The Best of What I Read in 2017
25 Books and Articles Which Changed the Way I See The World
Top 15 Books of 2017
I think the most efficient way to transfer information from one person to another is to give a book title. With a brief summary, I hope to share just enough to inspire you to go to the source.
[Full 2017 Reading List with Ratings]
Fiction
Hyperion / Fall of Hyperion — Dan Simmons
Would put Hyperion right behind Dune for favorite sci-fi of all time. Profound, far ahead of its time, and impossible to summarize. We will go to any length to escape our pain and mortality. Our actions constantly reinforce our identity. Our subjective experience of time is always localized.
Number9Dream — David Mitchell
A demonstration of the lengths to which our existential crises can take us. A plot structure that skillfully blurs the line between Japanese salaryman late-capitalism reality and a surrealist cyberpunk fantasy.
Foundation Trilogy — Issac Asimov
The classics are classics for a reason. Although times and circumstances change, human nature remains constant. As we find ourselves today on the brink of another dark age, what actions can individuals take to help steer humanity back onto a timeline of flourishing?
Nexus Trilogy — Ramez Naam
Near-future Tom Clancy style extrapolation of current trends. As cognitive pioneers continue to merge with technology and take control over our biochemistry, what happens when no one agrees on what it means to be “human”?
The Three Body Problem — Lixin Liu
How would our geopolitical climate shift if extraterrestrial contact was actually achieved? If all of history is a series of repeating cycles, how can we expand our myopic perspective to that of deep time and collaborate on a global solution to place humanity in the best of all possible worlds?
Autobiographical Novels
The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Alex Haley
Those with the power to change the system never feel the effects of their choices. Ingroup members are the strongest reinforcers and perpetuators of group stereotypes. Our potential is inherently limited by the molds that our culture and peer groups have selected for us.
When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi
Through an exploration of the moments before death we can start to address one of our most important questions: “what makes a meaningful life?” How can we step outside of our assigned roles and make the impossible but necessary decisions where there is no universally good outcome?
Journey to Ixtlan — Carlos Castaneda
Great introduction to mysticism and orally-transmitted ancient wisdom. Only when we stop assigning explanation and judgment can we see reality as it truly is. Only when we shed our attachments to identity and personal importance can we begin the journey towards realizing our true potential.
Born Standing Up — Steve Martin
Overnight success is built from decades of constant exploration of unknown territory in the face of failure. Focus on the process and be authentic to your own unique set of experiences. If we seek the approval of others rather than the validation of our own self-expression we will be perpetually disappointed.
Catching The Big Fish — David Lynch
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.” The master of harvesting the subconscious shares his techniques for going deep.
Nonfiction
The Four Agreements — Don Miguel Ruiz
Life changing if read at the right time. Read 3X, now in the “read every year” category for me. It is possible to systematically transcend the anchor of social conditioning to discover your personal power. By being conscious of our agreements, we can eliminate guilt and resentment towards others and self.
Work Clean — Dan Charnas
Best productivity read of the year. By deconstructing the processes of chefs and importing their habits, we can improve planning, organization, presence, and efficiency in our daily work. Bonus points if you have interest in improving your cooking skills or understanding what happens behind the scenes at a restaurant.
Why Buddhism Is True — Robert Wright
If you have ever wondered, “why is mediation important?”, this is for you. Evidence from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology supporting Buddhism as a personal operating system to improve our morality, overcome anxiety, and achieve harmony with the world.
Inner Game of Work — Timothy Gallwey
We are our own constraint. How can we unlearn the mental habits which interfere with our ability to learn and perform at our best? How can a coach draw out and augment the potential that a person already has inside them?
The Timeless Way of Building — Christopher Alexander
Our environment is a container which shapes the behavioral affordances available to us. Architecture is a set of patterns which, when combined in the right way, create a space which is “alive”, supporting and enhancing our desired actions.
Top 10 Long Form Articles of 2017
These pieces (in no particular order) successfully shattered my worldview.
All share a complex and multi-faceted structure which escapes summary. Instead, I will share select quotes which I found particularly insightful.
How to Do Nothing — Jenny Odell
Those spaces which are not seen as commercially productive are always under threat, since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified — despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides.
Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos.
I propose that a far more parsimonious way to live forever is to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity.
After Temporality — Sarah Perry
Linear temporality (time as a sequential series of experiences) and chronesthesia (time as many simulations of past and future) are not conflicting models. Rather, they are deeply interlocking models that constantly construct each other.
Remembering the past and imagining the future are not opposites, but expressions of a unified underlying capacity.
We seek [to make these positive] simulations come true on the consensus timeline… We might say that the fantasies themselves are after temporality, auditioning to become real.
The Tower — Hotel Concierge
Memory is a collection of memes. The word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.
