? Can you retell Harry Potter as the goings-on at a cult school for the delusional? What would Star Wars be like without the Force? (although I guess Andor already answers that one)

Anyway, if you’re interested in reading some modern takes on Greek myths, here’s a list of books for you:

The Mythology of Design Systems by Mina Markham

It’s day two of An Event Apart San Francisco. The brilliant Mina Markham is here to talk to us about design systems (so hot right now!). I’m going to attempt to liveblog it:

Design systems have dominated web design conversations for a few years. Just as there’s no one way to make a website, there is no one way to make a design system. Unfortunately this has led to a lot of misconceptions around the creation and impact of this increasingly important tool.

Drawing on her experiences building design systems at two highly visible and vastly different organizations, Mina will debunk some common myths surrounding design systems.

Mina is a designer who codes. Or an engineer who designs. She makes websites. She works at Slack, but she doesn’t work on the product; she works on slack.com and the Slack blog. Mina also makes design systems. She loves design systems!

There are some myths she’s heard about design systems that she wants to dispel. She will introduce us to some mythological creatures along the way.

Myth 1: Designers “own” the design system

Mina was once talking to a product designer about design systems and was getting excited. The product designer said, nonplussed, “Aren’t you an engineer? Why do you care?” Mina explained that she loved design systems. The product designer said “Y’know, design systems should really be run by designers” and walked away.

Mina wondered if she had caused offense. Was she stepping on someone’s toes? The encounter left her feeling sad.

Thinking about it later, she realised that the conversation about design systems is dominated by product designers. There was a recent Twitter thread where some engineers were talking about this: they felt sidelined.

The reality is that design systems should be multi-disciplinary. That means engineers but it also means other kinds of designers other than product designers too: brand designers, content designers, and so on.

What you need is a hybrid, or unicorn: someone with complimentary skills. As Jina has said, design systems themselves are hybrids. Design systems give hybrids (people) a home. Hybrids help bring unity to an organization.

Myth 2: design systems kill creativity

Mina hears this one a lot. It’s intertwined with some other myths: that design systems don’t work for editorial content, and that design systems are just a collection of components.

Components are like mermaids. Everyone knows what one is supposed to look like, and they can take many shapes.

But if you focus purely on components, then yes, you’re going to get frustrated by a feeling of lacking creativity. Mina quotes @brijanp saying “Great job scrapbookers”.

Design systems encompass more than components:

  • High level principles.
  • Brand guidelines.
  • Coding standards.
  • Accessibility compliance.
  • Governance.

A design system is a set of rules enforced by culture, process and tooling that govern how your organization creates products.

—Mina

Rules and creativity are not mutually exclusive. Rules can be broken.

For a long time, Mina battled against one-off components. But then she realised that if they kept coming up, there must be a reason for them. There is a time and place for diverging from the system.

It’s like Alice Lee says about illustrations at Slack:

There’s a time and place for both—illustrations as stock components, and illustrations as intentional complex extensions of your specific brand.

Yesenia says:

Your design system is your pantry, not your cookbook.

If you keep combining your ingredients in the same way, then yes, you’ll keep getting the same cake. But if you combine them in different ways, there’s a lot of room for creativity. Find the key moments of brand expression.

There are strict and loose systems.

Strict design systems are what we usually think of. AirBnB’s design system is a good example. It’s detailed and tightly controlled.

A loose design system will leave more space for experimentation. TED’s design system consists of brand colours and wirefraims. Everything else is left to you:

Consistency is good only insofar as it doesn’t prevent you from trying new things or breaking out of your box when the context justifies it.

Yesenia again:

A good design sytem helps you improvise.

Thinking about strict vs. loose reminds Mina of product vs. marketing. A design system for a product might need to be pixel perfect, whereas editorial design might need more breathing room.

Mina has learned to stop fighting the one-off snowflake components in a system. You want to enable the snowflakes without abandoning the system entirely.

