We’re close to the end of the pre-Christmas work crunch. Close to hours and hours of unfettered, unstructured time. For reading? Right? Once you’ve finished eating and boozing and being merry and bright, that is.
If you feel like getting extra-curricular with your time off, these ten smart reads across music, film, tech, politics and history will expand your mind, reinvigorate your attention span and fill you up with ideas to take with you into 2026.
It's your antidote to festive lethargy and the brain rot of holiday social media scrolling.
1. How to Live an Artful Life (Katy Hessel)
A gorgeous book, structured around the days and months of the year. It comes from Katy Hessel, she of The Story of Art Without Men. Each date gets a page here with a short, snappy instruction, a quote from an artist, some thoughts and prompts from Hessel, and then a two or three line artist bio.
The artists are both living and dead, some of whom Hessel has interviewed directly for one of her projects, or else those she has sought out via previous interviews, diaries and letters. Nan Goldin, Vanessa Bell, Hilton Als, Louise Bourgeois... If you like Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings blog (now The Marginalian), you’ll like this.
With some reproduced artworks for inspiration and some pages encouraging you to scrawl a few thoughts down, this isn’t a workbook exactly, more something to dip into and mull over for the rest of the day. The months are keyed into specific themes - memory for November, joy in December, "how to start" in January - which makes the book feel more of a journey than a random assortment of wisdom. Get the index tabs ready.
2. El Generalisimo (Giles Tremlett)
Giles Tremlett’s unputdownable biography of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco is a fascinating portrait of a man of contradictions. Brutal, cautious, politically mercurial for most of his ascent, hell-bent on absolute power. We see how the military man who eventually came to view himself as a crusading saviour of Spain, answering only to God and history, grew up in the shadow of the ‘disaster’ of losing Cuba in 1898 and was shaped by the Two Spains present in his family home.
The telling of the Spanish Civil War here is focused on Franco himself: his decisions, his indecisions, how he later spun his actions. Franco didn’t arrive in Morocco until after the Army of Africa uprising, which began the coup against the Republic. His political ideologies continued to shift until deep into the War and he took bold gambles such as choosing Toledo over taking Madrid.
The stories surrounding both the brutality of his regime from the outset and the relationships with Mussolini and Hitler from as early as 1936 are frequently jaw-dropping. Tremlett continues his meticulous study of the dictator, and his key allies, through World War II, Franco’s long reign through to his death in 1975.
3. The Uncool (Cameron Crowe)
The Uncool gives you everything you could possibly want from a Cameron Crowe memoir. The one-time teen Rolling Stone writer and director of cult classics like Almost Famous gives us ‘happy/sad’ family memories; a sense of limitless teenage obsession; sketches of underground music mags and the weirdos who run them and yes, lots and lots of hanging out with rock stars in the middle of the whole Riot House scene through the 60s, 70s and beyond.
It’s Led Zeppelin, it’s Bowie, it’s Brian Wilson, it’s a cabinet of unpublished Lester Bangs record reviews. And it’s taping the Allman Brothers Band off the radio on New Year’s Eve with his dad, his mother’s philosophical aphorisms, seeing Tiny Dancer live with his sister Cindy in San Diego. “It’s all happening.”
This is a book to treasure, full of rock and romance and what it was like to be there. (Once you’ve read this, if you’re looking for another dose of that Cameron Crowe magic, do seek out his one-season-only TV show Roadies from 2016. You won’t regret it. The soundtrack alone!)
4. Auto Biography (Mat Watson)
An A-Z of cars from YouTuber Mat Watson, whose carwow channel has over 10 million subscribers. Auto Biography is a neat gift for a petrolhead. Written in a chatty, silly tone, Watson’s love for all the tiny details of driving fast cars, cheap cars, small cars, any kind of cars really, comes across in his top tens, his pop culture references and his honesty about press trip mishaps, relationships with brands and general thoughts on the industry.
With potted histories of car makers (Tesla, BYD, Rolls Royce..) and funny asides into automotive history — especially all the vintage Enzo Ferrari and Ettore Bugatti quips and shenanigans — Watson also shares insights into his YouTube stunts, like his drag race of Bentleys from different generations. He’s passionate about everything from the old canary yellow Ford Fiesta Mk1 (nicknamed ‘the Banana’) he drove around Walsall as a teen to all the hypercars he poses next to in photos. Oh, and TIL that when kids draw cars they always make them ‘Rosso Corsa’ red.
5. Hunger Inc (Kayleigh Garthwaite)
Kayleigh Garthwaite’s Hunger Inc. sees the writer and organiser visit 90 organisations across six countries to report on "building solidarity beyond the food bank." Garthwaite’s message is nuanced but straightforward: greenwashed, corporate-sponsored food banks should not exist. We need to address the root causes of hunger and poverty. Not doing so is leading to the return of Victorian-style malnutrition in rich-but-unequal countries like the UK, while we can still honour the work of volunteers who help people to eat in the short term via charitable food aid schemes.
It features conversations with Toronto’s Nourish East End, the BEES Co-op in Belgium, West Virginia’s Voices of Hunger and campaigners working on ‘Right To Food’ towns and cities in the UK. Garthwaite offers clear calls to action around pivoting to cash-first schemes, exploring UBI, expanding universal free school meals, rights-based legislation and addressing housing and job security.
