My reading journey through 2016
Those who know me know I read a lot and often ask for recs. Last year, I put together a list of the books I read and enjoyed, and people later told me they got ideas off of it. So here’s the list of books that I loved reading this year. If you’ve got a long flight, or a cold winter, or a warm week on the beach coming up, pick one of these up and enjoy. You will not be disappointed.
I’ve often asked people if they can remember their first day on skis, and if they learned to ski after the age of 5, they will remember almost everything about that day: what time they got up, the socks they wore, what time they started off, what that first turn was like, what they had for lunch, who they met on the trip — everything about it. I can remember to this day what the weather was like when we started, how long it took us to get there, how I paid 50 cents for five gallons of gas, and the view across the San Gabriel range that day.
People remember their first day on skis because it comes as such a mental rush. When you come down the mountain from your first time on skis, you are a different person. The wariness in the mind slips away, and there’s that wonderful feeling of being powered by that huge force called total freedom. I had just now experienced that feeling, if only for half a minute. It was step one in the direction I would follow the rest of my life.
— Warren Miller, Freedom Found: My Life Story
“If Jefferson enunciated the more ample view of political democracy, Hamilton possessed the finer sense of economic opportunity. He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit. We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned.”
— Ron Chernow, Hamilton
“We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance — the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.
Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it — not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”
— J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
— Amos Tversky in Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
“Leave the problems of God to God and karma to karma. Today you’re here and nothing you do will change that. Today you are alive and here and honored and blessed with good fortune. Look at this sunset, it’s beautiful, neh? This sunset exists. Tomorrow does not exist. There is only now. Please look. It is so beautiful and it will never happen ever again, never, not this sunset, never in all infinity. Lose yourself in it, make yourself one with nature and do not worry about karma, yours, mine, or that of the village.”
— James Clavell, Shogun: A Novel of Medieval Japan
The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.
— Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE
The mismatch between the drug business’s high profits and the low capacity of its employees demonstrates perhaps the biggest problem that any drug cartel faces. The two conundrums — how to hire staff, and how to make sure they do what they are told — occupy drug cartels’ managers. Running complex operations using an ever-churning payroll of low-skilled, unpredictable workers who are prone to sabotaging deals through sheer stupidity is no mean feat.
— Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel
I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to…You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.
— Trevor Noah, Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
What do you know about war? They’ll tell you it’s about patriotism, democracy, or some shit about the other guy hating our freedom. But you wanna know what it’s really about? What do you see? A kid from Arkansas doing his patriotic duty to defend his country? I see a helmet, fire-retardant gloves, body armor and an M16. I see seventeen thousand five hundred dollars. That’s what it costs to outfit one American soldier. Over two million soldiers fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. It cost the American taxpayer $4.5 billion each year just to pay the air conditioning bills for those wars. And that’s what war is really about. War is an economy. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either in on it or stupid.
— Guy Lawson, War Dogs
The announcement plunged Israel into a haze, a gloomy twilight zone where everything seemed surreal. At a movie house not far from Ichilov, an usher went from theater to theater to convey the news. Audiences filed out in a daze. On Channel One, television’s most distinguished anchor, Haim Yavin, could not bring himself to say the words “Rabin is dead.” Instead he announced that the prime minister was “no longer among the living.” Yedioth Ahronoth, the country’s largest-selling newspaper, had already laid out its front section for the next day. Its editors now threw out the material and began working on a new edition for what would be a different country in the morning. The columnist Nahum Barnea, who had covered the peace rally earlier in the evening, sat down and wrote: “Ever since Israel was established people believed, rightly so, in the stability of the regime. Only in Arab countries are leaders assassinated. Only in Arab countries, people who strive for peace pay with their lives…We were mistaken. We are not immune.”
— Dan Ephron, Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel
We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.
Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent — at least when it comes to housing — we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Now a guarantee of happiness — that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.
— Viet Thann Nguyen, The Sympathizer
The joke Colombians told was that God had made their land so beautiful, so rich in every natural way, that it was unfair to the rest of the world; He had evened the score by populating it with the most evil race of men.
— Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw
Jack gave three explanations as to why Alibaba survived the early days: “We didn’t have any money, we didn’t have any technology, and we didn’t have a plan.”
— Duncan Clark, Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built
