My prediction from last year was correct. Not only did I read fewer books in 2023, but I completed the fewest amount since 2018. My reasoning was partially off the mark though. In my prediction I expected a decline in reading time due to spending time with my son, but so far there has been little overlap between his playtime and my reading/study time. The main culprits were a handful of duds I started to read or listen to but then had to put down. We’ll cover those books and more in the review below.

But first, for those who are interested, this year I self-published The Adventures of Duke: A New Home. The book is the story of us adopting our dog Duke but from his point of view. If you’d ask me years ago what my first book would be about, I probably would have said something along the lines of Crichton or Clancy (though not nearly as good). Duke will go on many more adventures and I am looking forward to completing Book 2. 

Now back to the show.

Biographies/History

Into Thin Air is an account of the 1996 Everest Disaster. I think this is a great book on mountaineering and risk management more generally. There are just certain venues where there is a high assumption of risk, and the cost of mistakes are high.

Prior to this year I had never read a book on the Korean War which fits its narrative as the Forgotten War. On Desperate Ground is a great account of the opening battles of the war and primarily the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. When I was growing up war books had an adventure feel to them. As an adult my thinking has changed to war may sometimes be necessary, but it sounds a lot like hell. The level of death and destruction during large scale conflict is unreal. On one side you have the Chinese executing wounded Americans and if you are charitable, you could argue that it’s because they were not equipped to take care of wounded Prisoners of War. Then during the American retreat, the Chinese blew up a bridge which the Americans proceeded to rebuild, but due to a lack of normal building material, the Marines used the frozen bodies of dead Chinese to stabilize the structure. Speaking of which, this book was a reminder about how important engineering is to warfare. From pontoon bridges on the way to liberate Seoul, to digging out an airfield in the frozen ground of the Chosin, to rebuilding a bridge, engineers were the main heroes of this book. 

There is a lot to take away from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, but the biggest for me was the importance of aesthetics and presentation. Products and presentations should be beautiful and easy to understand. This inspired me to change how I present client financial plans and it was nice to hear the positive feedback.

The Making of Jurassic Park and All Yesterdays both had the task of bringing dinosaurs back to life. The first is the production history of Jurassic Park and interesting for film buffs. The latter deals with the challenge of depicting animals we only have fossils of. Historically, dinosaurs have been depicted as muscular and very in-tune with their bone structure. However, modern animals aren’t like that. They have cartilage, fat, and feathers which distort their frame but wouldn’t appear in fossilized remains. All Yesterdays attempts to add those features to dinosaurs as well as depictions of behavior we see in today’s animals.

A friend back in the day joked there was no point in studying ancient battles. It’s true there is little to be gained by studying Roman legion formations and their equipment, but the human element is still worth studying. Someone may develop a new naval tactic that changes who controls the seas (such as new tech in business), there is tempo, making sure you are not over leveraged, taking the indirect approach, the shifting tides of politics and battle (no one wants to side with a loser), the importance of pageantry (especially for troop morale), etc. The War that Made the Roman Empire has that and more when Octavian faces off against Mark Antony and Cleopatra.   

The last history book I read in 2023 was Philip and Alexander. This book attempts and succeeds in illustrating how Alexander the Great’s father, King Philip, really laid the groundwork for Alexander to succeed in Persia. This isn’t to take away anything from Alexander. He still needed to win battles, sieges, counter insurgency campaigns, and push forward with unmatched tenacity. But Philip created the institutions and army to support those ambitions.

Business/Work/Finance and Economics

Books for my Certified Financial Planner coursework fall under this category. If I am a halfway decent test taker, I should have my certification complete in 2024 (yay!). How Successful People Lead provided a good framework on the five different levels of leadership. I go back and forth on whether reading books on leadership and the like are helpful. My intuition is that taking action, reading about great leaders, and then reflecting on the lessons from your own life will lead to greater improvement.

The Geometry of Wealth is a great book to gift someone if they are interested in the non-technical part of financial planning The book focuses on the philosophy of aligning monetary goals with your values and trade-offs... while using shapes to help visualize the ideas.  

Published in 2013, Average is Over is still relevant in the age of ChatGPT. According to Cowen, advancements in technology, particularly in the fields of automation and artificial intelligence, will increasingly replace routine and repetitive jobs. This will result in a small number of highly skilled individuals occupying high-paying positions and a larger group facing stagnant wages and limited opportunities. 

Cowen suggests that individuals who can leverage their unique abilities to work effectively with and adapt to technology will thrive in this new economic landscape. Honestly, I think Average is Over applies for things outside of AI as well. Using youth sports as an example, the skill level needed to be proficient has gone up from my dad’s generation, to mine, and now the upcoming generation. This book required me to think critically about how I allocate time to get better in my career.   

