My Top 10 Books of 2020

My fourth annual list of the top 10 books I’ve read over the past year. There’s some historical fiction, some behavioural finance, and some travel escapism that helped me get through the last nine months of not being able to travel myself. I’ve also included an excerpt from each book with the help of the Kindle Highlighting Tool.

Before I get to this year’s top 10, a brief interlude on one of my personal favourite authors who passed away earlier this month.

John le Carré (1931-2020)

David Cornwell, who wrote under the famous pen name John le Carré, died on December 12 at the age of 89. Le Carré was the best living writer of spy novels, and a prolific producer of them over the course of a writing career that spanned from 1961’s Call for the Dead to 2019’s Agent Running in the Field. He was also maybe the last of the great British spy novelists who wrote from personal experience. Like his predecessors Graham Greene and Ian Fleming, le Carré worked in British Intelligence (both MI-5 and MI-6) before retiring to focus on writing full time.

Unlike Fleming’s glamourous James Bond novels, le Carré’s depiction of espionage was often understated, dreary and realistic. His spy stories were about betrayal, cowardice, and internal moral dilemmas, and his spies rarely used or carried guns.

He also wrote more insightfully about England and the British psyche than anyone before or since. The slow decline of a once great empire in the background, along with the class consciousness and emotional reserve of his protagonists, were all hallmarks of his best works.

This giant of contemporary English literature may be gone, but hopefully this brief obituary influences a few people to read him for the first time. If you’re interested in diving in, I’d recommend The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Now on to my top 10 books from 2020:

The Psychology of Money

By Morgan Housel

“Someone driving a $100,000 car might be wealthy. But the only data point you have about their wealth is that they have $100,000 less than they did before they bought the car (or $100,000 more in debt). That’s all you know about them. We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that’s the information we have in front of us. We can’t see people’s bank accounts or brokerage statements. So we rely on outward appearances to gauge financial success. Cars. Homes. Instagram photos. Modern capitalism makes helping people fake it until they make it a cherished industry. But the truth is that wealth is what you don’t see.”

Housel is the best financial writer working today and I truly think this book will become a classic in the field of personal finance. It’s a relatively short book and is written in a way that makes it accessible for those who have never thought much about their finances, and interesting for those who have already read extensively on this subject. The best book I read in 2020 and a book that I think everyone would benefit from reading.

Wolf Hall

By Hilary Mantel

“That’s the point of a promise, he thinks. It wouldn’t have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.”

Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy has been on my To Read list for a couple of years, and the extra free time created by the pandemic led to me finally taking the plunge. Wolf Hall and its sequels, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light, are all fantastic historical novels. Chronicling Thomas Cromwell’s rise from the son of a blacksmith to the closest advisor to Henry VIII, and his eventual fall, all three books kept me engaged.

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

By Rolf Potts

“Over the years, family and friends have said to me, “I’m living vicariously through you.” Don’t ever live vicariously. This is your life. Live.”

As a result of COVID, I have not left the Province of Ontario since a long weekend trip to Florida in January 2020. Since that time, this book, and Long Way Up on Apple TV, provided me with some of the travel escapism content I needed to get through this strangest of years. It has now been a decade since I spent five months vagabonding around Asia in 2010, and Potts’ writing helped bring back some great memories of that trip.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

By Laurence Gonzales

“We have a saying: “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” That’s true in all hazardous pursuits.”

This exploration of what happens when humans are pushed to their physical limits was a strong contender for the best book I read in 2020. Gonzales introduces us to some memorable real-life daredevils before diving into what kind of people get themselves into perilous places in the first place, and what separates those who survive extreme events (eg. floating across the Atlantic Ocean in a life raft) from those who don’t.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

By Brad Stone

"On the third day, Jones was updating the S Team on the transition when Bezos tore into him. “He called me a ‘complete fucking idiot’ and said he had no idea why he hired idiots like me at the company, and said, ‘I need you to clean up your organization,’ ” Jones recalls, years later. “It was brutal. I almost quit. I was a resource of his that failed. An hour later he would have been the same guy as always and it would have been different. He can compartmentalize like no one I’ve ever seen.”

