2019 books
In 2016, I started sharing my annual book recommendations out of a desire to encourage friends to read some of the same stuff so that we could talk about ideas together. So here’s my 2019 list — it’s 152 books long. Maybe it’ll generate some interesting conversations and discoveries.
Disclaimer: likes/dislikes often say more about the reader than about the material, so in that spirit, my recommendations will divulge info about who I am and what I care about as a way to help you decide whether we’re on the same page about a given recommendation.
Here are prior years’ lists: 2016, 2017, 2018.
And now for this year’s recommendations:
🔥Best of the best🔥
🔥The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming 🔥— Makes the case for why we’re fucked, then gamely tries to breathe some optimism back into the shattered reader. Man, did he fail to do that second bit of work with me. It left me a nihilistic wreck. I love Greta Thunberg, and hope for revolution, but despair that necessary change will materialize in time.
As I write this, here’s one of today’s headlines: “In what was widely denounced as one of the worst outcomes in a quarter-century of climate negotiations, United Nations talks ended early Sunday morning with the United States and other big polluters blocking even a nonbinding measure.”
Quote from the book: “It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true.”
🔥The Road🔥 — This is basically “The Uninhabitable Planet” in novel form, and it’s a perfect novel. Spare and beautiful writing set in an apocalyptic world that has seen complete and total environmental collapse. This was my first Cormac McCarthy read ever and I feel dumb about missing out for so long. He uses gorgeous language to write horror.
Quote from the book: “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
🔥There There🔥 — After finishing this, I immediately opened it back up to the first page and started reading it again, specifically to sear the damning opening essay into my brain. We mustn’t forget the founding crimes.
Quote from the book: “If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.”
🔥Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World🔥 — You’ll never read this on Bill Gates’ best book list (even though it’s a best book of 2019) because Gates and his ultra-rich, do-gooding peers (Musk, Thiel, Obama, Winfrey, Bezos, Buffet, Soros, Sackler, et al.) are certainly on trial in this book.
Quote from the book: “There is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory in history…. By refusing to risk its way of life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the common good, [the elite class] clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to monopolize progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken — many of whom wouldn’t need the scraps if the society were working right.”
🔥White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism🔥 — A kick to my fragile white guts, especially well-placed because I was raised in extra-racist southern culture and it’s taken me years of deliberate practice and re-education to understand the roots of my privilege and the depth of my inappropriate advantage.
Quote from the book: “I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist, or in the “choir,” or already “gets it.” White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.”
🔥Educated🔥 — This memoir is amazing. The author’s strength, honesty, and courage made me question my own.
She grew up in poverty, she was raised by nutty parents, and she escaped through a narrow window using a ladder of her own making, climbing to places she didn’t even know existed. I certainly felt a kinship with her, similar to the one I felt with J.D. Vance on reading his book.
Quote from the book: “The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education”
🔥The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power🔥 — This book’s deliberately alarmist tone felt at first like overkill. “What’s so bad about surveillance if you’ve got nothing to hide,” I thought. “Why shouldn’t advertising cover the costs for these great products?” But I kept reading, and over time, found myself coming to a new understanding of the structure of today’s web.
Quote from the book: “Google had discovered a way to translate its nonmarket interactions with users into surplus raw material for the fabrication of products aimed at genuine market transactions with its real customers: advertisers. The translation of behavioral surplus from outside to inside the market finally enabled Google to convert investment into revenue. The corporation thus created out of thin air and at zero marginal cost an asset class of vital raw materials derived from users’ nonmarket online behavior.”
🔥Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams🔥 — The definitive book on sleep? If this doesn’t change your mind about sleep, you’re already an expert on the topic. I thought I knew a little something about how sleep works and how important it is to good health, being a reader and lover of popular science books. But this book helped me overcome my ignorance and change my behavior.
Quote from the book: “The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. The leading causes of disease and death in developed nations — diseases that are crippling health-care systems, such as heart disease, obesity, dementia, diabetes, and cancer — all have recognized causal links to a lack of sleep.”
🔥The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment with Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now🔥 — Easy to dismiss as neo-hippy new-age stuff, but fundamentally this is about being present in the current moment and about taking responsibility for your own experience. So strong.
