A Year In Books @ Guild

We have a holiday tradition at Guild —?we like to give the gift of a good book and share our own favorite book recommendations. This year, I asked our executive team Alana Brandes , Rebecca Biestman , Chris Garber , Dan Haley , Dean Carter , Terrence Cummings , Marty Martinez , and Jonathan Marek to share their favorite books.?

A few things I learned:?

1. We are all deeply interested in the nuances and impacts of our fast-changing world.?
2. Our team has eclectic tastes. Some of us like big idea non-fiction, and some of us really like good storytelling.?
3. Some of us also struggled to pick just one book (for good reason), as you can see below.?

Without further ado, here is our list:?

• Alana Brandes:?Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. I’m not a gamer but I truly loved this book which is immersed in video games and the video game industry and focuses on the highs and lows of a friendship that starts as two 11-year-olds playing video games together and encompasses so much —?growing into adulthood, handling success, love, loss, relationships, issues like racism and misogyny, belonging and so much more. It’s big-hearted and moving and tough to put down. ?
• Rebecca Biestman:?The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese. This is my pick for favorite book of the year. This is a beautiful, tragic and ultimately life-affirming story about a family knit together over more than 70 years by loss in Kerala, in southern India. (The author is also a unique and special voice —?he is both an award winning writer and accomplished doctor serving at Stanford’s Medical School.) What I found most powerful is the book’s focus on grace, perseverance, and the ability to find meaning amid loss and profound change.?BONUS: Dogman: Mothering Heights by Dav Pilkey. This is, perhaps, not my “favorite” book of 2023, but it is special to me as it is one of many? I’ve read with my sons this year. The Dog Man series is wildly popular with kids of a certain age but what makes it unique is the way it mixes children’s humor with big themes like getting along, along (like cats and dogs), confusion around identity, neurodivergence (there’s a robot named 80-HD) and understanding the ways parents let us down.
• Dean Carter:?The Ministry for The Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. One of the problems with climate change is that its impact can be subtle and then all at once. It can be hard to imagine and in some ways even hard to understand. This brilliant and imaginative novel uses storytelling through fictionalized first person accounts of a near future to show climate change’s impact from multiple perspectives.?It’s scary, searing, and yet ultimately hopeful about what we can do to create change.It’s ok to take a breath after chapter 1… but keep going, it’s worth the read!
• Terrence Cummings:?An Immense World, by Ed Yong. Lovers of nature and/or psychology need look no further. This book is the ultimate on widening your perspective while also better understanding the world around us. It looks at how all different kinds of animals sense the world — hearing, feeling, seeing, and whatever other senses there are.? While the book is about animals, the learning from it extends to people. It further opened my eyes to the idea that while I might see something a certain way, someone else might see something completely different based on their history, prior experience, or biology.? An awesome learning experience.
• Chris Garber:?The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl. The author happens to be one of my favorite musicians. Beyond his music and songwriting with the Foo Fighters and Nirvana, Grohl proves to be a great storyteller on the printed page as well. The Storyteller is part autobiography, part music history, part philosophy — and all fun. If you love music, this pick won’t disappoint. And, if you don’t, you’ll still appreciate the honest stories about Grohl growing up as an outsider, developing his curiosity about the world via his mother (a school teacher), and juggling the balance between family and career as he became a husband and a father.?
• Dan Haley: Yes, I picked two.?Nonfiction: Romney, A Reckoning, by McKay Coppins. Ponder this: A sitting US Senator, former major party presidential nominee and Governor, and first-person witness to the events that sowed the seeds of our current political and governing dysfunction, resists the impulse to write his own autobiography, and instead hands the proverbial "keys" (ALL of his journals, notes, emails, etc., along with full and unfettered access to his family, friends, staff, pets...) to a reporter, who he also gives complete editorial control. That guy did NOT run for President in 2012. Apropos its title, Romney, A Reckoning is a poignant, engaging, heartfelt and sometimes heartbreaking effort by one of the most influential people in recent American politics to understand, explain, and come to terms with the decisions, compromises, and Faustian bargains he made along the way to becoming, first, the 2012 Republican standard-bearer and, later the moral conscience and outspoken pariah of that same fractured party in the closing years of his career. A compelling read for political junkies and non-junkies alike.Fiction: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. If you read a summary of this sci-fi novel, you probably won't want to read it. A deep space, deep dystopian future-set story about humanity's initial interactions with an earth-spawned society of sentient spiders? SPIDERS? Arachnophobia, aversion to what feels like a stupid and contrived premise, or both turned me away from this one several times before the latest in a series of emphatic testimonials by trusted sources finally convinced me to give it a shot. I almost missed out on one of the most thought-provoking, imaginative, compelling stories I've read in years.Tchaikovsky grounds his future science solidly in legitimate scientific fact NS theory, and sets upon that foundation a series of characters that are just "human" enough to make the reader occasionally forget that most of them have eight legs. Take a chance now, thank me later.

• Marty Martinez:?The End of the World is Just the Beginning — Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, by Peter Zeihan: Peter studies demographics and geopolitics to make predictions about the future, and in this book he uses those two variables to argue — and makes a compelling case — that the era of globalization in trade and diplomacy is cracking up, in large part because the U.S. is no longer interested in funding and maintaining it. It tells a story of how our globally connected world came to be, and how that allowed economies and populations to specialize and grow in otherwise unnatural ways. And what happens when the conditions that encouraged that collaboration end, and the Americans decide to pick up their ball and go home. Besides being an interesting (if sometimes scary) hot take on the world to come, I think it also has implications for the North American workforce, and how a less inter-connected civilizations will manufacture goods, grow food, and source the raw materials, capital, and energy to do both.

• Jonathan Marek:?Act of Oblivion, by Robert Harris. It's The Fugitive transported back to 1660s New England. I'm guessing at this point I either have you or I've lost you ... but if you love historical fiction that is a page turner, this is for you. The setting, Puritanical New England in the aftermath of the English Civil War, gives a glimpse to cultures that we don't often explore in depth, but have complex echoes in America (and England) even today. As in his prior books, most of which I'd love, Harris's writing style is engaging, like a tour guide on a roller-coaster ride through the past. Yeah, I lost some sleep because I couldn't stop reading.
• Bijal Shah:?The Case for Good Jobs by Zeynep Ton. While many leaders fear the long-term impacts of spending more money per employee than their competitors, Zeyneb argues that creating more “good jobs” strengthens companies and creates a cycle that benefits everyone. And she speaks to my data heart, with research and case studies, as well as practical, actionable advice for what companies can do to drive better output and performance.?A great reminder of why we do the work that we do.

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