The Accidental Oxford Reading List: 6 Books that Followed Me Home
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| Six books on reality, history, technology, power & one novel I couldn’t leave behind |
Technically, the first book I bought in Oxford began somewhere on the way there. I was listening to an episode of Sleep on Physics about one of those questions that sounds deceptively simple until physics gets involved: does quantum physics need consciousness? By the time I arrived in Oxford, the question had lodged itself somewhere in my head. Then I walked into Blackwell’s and found Carlo Rovelli’s On the Equality of Things.
There are worse places for an impulse purchase.
Oxford is, of course, particularly dangerous if you have this sort of disposition. It is a city built around the idea that following a question wherever it leads is a perfectly reasonable way to spend a life. And its bookshops make it extraordinarily easy to turn those questions into additional kilograms of luggage.
I came home with six books.
Looking at them now, they make for a slightly peculiar reading list: quantum physics, everyday life in Ancient Egypt, a novel set in the eerie landscape of the Fens, Silicon Valley and political power, artificial intelligence and prediction, and Naomi Klein on disaster capitalism.
Not exactly a coherent curriculum, but that is exactly what I like about buying and reading books while travelling. They create a record of where you have been and what caught your fancy at that particular moment in time.
Carlo Rovelli — On the Equality of Things
The Rovelli was the natural consequence of that podcast episode on the journey to Oxford. So when I came across On the Equality of Things at Blackwell’s, it felt less like discovering a book than continuing a conversation I had inadvertently started several hours earlier.
Donald P. Ryan — 24 Hours in Ancient Egypt
This one came from the Ashmolean. My interest in Ancient Egypt is considerably older than this particular trip, so a book promising to reconstruct twenty-four hours of ordinary Egyptian life was always going to be difficult to leave behind.
Rather than approaching Ancient Egypt through pharaohs and monuments alone, archaeologist Donald P. Ryan reconstructs a single day in ancient Thebes through 24 different people. Each chapter represents an hour spent with someone—from a bread-maker and fisherman to a priestess, soldier, midwife, and king.
And there is something especially satisfying about buying a history book in a museum. Objects behind glass suddenly acquire another dimension. The monumental version of Egypt, of pharaohs, tombs, gods, dynasties, is joined by people getting up in the morning, working, eating, arguing, worshipping, and eventually going to bed.
Danielle Giles — Mere
Norfolk, AD 990. In an isolated convent surrounded by the dangerous marshlands of the Fens, a servant boy disappears. Suspicion spreads among the nuns, while the arrival of Sister Wulfrun—and her claim that the community is cursed—threatens its already fragile order. Giles combines historical fiction with religious belief, superstition, and the unsettling landscape of the medieval Fens. Sounds like a good story? I think so. Every proper book haul needs at least one of those books you didn't arrive intending to find, connected to no course, lecture or longstanding research interest. Something that survives the ruthless calculation of how much space remains in your suitcase simply because you want to know what happens.
Gil Durán — The Nerd Reich
Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich has the kind of title designed to make you stop in a bookshop. Its argument is no less provocative. Durán traces an intellectual and political current running through parts of Silicon Valley, from Peter Thiel and The Sovereign Individual to Curtis Yarvin, the “network state,” and the increasingly explicit involvement of tech billionaires in American politics. His contention is that what is often described as libertarianism has, in some influential circles, developed into something fundamentally hostile to liberal democracy.
Reviewers have largely praised the book for bringing these people, texts and ideas together in one place. Others have questioned whether Durán’s deliberately polemical language—particularly his use of “fascism”—sometimes moves faster than his analysis. That tension is partly what interests me. I have recently taken a class on Ethics in AI at the London School of Economics, where questions about artificial intelligence very quickly became questions about power: who develops these systems, who controls them, whose values they encode, and what happens when technological and economic power become concentrated in remarkably few hands. Seeing The Nerd Reich at Blackwell’s therefore felt like a logical continuation
Carissa Véliz — Prophecy
From the Oracle of Delphi to the predictive algorithms of Silicon Valley, Prophecy asks why human beings have always been so desperate to know what happens next—and, more importantly, who gains power by claiming that they do. Carissa Véliz argues that prediction is rarely as neutral as it appears. A forecast can influence the very future it claims merely to describe, while algorithmic predictions increasingly determine everything from what we see online to whether someone receives a loan, a job or insurance.
Reviewers have been particularly taken with the audacity of connecting ancient prophecy to artificial intelligence. I had already heard Véliz speak before finding Prophecy at Blackwell’s, and she was extraordinary. The book also seemed a natural continuation of questions I had encountered during my Ethics in AI class. What interests me particularly is the shift in emphasis: perhaps the most important question about an algorithm is not simply whether its prediction is accurate, but what happens once we allow that prediction to make decisions about somebody’s future.
There is also something pleasingly circular about buying the book in Oxford: Véliz is herself a philosopher at the University of Oxford, working on AI ethics.
Naomi Klein — The Shock Doctrine
First published in 2007, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is built around a disturbing proposition: moments of collective disorientation—coups, wars, economic collapses and natural disasters—can create the political conditions for changes that would be far harder to impose under ordinary circumstances. Klein calls this “disaster capitalism” and follows the idea across several decades, from Pinochet’s Chile and post-Soviet Russia to the invasion of Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The book caused considerable debate when it appeared. Admirers praised the scale of Klein’s research and her ability to find connections between events normally treated as separate chapters of political history. Critics were less convinced by the grand theory connecting those examples.
I first encountered the idea of the “shock doctrine” at the beginning of 2026, when Donald Trump took offices for the second time. It stayed with me ever since. What interested me was not simply the economic argument, but the underlying question about power: what becomes politically possible when a society is frightened, disoriented, or preoccupied with an immediate crisis?
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