Quote from the book: “All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future, and
not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”
🔥The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself🔥 — I saw Oprah in person this year, and she mentioned that she’d been touched by this book. I was captivated by Oprah, so I read the book. This is about mindfulness and getting past the “me” that is the ego, which is not really me at all. A mindfuck in all the best ways. Fundamentally, I think this book is saying many of the same things that the Buddhists have been saying for thousands of years, but it uses modern language and avoids jargon, building from the ground up a case for no-self and non-attachment.
Quote from the book: “There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind — you are the one who hears it.”
Another quote: “To attain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them… Once you’ve made the commitment to free yourself of the scared person inside, you will notice that there is a clear decision point at which your growth takes place.”
🏅Best of the rest🏅
🏅The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test🏅 — I was only 50 years late to reading this book, but I’m so grateful that I did. It helped me understand LSD and the psychedelic experience better. It deepened my understanding of American culture and counter-culture and the swings between both, and how prophets emerge to guide us to new territory. A great read alongside The Doors of Perception and Michael Pollan’s wonderful How to Change Your Mind (one of my top choices from last year’s reading).
🏅Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope🏅 — The author’s puerile addiction to four-letter words and humor undermine what’s really a thoughtful and thought-provoking book. If you liked Sapiens and 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, if you like Neitzsche and Plato, this is a good read for you. It’s a beautiful synthesis, cheapened a bit by coarse expression.
🏅Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It🏅 — The best book on negotiation you’ll ever read. Or that I’ve ever read, at least. Much better than the classic Getting to Yes.
🏅No Country for Old Men🏅 — The bad guys win in this Cormac McCarthy masterpiece. We need more stories that don’t wrap up all nice and neat.
🏅No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us🏅 — As a victim of domestic violence (when I was a child), this book was tough to read at times. But it helped me better understand my trauma and what we should be doing to decrease domestic violence and its impacts.
🏅The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup🏅 — Very practical, real advice on how to structure a company in the early founding phase.
🏅The Power of Myth🏅 — Joseph Campbell is a genius and this “book” is really a transcription of a bunch of interviews he did with PBS or the BBC. I listened to the original interview recordings, because I wanted to hear Campbell himself deliver the abundant wisdom.
🏅Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman🏅 — I already loved Patagonia (the brand) before reading this book. Upon finishing it, I immediately drove to the closest retail branch and bought some stuff, unburdened by consumer guilt. The cynical part of me appreciates the quality of the corporate propaganda. The hopeful part of me wishes every company were this good at appearing to be good. The planet would be better for it.
🏅Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution🏅 — Medicine was and still is super-discriminatory. Enraging and enlightening.
🏅How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk🏅 — The single-best book on parenting I’ve read yet. This was my second read-through after reading it several years ago. It’s relevant at every age.
🏅21 Lessons for the 21st Century🏅 — I love everything this author does. This one’s very relevant to our current place in time.
🏅The Shadow War: Inside the Modern-Day Undeclared Battles Waged Against America🏅 — How China and Russia are playing the US.
🏅Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption🏅 — Powerful story of resilience by a WWII PoW.
🏅The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1)🏅 — I re-read this book this year because I enjoyed it so much. It’s just great science fiction.
🏅The One and Only Ivan🏅 — Beautiful tale about the inhumanity of zoos as told by one charming silverback gorilla.
🏅The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity🏅 — These books about marital sex by Esther Perel are frank and blunt and helpful to anybody that’s wondering about how to nurture intimacy in long-term marriages. I’ve been married 20 years and it’s not always been easy. Through reading like this, I have become a better partner.
🏅Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World🏅 — “The widespread nostalgia, the yearning for a past that never really was, suggests that we still have ideals, even if we have buried them alive. True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well. We have to do what great thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes were already advocating 100 years ago: to ‘value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.’”
🏅All Systems Red 🏅— A sentient bot’s first-person tale of interplanetary exploration gone awry. Very well done.
The rest (honorable mentions get a silver medal:🥈)
Grant — Quite the biography. I resented some of the unnecessary detail, but am glad I slogged through.
🥈The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History🥈 —Elizabeth Kolbert details the ways in which humans are causing the sixth mass extinction of biological species. Wonderfully (and appropriately) scary. If you’re not pessimistic for the future of biodiversity (including human thriving) on earth after reading this, you simply weren’t paying attention.