Fierce Conversations is a guide to communicating effectively in professional and personal relationships.  The seven principles described in the book are great, but like many self-help books, I think this one is about 100 pages too long. 

Deep Work is my favorite book of the year. All of us are inundated throughout the day with busy work that needs to get done, but ultimately isn’t very important and doesn’t move the ball forward for our personal goals or the goals of the companies we work for. The solution is to block out time where you can focus intensely on tasks and projects that are actually important. There are a lot of ways to do that covered in the book, but the one I am implementing is waking up early to work on stuff that I think will move my career forward. For the past few weeks, 5-7am has been my “deep work” time and I love it. The next step is to include a second two-hour session during the workday.

Current Events/Religion/Science/Philosophy

You know a book is exceptional when Big Blue is used as the embodiment of great leadership in an essay. To Boldly Go draws on lessons from the best of science-fiction and how they can be applied to 21st century military and political problems. The relationship between political and military leaders as depicted in Battlestar Galactica, PTSD from Picard’s time with the Borg, and many other ideas are explored here.

For the past few years there has been a lot of talk about the decline of American power, so I decided to pick up a copy of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.  The book examines how world powers rise to dominance and eventually decline. The book covers 500 years of world history via the rise and decline of major world powers such as Spain, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, and the US. Kennedy (the author) identifies key factors that contribute to the rise of great powers, such as a strong economy, a powerful military, and technological innovation. He also examines the reasons for their eventual decline, such as economic stagnation, military overextension, and internal political and social divisions. Very insightful, but I think Kennedy misses the role culture and morale can play in the destiny of nations.

I can’t remember if he explicitly says he avoids discussing it because culture is something that can’t be measured, but its absence is felt. When I think of my mother’s country of Brazil, even the locals joke that, “Brazil is the country of the future and always will be.” And I think that bleeds into a nation’s psyche. How much does thinking you’re a loser or on the decline impact your performance? What does that say about the tenor of the conversation in the US?

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day is a blast from the past. Written in 1908, it is still useful today and an easy read at less than 100 pages. The book is about making better use of your leisure time throughout the day.

I don’t know if people have always been obsessed with power or I just started paying attention, but over the past decade I’ve heard “power” frequently mentioned in the culture. These were not rumors about the return of the Sith. Instead, people need to reclaim their power, speak truth to power, have different levels of power depending on the intersection of immutable characteristics, etc. Obviously, I don’t automatically think of things in terms of “power” (maybe because I am powerful and its not a scarce resource for me?) and find people’s obsession over it deeply annoying. Still, I found The 48 Laws of Power to be interesting since a lot of these laws seemed like good ideas in general whether or not they build “power.” Still, some were in the camp of “makes sense” but were a combination of cowardly and dishonorable. And others just seemed weird and made me think the author was stretching ideas to get to 48 Laws.  

The next book brings us back to Thomas Sowell who has made my reading list four years in a row. In Intellectuals and Society, Sowell argues that Intellectuals, those primarily engaged in ideas, education, and the dissemination of knowledge, have a disproportionate effect on society despite having limited practical knowledge. This is bad because Intellectuals often have a Utopian vision that is a simplified and ultimately a wrong model for how the world works. When Intellectuals try to impose this vision on a society, they fail to take into consideration the complexities and incentives of everyday people.

This is a familiar message for those of us who believe in the power of markets. It is simply impossible for a handful of intelligent people to approach the distributed knowledge of billions of consumers when it comes to market economics or to compete with cultures that are tinkered with by society over hundreds if not thousands of years compared to the social engineering that bureaucrats attempt to get away with today.

Finally, when confronted by those who don’t share their “vision of the Anointed,” Intellectuals can defer to making “arguments without an argument.” This means using rhetoric or ad hominem attacks instead of engaging with different ideas. An example might be with arguments about “free” health care. Intellectuals (and normies) often talk about how it is criminal there is a cost to health care services without trying to grapple with how a society allocates scarce resources amongst its existing population and how to deploy existing resources to hopefully discover better and cheaper treatment options.

Habits of the Household is a guide to building family habits that promote peace and happiness. The book is from a Christian perspective, but I think it would be helpful for anyone. I see myself re-reading this in a couple years as our family grows and gets older.

Of Boys and Men is one of the better NPR books I’ve read in a while since it’s a mainstream attempt to tackle the “men and boys are not alright” problem. Girls are beating boys in K-12 education results (GPAs, test scores, reading levels), men are 15% behind on bachelor’s degrees, and men have higher rates of deaths of despair.

The information is good but I’m not excited about the solutions the author presented. After a while it seemed like most of the solutions were some combination of accepting mediocrity and socializing costs. Our problems will be solved by encouraging some men to not work overtime which will lower the wage gap between women, have more stay-at-home dads, have more social spending, and promote 6+ months of paternity leave. I’m sure this is the route we are going to end up on, but it’s not food for the male soul.

