My Top 10 Books of 2021

My fifth annual list of the top 10 books I read over the past year. There’s a rock and roll memoir, books on sleep science and World War II, Seth Rogen, and some fantastic fiction. Enjoy.

The Splendid and The Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

By Erik Larson

“As the train departed, Churchill waved at the crowd from the windows, and kept waving until the train was out of sight. Then, reaching for a newspaper, he sat back and raised the paper to mask his tears. ‘They have such confidence,’ he said. ‘It is a grave responsibility.’”

A fly on the wall look at Winston Churchill’s first year in office during the darkest days of World War II, that reads like the very best of narrative fiction. Instead of focusing on the broader macro view, Larson uses personal diaries, archival documents and once-secret intelligence reports to zoom in on Churchill and his family, and the lives they lived during the German Blitz of the country. It’s easy to forget now, but in 1940, America hadn’t yet decided to join the war, and a German land invasion and takeover of Britain seemed imminent. A fantastic portrayal of personal leadership (and how to throw incredible dinner parties) during a very difficult year. The best book I read in 2021.

The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

“A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”

I tore through this book after my wife recommended it to me on a road trip this summer, and I think most people would enjoy it as much as I did. The story revolves around Nora, a depressed 30-something, who ends up in the Midnight Library after attempting to commit suicide via overdose. The Library is a purgatory-like place where Nora is offered the chance to try out the other lives she could be living if she had made different choices at different stages of her life. An ultimately uplifting story that will likely be a giant hit movie at some point in the next few years.

Life

By Keith Richards

“But the dark side of this was discovering that we’d become the focal point of a nervous establishment. There’s two ways the authorities can deal with a perceived challenge. One is to absorb and the other is to nail. They had to leave the Beatles alone because they’d already given them medals. We got the nail.”

Come for the incredible tales about booze, drugs, and excess from everyone’s favourite rock star, including my personal favourite about the nine consecutive days he went without sleeping in the 70s. Stay for his genuine love of the music, the people who make it, and his insightful way of describing himself, The Stones and why they’re still at it all these years later. There’s also some fascinating material on his half-century relationship with Mick Jagger and where it stands today (it’s complicated).

?Yearbook

By Seth Rogen

“I spotted a big greenroom that said Bob Dylan, with the doors wide open. There were dozens of people inside, so I was able to sneak in and grab a beer from the bar. I looked for Bob but didn’t see him. It would have been amazing to meet him. I’m a huge fan of his, which is kinda like saying, ‘I’m a huge fan of pasta,’ in that who the fuck isn’t? There are not a lot of cool Jews to look up to, and he’s objectively the top of the list. James Caan being right below him. James Caan is actually a scary Jew, which is almost unheard of. He’s in his own lane, Jew-wise.”

Seth Rogen has been alive for 39 years and famous for about half that time. This book is a series of hilarious personal essays about growing up in Vancouver, getting into stand-up comedy as a teenager, and moving to Hollywood and becoming a movie star. The highlights are the candid stories he shares about the personal interactions he’s had with people far more famous than he is (Tom Cruise, Kanye West, Jerry Seinfeld, etc.). The guy is a very good storyteller, which is why I had to also include one more excerpt from the book below:

“‘Hi, Sylvester.’ That’s when I realized that there is no other human on earth named Sylvester. There’s a cartoon cat named Sylvester, but literally no other human I’ve ever met. I’ve been alive almost forty years. I’ve met a grand total of one Sylvester, and it was Stallone. It’s a VERY rare name. And to say the name ‘Sylvester’ out loud to a person named ‘Sylvester’ really makes you realize just how strange a name ‘Sylvester’ is. It’s bizarre. For some reason ‘Sylvester Stallone’ isn’t that weird. The ‘Stallone’ somehow anchors it in normalcy. But you take that away and find yourself with just ‘Sylvester’ dangling out there like a dick in the breeze, and you understand how odd it is.”

How I Invest My Money: Finance Experts Reveal How They Save, Spend, and Invest

By Josh Brown and Brian Portnoy

“Indeed, there is no shortage of books on how experts think you ought to invest, but very few of the authors go into detail about whether or not they even take their own advice. In the pages that follow, you will be reading about investing and money management from a very different perspective. You’ll be hearing from some of the most thoughtful and interesting professional investors we know about how they manage their own portfolios.”

I’ve been working as a financial advisor for five years, and 2021 was the first year a client ever asked me how I manage my own money. This situation is not unique to me, as everyone always wants to know how they should invest their money, but very few people ever think to ask advisors and financial experts how they manage their own money. Brown and Portnoy put together this great compilation of 25 different financial experts writing chapter length essays on how they invest their own money and why they do things the way they do.

Rules of Civility

By Amor Towles

“Yes, Dicky was a genuine mixer. He took relative pride and absolute joy in weaving together the strands of his life so that when he gave them a good tug all the friends of friends of friends would come tumbling through the door. He’s the sort that New York City was made for. If you latched yourself onto the likes of Dicky Vanderwhile, pretty soon you’d know everyone in New York; or at least everyone white, wealthy and under the age of twenty-five.”

