These are the books I read in 2018.
In total: 19 books, 6,952 pages.
Here is a look at the reading over the course of the year. The book in green (The Cartel) was started in 2017. The 2 books in tan (On Grand Strategy and 21 Lessons) are books that I have not finished.
There is some good stuff in here and many I would recommend. Here are a hew highlights.
- I finally got around to reading Getting Things Done. I would recommend this to anyone who has stuff they need to do and would like that stuff to be organized. GTD is a full-on system and a by-the-book implementation would not be for the faint of heart, but its also filled with a myriad of good ideas that you can cherry pick and add to your process. That has been my approach.
- Sean Carrol’s The Big Picture was a great read. It is a mix of scientific history and philosophy and serves as a lucid chronicle of the (to quote the subtitle) “origins of life, meaning, and the universe itself.” Carrol is a theoretical physicist at Caltech and a great synthesizer of large and complex topics.
- I downright loved Robert Wright’s new book. It is an engaging exploration of serious ideas. Why Buddhism is True strips Buddhism of the woo woo and puts it on strong naturalistic footing. By truth, Wright means that “buddhism’s diagnosis of the human predicament is fundamentally correct,” and he does a good job laying out the case. At its most basic level this is this: natural selection uses feelings to goad desirous (from an evolutionary point of view) behavior, pleasure is short lasting and never fully satisfying and thus serves as a good goader, our natural inclination is to respond to the goading and become controlled by the feelings, through mindfulness one can inspect these feelings and begin to escape their control. To quote a quote from the book, “ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”
- I had the fortune of being able to see Tom Ricks speak in Atlanta back in May on his Churchill and Orwell tour. I’ve read 5 of Ricks’ 6 books and find him to be a wonderful and informative read. Churchill and Orwell is interesting in its a dual biography of two historical characters one would not expect to be central casting for a single book. But, it works. I learned quite a bit about both man. And it led me to go back and reread 1984 which was fantastic.
- I knew the basic contours of the Theranos story as it had been in the news. But, in reading Bad Blood I was floored by how crazy it all was. It is crazy how far they went and it is crazy how they were able to get away with so much for so long. This was first rate reporting by John Carreyrou of the WSJ.
- My biggest junk food uptake of the year, was the Red Sparrow trilogy – Red Sparrow (2013), Palace of Treason (2015), and The Kremlin’s Candidate (2018). This was just good ‘ol US / Russia spy-vs-spy. Nothing deep and thought provoking, but fun nonetheless. I personally preferred The Kremlin’s Candidate followed by Palace of Treason. But, I enjoyed them all.
Below shows the number of pages in each of the 19 finished books. This totals 6,952 pages (average of 366).
And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book. I averaged about 19 pages per day which is on par with the last 2 years (19 in 2016 and 18 last year). As with those years, the pace is quite varied where some books are consumed quickly and others were read in spurts.
(Chart creation code can be found here.)