New Year, Same Goals
A plan to write more (again) and a recap of the books I read (listened to?) in 2020
Prelude to a come up
I have long struggled with a desire to write more, but my track record has shown I have been unable to do so despite previous New Year’s resolutions.
In early January 2018, I set up my laptop overlooking a beach in the Philippines to start a piece similar to this one - how I was going to stop overthinking and just start writing. I wrote about 150 words, fell down an internet rabbit hole and never came back.
I have a lot that I want to write about - if anything, my issue should be sifting through all of my rants and raves. But I always seem to stare at a blank screen.
Starting writing is overwhelming. My biggest blocker is that my brain moves much faster than my fingertips. When I sit down to write, even when I try to home in on a narrow topic, I have difficulty getting all of my disparate thoughts onto the page. I think of so many points, counterpoints, tangents, previously read items I want to reference and new areas I know I need to research.
My mind races, which I chalk up to my “thoughtfulness.” Then I dig through my emails, Twitter, various go-to news sources. And the cursor keeps flashing.
I also let the perfect conspire to be the enemy of the good. I edit while I write, because I expect to see the crisp end product from the refined would-be writer I expect to be. I know I should write first, edit second. I know I should just write, overcome what Steven Pressfield calls The Resistance and just do the work. But it still hasn’t happened yet.
No more! My goal now is to write one post per week on whatever is on my mind, long or short - building the habit is what matters.
Obviously I am very biased about how interesting my writing may be. I am a news junkie and armchair media critic, though I get following the news is about as unique as following the weather.
I have also worked on both Capitol Hill in DC and at two FinTech startups in NYC. Thus, my view of the intersection of media, government and tech/startups might actually yield something worth reading from time to time.
If this is of interest to anyone, great! If not, that is not really the point - I really want to improve my writing, clarity of thought and focus.
To start, below are short blurbs on 6 books I read/listened to and 5 I have partially read in 2020. I will follow up with the other 9 books I read and a few more partial reads in my next posts.
(Note: During a previous attempt at the writing game, I started with Medium, but I don’t trust their constant pivots. I am using Substack because it was easy to start, but likely will play around with different publishing…mediums.)
And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations? - Through the Looking Glass
Books completed* in 2020
*These were mostly audiobooks from both Audible and Scribd. I know I retain more when I read physical books (and am trying to use them more in 2021), but I am able to listen to many more as audiobooks and I typically take notes as I listen.
Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan - This book has been getting popular with tech/VC Twitter (I saw Chamath Palihapitiya and Mark Suster’s endorsements) with good reason. It makes a strong, albeit not-overbearing, case that the entire history of the US can be summarized as “It’s all about the benjamins.”
Srinivasan remixes 400 years of our country’s history, detailing how major economic themes drove political changes and not the other way around.
Each chapter is a topic of a major economic driver that runs in a roughly sequential order from the fur and tobacco trade, cotton and the impacts on the South of abolition, steamboat and railroad capitalism creating fortunes and expediting travel, electricity and retail increasing the standard of living, cars and real estate development changing the landscape to favor the suburbs, all the way through to the centrality of modern finance and Silicon Valley’s preeminence in the global innovation economy and thus virtually everyone’s lives.
This isn’t a retelling of history, but a readable reframing of a story we already know well but where minor characters and events are much more important than most history books we have been reading since elementary school.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid - When the Black Lives Matter protests occurred this past Spring, I was one of many who decided that a small thing I could do was to make more of an effort to read more books by Black authors and stumbled across a list of novels that included this one.
Don’t take my world for it, it’s on Reese Witherspoon’s list too! Which was funny, because in this story of a woke white mother trying too hard to become best friends with her daughter’s Black nanny, I couldn’t help but picture Reese as the mother.
The perspectives switch between Emira, a self-assured, but professionally aimless, 25 year-old nanny/receptionist in Philadelphia, and Alix, a slightly older, successful blogger/influencer who is struggling to balance her own work-life dichotomy. The book starts with Emira accused of kidnapping the three-year-old Briar (whom she is nannying) at a supermarket due to their difference in race, a fictional video primed for social media outrage.
Alix then overcompensates for this offense by attempting to take Emira under her wing, despite zero interest from Emira, who also starts dating a white guy who happens to have a lot of non-white exes.
This book was hilarious and the story of relationships was intricate and layered - a searing but not jagged critique of overwrought (and self-serving) wokeness. This was a perfectly executed and entertaining social critique that I happened to be reading in May as the peaceful daytime BLM protests and often not-peaceful nighttime clashes between the police and would-be riot starters were occurring right outside my window in NYC, in between Union Square and Washington Square Park. A juxtaposition that I will never forget.
The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour - This was probably my favorite book of 2020. The title comes from a Paul Klee painting with many interpretations, but one is that mechanical birds are made to sing, drawing the entranced listener into a death trap. Nice analogy for social media!
It was topical, as any survey of social media will be, but also jam packed with philosophy, physiology and social science theory. It cites a wide range of academic sources, so you can’t help but feel you’re receiving a massive download of graduate-level scholarship, but is written as a smooth essay that keeps cruising along as you breeze by all sorts of intellectual signposts. Even if the subject matter is heavy, the quality of the writing is so strong that it feels like a revelation rather than a chore to read.
