For whatever reason, 2019 felt like a bad reading year in terms of quantity and quality. However, after going back over my notes, it was better than remembered. I started approximately 30 books and these are the best ones, plus some bonus internet stuff. I didn’t read any buzzy books, but that might actually have been for the best.
Books Recommended Unequivocally
This was the best novel I read in 2019. By far. It might crack top 5 novels I’ve read in the past decade. It is strange. It’s a series of letters written by an elderly preacher to his very young son. To be read after he’s died. It’s a family history. A town history. And a spiritual history. More than a novel, it’s a series of heartrending meditations that out of context don’t make sense or seem precious. But inside her world, you’ll spend a few days contemplative in a way that feels rare.
Ann’s chronicle of her friendship with fellow writer Lucy Grealy is a joyful and heartbreaking description of best friends becoming adults and becoming famous(ish). We should all be so lucky.
What You Do Is Who You Are – Ben Horowitz
Goddammit Ben Horowitz is a good writer. His first book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, is the best business book I’ve ever read. This has to be a close second. It’s about creating a kickass organizational culture, and he’s not talking about free beer and ping pong tables, but defining culture as how orgs make decisions. Ben decided not to use case studies from companies that will go bankrupt in five years—looking at you Jim Collins. (That’s actually unfair to Jim—looking at you every business book charlatan.) Instead he looked at amazing organizational cultures from history—like the culture created by Toussaint Louverture when leading the Haitian slave revolt or Shaka Senghor who led a wildly successful prison gang. It’s a fucking wild book and meets the absurd bar set by his debut.
Never Enough: the neuroscience and experience of addiction – Judith Grisel
Written by a former drug addict turned PhD neuroscientist, this book actually explains the underlying mechanism that creates chemical dependencies. And an explanation of how pot works and why it is demotivating. I read it in one sitting on a Friday night, super understandable and entertaining.
Man Walks into a Room – Nicole Krauss
I’ve read this before and remembered essentially none of it. Sitting here now, I remember incredibly little of it. Krauss’s debut novel is about memory and amnesia, so I don’t know if my brain kept reading the word forget and forgot everything (twice). But Nicole Krauss is fucking brilliant, and I reread this book in a couple days, so I know it’s a good book.
Internet Stuff Recommended Unequivocally
Matt Levine is an ex-Goldman guy turned Bloomberg columnist who provides analytical rigor and inside baseball to the typical business and finance headlines. Money Stuff is a daily newsletter and I recommend you subscribe. From today’s on Softbank:
“in these situations it is instructive to remove a few layers of abstraction and just think about what is actually happening here. At one end, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia plows gigantic piles of money into SoftBank’s Vision Fund. At the other end, Mexico City’s “legendary late-night snack spot El Moro” can have someone “deliver its churros and hot cocoa to takeout customers across the capital” well below cost, subsidized by the Vision Fund. The King of Saudi Arabia is sending hot chocolate to everyone in Mexico City. Here, have this nice hot chocolate, on the King of Saudi Arabia. Modern capitalism is always so much stranger than you expect.”
How Technology Grows – Dan Wang
Technically published in 2018, but I read it several times in 2019 and once in 2020, so I’m going to rep Dan’s views any chance I get. Dan is a student of industry and trade and his insight into process knowledge (unwritten technical expertise) and how it eventually codifies into tools and IP rather than the reverse provides a grimmer than normal view of American industry. Not only are the supply chains not here, but if you brought them back…we wouldn’t know what to do with them. Combining this with his definite optimism concept, lets us begin to imagine how we could get to a new age of American industry. I’ll just leave this here:
“I’d like for us to return to optimism. It’s not enough to tell everyone: “Just choose to be optimistic.” Instead, I’m suggesting that we can nurture optimism by developing a greater appreciation for industry and by reaching for higher economic growth. Pushing forward the technological frontier should not simply be someone else’s problem. Instead, the question of how to do so should preoccupy many more of us.”
Work on these things – Tyler Cowen
Tyler’s a weird guy who is probably right less often than average, but when right will be right in a bigger way. He runs a venture fund (of sorts) now and gave a list of things he’d like to see people work on, they’re all interesting and if you make a credible case that you’re the right person to work on them—he’ll throw you some essentially unrestricted cash to pursue it.
Books Recommended with Caveats
Like most, I love Mary Oliver. I love that she ran away from home as a teenager and somehow ended up living at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s house. I love that she spent her life walking around Cape Cod, foraging for food and writing stuff down in a little notebook. I love how much she loved this world and every creature and thing in it. Reading this book of essays is like a look inside her mind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a whole lot of it is quite boring. But there are moments of insight and joy that I think make it worth it like this bit about her partner:
“Molly and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic. M. will hardly look at a bush. She wants a speedboat; I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy…
If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above town and the harbor, and my life is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together.”
Getting Things Done – David Allen
I’m skeptical about self-improvement and productivity books. However, I’m not skeptical about people needing some system (whatever it is). I’ve heard about GTD from folks for years, so I finally read the book. The system is too complicated for me—I essentially use steps 1 and steps 1,000, but it seems better than nothing. No evidence on effectiveness yet, but if your casting about for a system, this one seems pretty good and has stood the test of time.
Sontag: Her Life – Benjamin Moser
Susan Sontag was maybe my first glimpse of literary criticism and after reading On Photography at age 12 or so, I’ve tried not to take many photos or be their subject. A task ever more difficult since the iPhone. Today, I’m completely unsure that my preteen interpretation of Sontag even makes sense, but at this point, I’m going to stand by it. When I heard there was a forthcoming 705 page biography of Sontag, I knew I had to read it. If you have any similar connection, it’s pretty badass. Sometimes melodramatic. Sometimes boring. I don’t know who Ben Moser is or why he wrote this book, but it’s an awesome accomplishment that he’s also self-effacing about.
“…Sontag showed how metaphor formed, and then deformed, the self; how language could console, and how it could destroy; how representation could comfort while also being obscene; why an even greater interpreter ought to be against interpretation. And she warned against the mystification of photographs and portraits: including those of biographers.”
Confessions of a Maddog – Jay Dunston Milner
I really like the Texas Chili Parlor (they give you those little glasses with your beer AND the kitchen is open until 1am everyday). I really like Guy Clark (no explanation needed). In the course of these dual fandoms, I discovered that Maddog Inc was a group of Texas writers and musicians who stirred up trouble in Austin, Dallas and Fort Worth in the 60s and 70s. The group contained the writers Billie Lee Brammer (The Gay Place), Bud Shrake, Pete Gent (North Dallas Forty), and Larry L. King (Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) and the musicians Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, Guy Clark, and Billy Joe Shaver and governor Ann Richards (what?). As well as the author himself. It’s mostly a scene book where not much happens. But if you wanted to get deep into one slice of Austin’s perpetual glory days—then this is for you.