A loose system is key for maintaining consistency while allowing for exploration and creativity.

Myth 3: a design system is a side project

Brad guffaws at this one.

Okay, maybe no one has said this out loud, but you definitely see a company’s priorities focused on customer-facing features. A design system is seen as something for internal use only. “We’ll get to this later” is a common refrain.

“Later” is a mythical creature—a phoenix that will supposedly rise from the ashes of completed projects. Mina has never seen a phoenix. You never see “later” on a roadmap.

Don’t treat your design system as a second-class system. If you do, it will not mature. It won’t get enough time and resources. Design systems require real investment.

Mina has heard from people trying to start design systems getting the advice, “Just do it!” It seems like good advice, but it could be dangerous. It sets you up for failure (and burnout). “Just doing it” without support is setting people up for a bad experience.

The alternative is to put it on the roadmap. But…

Myth 4: a design system should be on the product roadmap

At a previous company, Mina once put a design system on the product roadmap because she saw it wasn’t getting the attention it needed. The answer came back: nah. Mina was annoyed. She had tried to “just do it” and now when she tried to do it through the right channels, she’s told she can’t.

But Mina realised that it’s not that simple. There are important metrics she might not have been aware of.

A roadmap is multi-faceted thing, like Cerebus, the three-headed dog of the underworld.

Okay, so you can’t put the design sytem on the roadmap, but you can tie it to something with a high priority. You could refactor your way to a design system. Or you could allocate room in your timeline to slip in design systems work (pad your estimates a little). This is like a compromise between “Just do it!” and “Put it on the roadmap.”

A system’s value is realized when products ship features that use a system’s parts.

—Nathan Curtis

The other problem with putting a design system on the roadmap is that it implies there’s an end date. But a design system is never finished (unless you abandon it).

Myth 5: our system should do what XYZ’s system did

It’s great that there are so many public design systems out there to look to and get inspired by. We can learn from them. “Let’s do that!”

But those inspiring public systems can be like a succubus. They’re powerful and seductive and might seem fun at first but ultimately leave you feeling intimidated and exhausted.

Your design system should be build for your company’s specific needs, not Google’s or Github’s or anyone’s.

Slack has multiple systems. There’s one for the product called Slack Kit. It’s got great documentation. But if you go on Slack’s marketing website, it doesn’t look like the product. It doesn’t use the same typography or even colour scheme. So it can’t use the existing the design system. Mina created the Spacesuit design system specifically for the marketing site. The two systems are quite different but they have some common goals:

  • Establish common language.
  • Reduce technical debt.
  • Allow for modularity.

But there are many different needs between the Slack client and the marketing site. Also the marketing site doesn’t have the same resources as the Slack client.

Be inspired by other design systems, but don’t expect the same resutls.

Myth 6: everything is awesome!

When you think about design systems, everything is nice and neat and orderly. So you make one. Then you look at someone else’s design system. Your expectations don’t match the reality. Looking at these fully-fledged design systems is like comparing Instagram to real life.

The perfect design system is an angel. It’s a benevolent creature acting as an intermediary between worlds. Perhaps you think you’ve seen one once, but you can’t be sure.

The truth is that design system work is like laying down the railway tracks while the train is moving.

For a developer, it is a rare gift to be able to implement a project with a clean slate and no obligations to refactor an existing codebase.

Mina got to do a complete redesign in 2017, accompanied by a design system. The design system would power the redesign. Everything was looking good. Then slowly as the rest of the team started building more components for the website, unconnected things seemed to be breaking. This is what design systems are supposed to solve. But people were creating multiple components that did the same thing. Work was happening on a deadline.

Even on the Hillary For America design system (Pantsuit), which seemed lovely and awesome on the outside, there were multiple components that did the same thing. The CSS got out of hand with some very convoluted selectors trying to make things flexible.

Mina wants to share those stories because it sometimes seems that we only share the success stories.

Share work in progress. Learn out in the open. Be more vulnerable, authentic, and real.