The book highlights and grapples with several issues relating to the near-universal acceptance that there are significant downsides to social media as we know it: addiction, Utopianism, online harassment and bullying, false sense of community, narcissism, trolling, fake news, extremism.
So…why do we keep using social media? As we see more “these products will cause cancer”-esque warnings, why do we keep “smoking?” As much as the Social Dilemma is finally bringing to light how much these services try to game our attention spans, we can always turn them off. No optimized notification or recommended post is infallible. The answer: we must be getting something out of it.
Seymour is looking at the demand for and not the supply of social media. And his answer is that we have a burning desire to write, express and connect. But for a variety of reasons and caused by a range of actors, those desires are being repurposed by the “Twittering Machine” for goals that ultimately do not match, nor really care about, our own.
This was a great review that initially got my attention. Once I started this book, I couldn’t stop until I got to the end.
The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero by Michael Kranish - This is a biography of an often overlooked Black athlete whose name should be mentioned in the same breath as Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson, but whom I had never heard of prior to seeing this book.
I am also interested in the turn of the 20th century time period. With the Civil War and Reconstruction taking place in the middle of the 1800s, as well as the relentless WW1-Roaring 20s-Great Depression-WW2-Cold War roller coaster for much of the 1900s, the period from 1877 through the mid 1910s doesn’t get as much attention. So when I saw it in Ryan Holiday’s newsletter, I devoured it (and gifted a copy to my Dad, who is taking part in a more recent cycling renaissance).
This book, then, was a history of the brief bicycle mania of the time, as well as its industrial and economic growth. That broader history focused on one incredible story of a new trend, professional sports, and one of the few global superstars on the scene, Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor. He battled on the velodromes - indoor bicycle racing tracks - across America and frequently toured abroad, where he made much of his lifetime earnings throughout Europe and was given a hero’s welcome when he traveled to Australia.
It is not surprising to learn that he experienced brutal racism throughout his career and would often win races despite most of the rest of the field conspiring to block him, or even force him to crash and injure himself. Deaths on the tracks were not unheard of, even at Madison Square Garden.
That Taylor could win so consistently despite relentless, steadfast opposition on and off the track show that he is a figure that deserves a greater place in our collective memory. And the bicycle craze of the turn of the century is worthy of more historical coverage, as it was often viewed as a major leap forward for personal mobility and freedom (it was not without critics despite recent lazy analogies), and helped usher in the social and technological advancements that propelled the automobile age.
Unfortunately, the irony is not lost on the author that as this Black figure used a bicycle to will his way past unfathomably immense racism and repression to become a short-lived global icon, another ignored period of history was occurring at the same time, as the rubber needed to create the bicycle tires was produced via the brutal Belgian subjugation and massacre of the people of Congo.
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle - I fully intended to half-listen to this in the background while working on other things, but instead it captured my attention and I flew threw it in a couple of days.
This is an homage to a lesser known, but immensely influential figure that was an early leadership coach to the senior Google team, including the authors and many other Silicon Valley leaders. A youth football coach, Campbell’s emphasis was making others better without any expectation of notoriety (the book was published after his death) and working with people to help them make themselves better, without spin on fronts.
Above all, his focus was on people and required Monday meetings to start with a “what did you do this weekend” update from even the most senior execs. “ Title makes you a manager, people make you a leader.” He was able to isolate true problems, ignore massive egos and focus on the sustainable operations that made the whole team - the company - better. A motivating, quick read.
Last, while not technically a book, at 31k words, The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright would have come in at about 100 book pages and seems like it deserves honorable mention for being released in near-real time, not in retrospect. I cranked through it during my Christmas - New Years break last week.
Wright is a preeminent author of narrative nonfiction and I had previously read The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which the New York Times Book Review described as “[n]ot just a heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve. . . . A thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11.”
That is what he did here with The Plague Year, but for Covid-19, as the pandemic still ravages our country and the rest of the globe. His focus is on the US, though he gives ample coverage to China’s failures to contain the virus or inform the world of the horrors that were coming. Wright highlights acts of heroism from Administration officials sounding alarms, virologists developing vaccines and front line health care workers bearing the brunt of the battles in the trenches.
And while he notes some who did not act swiftly enough when there was no data to act upon, he makes clear that the abysmal failure to act in the US to implement a testing regime and encourage mask adoption were failures at the highest levels of our government, who ignored data once presented, not to mention endless stories of devastating human suffering.
Unfortunately, Wright’s piece appears to have been released at the end of the year on a hopeful note as the first vaccines were being approved. But the flaws in the system that he surveyed - and the ineffective and incompetent leaders leaders operating the government - are still in place. We are living through a coda he probably didn’t think he would need to write, but may well have to.
