2023 Reading Recap
It is an inescapable fact that the intent behind 99% of reviews or ‘wraps’ is to showcase the erudition and eclectic taste of the person sharing them.
Nevertheless, I enjoy reading reviews, and I often buy books people recommend — and so, maybe people will similarly enjoy reading mine. So, without further ado…
Books I (re)read in 2023
Business adventures by John Brook
Very readable, fun, and informative, Business Adventures chronicles business stories from the fifties and sixties: it includes essays on the history of the income tax, insider trading, the famous lunar phase price-fixing scandal at GE, the rise of Xerox, an attempted corner on the stock of PigglyWiggly, and others.
The most interesting thing about reading books from times past is how contemporary they seem. The situations described could be taking place today — for instance, the way people thought and talked about Xerox back then is exactly how they talked about Google in the 2000s, or OpenAI today. One of the reasons it’s worth reading history books (can we call the 60s ‘history’?) is that it makes it so obvious fundamentals don’t ever change (“this time” is never different!).
It’s hard to pick a favourite from the essays in the collection, but The Federal Income Tax, available here, is a contender. It’s fascinating to me how something so ingrained in our society and economy is so recent, and its introduction so incredibly contentious (senator Sherman, of antitrust fame, called it “socialism, communism, and devilism”; another congressman argued “An income tax! A tax so odious that no administration ever dared to impose it except in time of war.… It is unutterably distasteful both in its moral and material aspects. It does not belong to a free country”). Fun fact: income tax was for a long time unconstitutional in the US; the constitution was amended only because Republicans assumed states would never ratify such an amendment anyway, so they agreed to pass it to score political points. To their dismay, states did ratify it and the rest is history.
Number go up by Zeke Faux
Fun to read, especially if you are anti-crypto and are looking to confirm your bias, but Number go up doesn’t have much new to say, and it strawmans pro-crypto arguments. To be fair, it's hard to find serious arguments in favour of crypto, and even harder to find economically viable and sustainable projects (except for those that use crypto to bypass regulation / control associated with fiat currency (which is not an indictment of crypto: if you live in a corrupt country, being able to bypass controls is a good thing)); but there are some, and it’d be worth for crypto-sceptic journalists to engage with them in earnest.
(One argument I find particularly out-of-place is that crypto is enabling human trafficking: one strand of the narrative weaved by Faux has to do with what are basically prisons full of people lured with promises of high-paying jobs, forced to call and scam cryptocurrency out of their victims. Faux is upset that the organisations that run crypto protocols do little to stop this; but why is he directing his ire at crypto companies, and not at the people running these virtual prisons, or the corrupt governments and police forces that allow them to operate? If crypto didn’t exist, these criminals would still traffic humans, just use them in a different way.)
Working backwards by Bill Carr and Colin Bryar
This is one of the best business books I’ve read. Its offers a detailed walkthrough of Amazons’s processes for product discovery, planning, and hiring, with advice and suggestions that can be readily copied by other organisations (though actually doing so will have to overcome inertia and internal resistance).
For example, the authors describe
Amazon’s press release approach when developing new products: managers have to draft an article announcing the launch of their product, explaining customer needs and how their product addresses them better than other products do. This forces managers to articulate their value proposition succinctly.
Hiring approaches, including the concept of the bar raiser — an experienced interviewer who has no stake in whether a particular role gets filled. As such, they don’t succumb to urgency and hire someone who’s perhaps not as good, just because the team needs someone ASAP.
Weekly business reviews, where managers go through their metrics in detail.
More than anything, what stands out is the clarity of thought and deliberateness in how Amazon runs its business. It’s obvious that Amazon’s leaders have spent a lot of time thinking about things that many other companies see as mundane or run of the mill activities.
Honourable mention: Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. Not quite as good as Working Backwards, but worth a skim. The author is the COO of Stripe, and a former Google executive; having worked at Google, I’m kind of surprised at how sensible Johnson’s suggestions are, given that I saw few of them put to practice at the company.
The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald died before completing the novel, and so the book is not even close to a finished product — like what (I imagine) you’d get if a director shot a number of scenes but never got to edit them together. I re-read it this year, and I’m including it in this list partly because it’s interesting to see what a novel-in-progress looks like, but mostly on the strength of this quote:
Like many brilliant men, he had grown up dead cold. Beginning at about twelve, probably, with the total rejection coming to those of extraordinary mental powers, the “See here: this is all wrong — a mess — all a lie — and a sham—,” he swept it all away, everything, as men of his type do; and then instead of being a son-of-a-bitch as most of them are, he looked around at the barrenness that was left and said to himself “This will never do.” And so he had learned tolerance, kindness, forbearance, and even affection like lessons.
Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
Tom Wolfe (see below) dismissed Susan Sontag as a Rococo Marxist, someone who “perhaps was exceptionally hell-bent on illustrating McLuhan’s line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity”; and seeing as ideologically my sympathies lie with Wolfe more than with Sontag, I wouldn’t be expected to love her work. And indeed there’s a lot to dislike — mostly, her pretentiousness (e.g.: she writes “When one thinks of giants like Proust, Joyce, the Gide of Lafcadio, Kafka, the Hesse of Steppenwolf, Genet, or lesser but nonetheless masterly writers such as Machado de Assis, Sven Woolf, Stein, the early Nathanael West, Celine, Nabokov, …”; or “Compare that which is forced, labored, synthetic in the construction of Madame Bovary and of Ulysses with the ease and harmony of such equally ambitious works as Les Liaisons Dangereuses…”
Like, what is that, if not intellectual snobbery? A good rule of thumb is that a person who makes wild assertions without any attempt at explaining them (why is Nabokov lesser than Hesse? And how can Joyce be ranked as one of the giants, if Ulysses is “forced, labored, synthetic”?) isn’t actually trying to convince their reader of anything — they’re trying to signal superiority. I find that distasteful.)
Nevertheless: I may not like Sontag’s approach, but she does talk of interesting things. For instance, what is style (and what’s the difference between it, and stylisation)? Can there be a tension between morality and art (she says no — unconvincingly I think)? What’s wrong with interpretation of art? Etc. The book’s worth reading more as an impetus to think about these questions, as opposed to perusing it for answers — but that’s good enough.
Hooking up by Tom Wolfe
There are some authors, such as P.G. Wodehouse or Matt Levine, who you can tell are having a blast writing: there is an exuberance in their prose, a playfulness, a joy that jumps out of the page. Tom Wolfe is one of those authors. Like the others in the list, he perhaps leans into his natural style a little too much, so that it becomes exaggerated and more deliberate than it should be*, but the fun he’s having is contagious, and reading his essays is extraordinarily entertaining.
This particular collection includes essays on American culture in the year 2000; the aforementioned Rococo Marxists and the mental gymnastics they perform to cast American supremacy as an evil force; biology and neuroscience; a brutal take-down of the New Yorker; digibabble; the founder of Intel; the ills of the modern American novel; and a novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg.
They are all incisive and funny, but I think Fort Bragg stands out as an example of the kind of writing Wolfe extols: journalistic fiction, which captures life in America with nuance and realism.
The peculiarity of Wolf'e’s writing is most notable in his New Yorker pieces, where he exaggerates his own style to highlight its contrast to (what he considered to be) the magazine’s dull prose. Sample passage:
Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-whoaaaaaaugh! — piles of whichy whuh words — which, when, where, who, whether, whuggheeee, the living whichy thickets.
[…]
One might think that sensitive young writers would get upset about this, that they would take one look at these thickets of perhapses, probablies, I-should-says, at the long, tendrilly whichy clauses that have grown up in their prose — and get, well… upset.
But! That is not so. A writer gets used to it very quickly, as soon as he gives himself what one disparager called “the auto-lobotomy”. Paradise! The system! We! Ambrosial org-lit!
Good stuff.
*I am now conscious of making wild assertions myself; well, video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor (I’m not a walking Latin thesaurus — I’ve never even studied Latin; I remembered this phrase, or rather its meaning, from an Asterix comic book I read as a child. I wanted to use it here, but couldn’t remember the original — I googled it to no avail. I then turned to GPT and asked There's a Latin phrase in an asterix comic book that says something like "I see and applaud the best but practice the worst". Do you know that line? and it gave me the answer. (Incidentally, this is why education (including reading Asterix!) matters — GPT can give you the answers, but you still need to ask the questions, and how can you do that without broad enough frames of reference?))
But to justify this claim a little more, I think that when a writer becomes famous for their style more than for their content, they cannot help but become self-conscious, which leads to over-deliberation. It’s like if someone comments on your posture as they’re taking your picture: you’ll respond to the comment and lose your naturalness. I suppose it’s why Wes Anderson doesn’t like looking at Accidentally Wes Anderson memes!
Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn
St. Aubyn wrote the (tragic and excellent) Patric Melrose Novels; one of the books in the series was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but did not win. In response, St. Aubyn wrote Lost for Words, a hilarious parody of the award: in his book, the committee responsible for awarding the prize consists of people who are incompetent, political, or just absent, while the shortlisted books include a cookbook that was submitted by accident — with an Indian aristocrat hell-bent on murdering the committee thrown into the mix. Worth reading — I read it for the second time in 2023.
