My 2020 Books I Recommend List

How do we mark the end of this difficult year? How do we signal hope in a better year to come? I propose a list of books. In recent years I've ended the year publishing a list of books I read that year that I recommend or wish to review. Reading is an investment that pays off immediately and lasts for years. 2020 was a difficult year for everyone I know. Those who were fortunate, like me, were annoyed, anxious, distanced, frustrated, and under-performed in many areas of life. Those who were less fortunate had it much worse. As I publish this list, the future looks brighter. At the beginning of this past year, I had ambitious travel plans. In the first three months, I had traveled quite a bit for work and was planning more international trips. Travel affords me time to read. But so does staying at home. I didn't teach myself sign language, barely strummed that lonely guitar I can hardly play, and I gained a bit of weight eating comfort food (I'm reversing that now). I did read, and I'm better for it.

This post is long. In the past, I'd share the title and a tweet-sized text about it. I'm feeling wordy. I hope the content justifies the length. My other blog posts will be shorter, as they have been so far. Okay, now for eighteen books I enjoyed this year.

#1. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou. This was an excellent book. I'm not sure which was better, the fact that it was extremely well written and felt like a thriller novel, or the fact that it tells a true story. It is the story of a startup company that worked on a promising medical device that tests for all sorts of important medical conditions based on a single drop of blood. Blood testing is not new, but this company promised a revolutionary approach. People placed a lot of hope onto the bright and charismatic people and their impressive technology promises. Silicon Valley startups have changed the world in profound ways, ways that have a lot of positive consequences, or the opposite. This one was more of a hoax. Smart people were duped by charisma and their own hopes. Read how this played out. Whereas Lab Rats discusses the impact of Silicon Valley on workers in general, and Weapons of Math Destruction (both books are mentioned on this list elsewhere) discusses the inadvertent misapplication of technology, this story is about fraud, deception, intimidation, and fear. I lived in Silicon Valley for seven wonderful years. There's a lot of good happening there. But it's not all good. Sometimes a good expose can help the industry take stock of the checks and balances it places on itself.

#2. Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures by Christina Dunbar-Hester. Last year's book list mentioned that I had just started reading this and knew it was going to be very interesting. The topic is important. The book fell short for me. The author presents many important issues related to the politics of diversity and inclusion in the open technology space. Much of the book is a reflection of her fieldnotes after attending a variety of open source meetups, primarily focused on involving women in tech, as well as other conversations and analysis of email group discussions about the topic. It is organized and thoughtful, so it is worth reading. But I was hoping to see more about some of the solutions being considered. I also wanted the author to review the shifts in open source as it has become more corporate, as those shifts add an important angle to the issues. I read this twice, feel it has a place on the bookshelf, but am dissatisfied and wanted more.

There was a section in the book that dealt with an event that I have some insight into (I was involved in a part of it, but the book focused on a slightly different angle to the story). Had the author interviewed me about it, I would have shared insight that might have expanded the conversation. Another section in the book described situations around hacker-spaces (or maker-spaces, where people are encouraged to create and modify physical things, using traditional as well as new 3d-printing and single-board computers, like Raspberry Pi). In an attempt to increase diversity, the people who ran the space encountered some of the challenges that it brought to them, challenges that were greater than they were able to address themselves. She unpacked one facet of the "paradox of tolerance" (Karl Popper), but I thought there was more to say about it. She pointed to problems but did not point to this history of thought that confronted these issues before. Again, I wanted more.

Probably the most important takeaway from the book: people involved in open technologies (e.g. open source, open hardware, maker-spaces, etc.) are used to seeing a challenge, forming a like-minded community to address the challenge, and then solving it to some degree. They have been successful at hacking software and hardware, and now they are rather confident in their methodologies and abilities. The author suggests this is a problem in dealing with the more complex issues of diversity, identity politics, inclusivity, and the underlying factors that result in the current challenges that many open source communities face (or faced). The ability to hack code does not make one a sociologist. The author does not go so far as to condemn the open source movement for trying to fix things it can't, but she does suggest that the politics of diversity is more complicated than the areas open source professionals normally deal with well. I see a similar dynamic play out in the conversations about ethical source code, where groups of people leverage the patterns that worked in the open source movement to address issues that are much more complex. I thought her awareness of this pattern and its limitations was the book's most compelling point.

#3. The Art of Strategy by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalbuff. Here's a book that will teach you things about thinking strategically, even in areas where you think strategy will not help (e.g. playing the rock-paper-scissors game) and in areas that are really complicated (e.g. The Nash Equilibrium). The book shares great insight into some of the strategy games played on TY Reality/Game shows (like Survivor) and generalizes the thinking to common situations people find at work and in life. This is less about the strategy of leadership, and more about how one thinks about auctions, negotiations, incentives, and the challenges faced by the inability to coordinate with opposing parties to get the best outcomes (e.g. the Prisoners' Dilemma). If you are cerebral and want to fine-tune your strategic thinking, you'll enjoy this book. You will learn things about strategy that you did not know, and begin to appreciate how the book breaks down the general principles of orienting yourself toward better outcomes. If you enjoyed Algorithms to Live By, How Not to Be Wrong The Power of Mathematical Thinking, or A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, you'll enjoy this book too. Those are all excellent books too.

#4. Conscious Business by Fred Kofman. I read this based on a recommendation from an executive who shared that this is one of her favorite books that guides her approach to business. The book's message is not exactly novel but told well. The author argues that successful leadership comes from listening, suspending judgment, asking inquisitive questions, and approaching people with openness and compassion. He cautions against playing into the toxicity that can be part of a competitive or stressful workplace. He models how to have authentic conversations that bring people to greater awareness. It may be telling that the final word in the book is "namaste" and the book reads like someone who tries to leverage mindful self-work to workplace interactions. It sounds nice, and telling people you are mindful and sensitive will make you feel great about yourself. Operationalizing this is challenging. Will reading this book make you an amazing and thoughtful executive? I did not feel this book was game-changing to me, moreover, I didn't see this play out in the environment that the executive who recommended the book was fostering. Still, it’s a nice book with a good message. Telling people you read it sends the signal that you care (or at least that you want people to think you care).

#5. Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown (stylized in lowercase). I read this book twice (it's not that long). Once to orient me to the way this book is written, and again to get the messages contained. This is a book on strategy that is unlike the previous book on this list. It is not written for or by an MBA professor, but by the executive director of the Ruckus Society, a social justice activism movement. adrienne is a women's rights advocate, a Queer Black feminist, and an afro-futurist writer. This book was highly recommended by a friend of mine who is active in social justice. The author is thoughtful, fun, and intense. She conveys personality with rich experience organizing large and impressive movements. brown's written style is non-linear and inspired by nature. She uses phrases that, at first, did not mean much to me, like "embrace your inner multitudes" or "mushrooms are toxin transformers" and you want a mushroom on your team. But upon the second read, I started to get used to her style. Her practical wisdom will help you (and me) working with open source groups (one can argue that there's an element of activism there too). Inspired by this book, I picked up an Octavia Butler book (brown's primary inspiration) and will read a bit of Afrofuturism science fiction in the next few weeks.

Given the author's involvement as a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, the Occupy Movement, and other social justice movements, I wanted to expand my awareness of how the leadership of these movements thinks about strategy and leadership. She gave an insightful example of when she first joined the Ruckus Society. The organization was inspired by Greenpeace and excelled at what adrienne described as a "masculine" approach to action (also a reflection of the primary gender on the current board): they planned spectacular, disruptive events that captured media attention, but they were short-lived. Working with the leadership, she joined the board, recruiting other Queer, Black, and female leaders who introduced a different approach to social action. In their next major initiative, working with a group of Native American and Indigenous People, rather than stage a disruptive protest to invite attention to the issue they faced, they partnered and supported an initiative that empowered those who were previously disempowered to address the issues.