2020 reads continued next week(s):
You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe
The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Author), Ken Liu (Translator)
Beastie Boys Book by Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz
Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday
St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street by Ada Calhoun
In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You're Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book by Joel Stein
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Fight Club by Chuck Palanhuik (reread)
Books started* in 2020
*I have seen many others track their books-read for the year and kick themselves for not finishing more. It’s ok to put down a book that for whatever reason it doesn’t strike you and move on to another that does. In other words, it’s better to have dabbled in several books than have one weigh you down as a months-long albatross. Also, these highlighted below aren’t books where I read one page - typically I’ve stopped between the 1/3 and 1/2 mark.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson - (Currently Reading) I heard about this book on Ezra Klein’s podcast and he called it the most important book he read this year.
I gave it a shot and was immediately hooked. The book takes place in the very near future when the effects of climate change start to significantly impact the planet. What follows are a wide range of plausible reactions: UN platitudes, multinational squabbling, bureaucratic infighting, lingering indifference and even some ecoterrorism.
It is told from a variety of international characters, but this is not a Model UN exercise, as the changing perspectives create both a sense of urgency and highlight the massive scope of the impact.
The first chapter is a tough read, detailing a heat wave that kills virtually everyone in an Indian town in brutal detail from a first person perspective. This isn’t a fun read, but I agree it is an important - and compelling - one.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami - (Currently Reading) Murakami has his own unique writing style as a surrealist/romanticist, though his writing process is the simple “no fad diet” approach followed by so many successful people: do the work, consistently and with focus.
That applies to his writing and his running, so this book serves as both a fitness journal and meditation on work and life in general.
While I think there is a limit on what can be gained from studying habits, Murakami’s writing is both crisp and serene, so reading it almost lends itself to its own form of mindfulness.
Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson - (Currently Reading) For those keeping count, yes I have three books going, but they couldn’t be any more different. This is one that I started this summer and put off for a while and recently got hooked on again.
A thriller that blends The Girl on the Train and Memento, this is a story of a woman who wakes up each day having lost virtually all of her memory and has to relearn everything about her life. She wakes up next to a stranger in a house she doesn’t recognize, so he helps her remember all of the basic details we take for granted. Then she starts keeping a journal, so that each day she can piece together the details of her life…and the event that caused her to lose her memory in the first place.
I’m fascinated by memory - its visceral hold on us and the centrality to our lives, but also its extreme unreliability. (The Memory Illusion by Dr. Julia Shaw is a great, readable introduction on the unreliability component.) Before I Go to Sleep Takes that to the extreme - the main character is well aware of her failing memory and her fervent acceptance of any glimmers of her forgotten past, which she starts to believe includes details that her husband isn’t telling her.
The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham - One of the preeminent modern historians (you’ve probably seen him on cable news at some point), Meacham fundamentally has a positive view of the American experiment. He won’t hesitate in highlighting our “warts and all” history, but he sits squarely in the camp of Martin Luther King’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Published in 2019, he likely started writing this immediately after the election of Trump. This response is designed to show that we have had many ugly, reactive periods in our nation’s history, but we routinely would overcome them. We aren’t perfect and it isn’t always easy, but our better angles prevail.
This book presents lots of historical examples (the Civil War, first red scare, the civil rights era) and makes a case for hope based on our forebares’ latent righteousness and resiliency, though he clearly intended this book to be an exhortation for those of us alive in the present to continue that tradition.
A Promised Land by Barack Obama - Heard of him?
I started this partially as a palate cleanser to the absurdity of the still-ongoing (!) election cycle. My own politics are complicated and evolving (I plan to write a lot more about this over time), so my view of any politician will be mixed. I can appreciate that Obama is a thoughtful, decent man and a gifted writer.
The first few chapters were pleasant and highlighted a part of his life story that isn’t often told by him or in the media: his early life post law school and how he stumbled into politics. He is matter-of-fact, though unspecific, about money troubles, starting his family, ambivalence about his early career and misfires as he started in politics.
Nonetheless, Obama’s aw-shucks tone blurs his fierce ambition which subtly comes out in the muted disagreements he has with Michelle. He is frequently apologizing to her via you, the reader, but he spends little time detailing why she was often frustrated with him, particularly if his political career was the lark he implies it was. He notes his luck, but also implies a stars-are-aligned destiny.
But after having worked on Capitol Hill during much of his presidency (I worked there from July of 2006 through June of 2013), I was really interested to see how he would reconcile his time there. Would he acknowledge his failings, as well as his triumphs? Would he drop the niceties and say what he really believed about his Democratic frenemies and Republican opponents?
In short, no. He remains unfailingly polite and aside from genuine surprise about the haplessness of the McCain campaign, which attributes to the Campaign and not McCain himself, and he says little about Sarah Palin’s effect at the time and the premonitions she portended - his belief is clearly that he is a central, unifying force and we all should be able to better get along.
This is only the first volume of two, covering the run-up to and including the first campaign and term in office. After reading three of seven parts of this 768 page brick, I would be lying to say I was compelled to keep going. There is not much new or compelling here and I imagine it might rival Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century for most unread pages on collective bookshelves since War and Peace.
Reading this (long) response piece (from the Left) didn’t help to motivate me:
I also have more partially-read books to highlight, some of which I plan to revisit, but will save that until next time when I highlight some other books of note that I read over the past few years.
If you’ve read this far, I welcome any feedback!
-Dan