Resolved to read in 2024?

Happy New Year! The presents have been opened, the loved ones have dispersed and the booze is gone. These long dark days offer a time to catch up, but also to explore, reflect and revisit. But the week following the New Year is also when people make resolutions to read more. Reading is never about quantity and always about quantity. If you are wondering what you should read in the year ahead, well, here is a start with my personal top 10 of 2023:

FICTION

1/ ABOMINATIONS

By Lionel Shriver

“Reading time is precious. Don’t waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity all together.”

Abominations is a striking collection of essays from the prize-winning author of The Mandibles, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Should We Stay or Should We Go. Lionel Shriver has one of the sharpest pens of our age.

Her collection of cutting essays showcases Shriver’s contrarian opinions on a wide range of topics, including religion, politics, illness, mortality, family and friends, tennis, gender, immigration, consumerism, health care, and taxes. In her characteristically frank manner, Shriver skewers the concept of language “crimes,” while chafing at arbitrary limitations on speech and literature that crimp artistic expression and threaten intellectual freedom. Each essay in Abominations reflects sentiments that have “brought her hell and damnation and have threatened her with “cancellation” more than once.

2/ ANEANTIR

by Michel Houellebecq

“He had never found any particular aesthetic merit in this unstructured juxtaposition of gigantesque parallelepipeds of glass and steel. In any case, the aim pursued by the designers was not beauty, not even approval, but rather the showcasing of a certain technical competence -as if it were a matter above all of demonstrating it to future extra-terrestrials.”

A rash of strange messages, including the digitized film of a French Minister being executed by guillotine, appears on the internet worldwide; Chinese container ships are blown up; and the world’s largest sperm bank, based in Denmark, is burnt down.

Anéantir?is a polyphonic work, with several themes interwoven. It is set five years after its publication date, in the election year 2027. The protagonist, Paul Raison, is a civil servant and the confidant of a successful technocratic Minister of the Economy, Bruno Juge, who re-establishes the French economy on the path of growth. Bruno, a highly capable man, is a possible candidate for the presidency, which gives author Michel Houellebecq the opportunity to describe the auto-satirizing nature of modern politics, in which communication is all and substance practically nothing.

3/ HIMMLER’S COOK

by Franz-Olivier Giesbert

“History is a bitch. She has taken everything from me. My children. My parents. My great, true love. My cats. I don’t understand the stupid veneration that the human race feels for her.”

Quirky and eccentric,?Himmler's Cook?is a tale of survival. The book is an utterly charming story of a woman who witnessed the very worst of the 20th century but never lost her passion for love, life, good people and fine food.

The novel tells the epic story of Rose, an inspiring, resilient 105 year old chef who has experienced life at its fullest. . . and at its most deadly. Rose has endured more than her fair share of hardships: the Armenian genocide, the Nazi regime, and the delirium of Maoism. Yet somehow, despite all the suffering, Rose never loses her joie de vivre. As she looks back over her long life—one of survival and, sometimes, one of retribution—she recalls those unique experiences that added such spice to her life, whether it was being a confidante to Hitler, a friend to Simone de Beauvoir or cooking for Heinrich Himmler.

4/ LE MAGE DU KREMLIN

By Giuliano Da Empoli

“The aim of manipulation with fake news is not to convince people, but to sow doubt about reality. This is how you create apathy. Slowly, but very slowly, you can do what you want. Use violence as a reason d’état. Inflate dangers in the media, scare people to death, then deal with the rest.”

A stunning work of political fiction, about the rise to power of Putin's notorious spin doctor. From the war in Chechnya to the invasion of Ukraine,?this thriller on?contemporary Russia is a sobering meditation on power, which takes us?behind the scenes of the Putin era.

The enigmatic Vadim Baranov was a TV producer before?becoming political advisor to Putin. After he resigns from this position, he tells?his story to the narrator of this book. Vadim, the regime's main spin doctor, turns an entire country into an?avant-garde political stage. Yet Vadim is not as ambitious as the others. Entangled in the?increasingly dark secret workings of the regime he has contributed to build, he will do anything to?get out, guided by the memory of his grandfather, an eccentric aristocrat who survived the?Revolution, and the mesmerizing, merciless Ksenia, whom he has fallen in love with.