This part Bezos biography, part history of Amazon, won the 2013 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. A fascinating illustration of what makes the man tick, and the story of how he grew a company he dreamed up on a cross country road trip with his wife into the trillion-dollar behemoth it is today. I don’t usually like to include spoilers, but the part where the author finds Bezos’ biological father and connects him with his son is incredible.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

By David Epstein

“Career goals that once felt safe and certain can appear ludicrous, to use Darwin’s adjective, when examined in the light of more self-knowledge. Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same.”

This book presents a fascinating counterargument to the 10,000-Hour Rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. Epstein argues that in a world that is increasingly hyperspecialized, it is generalists with a broad range of experiences and interests who will ultimately find the most success. As someone who was a late bloomer from a career perspective, the ideas in this book resonated a great deal with me. The opening chapter comparing Tiger Woods (specialist) and Roger Federer (generalist) is worth the price of admission by itself.

Agents of Innocence

By David Ignatius

“Rogers had crossed the Green Line before, but he still found it unsettling. Rogers hated snipers. They were a symbol of the sickness that had seized the country: bored teenagers, hiding behind sandbags on either side of the line, gobbling speed to stay awake, earning $100 a month plus a chance to swagger around town with automatic weapons, shooting at people without knowing who they were. The only consolation, Rogers thought, was that their aim wasn’t very good. In that regard they were Lebanese. Better at the show of things than at the substance.”

A spy novel set in Beirut before and during the Lebanese Civil War. Ignatius might not be a former spy like le Carré, but his writing makes this story and the glamour of 1960’s Beirut come to life. Really good.

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

By Ben Rhodes

“Ann and I were about to get married, and this promotion was going to ensure that I wasn’t going to move to New York or anywhere else for the foreseeable future. I wasn’t going to go to happy hours after work, or watch live music, or keep in touch with old friends, or go to movies and read books as they came out, or see a lot of my parents before they got older, or see my nephews grow up. Instead, I was going to be a deputy national security advisor.”

Obama’s own memoir, A Promised Land, also landed on my Kindle this year, but it was this memoir by his former Deputy National Security Advisor and Speechwriter Ben Rhodes that stuck with me. Rhodes had a front-row seat to some of the more impactful foreign policy events of the Obama Presidency including the Arab Spring, the Bin Laden Raid, and the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba. He writes well and gives you an inside view of both Obama’s Presidency and the personal sacrifices involved in working at that level of government.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy

By Stephanie Kelton

“We will show how MMT demonstrates that the federal government is not dependent on revenue from taxes or borrowing to finance its spending and that the most important constraint on government spending is inflation.”

This book was published in June 2020, which was perfect timing, since COVID-19 has created an economic experiment not dissimilar to the ideas discussed in the book. The main concept of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is that government deficits don’t matter for countries that issue their own currency (eg. the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.) as they can just print more money to pay their debts off. As a result, the only constraint on government spending should be inflation, not the misguided idea that a government is like a household and should balance its budget.

I’m not sure I agree with everything in this book, but I do think these ideas are worth thinking about. With governments around the world running up unprecedented deficits, and inflation still hovering around 1%, I’m not sure why we spend so much time worrying about government spending and how we're going to pay off the debt.

 The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

By Dan Carlin

“To imagine our tombs, buildings, and human remains being treated the way we today treat ancient archaeological finds might seem unimaginable, but there’s a pretty good chance that’s what the mummy being excavated thought about his time and place, too.”

You may have heard of Dan Carlin’s podcast Hardcore History, but this is the first book he has written. Carlin is a great storyteller and the topic he decided to focus on is endlessly interesting. Using a wide view of world history, Carlin examines how and why societies have collapsed in the past, and the biggest threats facing our society today. Considering the book came out in October 2019, the chapter on viral pandemics past and future looks pretty prescient.

Bonus for the Runners

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

By Haruki Murakami

“At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty-three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.”

Like many others, I got into outdoor running to try and stay sane and healthy during this crazy year. This part memoir, part travelogue, part running diary by Japan’s most famous novelist was a short and fun read from someone who also started running in his 30s.