The author observed that one of the signals of a flawed movement is when you see disempowered people being staged as if they are running things. They are set up for the photo-ops and asked to provide quotes to show how they are being supported, while the actual leadership is still in the hands of those who had power all along, and will soon disengage to work on some other issue that captures media attention. (I've seen this play out that way related to open source diversity issues, sadly. We need to find a way to avoid plating the optic game, since it's disingenuous, unauthentic, and unhelpful.) That behavior raises false hope and is not sustainable. Those who were disempowered, remain so. Whereas raising leaders while providing for them the supportive networks, composed of the people most directly impacted by the issues, is far more sustainable. This is part of the "Emergence" that is at the heart of her message. Please read this strange but very interesting book.

#6. Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil. O'Neil is a mathematician. Unlike the books listed with the blurb on The Art of Strategy (above), this book is not about how you can use mathematical thinking to improve your thinking. It is about how flawed mathematical thinking is ruining our societies. She coins the term WMDs to refer to a category of math-based applications that are widely used in society, has profoundly destructive effects, and few if any mechanisms to fix them. This is a critique of Big Data / AI algorithms that are increasingly used to replace decisions in all areas of society, including areas that impact you every day (and you are probably not aware of them too).

This book takes a strong position. It is based on very well researched information. But it is also targeted at a category of Big Data applications, not all of them. The author also points to examples of these applications that work well (and explains why, and under which conditions they do). This is not anti-technology, or some 'light my hair on fire" hyperbolic dystopian prediction by an anti-futurist. She's a mathematician and a systems thinker. She methodically explains how these algorithms (along with fraud) created the financial crisis of 2008. She shares the insight of an insider since she was a quant at a prominent hedge fund watching this happen.

The book's thesis is not that AI and Big Data are bad, rather she points to the conditions such that they become bad and how easy it is to create those conditions. She calls for data scientists and organizations that leverage their skills to recognize the signs. She also calls for governmental regulations, suggesting that the free market will/can not correct the flaws (she explains her reasoning). Is she right? I wish I knew. Two years ago I shared a list of books I read that year, which included a few that take the other view on these matters (e.g. books by conservative thinkers, anarchists, and free-market advocates). This year I read books by people who advocate for the other side of the political spectrum. This is by design. I can't claim to know the answers to these complex questions, but I challenge myself (and recommend to you) to read positions from opposing views since you'll have a much better appreciation for why people believe what they do. In this case, for example, I'm not yet sold on the idea that governments are currently well-positioned (or aware of the intricate technical details) to create regulations that would fix the problems O'Neil raises. But I understand her many examples that demonstrate clearly that the marketplace itself will tolerate (and has no incentive to fix) many flaws in these algorithms that will have terrible consequences for many people. My inclination is that the open source movement may be able to provide better approaches. But I'll have to do a lot more thinking, reading, and discussing to flesh that out into a compelling argument.

If you are a fan of the Netflix Black Mirror series, you probably loved the Nosedive episode, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror). It was my 3rd favorite (behind Hated in the Nation and San Junipero). The episode is a fictional depiction of a society in which various opaque and easily manipulated algorithms play a significant role in your success in nearly every aspect of life. This book demonstrates how close we have come to this reality. It is a lot closer than you might think. For that reason, I highly recommend reading this book. However, I'll add: I work with many data scientists. I'm familiar with some of the algorithms mentioned in the book, especially around digital advertising and the use of cell phone location data. I hope that my colleagues who read this book notice that she is not suggesting malice, nor does she deny the good that these algorithms bring to the world. She takes one side, and she does a great job of explaining why this side is important to keep in mind. You especially should read this book to ensure you are not letting yourself be unaware of the concerns your work creates.