🥈Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World🥈 — “Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.”
🥈The Fifth Risk🥈 — I love Michael Lewis and the quality of his storytelling and metaphors. Example: “if a hurricane is like another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a one-night stand.” And: “a tornado’s path of destruction is like dragging your finger through the icing on top of a cake.” Also, his reporting is excellent. He gets things out of people that many cannot.
🥈Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street🥈 — Reminded me a ton of the great book The Informant (later made into a movie) about fed investigators’ bust of a price-fixing ring. This book is about dirty, dirty hedge funds that traded on illegal insider information and profited to the tunes of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. Great read. Steven A. Cohen is a real jerk.
🥈The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure🥈 — Good, rigorous frameworks for understanding issues and trends including callout culture, intersectionality, diversity, inclusion, safety-ism, cognitive distortions, victim culture, political polarization, etc. No easy answers, but the practical advice offered here is actionable, research-backed, and useful.
The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others — Fans of Cialdini’s Influence will enjoy this one. I found much of it familiar and not that original.
The Alchemist — Super-popular. This was my first read through … I will need another (and perhaps another after it) to appreciate this work fully. For now, I take issue with the fact that the protagonist’s entire reason for being is pursuit of literal treasure and riches, though of course, figuratively, it’s meant to stand in for whatever. And it seems that many people read this as a guide to getting rich. I wish the book had more to say on the decision by which treasure became the boy’s most important pursuit.
🥈Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI🥈 — From roughly 1918 to 1932, white judges, cops, lawyers, and doctors (and other, less respectable types) were all in on the plot to kill dozens of Osage Indians for the purpose of separating them from life to steal their land for the lucrative oil underneath. Excellent journalism that adds more tales of rapacious behavior by United States citizens and agents.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present — The first part of the book (through the 1800s) was better than the contemporary bit, which felt disorganized and repetitive. An example of the disorganization: we hear about a man who hunts leeches. And leeching is mentioned perhaps a half dozen times before the author finally explains why leeches are hunted and what they’re good for once hunted. This happens with several other topics. This book needed a better editor.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones — Really good. But not sure if it gave me any new habits, so perhaps this is why it doesn’t make my “best of” list. Feels redundant with Duhigg’s Power of Habit.
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose — Every sentence reads like a koan. I’m going to have to read this one again to more deeply appreciate it. I didn’t get the “pain body” portion as deeply as I could have, for example. There’s just so much wisdom in this man’s works that my only regret is not reading him sooner.
Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigations of a Lifetime — This is a great story, but it’s not particularly well told here. I haven’t seen the movie, but I imagine it’s one of the few instances where the movie is better than the book. The issue with the book is that the author’s ability to draw out and heighten tension seems limited, and the sketches of other characters (David Duke and the local KKK leadership in particular) are flat and shallow.
🥈The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness🥈 —Presented as a Socratic dialogue between an old master and a disaffected youth, this book claims to stick to Adlerian psychology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic...) but in it I found plenty of similarity to certain secular Buddhist teachings and the work of folks like Eckhart Tolle. I was at first impatient with the way the book started all the way from the basics, but it soon progressed into more challenging content. I especially liked the advice around non-vertical relationships with family and colleagues, and will strive to put it into practice in my relationship with my children.
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter — Healthy advice for well-meaning leaders who need help understanding the shadows of some common leadership behaviors. A few things here made me rethink my own behavior.
Player Piano — A novel imagining of an anti-automation revolution. Even though the trend forecasting feels a bit lacking in vision or imagination, and even though most characters, even the protagonist, don’t feel that complex or real, the deepest truth about the crisis of human dignity that accompanies underemployment and that propels the novel’s characters forward hit the mark.
Bring Your Human to Work: 10 Surefire Ways to Design a Workplace That’s Good for People, Great for Business, and Just Might Change the World — A good list of examples and case studies for workplace behaviors and policies that make work more human. I liked that it didn’t use the same tired examples that we’ve already read about in other books. I craved a little more depth: for example, what was the real effect of these policies? Any unintended consequences? How to design policies that really work, rather than sound good but fail? For anyone interested in this topic, the book Reinventing Organizations is still the best.
