This year, I felt galvanised and excited by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan (Allen Lane, £20). Taleb, whose background is in finance, believes that, in the modern world, weird things happen much more often than we expect them to. He calls these weird things Black Swans, and they’re events like economic crashes and terrorist attacks. They come out of the blue, he says, and afterwards, we nod wisely and pretend we understand what they were about. But we don’t. He has a lovely way of telling a story, like a good companion. I’d also recommend Terence Blacker’s book on Willie Donaldson, You Cannot Live As I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This (Ebury, £12.99). It’s a serious study of a self-destructive individual, a man who threw away his money and became a crack addict, although Blacker wonders if, in spite of everything, Donaldson’s life was not ‘a sort of perverse triumph’. I also liked Chuck Klosterman’s fourth book, Chuck Klosterman IV (Faber, £12.99), in which, among other things, the American journalist interviews Britney Spears and Val Kilmer, and writes a fictional story in which a woman falls out of the sky and lands on his car.

Sebastian Smee

I read, on a friend’s recommendation,

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