This year I enjoyed Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf (Icon Books, £8.99), a brilliant book about how human beings learned to read and write. There's a superb explanation of the conditions that cause dyslexia -- which, Wolf points out, wouldn't have conferred an evolutionary disadvantage until very recently, and might even have been beneficial to some people.
I liked Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt (Allen Lane, £20), which explains, among lots of other things, why it's counterproductive, beyond a certain point, to tell people what to do. People drive better when they have to think about what they're doing, rather than living in a world of relentless instructions. And I take my hat off to Randall Stross, whose book Planet Google (Atlantic Books, £16.99) explains the genius of that company: how they found a way to make more data into better data, which is, perhaps, the modern-day equivalent of striking oil. Naturally I loved Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Bloomsbury, £14.99). And I was pleasantly drawn into Ethan Canin's novel America, America (Bloomsbury, £17.99).
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