The Greek Revolution by Mark Mazower
I read this in 2023, having read Beaton’s Greece: biography of a modern nation last year. I imagine both books will be of limited interest to most people, but I strongly recommend them to Greeks, because they give an account of the revolution that is far different to what we were taught at school. The two books do highlight some of the virtues we’re taught to believe we Greeks have — mainly, bravery and intelligence (at least, among the extremely well-educated elite) — but they also show the vices that plague us even today — dishonesty, self-interest, suspicion, mistrust, frequently extreme cruelty — vices that cause us to fight each other the moment we feel safe from external oppressors (as we did during the revolution, and right after (or even during) WWII).
Also, I loved reading about admiral Codrington, a veritable badass. In one instance that possibly determined the outcome of the revolution, he sailed his flagship into the bay of Navarino, where the Turkish and Egyptian armata was anchored. A boat was sent with a message telling Codrington he had no permission to enter and should leave immediately; he replied that he had come to give orders and not receive them, and that the first gun fired at him would prompt the destruction of the Turko-egyptian fleet. His warning was not heeded, and the promised destruction ensued.
The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow and Morgan: American Financier by Jean Strouse
I started a new job last summer and I decided to read on the history of my new employer. American Financier is an extremely detailed biography of J.P. Morgan the man, whereas The House of Morgan focuses more on the evolution of the company that bears his name (companies, in fact, as the book also talks about Morgan Stanley, which was spun off the original JP Morgan, and Morgan, Grenfell in London).
Both are enjoyable books, though excruciatingly detailed (especially American Financier). Some of the most interesting parts of the story have to do with
J.P. Morgan’s white-knight rescues of governments and companies alike (helping keep England on the gold standard; helping do the same with the US and halting the 1893 panic; acting as a lender of last resort in the crisis of 1907). I suppose this is an example of how history evolves through self-reinforcing loops: a man steps in and stops a crisis, and becomes famous for doing so, which makes him the go-to person to help with the next panic; and this keeps happening, so that the company the man started is still seen as the default white knight, a century after the man has passed away.
the formation of US Steel, and railroad consolidation (as an aside, reading about American industry in the 19th and early 20th century led me to ask: why was this growth financed so heavily through debt and not equity? I haven’t done any work to answer this question, but if anyone has some thoughts on this, please share them!)
the company’s bizarre choice to focus on commercial banking when Glass-Steagall forced banks to separate commercial from investment banking (strange because JPM was the world’s pre-eminent investment bank), and J.P. Morgan’s subsequent merger and cultural takeover of the Guaranty Trust Company.
J.P. Morgan’s uncle being the author of Jingle Bells.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
I re-read this in 2023; it’s an excellent, touching novel, and I found it even more relevant reading now after having children, because one of its themes is the struggle against one’s nature. As I’ve said before, after having children I’ve come to believe that our characters are to a large extent innate. This is not to say we cannot shape our destinies, and that we can’t strive to be better people — but such attempts will be reinforcing or going against our natural inclination (as biologist E.O. Wilson (profiled by Tom Wolfe in the collection mentioned above) said: “every human is born an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developed fluid”. And, Wolfe adds, “you can develop the negative well or you can develop it poorly, but either way you’ll get precious little that is not already imprinted on the film”).
This is an idea that runs through East of Eden — for instance, here’s Caleb pleading with God,
“Dear Lord,” he said, “let me be like Aron. Don’t make me mean. I don’t want to be. If you will let everybody like me, why, I’ll give you anything in the world, and if I haven’t got it, why, I’ll go for to get it. I don’t want to be mean. I don’t want to be lonely.”
Steinbeck’s optimistic conclusion is Timshel — “though mayest”: people have the God-given right to choose how to be. For all the sadness in the book, it’s an uplifting message.
Others
Rapid-fire round:
The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas: the novel is about a thousand pages long and so you might think it might make for heavy reading, which it does literally, but figuratively it’s a breeze. A fun, swashbuckling adventure.
Agatha Christie: I re-read a number of her books, which I often do when on holiday or before I sleep. I’ve read a lot of detective fiction, and no-one comes close to a) creating tight plots with clever resolutions, and b) subsuming their style to their content this well. Her writing is functional — none of the attempts at embellishment or artistry you see with other authors, which have no place in a whodunnit. She also has some pretty good quotes! E.g.
P.G. Wodehouse: my other go-to when I’m in-between books, I’ve re-read his works multiple times. I’m constantly surprised at how few people (even in England) have read his novels, and why he’s not assigned reading in school is beyond me: if you want children to learn to enjoy to read, and improve their writing, there’s honestly no better author. A few choice quotes:
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler: notwithstanding my comment on functional prose for whodunnits, Chandler’s writing and rich, evocative metaphors pack a harder punch than those of his hardboiled PIs.
