This year, I completed 23 books, started but abandoned seven, and re-read two. Bolded books were my favorites of the year.
- Heart of the Sea, the Whaleship Essex, Nathaniel Phillbrick, 08 JAN 23 - one of my favorites this year.
- [An evolutionary economics book I abandoned whose name I don't even recall] - I read a lot of evolutionary economics books in 2022 but as I started reading this one I felt like I'd hit the point of diminishing returns, so I abandoned it.
- Hello Stranger, Stories of Connection is a Divided World, Will Buckingham, 22 JAN 23. This was more memoir than I was expecting, so was a bit disappointing.
- The DOPE, The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, Benjamin T Smith, 26 JAN 23 - this was interesting but not riveting. Basically there has never been any progress on the war on drugs ever, just changes to who monopolizes the violence and taxes the activity. Any "progress" we've made is just propaganda by the most recent monopolizer.
- Venture Deals, be smarter than your lawyer and venture capitalist, Feld & Mendelson, 29 JAN 23. Exactly what's on the cover.
- Nature’s Metropolis, Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon, 19 FEB 23 - Also interesting but not riveting. How Chicago and the west symbiotically grew together. Dan Wang reviewed it in his 2023 annual letter; neither of us can recall where / who pointed us at this book:
We like to imagine the Midwest as having been populated by earnest farmers and dour machine tool makers. Yes, it was that. Cronon’s book is a nice reminder that they couldn’t have plied their trade without also depending upon the bloody-minded hucksterism of the big city.
- Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss, 09 FEB 23 [re-read]
- The Wave, In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, Susan Casey, 23 FEB 23 - I fancy myself a surfer at heart with no evidence to support this beyond a one-a-decade trip to Rincon, PR. I've read a few surfing tomes and absolutely loved 100 Foot Wave on HBO. This was a fun interweaving of surfing stories and science.
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz, 05 MAR 23 [reread]
- A Psalm for the Wild-Built:1 (Monk & Robot), Becky Chambers, 09 MAR 23 - fun departure from my usual reads.
- Engaged:Designing for Behavior Change, Amy Bucher [paused] - I met Amy professionally and this book looks like a great resource. I didn't have an outlet for the lessons at the time, so put it down until such a time.
- Outlive, The Science and art of Longevity, Peter Attia, 02 MAY 23 - Attia claims that Metabolic Disease (aka diabetes) is casual of a whole host of diseases that we currently treat as all separate, including Alzheimer’s. I am sympathetic to this claim. His advice is mostly the standard eat well and exercise. He also recommends tracking some very specific bio markers that aren’t in your normal panel and aggressively treating / addressing some of these. There are drugs being developed today, specifically rapamycin, that look promising for longevity but this has yet to be proven out. This book was written too early for any inclusion of GLP-1 inhibitors in the discussion.
- Last Man Standing, The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan, Duff McDonald, 02 MAY 23 - a PR piece for sure, but interesting to learn about Dimon's history.
- Fast business, 08 MAY 23 - I can't recall what book this even refers to!
- Price of Time, The Real Story of Interest, Edward Chancellor, 01 JUN 23
- The First Junk Bond, A Story of Corporate Boom and Bust, Harlan D Platt, ~20 JUN 2023 - somewhat academic retelling of a the ups and down of a company that used early junk bonds. Appropriately dry.
- Now it Can be Told, The Story of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie M Graves, 26 JUN 2023 - I liked this a lot. I had also read the Oppenheimer biography a couple of years back so was a good compliment to that and gave a great background for the movie.
- The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday, 02 AUG 2023 - Felt like a graduation gift book that didn't live up to it's hype.
- Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark [abandoned] - Tautological fear mongering over AI.
- The Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Max Chafkin 11 AUG 2023 - This seemed to be a well balanced look at Theil. Not a hero worship book, but not a hack job either.
- Carrying the Fire, An Astronaut’s Journey, Michael Collins, 18 Aug 23 - Autobiography in the same vein as Now it Can be Told.
- The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti, Meryle Secrest [abandoned] - The book promises a Cold War conspiracy story but spends the first portion of the book on an uninteresting history of the Olivetti family that I just couldn't get into.
- Meditations, Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays translation), [paused]
- Shoe Dog, a Memoir by the Creator of Nike, Phil Knight, 31 AUG 23 -
- SPQR, a history of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard [abandoned] - I was expecting a history of Rome. This was more of a critique of existing histories of Rome. I struggled to get into it since I was looking for something else. My mother loved it when I passed it off to her.
- The Pentagon’s Brain, An uncensored history of DARPA, 07 OCT 23 - my dad loved this book. I enjoyed it, but didn’t like it as much as I had hoped I would. A lot of Vietnam era stuff.
- The Comfort Crisis, Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, Michael Easter, 29 OCT 23 - Easy read that I enjoyed a lot. Misogi! Written a bit in the Malcom Gladwell style of stringing a bunch of studies and anecdotes together to try and tell a societal theme / story.
- How will you Measure Your Life?, Clayton Christensen, XX NOV 23
- Mornings On Horseback, The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child who Became Theodore Roosevelt, David McCullough, 02 DEC 23 - RIP David McCullough.
- Outsourcing Empire, how company-states made the modern world, Andrew Phillips & JC Sharman, 31 DEC 23 - I found this interesting but it was a little too academic and repeated itself more than necessary. Company-states were an innovative form of public-private partnership that helped to define what “public” and “private” mean to us today. Once the difference between those two realms was defined, the company-states could no longer straddle that gap and thus had to be essentially broken up. The company states drove empire building just as much, if not more, than the country itself did. Most company states did not actually succeed. The conditions no longer exist for these type of company-states to exist despite later tries - or do they?
Jacob Flanders is the President of Flybridge VI, a strategy consultancy focusing on data at the intersection of health care and life sciences.