i haven’t written on here in a while. i’ve had quite a few things going on, and writing ended up taking a back seat. i’ve been working on a few different things, doing some research, building stuff, and generally just being busy. i also somehow ended up reading a lot more this year, which is probably the more interesting thing to write about anyway.
i got much more into fiction this year than i expected to. i’ve never really been the biggest fiction reader. i’ve usually preferred biographies, history, philosophy and books that give me something concrete to think about. but i’ve realised that some of the fiction i enjoy most does something similar to what i like about biographies and philosophy: it gives me enough to work with and leaves me to make up my own mind.
the first obvious example is dostoevsky. i’d had crime and punishment and the brothers karamazov sitting around for a while, but it was notes from underground that properly got me into him. i enjoyed that book a lot. the narrator is irritating, contradictory and sometimes completely ridiculous, but that was part of what made it interesting. you’re essentially stuck inside the mind of someone who can rationalise almost anything, and the book doesn’t spend much time telling you how you’re supposed to feel about him.
that made crime and punishment even more interesting when i eventually read it. i like the way dostoevsky uses the story to get into questions about morality, guilt, rationalisation and human behaviour without turning the book into a philosophy lecture. i’ve always had an affinity for that kind of writing. i prefer when an author gives you the situation, the arguments and the characters and lets you arrive at something yourself. i think that is one of the reasons i’ve always liked biographies too. a biography can tell you exactly what someone did, how they behaved and what happened to them without having to tell you what conclusion you’re supposed to draw from it.
walter isaacson’s einstein was another book i really enjoyed. it took me a while to finish because it is a fairly dense book, but i eventually finished it while i was in kigali around april. what i liked most was getting past the usual version of einstein that exists in popular culture. everyone knows the genius, the equations, the photographs and the hair. the biography gives you much more of the actual person: his relationships, his disagreements, his habits, his work and the different stages of his life. i tend to enjoy biographies for exactly this reason. i’d rather be shown how someone lived and worked and then decide what i think about them.
i also read the polyglot genius, the biography of nikola tesla, and found it really interesting. tesla is one of those historical figures where the mythology has almost completely taken over from the person. there are so many stories about him that it becomes difficult to separate what actually happened from the version of tesla that people have built over time. i enjoyed getting into the person behind all of that. again, the interesting part for me wasn’t being told that tesla was a genius. it was seeing how he thought, what he obsessed over, how he worked and the decisions he made.
i read aristotle’s rhetoric this year too. i think i eventually finished it, although it took me a while. it’s obviously an old book, but it was interesting seeing how much of what aristotle was interested in still shows up in how people argue and persuade each other today. it isn’t exactly light reading, but there were enough things in it that made me stop and think that it was worth the time.
secrets of sand hill road by scott kupor was another book i enjoyed, particularly because of how practical it was. it gets into how venture capital actually works, from fundraising and term sheets to ownership, exits and how investors think about companies. i’ve spent enough time around startups and fundraising that a lot of it felt immediately relevant. there were several moments where i could connect something in the book to something i’d already seen happen in real life, which is usually a good sign for me.
chaos monkeys was probably one of the more entertaining books i read. i liked the inside view of silicon valley and the fact that the author was willing to be fairly unflattering about the industry and the people in it. my only issue was that at some point it started feeling like the book was making the same point repeatedly. i got what he was saying quite early, and there were sections where i thought, alright, we get it. still, there was enough good material in there to make it a strong read overall.
simon winchester’s the professor and the madman was another one i liked. the story behind the oxford english dictionary is interesting enough on its own, and the people involved make it even better. i liked the book, although it didn’t have quite the same hold on me as some of the others. sometimes you read something and enjoy it while you’re reading it, but a few weeks later you realise you don’t have much left to say about it. this was probably one of those books for me.
house of huawei was more disappointing. i actually wrote a separate review about it, so i won’t go too deeply into it here, but i found it fairly vapid. i don’t mean that as some grand criticism of the author. i think she made a genuine attempt to tell the story she wanted to tell. my problem was that i wanted much more about huawei itself. i wanted more of the company’s history, its internal workings, the decisions it made and the details that actually explain how it became what it became. i kept feeling like i was getting information around huawei rather than enough information about huawei.
i preferred breakneck, which covered some related territory and was simply more enjoyable to read. there were things in it that i had reservations about, but at least i found myself wanting to keep going. sometimes that is enough. a book can have things you disagree with and still be a very good read, and i thought breakneck was much closer to that for me than house of huawei.
i also read paulo freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, which was probably one of the denser books on this list. there is a lot packed into it, and some sections require a second read before you really get what he’s trying to say. i thought it was a solid book, even though i didn’t necessarily agree with everything in it. i don’t think agreement is always the best measure of whether a book was worth reading anyway. sometimes the more useful books are the ones that give you enough to argue with.
looking back at what i’ve read this year, i think there is probably a pattern. i’m drawn to books that give me enough information to form my own view. that’s why biographies work so well for me. someone did something, someone lived a certain way, someone made a series of decisions, and i get to decide what i make of that. i think that is also what i’ve started appreciating about fiction, particularly with someone like dostoevsky. i don’t need a book to hand me its conclusion. i’m quite happy to sit with the characters and the ideas and figure out what i think myself.
there are definitely a few books i’ve forgotten while writing this, so this probably isn’t even the complete list. but these are the ones that came to mind immediately, and probably the ones i have the most to say about. i’ve been reading more than i’ve been writing this year, so maybe this is a good excuse to start doing the latter again.