5/ THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA

By Shehan Karunatilaka

“All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swaps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.”

Ten years after his award-winning novel?Chinaman, Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction for this novel about a war photographer murdered in the country’s civil war.

Sri Lanka, 1990. Maali Almeida—war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka.

NON-FICTION

1/ SCALING PEOPLE

by Claire Hughes-Johnson

“The more senior you become, the more creative reality finds its way to beat you up every day. You will have days when your highest performer is threatening to quit, a top customer has just informed you that they are moving to a competitor and the cross-functional project you have kicked off last week is already going off the rails.”

Good books about the nuts and bolts of management are vanishingly rare. Scaling People offers a practical guide to everything from giving feedback to running a meeting and building teams.

What a relief to finally read a management book that breaks the mould. “Scaling People” is written by Claire Hughes Johnson, a tech-industry veteran who spent more than a decade at Google before joining Stripe, a digital-payments unicorn, as its chief operating officer. By the time she left that role, the firm had gone from 160 employees to over 7,000. In a world of coders, creators and visionaries, her work was to make things work. This book looks and feels like a textbook. It is full of exercises and templates. And it is unapologetically practical in its focus.

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2/ SMART BREVITY

by Jim Van deHei, Mike Allen &Rory Schwartz

“Delete, delete, delete. What words, sentences or paragraphs can you eliminate before sending? Every word or sentence you can shave saves the other person time. Less is more – and a gift.”

Anyone who wants to be heard is facing an epic challenge. In 'Smart Brevity' the authors teach us how to say more with less in virtually any format. They also share communications lessons learned from their decades of experience in media, business and communications.

How do you get you audience to pay attention? Brevity is confidence. Length is fear. This is the guiding principle of Smart Brevity, a communication formula built by Axios journalists to prioritize essential news and information, explain its impact and deliver it in a concise and visual format. Now, the co-founders of Axios have created an essential guide for communicating effectively and efficiently using Smart Brevity—think Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for the digital age.

3/HIDDEN POTENTIAL

by Adam Grant

“You don’t need to get comfortable before you can practice your skills. Your comfort grows as you practice your skills.? People who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They are usually freaks of nurture.”

This book from Adam Grant reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. Hidden Potential?offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop.

4/ RACE FOR TOMORROW

by Simon Mundy

“The world’s population is set to reach nearly ten billion by 2050. With growing affluence in middle-income countries, global food demand will rise even more. Yet, as climate change takes hold, even traditional levels of output are becoming impossible to achieve in many places. Around the world, crops are being pummelled by repeated droughts and temperatures, well outside the normal range.”?

In this journey through 26 countries and six continents,?Financial Times?reporter Simon Mundy travels to the frontlines of the climate crisis. By telling the stories of those he meets — from a scientist building a home for engineered mammoths in northeast Siberia to the entrepreneurs chasing breakthroughs in electric and fusion power — Mundy demonstrates how climate change is displacing communities, disrupting global businesses and inspiring a new wave of innovation.

Race for Tomorrow?does not demonise anyone, or present an unremittingly bleak picture of climate doom. Nothing about this issue is black and white. By exposing what’s at stake, Mundy shows us a world to really care about.

5/ THE DAILY STOIC

by Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman

“It is pretty obvious that one should stay away from the wicked and two-faced as much as possible -the jealous friend, the narcissistic parent, the untrustworthy partner. At first glance, Marcus Aurelius is reminding us to avoid false friends. But what if we turn it around? What if, instead we ask about the times that we have been false to our friends. Ultimately that’s what stoicism is about -not judging other people’s behaviour, but judging our own.”??

The best way to start one’s day is by reading something positive and inspirational. The Daily Stoic is a 366 day-long compilation of short daily meditations from ancient Stoic philosophers like Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and others, teaching us equanimity, resilience, and perseverance?via the three Stoic disciplines of perception, action, and will.

In 2023, The Daily Stoic was my morning routine since the passages in book are short and can be consumed in a few minutes. For 2024, I might take things up a notch with The Daily Stoic Journal, which provides prompts for journaling.

Enjoy the read(s)!