I included Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow on my 2018 top 10 books list and like to think I gave him the break he needed in the writing business. Last month, the New York Times Book Review celebrated its 125th anniversary by naming that book as one of the 25 finalists for the best book of the last 125 years. Rules of Civility, Towles’ 2011 debut, doesn’t reach the heights that his follow up did, but it’s still a fun and whimsical story about a Brooklyn girl thrown into a Gatsby-like social circle in late 1930s Manhattan.

Leadership in Turbulent Times

By Doris Kearns Goodwin

“‘The way you get ahead in the world, you get close to those that are the heads of things,’ Johnson had told his college roommate when he took a job mopping floors in the hallway outside the president’s office.”

My problem with lots of historical biographies are that they run to 800 pages due to the author’s decision to spend 20 pages focusing on the subject’s great uncle, and then another 250 pages on the subject’s childhood. This study of leadership by one of America’s preeminent presidential historians solves that problem by focusing on four different presidents and their leadership styles in a single book. All four profiles are fascinating, but the one that stands out is Goodwin’s intimate look at Lyndon Johnson and the all-consuming ambition that dominated his life.

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

By Matthew Walker

“Similarly problematic is baseline resetting. With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will actually acclimate to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels. That low-level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline. Individuals fail to recognize how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health. A link between the former and latter is rarely made in their mind. Based on epidemiological studies of average sleep time, millions of individuals unwittingly spend years of their life in a sub-optimal state of psychological and physiological functioning, never maximizing their potential of mind or body due to their blind persistence in sleeping too little. Sixty years of scientific research prevent me from accepting anyone who tells me that he or she can “get by on just four or five hours of sleep a night just fine.”

H/T to Northwood's Andy Jeffery for recommending this really interesting book on sleep and why we all need it. This was not a topic I had spent a lot of time thinking about before reading this book, but it’s become something I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about since reading it as I’ve reflected on my own personal sleep habits. I particularly enjoyed the examination of the genetic hardwiring that makes someone a night owl (and how our society is not set up to accommodate these people). The section on how regular sleep deficits lead to long term health consequences was also eye opening.

City of Thieves

By David Benioff

“‘Those words you want to say right now? Don’t say them.’ He smiled and cuffed my cheek with something close to real affection. ‘And that, my friend, is the secret to living a long life.’”

Before he co-created and wrote HBO’s wildly successful Game of Thrones adaptation, Benioff wrote this great little piece of historical fiction on two young Russians enduring the Nazis’ siege of Leningrad during the first week of 1943. Written as if Benioff is interviewing his grandfather about the siege 60 years later in Florida, I read the whole book before learning it was a piece of fiction. A beautiful story about the horrors of war, and the endurance of the human spirit, with a perfect ending.

Peril

By Bob Woodward and Robert Costa

“Bannon told Trump to focus on January 6. That was the moment for a reckoning. ‘People are going to go, “What the fuck is going on here?” Bannon believed. ‘We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th, fucking bury him.’ If Republicans could cast enough of a shadow on Biden’s victory on January 6, Bannon said, it would be hard for Biden to govern. Millions of Americans would consider him illegitimate. They would ignore him. They would dismiss him and wait for Trump to run again. ‘We are going to kill it in the crib. Kill the Biden presidency in the crib,’ he said. On December 31, Trump returned early from Florida, cutting his trip short and skipping the New Year’s Eve gala at Mar-a-Lago. Stepping off Marine One, Trump, in a heavy black winter coat and bright red tie, stared over at reporters. He did not take questions.”

A behind the scenes look at Trump’s final year, a tumultuous transition period after the election, and the early days of the Biden presidency from Washington’s most legendary political journalist. Interviews with over 200 insiders paint a damning picture of Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlight how his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election created real concern in the upper echelons of the American and Chinese militaries. Not to make this political, but anyone hoping for the return of Trump in 2024 should read this book cover to cover and understand exactly the threat he still represents to American democracy.

Bonus for the New Parents

Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting

“Since I’m a journalist, what really sold me on the French principles was the data. Many things that French parents do by intuition, tradition, or trial and error are exactly what the latest research recommends. The French take for granted that you can teach little babies how to sleep through the night; that patience can be learned; that too much praise can be counterproductive; that you should become attuned to a baby’s rhythms; that toddlers don’t need flash cards; that tasting foods makes you like those foods—all things that science is telling us, too.”

As some of you will know, my wife and I welcomed our first child in October. As a result, 2021 was the first year that I encountered the wide world of books catering to new and expecting parents. This one stood out because it’s a well written narrative about one American woman’s experience raising her children in Paris, and because I had no idea how different the approach to child rearing is in Europe vs. North America. From the art of ‘le pause’, to how to say ‘non’ and mean it, the book offers a bunch of insights on how French parents are able to raise well-behaved and well-adjusted children. The section contrasting the daily French go?ter routine vs. the non-stop snacking of North American kids was particularly interesting.

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