The Book of Help: A Memoir in Remedies — a self-help junkie’s memoir, she covers everything from Ayahuasca to Zen. If you dig memoirs by slightly batty, open-minded, middle-aged women, this one’s for you.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed — This book demystified the idea of therapy for me. I’ve never been (that’s not a humble-brag, it’s an admittance of ignorance) and now I want to go after reading this.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War — A fun zombie tale. Far better than the awful movie that it inspired.
Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child — Great advice for parents.
Becoming — This book gets rave reviews, but not from me. There are no big flaws with it, but I feel that Michelle, after years in the spotlight, and after getting mercilessly punished for even the slightest misstep, is not ready to show her unpolished or vulnerable side.
For example, she writes here about the firestorm ignited by her remark: “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” Her excuse-making in this book, and her insistence that it was taken out of context, really didn’t convince me. Why can’t she have admitted to not being “really proud” of her country? The country is broken: guns, environmental disaster, racism, police brutality, for-profit prisons, ballooning debt, the housing crisis, etc. She’s writing scared in this book a little bit, and I can’t blame her for it, but it makes the book far less interesting than the revision she might write 10 or 20 years from now.
There are so many wonderful moments in this book. It does feel like a walk down memory row, and it’s delightful to experience again (through Michelle’s eyes) so excellent a president that was to Trump Hyperion to a satyr.
That’s why the book really has all the great reviews it does — Trump is so, so low that this book’s mediocre highs feel very high indeed.
Dear Girls — By comedian Ali Wong, this gross and raunchy “letter to my girls” is a fun memoir. I vehemently disagree with Ali on a few things (her gender essentialist notions in particular), but I still enjoyed reading this.
Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life — Some good stories in this book, so I’m glad I read it. And I’m a fan of the central idea that rebellious attitudes towards work create greater value than traditional, hierarchical, and non-creative approaches. But I thought the book lacked focus, splashing around in the shallows of unrelated topics and failing to connect them well enough.
The Byline Bible: Get Published in Five Weeks — Want to get published and build a writing career? Read this. If my tech career fails, writing is my plan B.
Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins — Not well structured or deep or well written. Fine advice, some interesting moments, occasional flashes of brilliance, but destined to be another forgettable marketing advice book.
Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist — A workbook and textbook for handling VC negotiations and fundraising. It’s a slog, but good education to have.
Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone — I struggle to understand the structure of Brene’s books. I still enjoy reading them, but they’re hard to remember only a few days after reading them. They don’t stick to the ribs, and I don’t know why. I think it’s structure that’s missing, and the insistence on unique terminology that doesn’t reinforce what others are saying. Here’s an example. There’s an acrostic in this book: BRAVING. Each letter stands for something, but I had to go look it up, because the formulation is so convoluted that I don’t think I could ever commit it to memory:
B — Boundaries
R — Reliability
A — Accountability
V — Vault
I — Integrity
N — Non-judgment
G — Generosity
This is supposed to be a formula for trust. I love discussions of trust, and this one started off OK, but wraps with this convoluted and self-promoting acrostic. Just disappointing.
Marriageology: The Art and Science of Staying Together — Hilarious, frank, reasonable. A bit broad, splashing about in the shallows rather than going deep on any one of its topics, from sex to child-rearing to arguing well. Good survey.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World — Flattering read for dilettantes like me. I find myself convinced by the central argument for intellectual breadth and lateral thinking.
Calypso — David Sedaris is getting funnier and darker as he confronts mortality.
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know — Malcom Gladwell’s latest.
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence — “delves into the science of attention in all its varieties, presenting a long overdue discussion of this little-noticed and under-rated mental asset that matters enormously for how we navigate life”
The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future — Could be titled “how to start a small online business that you can do from anywhere.” Stuffed with excellent advice and checklists, it’s very practical. Fans of the Four-Hour Workweek and people who harbor fantasies of working from a beach in Thailand or Costa Rica will enjoy it. Very practical, very thorough: like a mini-MBA for small business entrepreneurs.
Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World — Debunks some popular management fads. The 9 lies (and their truth pairs):
01: People care which company they work for (people care which team they’re on, because that’s where work actually happens)
02: The best plan wins (the best intelligence wins, because the world moves too fast for plans)
03: The best companies cascade goals (the best companies cascade meaning, because people want to know what they share)
04: The best people are well-rounded (the best people are spikey, because uniqueness is a feature, not a bug)
05: People need feedback (people need attention, because we all want to be seen for who we are at our best)
06: People can reliably rate other people (people can reliably rate their own experience, because that’s all we have)
07: People have potential (people have momentum, because we all move through the world differently)
08: Work-life balance matters most (love in work matters most, because that’s what work is really for)
09: Leadership is a thing (we follow spikes, because spikes bring us certainty)
That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea — Some neat details about difficult moments in Netflix’s early history. Really great stories. But the author has a chip on his shoulder that interfered with my ability to trust the narrative. Careful lies of omission made me yearn for a less conflicted historian.
The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality — Can’t beat this book for a well-researched account of Oculus’ founding moments, up to and including the departure of Palmer Lucky. The author had clear insider access, and was able to reproduce emails, chat transcripts, etc. I greatly enjoyed the book, but my interest was motivated by personal interest in this story. I can’t recommend it as general business read because it doesn’t include enough information about the other players who helped bring about “the revolution that swept virtual reality.” It’s ultimately a bit one-sided in its sweep.
The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life — Good wisdom from Stanford d.school cofounder on how to unstick/unfuck yourself from shipping more work of value.
Mere Christianity — “C.S. Lewis’s forceful and accessible doctrine of Christian belief.” I read it for research and ultimately found that it doesn’t seem to have aged well.
🥈Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy🥈 — I’ve read other excellent books in this vein (Eating Animals, Animal Liberation, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?), so there’s not much new here to a student of this topic, but what is new is the willingness to tackle the religious arguments in favor of God-granted human dominion over animals. I admire the author’s courage and dogged pursuit of his case.
Some great quotes:
“Factory farming isn’t just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them.”
“The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.”
“An author describing the methods of intensive farming, or the excesses of sport hunting, or even the harsher uses of animals in science writes with confidence that most readers will share his sense of concern and indignation. Sounding the call to action — convincing people that change is not only necessary, but actually possible — is more problematic. In protecting animals from cruelty, it is always just one step from the mainstream to the fringe. To condemn the wrong is obvious, to suggest its abolition radical.”
The Glass Castle — Wonderful memoir. I’m a sucker for tales of kids who escaped bad parenting and this one, like Educated and Hillbilly Elegy really scratched my itch.
The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World — The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu get together for some conversation. This book is too informal and poorly edited to be great. It’s so enamored of the “great men” that it fails to dig deep enough. It’s still an interesting read and I enjoyed the interfaith dialog the two had.
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds — “Bestselling author Michael Lewis examines how a Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.”
What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture — “explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building”
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things — “a humor memoir tinged with just enough tragedy and pathos”
The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work — Shelves are glutted with books on happiness, but this one feels very practical and concrete. It’s worth a read, and will help you rethink your approach to many common life situations.
Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn’t Want You to Know — -and What to Do About Them — “an inside look at a secret world of hidden agendas”
Survivor — From the author of Fight Club: “a mesmerizing, unnerving, and hilarious vision of cult and post-cult life.”
Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart — “the counterintuitive reasons why so many partnerships and groups break down — and why some break through”
🥈Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?🥈 — a more palatable book on the same topics as Reinventing Organizations, which I regularly recommend to people.
Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It — Good primer on how VC works. Covers too much territory in too few pages, and occasionally repeats itself out of carelessness. But I haven’t read a better overview.
🥈Cloud Atlas 🥈— The author’s stylistic flexibility showed me new summits of writerly achievement. The complexities of the interwoven plot strands were less interesting to me.
The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business — “a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business”
🥈Never Let Me Go 🥈— Ishiguro is a master of emotional dialogue. The sci-fi setting here seems almost incidental. The most subtle sci-fi I’ve ever read.
A Truck Full of Money — “the story of Paul English, a kinetic and unconventional inventor and entrepreneur” who makes a killing founding and selling Kayak.com.
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days —
Hands on guide to running a five-day design sprint. Practical. A bit prescriptive and rigid, but they’ve learned from experience and share it here.