#7. Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons. I read his previous book, Disrupted, and loved it. For me, Lab Rats was not as enjoyable as Disrupted. It felt a little repetitive and slightly preachy. Lyons is an excellent writer and storyteller. He shares an important perspective based on careful research on how he sees problems arising from the way the high tech industry puts profits before people. (Note: public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value, startups are in pursuit of that same goal -- so the core flaw is rooted in capitalism, which he discusses.) If you like this book, read his earlier book Disrupted. If you like Dilbert cartoons or the HBO Silicon Valley show, you'll like this book. And even if you are a fan of capitalism and making money, read this to get a perspective of when things go off the rails and how it impacts the economy and our overall happiness.

Lab Rats is a different take on Weapons of Math Destruction (reviewed on this list). Lab Rats is about the workplace and what's going wrong. The other book is about the algorithms that are helping companies (inadvertently) destroy their own workplaces.

#8. The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. This is a classic. I read it because I changed jobs this year and it came highly recommended to help orient me with the challenge of starting a new job. The book is about setting a strategy for your first 90 days at a new role (or a new leadership role). I see why it is a classic, it's very thoughtful and good. It does not cover the unique challenges of joining a company during a pandemic where you don't actually meet anyone. So that could be a good addendum for the next edition! That being said, starting a new role is very challenging since you know what you know, but you have no idea what you are getting into. A company hired you with the hope they made a good decision. There is a bit of a grace period where everyone knows you are in learning mode. How you use that time can make or break your new role. The book lays out many useful tactics for taking advantage of this period for your benefit. I hope I'm internalizing the content since I'm still in my first 90 days! If you have transitioned to a new role or a new company, this is a worthwhile read.

How did this help me? I had worked in my previous role for a while and became very familiar with its complexities. Show me a problem and I was pretty sure what to do, whom to involve, and why the problem came to be in the first place. When seated in a new venue, you have to bring that knowledge and expertise into an environment where you might not know what could be done, whom to involve, or how the issue came to be. This does not make you less an expert, it makes you more an explorer. This book teaches you how to structure that exploration.

The author provides a helpful framework called STARS representing 5 situations you might be brought in to lead. These are to Start something new, to Turn something around, to Accelerate growth, to Realign (or Recalibrate), or to Sustain successes. Each of these situations implies very different needs and motivations. It is critical for the new leader to carefully assess which situation they are in. What makes matters complicated is that depending on whom you ask in the organization, you might hear very different views of their current state and their need for your help. Creating something new is quite different from Realigning something that exists but needs to be recalibrated. That too differs from a Turnaround situation where you need more than recalibration, you need something more radical, etc. The book provides worksheets, stories, and a ton of insight into navigating these important transitions.

#9. (two books) Wisdom of the Idiots and The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin, both by Idries Shah. These are unlike the other books on the list. They are short, cute, and wise. Nasrudin was a Sufi master who shares his "wisdom" which is often in the form of dad-jokes. If you like Zen koans, you might like this book. If you like the stories of the Wise Men of Chelm (links to a few books here), you will love this book. I think the Jacob the Baker books by Noah ben Shea are better (or perhaps much more familiar to me ethnically). Khalil Gibran's books are more thoughtful, cerebral, and deep, Yet I enjoyed these Nasrudin stories a lot. Although clothed in silliness, the stories can be rather deep. I'll share a sample:

A traveling Sufi arrives at a village. The people of the town ask him where he came from. He said “I don’t know.” They asked where he was going. He said “I’m not sure.” They asked him what is Good. He said he had no idea. What is Evil? He was not sure. They asked what is right. He said “That which benefits me.” What is wrong? He said “anything that harms me.” The townspeople laughed at him and drove him out of town. 

A sage approached the crowd and told them they should repent for the sin of misanthropy. The Sufi’s answers, he explained, were meant to symbolize all humanity. By deriding him they show intolerance to all.

This was not a story of a fool, but a message about the human condition. I may want to read more Sufi wisdom or other culturally grounded wisdom literature. I'll take recommendations.