Moonraker by Ian Fleming. The Bond novels are even more intensely hedonistic than the films, with many pages spent describing Bond’s clothes, cars, accessories, travels, and drinks (unlike in the films, in the novels Bond doesn’t always go for a martini; he tends to order the local specialty). Moonraker is (again unlike the film!) very enjoyable — about half of it takes place in M’s private club, and involves a game of bridge, where Bond cheats in a very satisfying manner to beat another cheater. Worth reading if you like cards!
Incidentally: work to reinvent James Bond hasn’t begun yet; I’m not surprised. How to reinvent a character who was an anachronism even at the time he was created? Fleming wrote his first story in the early 50s; even then, Bond was a vestige of British prestige, imperial power, and importance - perhaps the last echo of the Victorian era. He was, from conception, an idealised hero from the past, not a symbol for the future. Bond made sense as a hark back to the old days, or as escapism with its exoticism and luxury. But you can’t have Bond the character as a shrine to Victorian values anymore — the establishment no longer holds those values, so how can Bond? And nowadays there are more direct means of escapism. So I can’t see how Bond can carry on, unless as a complete reinvention (in which case the only point of keeping ‘Bond’ is the franchise power), or as a remake back in its original time.
Articles / Essays / &c
And a number of interesting links — these are articles and essays I read in 2023, but not necessarily written this year:
A tax puzzle: guess the tax that led to these architectural choices (form follows finance!)
Internet artifacts: a beautifully put-together collection of internet memorabilia
I love when the leaves turn beautiful and fall to their deaths
Data Falsificada: the opening shots in the saga of Professor Francesca Gino’s fall from grace
Making architecture easy: “Unlike nearly all other arts, architecture is inherently public and shared. That means that buildings should be designed to be agreeable – easy to like – not to be unpopular works of genius”
The razor-and-blades myth: a historical overview of Gillette’s pricing model — contrary to the standard theory, Gillette did not in fact sell razors for a low price, making its money from blades, when it was best-positioned to do so: when its invention was protected by patents. It only started selling its razor for a lower price when its patent expired — while at the same time introducing a new, higher-priced version (a strategy the company has followed ever since).
Where do fonts come from? Funny to think there is such a thing as ‘big font’
Bring back the 90s legal thriller! Fully agree, Amazon and Netflix take note please. Producing legal thrillers will be much cheaper than the action-packed, CGI-heavy nonsense Netflix has been churning out.
Against automaticity. Interesting read but overstates its case I think.
Linked from the above, ads don’t work that way; my take on this here
The decline and fall of the British economy — why did the USA overtake England in the 19th century? The article dismisses some standard theories (entrepreneurialism, better education) and suggests that it was kind of inevitable: a large domestic market, scare labour that favoured automation and technology, and abundant resources meant that the US was always destined to leap ahead.
And why doesn’t Britain build? TL;DR regulations and vested interests. The Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) was formed in the 30s by architects and urban planners who were upset by urban growth. The CPRE expanded and had enough voters as members that it attained political influence. This influence resulted in things like banning private housebuilding without permission, the establishment of New Towns, etc etc; and once house owners realised they could exercise political power — well, it all went downhill.
Charing Cross is named after one of the twelve Eleanor crosses erected by Edward I in the 1290s in memory of his wife. Only three survive.
Why adventure games suck; this was written in 1989 by Ron Gilbert, who made the classic game Monkey Island. I’m not a gamer, but I enjoyed this because I like essays that explain what makes something (anything!) good. I think attributes that contribute to goodness are general, so it’s worth learning what makes artifacts in one field good, because you can apply the same principles in other areas.
Intellectual laziness — excellent article that argues “managers should strive for intellectual rigour, to probe deeply to identify and confront root problems and think creatively and rigorously to find solutions.” Some signs of intellectual laziness: nonsense axioms are invented out of thin air, and appeal to complexity: “anyone who argues that the narrative is a convoluted, illogical mess is accused of being an ignorant simpleton who is incapable of grasping such sophistication and brilliance.”
Fast: examples of ambitious projects that were completed surprisingly quickly (e.g. first thing on the list: Visa’s predecessor was launched in 90 days, in which period it has amassed 100k customers (although, if memory serves, this was not done from scratch: it used Bank of America’s franchised credit card as a basis)
Turns out, Spock is bad at logic: “events he describes as “impossible” happen 83% of the time”. Ouch.
Hope you enjoyed these! If you did, consider sharing them with your bookworm friends: