These are the books I read in 2016.
14 books, 6,782 pages. Some great books!
Here is a look at the reading over the course of the year. The book in green (The Tell- Tale Brain) is a carryover from 2015. The 3 books in tan (Good to Great, Smarter Faster Better, and The Upright Thinkers) are books that I have not finished.
It’s interesting to see how it’s not 100% serial. There is a fair amount of overlap. For example, I started 4 and finished 3 books while reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is sort of in a class by itself. I found it to be an intense and fascinating read. It never slowed (which is impressive for a 1250 page book). (on a side note, here is a textual analysis I did for that book.)
I also greatly enjoyed Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. It covers a wide swath of the research Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Israeli phycologists) undertook. We are bad at thinking statistically, so we create these shortcuts / rules of thumb that inevitably lead by biases in how we made decisions.
The Undoing Project (which is in some ways a follow-on to Money Ball) looks at decision making and tells the story of Kahneman and Tversky. It certainly covers much of their research (with great anecdotes), but also tells the personal side of the two as individuals and as a partnership.
Thaler, who wrote Misbehaving, worked with both Kahneman and Tversky. He’s an economist, but a bit of an iconoclast. He coined the terms Econ and Human to refer to the theoretical “rational actor” vs the actual person who behaves as they do (not necessarily as they “should”).
Superforecasting was also great (and it turns out I know a Superforecaster – top forecaster in Tetlock’s IARPA-funded Good Judgement Project). Successful forecasters are ones that are not tied to a specific world view (and thus do not feel the need to fit world events into their box of pre-conceptions) and change their predictions as they learn more (not wedded to previous predictions). It is interesting that the loud voices in punditry are not the people that are the most accurate prognosticators, but rather the ones that exude confidence (making the viewer see them as likely right) and are experts at conforming whatever happens into their world view (through their telling, the past always makes sense as part of their world view).
The last book I will mention is The Righteous Mind. Haidt does a good job of digging into the different moral intuitions people have and how it influences their view of the world. And there is an interesting discussion of his research on harmless taboos (e.g. the Julie and Mark story).
Oh, and of course, The Martian. Fantastically fun read.
Below shows the number of pages in each of the 14 finished books. This totals 6,782 pages (average of 484).
And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book. I averaged about 19 pages per day, but as you can see there is quite a swing. Some of these books were read in a continuous fashion; others were read in spurts.
Lastly, here are the Goodreads ratings along with my ratings. Goodreads allows a score of 0 to 5 (whole numbers only). Across the 14 books, I gave an average rating of 3.9 out of 5.