Your Money or Your Life — Hugely influential book that promises to change your life. If you actually follow the difficult steps within, it will.
Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion — Written by a veteran cop and instructor (with a PhD in English Lit), this book puts the onus on the communicator to achieve results, not win verbal battles. It’s about personal responsibility in communications during high-stakes moments. The right mix of tactical and theoretical advice.
Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work — spoiler alert: drugs and mind hacks.
Treasure Island: Wonderful, kid-friendly classic pirate tale.
Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practices — A wonderful set of exercises in mindfulness. Books like this make me dream of taking a sabbatical to do nothing but practice the exercises. But this book also helps me tame that impulse, and realize that every moment is an opportunity to practice. I paused and breathed deeply at every period in this short review.
Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects — Witty, intelligent and funny. Reminded me a bunch of FDW’s “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” Could have used more energy supporting the arguments against environmental degradation. The research of “The Sixth Extinction” and the arguments from “This Changes Everything” would have made this a deeper, more impactful book. It stays too near the safe and fun topics, and seems reluctant to sound the alarm.
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead — All the Brene Brown books blend together. Check out my brief review on her Wilderness book, below.
The Unexpected Truth About Animals: A Menagerie of the Misunderstood — This is a very humorous romp through a handful of misunderstood animal species: beavers, sloths, frogs, eels, bats, storks, hippos, hyenas, moose, penguins, and chimps. Really fun examples of how so-called scientists have repeatedly failed to understand animals. I really enjoyed it. I only wish the book had done more than merely nod at Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which I feel is a more serious and impactful work on the nature of how deeply we misunderstand other species.
Voice Lessons for Parents: What to Say, How to Say it, and When to Listen — Advice on how to talk to kids at every stage, from infant to young adult. Solid advice, can’t fault any of it.
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America — “history of the class system in America, extending from colonial times to the present”
Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results — Essentially “what got you here won’t get you there” for organizations. Practical advice for unlearning previously successful behaviors and learning successful new ones.
Sabrina — A woman (Sabrina) goes missing. What the internet does with that fact is spin brutal, ugly stories. This book makes the pattern of ugly human mob behavior and fake news personal. A pessimistic success.
An End to Upside Down Thinking: Why Your Assumptions about the Material World Are No Longer Scientifically True — A valiant and brave attempt. Too much desire to believe led the author to overstate the case he’s trying to make. A more skeptical approach would’ve wooed better, rather than the zeal-infused path taken here.
The Library Book — A charming stroll through library history, using the mystery of a huge fire at Los Angeles Central Library (1986) as a page-turner to compel the reader forward. I really enjoyed it.
Marketing 4.0 — Good, big-picture review of current marketing best practices. Some real meat in the middle, with discussion of conversion metrics that marketers should pay heed.
The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas
Meditation Is Not What You Think: Mindfulness and Why It Is So Important
🥈A Short History of Nearly Everything 🥈— Bryson entertainingly summarizes science’s bumpy ride to our present-day understanding. He covers many of the great errors and injustices of science with dry humor, and also covers the breakthroughs with something of the breathlessness of a sports broadcaster. I learned a ton about many of the physical sciences, especially the bits having to do with fossils. I loved his candid honesty about the foibles of many of the scientists mentioned in the book; this text feels much more trustworthy than books that only praise the giants on whose shoulders modern science stands
Measure What Matters — I read this like three times in 2019 as I worked to implement OKRs at a company. The best book on OKRs. Not the best book on measuring what matters. An indispensable guide for anyone implementing OKRs in an org, or working to succeed in an org where OKRs rule.
No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline — Very good advice, but not much of it’s new. The writing feels a little old-school, full of chestnuts you’ve heard before like “winners never quit and quitters never win.” Not so sure about that one. Plenty of bad ideas need to be dropped because the opportunity cost of staying with a bad plan is, like, your life. Anyway, there’s not any objectionable content here. The chapter on how to be great at sales didn’t speak to me, but the chapter on parenting really did.
Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts — Becoming the Person You Want to Be — Marshall Goldsmith wrote the excellent book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” which I still recommend regularly to people who have recently been promoted. He wrote this book from his perspective as an executive coach, distilling some of his advice for executives struggling with adult behavioral change. Part 1: the barriers to change. Part 2: the pro-change mindset and tools. Part 3: creating change-supportive structures/environments for you and yours.