#10. The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. This is a remarkable book and I hope you read it. It sets out to tell the history of the world (that's a tall order) and does so from three very important perspectives: 1. Commerce, as in the trade of fabric, spices, food, and fuel, 2. Conquest, as in the wars and alliances created by tribes, empires, and nations in support of their commercial interests, and 3. Central Asia, as in the "stan" countries, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. Every chapter takes a look at history through those lenses, each focusing on a different era trading a different commodity. Trading in silk resulted in other exchanges, such as ideas, technologies, and faith systems. The roadways paved 2000 years ago used to trade silks were used to trade pepper, gold, grain, and oil. In each major era of history, Central Asian empires and peoples played a pivotal role. Sure, you know who Marco Polo was and that Magellan navigated the globe. But the author connects their stories to the patterns that play out over and over again, even today.

I was unfamiliar with the role Ukrainian wheat played as a motivator for the rise of Nazism. The author did not shift focus away from the messages of the Nazi era we generally think about, but he adds a fascinating underpinning as to why Hitler made (and broke) the deals he made with Russia, and why he took his armies to certain locations. What's more, the book connects these very patterns with the spread of multi-ethnic religions (like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism), as well as the patterns that played out during the oil crisis of the late 1970s and the military involvement the US has in Iraq and Afghanistan. History is all connected, and this book does a very reasonable (and lay-person accessible) attempt and drawing those connections (with ample endnotes for the interested reader to explore).

If you like this book, you'll like Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore and Amsterdam by Russell Shorto. These books tell fascinating stories about history from a clear vantage point and are worth reading. I recommend them all. I'm generally focused on technology and the future. But reading books about history is a fantastic way to ground thoughts in the patterns that have been set by the generations before us.

#11. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. I met Bessel at a family event. He's friends with my sister Rachel Yehuda (who is quoted in the book a few times). This is a truly fascinating book about how people deal with and internalize trauma. It is written with compassion and insight. The author is a very experienced practitioner, which informs the way he approaches this topic. His colleagues in the research setting seek to understand how things work, or at least how they work at large. As a practitioner, van der Kolk takes each patient for what they present. Meaning, a patient may describe something, and the therapist's job is not to validate facts ("did that really happen that way?") but more to understand the implications to that patient. He has seen thousands and is rather well-known as one of the world's experts in trauma therapy. So he has the perspective of thousands of real people along with his deep connections with the research world. The book is filled with very compelling stories and a lot of scientific contexts. This makes it very readable and relatable.

The author demonstrates that trauma is stored in the body, which may be in the brain, but not only the brain. Moreover, it may be stored in parts of the brain that are not as accessible initially as one might wish. For example, some people who experience certain traumatic experiences are unable to recall the experience or are unable to verbalize the experience. This is not to say they forgot it, but to say that the method in which the brain deals with trauma may circumvent certain processes that make the verbalization or recall happen differently. This has immediate and profound implications to witness testimony as well as the therapy options. At times you encounter someone who discovered they had been traumatized -- and it's easy to wonder how they discover that, didn't they remember? And the answer may be much more complicated than meets the eye. 

Perhaps you've heard that people have a visceral reaction where they find something uncomfortable, but can't verbalize why it is that way. Or someone complaining of some phantom pain somewhere, but there's no indication of actual injury. Or maybe you heard about a therapeutic technique called EMDR that somehow connects your eye movement to recovering from trauma (an idea that seemed to me at first to be crazy, but the author explains what the method does from a neurological perspective). This book unpacks these ideas, explains them, and shares moving stories about recovery.

In a world where far too many people carry a lot of "baggage" with them, this book may help open your eyes to how important it is to hold judgment and try to understand how people deal with the traumas that many people face. Because some discussions focus on war veterans, Tribe by Sebastian Junger is a relevant book to read alongside. It's smaller and very worth reading. Given that a lot of the book discusses how the brain processes trauma, I was glad that I read Behave by Robert Sapolsky last year (I reviewed it on this blog last year, it provides an excellent underpinning of human behavior at a very granular level).

