My reading journey through 2018
This has been a busy year, but I still read a bunch of good books. If you’re looking for holiday gifts, or just for a good book to pick up, these are all thought provoking, thrilling, funny, surprising, enjoyable reads — sometimes even all at once. Happy holidays, and happy reading!
(PS. If you are on the hunt for more, check out lists from 2015, 2016, or 2017)
“…and she had known the names of almost everyone on her street, and most had been there a long time, they were old California, from families that were California families, but over the years they had changed more and more rapidly, and now she knew none of them, and saw no reason to make the effort, for people bought and sold houses the way they bought and sold stocks, and every year someone was moving out and someone was moving in, and now all these doors from who knows where were opening, and all sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was, even the homeless ones…”
— Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
“Storms have the habit of feeling like their own little worlds, even though they’re just weather patterns and they move on.”
— Scott Belsky, The Messy Middle
“…after all, the right stuff was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life (by riding on top of a Redstone or Atlas rocket). Any fool could do that (and many fools would no doubt volunteer), just as any fool could throw his life away in the process. No, the idea was that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back at the last yawning moment…”
— Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff
“America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, “You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.” But then he added, “Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.”
— John McCain & Mark Salter, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations
“Most people go through life thinking that tomorrow they’re going to do something great. Tomorrow will be the day that they wake up and discover what they were put on this earth to do. But then tomorrow comes — and goes. As does the next day. Before long, they realize that there aren’t that many tomorrows left.”
— Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
“Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
— Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem
“Time is the one thing that can’t be stopped. Like a sharp blade, it silently cuts through hard and soft, constantly advancing. Nothing is capable of jolting it even the slightest bit, but it changes everything.”
— Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest
“Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave.”
— John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
“The Iron Lady had developed a soft spot for her Russian spy. Margaret Thatcher had never met Oleg Gorodievsky, she did not know his name, and referred to him, inexplicably and insistently, as ‘Mr. Collins.’ …the spy opened a window into Kremlin thinking, which she peered through with fascination and gratitude.”
— Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor
“The fundamental advantage Microsoft has is not the operating system but Bill Gates. He never allows Microsoft to goof off. He always deals with the problem. Every other company allows something else to get in the way. But Gates is tenacious. That’s what’s scary…People are scared of Microsoft because they’re so persistent.”
— Stewart Alsop quoted in James Wallace and Jim Erickson’s 1992 book, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, an amusing book to have been reading when Microsoft briefly became the most valuable company once again
“Bannon and Christie set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown Washington, DC, along with computers and trash cans and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied, Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.
Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.
Here Christie and Bannon parted ways. Neither thought it was a good idea to shut down the transition, but each had his own misgivings. Christie thought that Trump had little chance of running the government without a formal transition. Bannon wasn’t so sure if Trump would ever get his mind around running the federal government: he just thought it would look bad if Trump didn’t at least seem to prepare. Seeing that Trump wasn’t listening to Christie, he said, “What do you think Morning Joe will say if you shut down your transition?” What Morning Joe would say, or at least what Bannon thought it would say, was that Trump was closing his presidential transition office because he didn’t think he had any chance of being president.
Trump stopped hollering. For the first time he seemed actually to have listened.
“That makes sense,” he said.
With that, Christie went back to preparing for a Trump administration…”
— Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk
“There is a Japanese belief that business is temporal, whereas relationships are eternal. That’s true. One day you compete. The next day you partner. One day someone is your subordinate; the next day he or she may be your superior.”
— Marc Benioff in Behind the Cloud
“We have gone upon the principle it were better to attend to our business and pay no attention to the newspapers, with the idea that if we were right they could not permanently injure us, and if we were wrong all their comments, though favorable, would not make it right.”
— John D. Rockefeller in Ron Chernow’s Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
“At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves — that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.”
— Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
“There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standard of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.”
— Herbert Hoover in Kenneth Whyte’s Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times
Happy holidays, and happy reading!
-Dimitri