🥈The Power 🥈— I loved this provocative novel’s inquiry into the nature of power, culture, religion, and gender. Stayed up late reading it into the night, though there were some boring parts. Its ambition isn’t fully realized — four main characters, none of them fully fleshed out. Feels a little like YA. I can’t wait for my son and daughter to read this book when they’re ready for more violent literature. Will end up in my 2019 favorites list.
Asymmetry — Excellent fiction. Set in New York City and country, Heathrow, and Iraq. Halliday nails her characters’ voices, using them to confront the reader with important questions.
Target 100: The World’s Simplest Weight-Loss Program in 6 Easy Steps —
It’s OK. The Power of Habit meets “all the weight loss advice you probably already know.” It’s not rocket surgery, this stuff. Didn’t work on me!
Twelve Years a Slave — A remarkable story (later made into a movie). Wonderful.
Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within — The most concrete meditation book. Two chapters of fluff at the start, and a little corny at times, but full of concrete tactics.
Not recommended:
Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits — Compilation of interviews. Interviewer lacked the skill to push for deeper wisdom.
Small Fry — Only interesting because it’s by Steve Jobs’ daughter. Take away that big crutch, and it’s a mediocre memoir.
Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style — Lame, lengthy lists of how to spell celebrity names. Some bright spots, but not worth the slog.
Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success — Overhyped.
Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds — I’ve read a bunch of books on this topic. This is one of the least excellent.
Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies — Too many companies have used this book as an excuse to grow sloppily and recklessly.
Teamwork & Indian Culture: A Practical Guide for Working with Indians — very poorly written and edited, but useful to me as a professional culture primer before I visited India for the first time.
iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us — “Stop trying to make iGen happen; it’s not going to happen.” Part of me felt that the author had too much self interest wrapped up in making the “iGen” label stick (for the purpose of growing her consulting and advisory practice). Part of me felt that much of the analysis was far too simplistic — lumping together many sub-segments of behaviors and attitudes simply because they happen to share birth years. The most distasteful aspect of this book is the alarmist tone. I got the feeling that the author believes this generation is totally off the rails and doomed and “completely unprepared for adulthood.” The author seems to be out of touch with youth culture, using her subjects instead to make a doom and gloom prognostication that will help her win speaking engagements. The data feels manipulated for shock and profit.
The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos — I found the reporting to mostly based on already public events, rather than on direct access to people involved in the Musk-Bezos-Branson space race. The author made poor choices — providing too much detail about the relatively uninteresting test pilot drama, for example.
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t — This short book defines certified asshole vs. occasional asshole and encourages organizations not to hire assholes. Overall, far too shallow. It could have discussed different types of asshole behavior, could have gone deep on how to really smoke out assholes in the interview process, and could have provided readers with greater understanding of how to dismantle assholes. It’s a catchy title and the sort of breezy read you get when a publisher asks you to turn your hit blog post into a book.
Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts — Brene Brown’s repetition is beginning to wear on me. I’ve read most of her books at this point, and they all bleed together in a mush.
Get Your Sh*t Together: How to Stop Worrying About What You Should Do So You Can Finish What You Need to Do and Start Doing What You Want to Do — Humorously written, but not that great, mostly because there are far better books for helping one get one’s shit together. The humor references feel dated and Gen X-specific. I think the author said she wrote it in two months. That sounds about right.
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World — Popular. How to minimize being controlled by and overwhelmed by personal technology.
Stardust — Too predictable. Guessed the inevitable ending well before it happened (because it was too obvious) and then found it rather procedural from there. Also, too many cliches and common verbal flourishes. Charming most of the time, but the disappointments crowd out the charms.
Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals — I read books like this one because they’re popular and easy to obtain via my public library. I almost always regret reading them, but at least they help me stay in touch with the pop-help genre and they also help me keep my goodreads star rating average low.