Compassionate, clear-eyed and full of practical solutions - from Scotland’s plans for "public diners" to community-run fridges in San Francisco - Garthwaite shows it’s possible to change course.
6. Lynchian (John Higgs)
This slim 100-odd page volume was published pretty damn quickly by Orion Books following David Lynch's death in January. It serves as an excellent intro or refresher to the dreamworlds of the director, and borrows from Lynch’s books, interviews, his doc The Art Life and longer biographies.
John Higgs thoughtfully considers the auteur through a series of lenses: childhood suburbia, transcendental meditation, painting and fine art, the individual vs society, even his addictions to coffee, sugar and cigarettes.
The quotes, the anecdotes and the lists of projects he could never get made will all leave you wanting to immediately watch or re-watch his films and, of course, Twin Peaks. Higgs is especially brilliant in the closing chapters, arguing nobody else can successfully mimic Lynch’s style because it’s about the process, not just the iconic images, and about the state of mind he allows to come forth in his audience. Bob’s Big Boy forever.
7. Incel (Katherine Denkinson)
This is the book to read if you want a deep dive into how incel culture, niche social media, mass shooters and figures like Andrew Tate have all been flattened into one single "manosphere" by irresponsible tabloid news. Katherine Denkinson, who has both reported on these phenomena and worked in mental health herself, is precisely the right person to pull apart these threads. She explains the links between them and situates the misogyny, the cries for help, the slang and the threats into a comprehensive analysis.
Denkinson waded through the internet to reach and talk to those who identify as incels, members of online subcultures who are being infiltrated by far-right, misogynistic messaging. And people who are trying to provide positive, offline role models for teen boys, like Progressive Masculinity.
This will be an illuminating read for parents in particular. It brings nuanced looks at autism, gender and empathy and fantasy gaming communities, not to mention a whole host of new acronyms and site names to keep tabs on. You’ve heard of 4chan but how about Soyjack, Gab, Terrorgram, groyping and Kiwi Farms? Food for thought on digital diets and beyond.
8. Mother of Capital (Matthew Costa)
Australian political economist Matthew Costa’s book Mother of Capital is a survey of “this shitty rent business” over eight centuries. It focuses on England but covers its global implications, both then and now. An engaging mix of theory and history, Costa uncovers a lost tradition of critiques of rent (in the broader economic sense, not just what you pay for your one-bed flat every month) from theological arguments by dissident priests to "the Norman Yoke" to the 17th century Levellers, Diggers and beyond. (Reading some of the Digger intellectuals is equal parts exhilarating and depressing…)
Costa expertly argues rent gave birth to capital as he traces the transformation from tributary - as in tributes paid by peasants to lords, the Church and the Crown - to capitalist rent relations between the classes.
He traces the impact of post-Black-Death competition between tenant farmers and lords’ tenures, the creation of a new yeoman leaseholder and wage labourer classes and the enclosures of common lands for specialised, profit-motivated farming. As for the future, he explores what this lens can offer to debates around the so-called death of capitalism and the rise of "techno-feudalism" happening today. Brilliant.
9. The Curious Case of Mike Lynch (Katie Prescott)
A twisty-turny corporate thriller, The Curious Case of Mike Lynch charts the rise, fall and tragic death of British tech CEO Mike Lynch. Written by The Times technology business editor Katie Prescott, the story opens with Lynch growing up in Essex, an early interest in Bayesian probabilities and his first few computing businesses in and around Cambridge.
Then, how he built Autonomy, sold to HP in 2011 for £6.7 billion and became embroiled in fraud trials that continued essentially for the rest of his life. The story behind the story has been painstakingly stitched together from over 100 interviews with former colleagues, investors, lawyers and executives and years' worth of recordings and documents. It’s a real ride.
Lynch was a huge personality. He invested in companies like Darktrace and Luminance, and there are plenty of juicy details on his relationships with entrepreneurs, the City, Wall Street and the UK and US establishments. But it’s the central scandal, the cast of main characters and the surprise of Lynch’s acquittal in 2024, that propel the book forward.
Why did HP reportedly take just 18 days to look into Autonomy’s books? How much was it really worth? And - back to probability - what are the chances of both Lynch and his former VP of Finance Stephen Chamberlain being killed in two different accidents, in two different countries, on the same weekend? Stranger than fiction.
10. The End (Joel Wainwright)
In December 1860, Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels that Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published the year before, is “the book which contains the natural-historical foundation of our outlook”.
Ohio State University professor Joel Wainwright argues Marx was influenced in his thinking Darwin's landmark work, specifically on the ideas in his Capital volume 1.
Wainwright takes us through Marx’s ideas before and after he read Darwin, focusing on competition, material exchange, adaptation, technology and surplus population. He adds contextual evidence about how, where, when and with whom these thinkers were operating, in the 1860s in particular.
Later, Wainwright looks at what reading these two colossal writers together can tell us about how we got here and how we can face climate breakdown, whether that’s the day-to-day business of strikes and boycotts or ideas such as degrowth and new economic networks. Absorbing stuff.
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