#12. The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal. Imagine humans could learn something from primates. Wait a second, humans are primates. Aha. Are we like chimpanzees? In some ways yes, others no. As it turns out less than a century ago scientists identified a primate species that was first viewed as "pygmy chimpanzees" and then recognized to be their own species (that is sadly endangered of extinction), now known as bonobos. On the surface, bonobos seem like chimps, maybe a bit smaller, more docile, less violent, more sexually promiscuous, and well, not exactly like chimps. The more you study them, the more interesting they reveal themselves to be. The social behaviors of bonobos are quite different from those of chimps. The former are more socially liberal and egalitarian, the latter are more hierarchical and tribal. Some people simplify this to suggest that the bonobos are the progressives and chimps are the conservatives. It is an oversimplification, but the analogy has its place. More importantly, bonobos are actually quite interesting and the author really shines a beautiful light on why they are so special. And when looking at bonobos, we can learn something about being human too.

What does this have to do with atheism? Well, this is not a book about religion or atheism per se. Meaning, the book is not advocating a religious belief, nor suggesting it is better to abandon one. The author shares his personal religious perspective from his youth and how that has informed his views of how religions describe good and bad (and how specifically his denomination taught these matters in contrast to other denominations). This perspective, about how people believe, and more importantly, about how people convey and share these beliefs in an organized group we call "a religion" provides this primatologist with a lens with which to describe how the bonobos' pro-social tendencies operate in a way very reminiscent of religion. He does not suggest bonobos have a concept of God (or gods), but that both religious people and perhaps, more importantly, atheists, can be inspired by bonobos to better understand why and how religion is such a fundamentally big part of human history and identity.

If you liked reading this, you'll probably enjoy Ishmael by Daniel Quinn -- which is a fictional story that takes a similar perspective about how humans can learn a lot from how we see other primates. And perhaps it goes without saying, and yet I'll say that Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari was one of the most profound and compelling books I've read in recent years and is an excellent book to read before reading this one. Bonobos are fascinating and this book does a great job of celebrating them in the most cerebral way. They are also endangered. Perhaps the more we see how important they are to understanding ourselves, the more we'll take care of these beings that, at first, we might think are unrelated to us.

#13. Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg. This is a great book about physical civic space. When published in 2019, I think the author was hoping that every mayor, town council member, and civic-minded person would read this and earn a much greater appreciation for the role played by the town library, urban gardens, and other physical spaces that either make or break your community. When I saw this book in late 2020, I knew I had to read it precisely because the world has spent nearly a year depriving ourselves of these social spaces (for good reason). I imagine the author will have a follow-up book to reflect on the aftermath of the pandemic.

The book is about public spaces and their impact on people. Public spaces include neighborhood parks, the public library, public schools, a town square, urban gardens, and the local basketball court on a once-abandoned parking lot. They also include run down, overgrown, neglected, and abandoned spaces. Walking past, or into, any of these spaces gives you some feeling. When well maintained, with people milling about, and an appearance that space is maintained, most people feel calm, happy, and pro-social. When not maintained, most people feel anxious and are prone to react in a protective or even anti-social way. But why is that?

Klinenberg explores the history of public space policies and shares findings from experiments on public space management impacts on crime, health, and overall community happiness. His heart is set in the south side of Chicago, where his interest in this field was piqued by how different neighborhoods fared differently during a particularly deadly natural disaster. The neighborhoods he compared were demographically similar on their surface (low income, largely populated by African Americans), but operationally different in terms of how cohesive the community was, e.g. whether people were more likely to check in on older residence to see if they were OK. There were differences in these communities that you could see if you looked at how physical space was being used. He discusses many other cities too.

Reflecting on this past year, we all experienced a significant departure from the physical public space. Most kids are not in a classroom, most people avoid shopping malls. Even those who are keeping up with their outdoor exercise are diminishing the social aspects of shared space. This reality falls well outside the ideal of what Klinedberg was writing about, but it creates a fantastic contrast where one can better appreciate the cost of our withdrawal from physical social interactions. Perhaps if every mayor, town council member, civic leader, and social movement organizer would read this book, they may be inspired to plan for our return, in a post-pandemic world soon to emerge, to spaces that build trust, community, and safety.

#14, How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish. A title that promises this means a book that goes onto my list. I like writing. Over time I'll get better at it. With guidance from books like this, I'll get even better. You, the reader, are the beneficiary or the victim of the writer.

Before talking about the Fish book, let me recommend Writing without Bullshit by Josh Bernoff. It is the best book on writing I have encountered. If you blog, write emails, or use words as part of your job, please read Bernoff's book. I wish to achieve his level of writing. I wish those who wrote things I need to read would too. Bernoff is an amazing writer, a clear thinker, and a crisp communicator. He shows you how to write what others want to read. Fish is also a great writer and thinker. He's a bit edgier. His book is less about business writing and more about writing in general (including novels, creative essays, newspaper writing too). These two books on writing differ considerably; Bernoff is a master technician who shows you how to be a better writer, Fish takes you on an appreciation tour celebrating the different roles a sentence can play.

Fish breaks things down to the essentials. E.g. What is a sentence? What is the role of the first sentence (and the final sentence)? How are some of the most compelling sentences constructed? Questions we all face when writing, but often don't address explicitly. Read this book and you'll have a new appreciation for the vehicles that carry our thoughts.

#15. Winning Arguments by Stanley Fish. Reading one book by an interesting writer leads to reading more books by the same writer. I read two of his other books. You'll note the title is deliberately ambiguous. The book is both about the nature of a winning argument and also about the method in which you can win an argument. The book is actually about the notion of arguments in the first place. There are different types of arguments, with different goals and processes. You would argue with a debt collector in a different matter than you would with your spouse or with your child. In fact, the nature of the argument itself differs. Some arguments attempt to find the truth, others to find common ground, still others to highlight the lack of common ground.

Fish is a professor, a thinker, and every so often a bit of a thought provocateur. He'll make arguments that he might not agree with himself, but demonstrate a mastery of the skill. Much like the previous book I mentioned is an appreciation tour of the structure we call "sentence" this book is a tour of the concept we call "argument."

A personal cultural note: I was raised in a culture that valued a good argument. Arguing with someone was often a sign of respect. Why bother arguing with someone you don't respect. Whereas posing an argument and engaging in verbal sparring will expose value. Arguments are good. Then I entered the workforce in corporate America and discovered that many, perhaps most, of the people I'd interact with (especially those who were in management) were raised in a different culture. Arguing is seen as disrespectful, an attempt to assert control or subvert responsibility. It was a tough lesson to learn. When in Rome…

#16. The First by Stanley Fish. OK, maybe I got carried away and got another Fish book. This was less enjoyable than the other two, perhaps it was longer, or I was getting tired of him. I'm not sure. It's a decent book, but The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt as well as The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt are much better (in my opinion). The book is about the First Amendment and the nature of "free speech" in our society (on college campuses, the newspaper opinion columns, etc.). Free does not mean inconsequential, and free does not mean no application of speech suppression. What does it mean?

In addition to being a master of words and a fanboy of the written works of John Milton, Fish is also a law professor. He had a good handle on the law and how we apply it, often in strange and inconsistent ways. This book sets out to show you how complicated "free speech" is, and how we have interpreted it or misinterpreted it countless times.

Personally, I got more insight from reading Haidt's books. Fish mentions them and points to some critiques he has about them. That's fair. If you are interested in learning more about free speech, hate speech, or those situations where campuses have invited people for whom some categorize the speaker as sharing hate, others defending the need for speech to be free, then read this book. It is a good book to read, but I appreciated the other two of his on this list better than this one.