Our other primordial desire is not for death per se, but for control — Ananke. Self-destruction is the ultimate form of such power — the pleasure of failure is that you know how to do it… Only when the universe is predictable can we believe that it is part of us.
No matter how pleasant, when nothing is happening, the superego starves. Reinventing yourself between brunches feels good — the illusion of control — until you’ve dreamt the same dreams too many times… Adulthood marks the switch from explore to exploit.
The meaning of life is arbitrary, constructed, cultural, fake. But the path to a meaningful life is universal. Happiness and meaning — sometimes they overlap, sometimes you must choose… We arrive at verisimilitude by ping-ponging between falsehoods.
The Mind of John McPhee — Sam Anderson
Structure, in McPhee’s writing, carries as much meaning as the words themselves. What a more ordinary writer might say directly, McPhee will express through the white space between chapters or an odd juxtaposition of sentences. It is like Morse code: a message communicated by gaps.
“The procedure eliminated nearly all distraction and concentrated just the material I had to deal with in a given day or week. It painted me into a corner, yes, but in doing so it freed me to write.”
“Every part of time touches every other part of time. You just have to find the right structure.”
Different Worlds — Slate Star Codex
People self-select into bubbles along all sorts of axes…Even for two people living in the same country, city, and neighborhood, they can have a “society” made up of very different types of people.
Nothing makes sense except in light of inter-individual variation. Variation in people’s internal experience. Variation in people’s basic beliefs and assumptions. Variation in level of abstract thought. And to all of this I would add a variation in our experience of other people.
On Social States — sam[]zdat
One group gets to write laws, and that is powerful indeed. But another gets to interpret them, and, indeed, pressure those interpreting them.
There are realistically two different “legitimacies” working. One of these is structural: i.e. the letter of the law. The other is social: interpretation and change.
Partisans of both the Left and the Right agree on one thing and one thing only: the enemy is running the country. Both are right, which is why both can produce graphs. The Left is winning the culture war, and the Right is winning the economic war.
Structural power is rich and poor. Social power is good and evil.
Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail — John Salvatier
Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent.
This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.
The Throughput of Learning — Tiago Forte
Assumptions constrain your view, what you are allowed to see, and thereby the thoughts and actions available to you. Unearthing new assumptions shines a light on blind spots that, by definition, you didn’t know you didn’t know about. This process is unbounded, because with enough examination, all your beliefs are revealed to be assumptions.
Modern learning is not a process for maximizing the throughput of insights, but for maximizing the throughput of learning process improvements. The best assumptions to invalidate in our quest for learning are assumptions about learning itself.
We have to design our mental environment to maximize the throughput of invalidated assumptions, accelerating it to the point that the rules of our learning process break, thereby surfacing even more assumptions, which we can exploit to further improve this process.
The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective — Puzhong Yao
Maybe randomness is not merely the noise but the dominant factor. And those reasons we assign to historical events are often just ex post rationalizations. As rising generations are taught the rationalizations, they conclude that things always happen for a reason.
If we look at one individual’s life in isolation, it is very tempting to come to the conclusion that one’s particular actions lead to whatever happens next. But if we look at the society as a whole or look across generations, we can see that people with very similar backgrounds can take similar actions and end up with vastly different results.
After we have given our best and once the final card is drawn, we should neither become too excited by what we have achieved nor too depressed by what we failed to achieve. We should simply acknowledge the result and move on. Maybe this is the key to a happy life.
What Is Better: A Happy Life or a Meaningful One? — Roy Baumeister
[This article is from 2013 but given it was the most influential thing I read all year I would be hard pressed to not include it here.]
Satisfaction of desires was a reliable source of happiness. But it had nothing — maybe even less than nothing — to add to a sense of meaning.
The more time people spent thinking about the future or the past, the more meaningful, and less happy, their lives were. Meaning seems to come from assembling past, present and future into some kind of coherent story. Conversely, the more time people spent thinking about the here and now, the happier they were.
It feels as though happiness comes from outside, but the weight of evidence suggests that a big part of it comes from inside. Meaningfulness comes from contributing to other people, whereas happiness comes from what they contribute to you.
One tries to accomplish things in the world: this brings both ups and downs, so the net gain to happiness might be small, but the process contributes to meaningfulness either way.
We climb the ladder of meaning… We want our lives to have value, to fit into some kind of intelligible context.
Life, in other words, is change accompanied by a constant striving to slow or stop the process of change, which leads ultimately to death. Meaning therefore presents itself as an important tool by which the human animal might impose stability on its world.
If you enjoyed this, you might also be interested in my top reads from 2016.
I’m always looking for reading recommendations. If there is something that you think I should read, let me know!
Ready to excel? Download my free peak performance workbook.
