Books read - Ben Fraser

2026

The Survivor, Josef Lewkowicz
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Süskind
Fritz and Kurt, Jeremy Dronfield
1984, George Orwell
Groovy, Laidback and Nasty: A History of Independent Music in Sheffield, Daniel Dylan Wray
The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel
Careless People, Sarah Wynn Williams
Die With Zero, Bill Perkins
Migraine, Oliver Sacks
Transformed, Marty Cagan
Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart
Vagabond, Tim Curry
The Courage to be Happy, Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
The Courage to be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
The Places in Between, Rory Stewart

AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference; Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor
The Art Of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, Tom Kelley
Messing with My Head, Howard Dully
Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky
Free: coming of age at the end of history, Lea Ypi
Man's Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust, Viktor E Frankl
Surrounded by Idiots, Thomas Erickson
Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows
How Westminster Works…And Why It Doesn’t, Ian Dunt
Rave New World, Kirk Field
Germs, Genes and Civilisation, David Clark
Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, Fuchsia Dunlop
Normal People, Sally Rooney
The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell
The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor, Mark Schatzker
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan
Orbital, Samantha Harvey

Firewatching, Russ Thomas
Batavia, Peter FitzSimons
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari
Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, Dan Saladino
Dam Busters, James Holland
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, Brian Christian
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Last Man Off, Matt Lewis
All the Light We Cannot See. Anthony Doerr
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. John Boyne
The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Gripping Story of Finding Shackleton's Endurance. Menson Bound
Holes, Louis Sachar
Fast Forward: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist: Volume II. Stephen Morris
Record Play Pause: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist: the Joy Division Years: Volume I. Stephen Morris
Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn't Food ... and Why Can't We Stop? Chris Van Tulleken
The Happiest Man on Earth: The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor, Eddie Jake
Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. Jon Krakaeur

Gene Eating: the story of human appetite, Giles Yeo
The Puppet Show, M W Craven
The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin
The Great Bridge, David McCullough
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa - Adam Hochschild
Congo Journey, Redmond O’Hanlon
True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise, Terence McKenna
Blank on the Map: Pioneering exploration in the Shaksgam valley and Karakoram mountains, Eric Shipton
Between Ape and Human, Gregory Forth
Educated, Tara Westover
Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape, Henry Dimbleby
Children Of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tuesdays With Morrie, Mitch Albom
Bring It On Home: Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin and Beyond: The Story of Rock's Greatest Manager. Mark Blake
Work: a history of how we spend our time, James Suzman
Losing It (or How I Fell Off My Bicycle) - Adam Morris

Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond
Red Notice, Bill Browder
Regenesis, George Monbiot
All Quiet on the Western Front, Vintage Remarque
Citizens, Jon Alexander
The ink that draws the map, Dan Olner
The body keeps the score, Bessel Van Der Kolk
Creativity, the Perfect Crime, Phillips Petit
Sing Backwards and Weep, Mark Lanegan
See a Little Light, Bob Mould autobiography
Devil in Coma, Mark Lannegan
Do What You Want, the story of Bad Religion
Papillon, Henri Charriere
Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit, Matt Brennan
The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity, David Wengrow & David Graeber

Those Who Were Dancing, Mark Sleigh
Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory In Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe
Explaining Humans, Camilla Pang
Xavier DuPont De Ligonnes, L’Enquete
Mermaid of Black Conch, Monique Roffey
Not in the label: what really goes into our food, Felicity Lawrence
Memoirs of a Geezer, Jah Wobble
Bullet Journal, Ryder Carroll
Football Factory, John King
Epidemics and Society, Frank Snowden
Clouds on Both Sides, Julie Tullis
The Year of the Runaways, Sunjeev Sahota
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell
In Search of Tito’s Punks, Barry Phillips
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Entangled Life, How Fungi..., Merlin Sheldrake

Evil Cradling, Brian Keenan
We are the weather, Jonathan Safran Foer
Set the Boy Free: Johnny Marr autobiography
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World, Steve Brusatte
Ruined by Design, Mike Monteiro
The Soloist, Steve Lopez
Stop Selling Music, Damian Keyes
A godawful small affair, J Morrison
Freakonomics, Steven Levitt
Body book, Bill Bryson
Mountain Shadow, Gregory Robert Davies
Sixteen Trees of the Somme, Lara Mytting
Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen, Brian Masters
Paris Architect, Charles Belfoure
Obliquity, John Kay
Stories of the Sahara, Sanmao
The Frozen River: Seeking Silence in the Himalaya, James Crowden