13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do: Take Back Your Power, Embrace Change, Face Your Fears, and Train Your Brain for Happiness and Success — The advice seemed decent, and I don’t disagree with the items on the list. But I think this same content could have been delivered in a tenth of the space. Tighter writing, less repetition, etc. Also, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was no foundation here. The idea of mental strength wasn’t well defined, and the book seemed unaware of great writers about mental strength such as Viktor Frankl, Marcus Aurelius, Angela Duckworth, etc.
Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living — “The world will tell you how to live, if you let it. Don’t let it. Take up your space. Raise your voice. Sing your song. This is your chance to make or remake a life that thrills you.” You get the idea.
Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business — This is not a bad book, but it’s so forgettable. Some of it just feels so quotidian: “Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.”
The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life’s Direction and Purpose — Disappointing. Lacks organization and cohesion.
Where the Crawdads Sing — I found the protagonist completely unbelievable and somewhat unlikeable. Feels like young adult fiction in the sense that only a young teen would fall for such shallow characterization.
The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age — The author seems credible. I am going to implement many of the suggestions. But the book could really use some stronger editing. I’d prefer to have the science concentrated in one area, and the recommendations in another section. Instead, the science is sprinkled throughout, so it feels like the author it constantly trying to persuade an already persuaded reader. I felt impatient. I had already decided to trust the author, I didn’t need to be re-convinced over and over.
Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism — Short and sweet, with 52 tips that are a mix of practical tips and tips that will help with the mindset shift needed. Have encountered most of this in my other readings, so give it a two based on low originality.
The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store — One reviewer described it as “self-indulgent millennial whining” and I don’t disagree. The title is misleading. This is really just someone wallowing in self-pity.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft — More memoir than advice for writers. I was looking for actionable advice.
Hit Refresh — Not sure if there’s an original idea in here. I appreciate the effort and believe Microsoft is on a better path now than when I worked there, but this book could have been so much more. For example, he discusses the Gini coefficient, but lets the boat drift from there without steering the discussion into a credible plan. Overall, a nice piece of PR, but not vulnerable or daring enough to stand the test of time.
The Four Seasons of Marriage — When the book suggested that certain marriages were in “winter” because Satan had been allowed to enter the relationship through the mechanism of premarital sex, I could no longer justify wasting my time on it.
Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You — A too-basic version of a book that’s been written better many times before. Try The Three Marriages for a more powerful version. Or Big Magic. Or Choose Yourself.
The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better — Shallow garbage.
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — Not well written. Too much praise for this.
You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life — The writing is fun and funny, but I found this to be more of that magical thinking snake oil as preached in Rhonda Byrne’s “The Power.” Also, it was clear that this book is the author’s Nth (2nd, 3rd) and that she cranked it out in four weeks. It feels rushed, fluffy, and jammed with filler. It’s not terrible, but it’s not even an average book in this genre.
Make Your Kid A Money Genius (Even If You’re Not): A Parents’ Guide for Kids 3 to 23 —
What I Told My Daughter: Lessons from Leaders on Raising the Next Generation of Empowered Women — Terrible. A vanity project. It’s a short collection of letters/essays from famous people, most of whom never really let down their guard or self-promotion long enough to say anything real.
Weird Parenting Wins: Bathtub Dining, Family Screams, and Other Hacks from the Parenting Trenches — A collection of short (one or two paragraphs) anecdotes about parenting hacks. For example, “we put glow-sticks in the bathtub to coax a reluctant toddler to entertain herself at bathtime” or “here’s how we convinced our kid not to be afraid of monsters under the bed.” I enjoyed the collection, but there’s not much of a unifying theme. Some of the stories feel like downright terrible advice. Still, I enjoyed reading this — the candid peek into others’ parenting felt voyeuristic, and did give me some useful ideas.
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win — Garbage. Recycled lessons (some of them decent enough), with lots of “red meat” war porn for macho, macho boss types.
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell — This is a breezy highlight reel of one of Silicon Valley’s most excellent executive leaders. Because Bill Campbell didn’t participate in the book, it’s constructed posthumously, and because it’s written by a couple of Bill’s adoring fans, it’s not anywhere near the excellence of something you’d get from an actual professional biographer such as Chernow or Isaacson. Still, was an interesting read.
Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need — Uneven quality of advice. Some great, some terrible. For example, advises that certain real estate locations will “never” fail to appreciate. Not a stellar example of the personal financial advice book genre.
