Tag: reflection

 

Or books people told me to read in 2018…

I didn’t read as many books in 2017 as I did in 2016, but I still learned a lot from what I read this year. I did read Deep Work, and, with Klein, would highly recommend it. Titan by Ron Chernow was a brick of a good book and I would expect nothing less from Grant (in terms of both length and quality). And How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid was pretty good (even if I read it in 2016).

To start 2018, I’m reading You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier and Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson. Lanier probably wouldn’t approve of this type of post (we should go for evergreen content instead of rehashing previous work), but I found it funny that so many people had these Best books posts. So this is mine! Looking forward, not back, to take what we learned in the past months and apply it to the present and future.

Here’s to another year of great books and learning.

Ezra Klein

• Young Radicals by Jeremy McCarter
• The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
• Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev
• Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen and Barbara Fields
• Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier
• Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• Deep Work by Cal Newport

Ryan Holiday

• Bodyguard of Lies: The Extraordinary True Story of D-Day Vol I & Vol II by Anthony Cave Brown
• The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader by Fred I. Greenstein
• Montaigne & Magellan by Stefan Zweig
• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: A Novel by Karen Joy Fowler
• Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey

Bill Gates

• The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond
• Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, by Eddie Izzard
• The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Energy and Civilization: A History, by Vaclav Smil

Barack Obama

• The Power by Naomi Alderman
• Grant by Ron Chernow
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
• Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein
• Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
• Five-Carat Soul by James McBride
• Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
• Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
• Coach Wooden and Me by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Basketball (and Other Things) by Shea Serrano

NY Times

• Autumn By Ali Smith
• Exit West By Mohsin Hamid
• Pachinko By Min Jin Lee
• The Power By Naomi Alderman
• Sing, Unburied, Sing By Jesmyn Ward
• The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us By Richard O. Prum
• Grant By Ron Chernow
• Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America By James Forman Jr.
• Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder By Caroline Fraser
• Priestdaddy By Patricia Lockwood

Wired

• Betaball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History By Erik Malinowski
• (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work By Brooke Erin Duffy
• Ours to Hack and to Own Edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
• Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest By Zeynep Tufekci
• Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech By Sara Wachter-Boettcher
• The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies By Jason Fagone

Some notable repeats are Pachinko (Klein and NYTimes), Grant (NYTimes and Obama), Evicted (Gates and Obama), Exit West (NYTimes and Obama). There are a lot of books out there to read in 2018. If you are looking for something, perhaps take a recommendation from the world’s thought leaders. Or, in the spirit of Lanier, go out on your own and read something no one else is talking about. In either case, keep curious.