#17. Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre. Ironically the smallest book on this list is a book about lies, a topic for which there is so much to say. This book condenses the topic into a short history and careful dissection of the phenomenon we all experience as consumers of media. We know there is "Truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" and when we review that expression we can point to its three distinct elements. A story may include facts. That alone does not make it a true story. But how does one share a "whole truth" in a story? When one adds opinions, isn't that something more than the truth too? Have we abandoned the notion that there is a truth and replaced it with the belief that everyone has their own truth?

The notion of falsehood, partial truth, fake news, and misinformation campaigns are commonplace issues in our society. But careful analysis reveals these to be slightly different from each other in composition, intent, and outcome. This book helps unpacks the recent history of media in the US, from the rise of cable news, the role comedians played, replacing authoritative news anchors with humor and truthiness, to the proliferation of social media as a vehicle for content filtering. The author also includes the role that doubt-based campaigns (advocates who suggested that maybe smoking is not so bad for one's health, maybe climate change is not really happening or caused by humans, maybe vaccines aren't safe for everyone, maybe the media deliberately misreported information to make a politician look bad…) have in supporting a post-modernist era of relative, alternate, and subjective truths. 

At my last job I had the fortune of befriending some of the people who decide what millions of people read on internet news every day. In some cases, I've had energetic conversations with some news editors about how the company addresses the complexities of sharing the news in a responsible way. Without sharing much about these conversations, I will say that the news editors I did meet were solid journalists and thoughtful in their craft. They were often at the center of very complicated balances between business outcomes (that incentivized sensational news and rapid engagement), technology outcomes (that focused on things technology can do, such as scale, not on things it does not do well, such as selecting for quality or accuracy), and time pressures (when it's not worth the time or money to make things slightly better even if you know you should). Yet, the very mechanisms of online news optimize for one type of access (making it much easier to get information about the world than ever before), but lacks some important, and perhaps impossible to create, mechanisms to help readers understand if what they read is actually grounded in fact.

This small book does not solve the problem. But it does decompose the issues carefully and explains what we have, how we got here, and how to deal with the era of post-truth. It's worth reading, and I hope you believe that I'm telling you the truth. You can verify my claim by reading this book yourself and commenting if you agree.

#18. Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach. I figure it's appropriate (or deliberately inappropriate) to conclude my 2020 book list with this happy ending, although I read this early in the year while traveling. Mary Roach is a fantastic author and knows how to cover a topic with humor and depth. I loved her book Gulp (about the complexities of the human digestive system), and this topic is, well, even more interesting. If you have any interest in human sexuality (most people do), you'll find her humor, candor, and scientific take to be educational and refreshing. She's blunt and entertaining. You will learn science, and you will laugh out loud with her incredibly clever mastery of words. Yes, this book gets fairly explicit about the topic but it is not prurient or vulgar. In fact, the author shares a bit of the challenging history of sexology. For many decades, if researchers wanted to study the digestive tract or the circulatory system, they could apply for grants, construct research, and publish findings that improved lives and health. But those researchers who wanted to study reproduction, arousal, or anything related to the relevant bodily functions were suspected of being perverts. Thankfully society is a lot kinder to the medical and scientific professions, and yet, there's a way to go to improve things. (My sister Talli Yehuda Rosenbaum is a well-known AASECT Certified Sex Therapist who uses her scientific, medical, and cultural knowledge to help couples and individuals with challenges that range from physical to emotional.) If you like any of Mary Roach's books, you'll like this one (and vice versa).

So what's on my list for next year? Two people just recommended Accelerate, a book about high-performance software engineering companies. So I have that on top of my list. Invisible Women (how data biases for a world designed by men, for men, and what to do about it) is in my order queue. I'll read The Most Human Human, about what AI can teach us about our own humanity soon. And I might start the year with the Octavia Butler book I mentioned above. The Parable of the Sower. If I like it, I'll read more Afrofuturism books too. What's on your list? What do you think I should read and why?