Fiction

A popular financial advisor I follow on Twitter tweeted that The Fifth Science is a great science-fiction book that he recommended reading. I hope his financial advice is better than his reading picks. The Fifth Science is a collection of short stories dealing with the 100,000-year galactic rise and fall of a human empire. The unifying thread between all the stories is whether non-biological material and organisms can have a soul. I enjoyed the ideas discussed in the stories, but the presentation was terrible. I can only recommend this book to someone who really likes weird sci-fi.  

The Star Wars Essential Guide to Warfare has been on my list for a while so I finally picked up a copy at Barnes & Noble. A good read, but for those who are deeply familiar with the lore I think the greater story is how the author was able to tie all the disparate ways warfare is depicted in Star Wars and create a cohesive in-universe explanation.

Star Wars has always struggled with depicting scale and tactics and the quality of the work when the Expanded Universe was getting on its feet was very author dependent. How many Star Destroyers would an Empire need to maintain peace? Why were there only six main Star Destroyers in the Thrawn Campaign? How can Han Solo battle a Super Star Destroyer with a few Mon Calamari cruisers? There can’t really be only a few million clone troopers fighting in the Clone Wars, right? Jason Fry weaves all these questions into a convincing story about off-screen fleet actions, the role of starfighters vs capital ships, etc.  

As we learned last year with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, some of the best thrillers have already been written, as is the case with The Day of the Jackal. You’re not supposed to root for the Jackal since he is trying to assassinate French president Charles De Gaulle, but you have to respect a man who takes his craft seriously.

Now we get to the nerdy stuff. I read two books in the “humanity comes across an alien signal” genre. They were His Master’s Voice and The Listeners. His Master’s Voice was a little more “hard science fiction” than the latter. In the book, scientists discover a neutrino signal that seems alien in origin and study it for two years. They make some progress but ultimately can’t even conclude if the signal is alien at all. A key idea is the possibility that an alien civilization is so advanced that even if we come across their signals, we will have no way to understand them. The Listeners is a bit more optimistic on the distance between civilizations and are ability to understand them. The story takes place in 2025 when the SETI project finally receives a signal from another civilization. The book moves at a crisp pace with the battle between science, religion, and politics over what to do with the signal.

My favorite part of the book is how it captures the challenge of communicating across space.

“Fifty years is but the flicker of an eyelash on God’s face.”

“Fifty years is a man’s working life.”

It can take decades, hundreds, and even thousands of years for a signal to get to you. Then it will take the same amount of time for your reply to get to the other civilization.

Red Mars is the first in a trilogy of books about the exploration, colonization, terraforming, and eventual independence of Mars. I really enjoyed the story and think I will buy the next two books. An interesting thought I had while reading was that the author is too optimistic about Mars colonization and too pessimistic about how things will be on Earth in the future. Things can get pretty bad down here on Earth but by default it’ll still be better than any other place we know about in the universe.

The Slow Time Between Stars also battles with the vast distance of space but this time our protagonist is an autonomous spaceship. The ship was built by humanity to terraform other planets to suit Earth’s genetic offspring. Once the planet is habitable the ship would start human civilization on that planet. I normally don’t include a single short story here, but the idea of a ship traveling millions of years in search of the right planet was interesting enough that I thought I would share it.

 The Duds

I’ve finally accepted that even if you start a book, you are under no obligation to finish it. That’s where these five come in.

Grit and Why We Sleep were on many book review lists last year. I stopped Grit after the first chapter because I didn’t think I would glean any new information from it. Perseverance was my grandpa’s favorite word and my parents have a sign that says “Perseverance” on their book shelf. It’s in the blood at this point.

Why We Sleep was a snooze fest on audio. It might be better to read, but in my hour and a half of listening to it, I didn’t hear anything inspiring.

I will go back and try re-reading Miracles and The Family Firm. Miracles is by C.S. Lewis and I stopped reading the book because Otherlands arrived in the mail. I just didn’t have the energy to return to Miracles later though I think it will make the list in 2024. I’ll eventually try and go back to The Family Firm but for now the book is a little ahead of where I am at in my life since it deals with family management when children are older.

Otherlands was a tragedy. The book provides little snippets of what the Earth was like during different epochs going from today to back when single celled organisms started. I thought that was an interesting idea but what caught my attention in the first place was the jacket of the hardcover which has a picture of a terror bird, one of my favorite extinct animals. Sadly, the book did not meet my expectations. I don’t know if it was the writing or that the locations and animals chosen for each epoch were boring. I also skimmed the section I thought terror birds would fall under and I don’t recall seeing the author mention any Phorusrhacids, which was deeply disappointing.