I read 40ish books this year.
I would have liked to write more, but spending my leisure time staring at a screen and typing felt an awful lot like my non-leisure time.
In any case, here are the books and ideas which resonated the most with me this year.
Best fiction books
Pachinko by Min Lee. Story of multiple generations of Korean immigrants living in Japan. Starts off a bit slow, but was quickly pulled in and engaged. What resonated for me is that the challenges and themes immigrants (and their children) face are consistent across cultures. Should you try to assimilate? How do you honor your culture? What do you want for your kids - for them to maintain their roots or try to blend in? What language do you speak to them in?
Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang. Science fiction short stories for people who don’t necessarily like science fiction. Consistently interesting and fun to read. A story might start off like this:
The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.
But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?
We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?
Best nonfiction
Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit by Ashley Mears. Book about the nightclub industry by sociology professor who previously modeled. Besides being a look into a fascinating and novel world, it also shows some parallels between nightclubs and more “respectable” industries: the importance of status, the use of people in a slightly instrumental / signaling ways (e.g., having beautiful models at your club is not that dissimilar from putting former politicians on your advisory board), and the blurring of personal and professional lives. I wrote about it more in-depth earlier this year before transferring the newsletter to Substack.
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas. One sentence summary: By offering to solve every societal problem, the business community is able to provide “solutions” that primarily serve its own interests. “MarketWorld,” as he calls it, thinks that every problem has a “win-win” solution where business can make a positive impact. But, he argues, this conceals more radical solutions and the fact that these companies are the actual cause of the problem. A simple example would be Coca Cola’s campaign a few years ago to encourage and celebrate exercise. This could be applauded as “corporate responsibility” and “win-win.” But you could also say that Coca Cola, by encouraging people to drink highly unhealthy, caloric beverages, is the actual problem here - but any attempts at regulations or bans are derided by the “free market” people. I don’t necessarily agree with the whole book and it flags at the end, but nonetheless a fun and thought-provoking read.
The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina. Really interesting book about slavery, murder, and piracy on the high seas. Book is a bit repetitive / kludgy, but stories themselves are engaging so very much a “fun read.” Just brace yourself to read the phrase “there are no laws in the outlaw ocean” 3,000 times and you’ll be fine.
Favorite ideas and themes
Public intellectuals v. thought leaders. We used to have public intellectuals, who would grapple with big ideas, challenge authority, and generally be comfortable airing unpopular opinions. Think Milton Friedman, Gore Vidal, or William F. Buckley. Their theories were often rigorous (or at the very least controversial) and they generally had strong academic backgrounds. They have been replaced by thought leaders, who share crisp packaged "insights", hang out at TED conferences, and make us feel good about ourselves. Their social media profile picture is probably them giving a keynote or gesturing wisely while sitting in a comfy share on some conference panel. Unlike public intellectuals, they don't question power structures or authority, but instead praise the status quo. Their ideas are uncontroversial and blandly appealing. One example of this is Harvard professor Amy Cuddy, who originally focused on how sexism perpetuates itself across cultures and societies. Corporate audiences found this to be too much of a bummer, so she shifted to talking about "power poses" - who can argue against that? Idea is discussed in Winners Take All, but was originally developed by Daniel Drezner.
The mosaic approach: In I Know How She Does It, Laura Vanderkram discusses how successful women balance work, family, and personal life (book is widely applicable to anyone who wants a family + career). She talks about the idea of a "mosaic" - women who felt empowered to play with their schedule and “move around the tiles” in a way that worked for them were generally happier (e.g., eating dinner with the family and getting some work done at night, or taking time mid-day to catch-up with a friend). If you're lucky enough to have a job with some control over your schedule, this can be very helpful, I've found. Or at least believing that you don't "need" to do anything - you don't "need" to eat dinner with your spouse every night: you might get drinks with coworkers one night but then spend all of Sunday with your spouse. Of course during covid, many of us have been forced into mosaics and flexible schedules, and might find ourselves wanting to clean boundaries of “normal life.”
Genetics (and life) are complicated; there's not “one gene” or “one cause.” Take smoking for example: one of the key "smoking genes" researchers found doesn't make you more likely to smoke, but instead makes you more likely to become addicted / a full-time smoker once you try. So while genetics does matter, so does environment. As a general principal, it's easy to look for proximate causes or simple cause and effects. But in reality, things are more complicated. (A lesson from War and Peace as well). From The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life.
Results v. Ritual: Good to Go is a scientist's examination of "athletic recovery" methods such as foam rolling, supplements, ice baths, etc. Findings: sleep is really important, everything else not so much. But many people still do these other things out of a sense of ritual - it makes them feel like they are doing everything possible to improve and might give them a sense of security. When I'm doing something, is it because it yields results or I just like the ritual?
Looking to next year, I would like to spend more time taking notes / synthesizing. I struggle with this, to be honest - 90%+ of my book consumption is physical books from the public library. So I can't do kindle highlights or underline. And to the point above, I'm not dying to spend more of my free time staring at a screen. Would welcome any solutions here, other than the obvious "stop being lazy."
Thank you all for the kind words, book recommendations, and thoughtful responses over the last year.