While I haven’t done as much writing this year as I might have liked, I did read some books I thoroughly enjoyed and wanted to pass along. Perhaps they may even be in time for the holiday season for any of you who, like me, feature books on their wish lists.
Here’s to 2022, quite a year it was. I wish you all a 2023 filled with good health and good fortune, and of course, good books!
- Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement. This book evolved my thinking around how we form an accurate picture of the world. The concept of bias, or a systematic error of judgment in a given direction, has a lot of currency today, and rightly so. Noise, or just plain old error in judgment, in any direction, distorts decision-making just as much but gets a lot less attention. Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors explain noise, make the case for why we should minimize it, and give some practical advice on how to do so.
- Making Numbers Count. A digestible set of practical tips for making data meaningful to an audience. As humans, we’re not programmed to deal well with a lot of the ways we often encounter data, but we can make this better. It’s a very digestible book, you can get through it in 1-2 sittings. There were a lot of connections to the very valuable lessons in Storytelling with Data, which I also highly recommend for any folks out there who regularly deal with presenting data to other humans.
- Four Thousand Weeks. A sort of non-time management book about time management. What I mean is that this book will not provide tips for answering more emails in a day. What it will do is provide some thought-provoking reframing of many of the “problems” of the modern condition which cause us to be worried about managing our time. In my case, it helped me to be less frustrated when my kids distract me from doing email as in the end, time with them is what’s important. I of course still spend plenty of time on email, but I’m more at peace when I do, or am interrupted. This seems obvious, but we can all get caught up and drift off course. This book can help to re-orient.
- Radical Candor. I found Kim Scott’s other book Just Work to be enjoyable and thought-provoking, so I came back for this one. A great no-BS overview of how to manage a team effectively, with both theory and practical strategies in full measure. I would put it on my personal top 10 list of books on people management.
- The First 90 Days. I started a new job this year, which was both exciting and daunting as being in a new company and industry always means adjustment. I definitely didn’t get everything right, but I found this book’s strategies for approaching the initial onboarding period to be effective and it helped sharpen my thinking and approach during that time. I’d highly recommend it for anyone who is changing jobs themselves, and it’s also good for managers with people on their team who are new to the company and/or role they’re in to help empathize with what that experience is like.
- The Tiger. A page-turner that’s true but reads like fiction. It’s also a portrait of the geography, people, and nature of a part of the world we don’t hear a lot about, but is very fascinating.
- Imperium. I have to thank my friend Karolina for getting me this book. The author has a wild life story, he was a Polish reporter who more or less sought out the places in the world which happened to be the most chaotic (and dangerous). He saw many small wars take place, governments be overthrown, and was sentenced to death multiple times. This book is about his travels and experience across the Soviet Union over many decades, from his childhood in the 1930s to the unraveling of the USSR in the late 1980s. A fascinating portrait of the people and places involved, and despite it being written several decades ago, there are surprising similarities to goings-on today.
- The Perfectionists. Simon Winchester traces the history of technological advancement through a number of stages starting with the steam engine through silicon processors and GPS. A connecting thread is the greater degree of precision we’ve been able to achieve, something that was truly unthinkable a couple hundred years ago, and wasn’t really even valued until the last couple of hundred years of human history. It reminded me a lot of James Burke’s series “Connections”.
- The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity. This book explores how permeable and shifting the concept of identity really is. While many external categories are very important to individuals’ and societies’ concepts of themselves, when probed they often end up being pretty shaky foundations. For example, we think of national borders as clear lines on a map, this side you’re in, other side, you’re out. But the reality is much more complex than that when you consider emigrants, mixed parentage, language and cultural overlays, and much more. This is not a case for moral relativism or anarchy, but more about finding universal values that cut across the much more ephemeral and less meaningful categories like nationality and race. The author, Kwame Anthony Appiah, also has a column titled “The Ethicist” in the New York Times which is great and I highly recommend.
- The Wheel of Time series. Most of my reading is non-fiction, but I had to include this series this year as it was such a memorable part of not only my reading this year but also my love of books more generally. Along with The Lord of the Rings series, this was a major entry point for me into the fantasy genre, but it had been many years since I’d read the books. I was surprised by how well I remembered much of it, especially the first book, despite the intervening decades. The worldbuilding is really exquisite and the characters are varied and engaging. Reading the whole series is a commitment, and I highly recommend getting the companion guide books to help keep track of all of the moving pieces. For me, the journey was well worth the investment.
Honorable mentions: