Book recommendations (April 2023-Dec 2023)

As the Holidays draw near I wanted to pause from the daily grind and share some of my favorite books since April.? These books may not have much in common other than providing some ideas, themes, or extensions that have stayed with me long after I finished the text itself.

The TLDR of 4 top book recommendations from my readings since April by genre are:

• For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson (Business)
• Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (History)
• Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver (New-ish Fiction)
• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders (Older Fiction)

Business (or Business of self) books

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

The Roman corporation, though, looked substantially different. It dealt exclusively in government contracts, handling things like building roads, collecting taxes, and supporting the army. It was run by a single social class—the Roman knights. Not all of its owners had their personal assets protected from liability. And it was notoriously warlike. Its executives were often accused of lobbying for new Roman conquests. But the legacy of the Roman corporation tells us something about why corporations have persisted and why they possess the form they do today. The Roman state and the Roman corporation were close partners in a grander project: building a prosperous and flourishing society. The Roman Republic granted corporations special rights and privileges in return for their services to the republic. The relationship was mutually beneficial. The privileges increased the efficiency and stability of business enterprise, which could, in turn, serve the state more efficiently and reliably.?

Invoking first principles may be fashionable among Silicon Valley intellectuals (especially non-technical elements trying to burnish their credentials), but the fact is that many of us are so busy with the “how” that we don’t have time for the “why”. This book (which admittedly had the potential to be very boring) manages to break down the history and evolution of corporations into 8 entertaining case studies each inspecting a particular company or organization (ranging from Roman knights and the Medici Bank to Henry Ford’s eponymous organization and Facebook) and explains why a certain concept (ex. Corporate charters) were created, and how we have moved from their original purposes. This was a surprisingly easy read and highly recommended.

Other Recommendations

• Quit by Annie Duke
• Butler to the World: The Book the Oligarchs Don’t Want You to Read - How Britain Helps the World’s Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything by Oliver Bullough
• Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia MD
• Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly

History and other Non-Fiction

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Like most Russian refugees, he had had an adventurous life. His parents, killed in the Revolution, had been rich people, and he had served through the war in the Second Siberian Rifles, which, according to him, was the best regiment in the Russian Army. After the war he had first worked in a brush factory, then as a porter at Les Halles, then had become a dishwasher, and had finally worked his way up to be a waiter. When he fell ill he was at the H?tel Scribe, and taking a hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition was to become a ma?tre d’h?tel, save fifty thousand francs, and set up a small, select restaurant on the Right Bank. The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his medals and some photographs of his old regiment; he had kept these when everything else went to the pawnshop. Almost every day he would spread the photographs out on the bed and talk about them: “Voilà, mon ami! There you see me at the head of my company. Fine big men, eh? Not like these little rats of Frenchmen. A captain at twenty—not bad, eh? Yes, a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles; and my father was a colonel. “Ah, mais, mon ami, the ups and downs of life! A captain in the Russian Army, and then, piff! the Revolution—every penny gone. In 1916 I stayed a week at the Hotel Edouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as night watchman there. I have been night watchman, cellarman, floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant. I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters. “Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman, mon ami, I do not say it to boast, but the other day I was trying to compute how many mistresses I have had in my life, and I made it out to be over two hundred. Yes, at least two hundred . . . Ah, well, ?a reviendra. Victory is to him who fights the longest. Courage!”

It is surprising how quickly popular history books lose relevance as they age- new facts come out and the intellectual zeitgeist shifts- and the past provides another battlefield where we can continue our fights about the present. In 2023 we live in a pessimistic miasma- nothing has changed we are told- progress is illusionary. However, by stepping into the shoes of poverty of the pre-war era in George Orwell's polemic "Down and Out in London and Paris" we are confronted with the stark reality that many of our ancestors were all too familiar with. This deeply personal account of Orwell's experiences living as a dishwasher, tramp, and laborer in both cities offers a powerful critique of social injustice and the dehumanization of the poor. By immersing yourself in his vivid descriptions of hunger, hardship, and camaraderie, you'll gain a deeper understanding of the vast chasm between the "haves" and "have-nots," and the complex factors that contribute to poverty –as well as how far we have come since Orwell wrote it – which may give us resolve to continue to move forward.

Other Recommendations

• Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller
• We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O’Toole
• The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
• Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans

Newish Fiction

Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver

Those are the words she’d use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom’s life. And if that’s how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I’ll take it. To me that says I had a fighting chance. Long odds, yes I know. If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic highway. This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian, nonusing type of mother. Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose. Me though, I was a born sucker for the superhero rescue. Did that line of work even exist, in our trailer-home universe? Had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for bigger action? Save or be saved, these are questions. You want to think it’s not over till the last page.

Putting a hat on a hat successfully is hard to accomplish in comedy- it can come off as unnecessary and self-absorbed. In scriptwriting the remake of a classic movie is treated much the same way- why try to recreate something already great? However, Dickens wrote (a partially autobiographical) David Copperfield to expose the plight of poor children in Victorian England to the respectable middle and upper classes, and Kingsolver masterfully updates the tale to a opioid-deluged Appalachia – weaving an engrossing story with elements of modernity’s ills that the reader might shy away from in their actual lives. A gripping page turner.??

Other Recommendations

• Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
• The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
• The Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
• All the Sinner Bleed by S. A. Cosby

Older Fiction

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders

A story (any story, every story) makes its meaning at speed, a small structural pulse at a time. We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises. “A man stood on the roof of a seventy-story building.” Aren’t you already kind of expecting him to jump, fall, or be pushed off? You’ll be pleased if the story takes that expectation into account, but not pleased if it addresses it too neatly. We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments. — For our first story, “In the Cart,” by Anton Chekhov, I’m going to propose a one-time exception to the “basic drill” I just laid out in the introduction and suggest that we approach the story by way of an exercise I use at Syracuse. Here’s how it works. I’ll give you the story a page at a time. You read that page. Afterward, we’ll take stock of where we find ourselves. What has that page done to us? What do we know, having read the page, that we didn’t know before? How has our understanding of the story changed? What are we expecting to happen next? If we want to keep reading, why do we?

A magician never reveals his secrets. There are many surface reasons for this- intellectually by showing how the trick was accomplished the wonder of it will reduce for many of the audience (“so obvious” they think to themselves after being baffled mere moments before), practically, the magician feeds himself? by this esoteric knowledge, so expanding those in on it may hurt his pocket book. However, the real secret of any trick is the thousands of hours of practice that went into the hand and other manipulations required to distract the audience from the thread the performer is pulling- and after this effort- the performer is not able to use words to exactly explain how he did it. That is what is interesting about this book- in which Saunders closely reads and explains several short stories – and dives into their mechanics. For those who really want to know how fiction works, this book provides several tips and strategies- no you won’t become a Russian master after finishing it, but it will enhance to appreciation of craft, and also shed some light on some tools (that if you also spend thousands of hours honing) that may make your writing better (and since this has been my 4th of these book recommendation posts- I selfishly hope this is at least true for me).

Other Recommendations

• Wind up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami
• Diamond Age or A Young Lady’s Special Primer by Neal Stephenson
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) by Naguib Mahfouz

Full list of Books

1. ? ? ? A swim in the pond in the rain

2. ? ? ? The Contrarian

3. ? ? ? 42nd Parallel

4. ? ? ? Strangers to ourselves

5. ? ? ? Delta-V

6. ? ? ? The Wager

7. ? ? ? Quit

8. ? ? ? Excellent advice for living

9. ? ? ? Life is Hard

10. ? Butler to the world

11. ? Chain gang allstars

12. ? For Profit- A history of corporations

13. ? Oscars Wars

14. ? Demon Copperhead

15. ? Chip Wars

16. ? Critical mass

17. ? Super Infinite

18. ? Power and Progress

19. ? Outlive

20. ? The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China

21. ? Fourth Wing

22. ? Wonder boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley

23. ? Down and out in Paris and London

24. ? All the Sinners bleed

25. ? The Secret History

26. ? Diamond Age or A Young Lady’s Special Primer

27. ? Untethered Sky

28. ? Please Kill Me: A Uncensored Oral History of Punk

29. ? The Light at the End of the World

30. ? The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

31. ? The Wind up Bird Chronicle

32. ? We don’t know ourselves: A Personal history of Modern Ireland??

33. ? The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk

34. ? The Cairo Trilogy: Palace of Desire

35. ? The Cairo Trilogy: Sugar Street

36. ? Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

37. ? Light Bringer: A Red Rising novel

38. ? Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for the Modern World 1848-1849

39. ? Possession: A Romance

40. ? ?The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism

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