My reading journey through 2019
It’s the end of the year, the end of the decade, and I hope you can find a time to curl up with a good book over the holidays or, certainly, next year. Here are my favorite reads of 2019. And, if nothing on this list catches your eye, check out previous year posts.
“You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis like New York, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” — Robert Moses
I’ve wanted to read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York for years and I finally did read it this year. It took me a long time to decide to do it because it is 1,344 pages long. But those are some of the best pages I’ve ever read. Highly, highly recommended, an epic tale of political power and urban innovation and New York City history on an incredible scale — and certainly the best book I read in 2019.
“Surely it was a lot for them to process, but I was learning that each child took in what she could and from her own perspective. Sasha had returned home from our summer travels to start third grade. Walking around her classroom, I’d come across a short “What I Did on my Summer Vacation” essay she’d authored. “I went to Rome and I met the Pope,” Sasha had written. “He was missing a part of his thumb.”
I could not tell you what Pope Benedict XVI’s thumb looks like, whether some part of it isn’t there. But we’d taken an observant, matter-of-fact eight-year-old to Rome, Moscow, and Accra, and this is what she’d brought back. Her view of history was, at that point, waist-high.”
— Michelle Obama, Becoming
“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, as quoted in John McCain’s parting message that led me to pick up McCain’s favorite book
“In four years, Genentech would have one of the biggest initial public offerings in Wall Street history. But in the spring of 1976, Genentech had no lab, no offices, and no scientists. It was just Swanson, Boyer (part-time), and the confident naivete they shared…As Perkins saw it, the biggest risk for Genentech was fundamental, what he called “white-hot risk”: the company might not be able to engineer the hormones it was proposed to sell.
As Perkins memorably asked, “Would God let you make a new life form?”
— Leslie Berlin, Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age
“I took the final 5.7 slab to the summit at a near run. Twenty or more hikers sat on the edge of the precipice, witnessing my final charge. But no one said a word. No yells, no pictures, nothing. Maybe they thought I was a lost hiker. Maybe they couldn’t conceive of where I’d come from, or maybe they just didn’t give a shit. When I mantled onto the actual top, I was met with a flood of humanity, a hundred-odd people spread across the summit plateau. Tourists ate lunch next to me. They made out, took scenic photos. People everywhere.
It was so weird. Like parachuting out of Vietnam into a shopping mall.
I was shirtless, pumped, panting. Psyched out of my mind. Flooded with conflicting emotions. I was embarrassed that I’d gotten scared on the slab. But I was thrilled beyond words to have finally done something that I’d been thinking about for months. Ashamed of myself for maybe pushing it a little further than I’d planned. Yet still proud of myself…
I took off my shoes and started hiking down the Cable route. It was only then that someone noticed. “Oh, my God,” this dude blurted out. “You’re hiking barefoot! You’re so tough!” — Alex Honnold, Alone on the Wall
“There was something terribly thrilling in watching the elements spit and sway and roar in fury, in standing fractionally too close to the cliff edge, feeling threatened and safe at the same time, shivering with cold and perspiring in fear. It was thrilling, and there were few thrills in her life.”
— Ken Follett, Eye of the Needle
“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”
— Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir
“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”
— Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
Note: Kitchen Confidential is the most enjoyable audiobook I’ve ever listened to. Definitely the right way to consume this book, ideally with a fork in hand.
“Why study political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about.”
— Robert Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing
“Historically, banks made their money by borrowing and lending, which generated interest income. But events like the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when so many banks failed, illustrated how disastrous that model could be. In order to make banks less vulnerable to volatile interest rates, bank examiners encouraged them to find other ways to make a profit. That’s when banks discovered fees — the fees that anger and frustrate nearly everyone I’ve spoken with.” — Lisa Servon, The Unbanking of America
“Algorithms tuned by an average engineer can outperform those built by the world’s leading experts if the average engineer has access to far more data…there’s no data like more data.”
— Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
“As he does before all games, he began by shooting set shots close to the basket, gradually moving back until he was shooting long sets from 20 feet out, and nearly all of them dropped into the net with an almost mechanical rhythm of accuracy. Then he began a series of expandingly difficult jump shots, and one jumper after another went cleanly through the basket with so few exceptions that the crowd began to murmur. Then he started to perform whirling reverse moves before another cadence of almost steadily accurate jump shots, and the murmur increased. Then he began to sweep hook shots into the air. He moved in a semicircle around the court. First with his right hand, then with his left, he tried seven of these long, graceful shots-the most difficult ones in the orthodoxy of basketball-and ambidextrously made them all. The game had not even begun, but the presumably unimpressible Philadelphians were applauding like an audience at an opera.”
—John McPhee, A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton
“By the middle of the century mankind had acquired the power to extinguish life on earth. By the middle of the next century, we will be able to create it. Of the two, it is hard to say which places the larger burden of responsibility on our shoulders.”
— M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
“I remember going in for some work on the budgeting numbers in December 1976, and I said, “here we are, providing the service off of one computer in one data center, which is made out of wood, combustible wood, on a hillside that has dry grass, above a road where a car could catch on fire; we’re right below a parking lot where kids are parking their cars, and the cars could come off the edge and drop into the building; and not only that, we’re a mile from the San Andreas fault! How many more threats could you take on? If your goal is to run the credit card industry of the world, we really should have some sort of redundant parallel site.”
I went back in on Monday and Dee said, “you know, we thought about what you said, and you’re right. You have a new job. Your new job is to go somewhere on the East Coast, find a site and build a center.” Nothing more. No papers. Nothing more than, “we thought about it, now let’s do it” … and Dee said, “Oh, and by the way, this has to be up by July 1977. So we had six months to find a site, build it, and staff it.” — David L. Stearns, Electronic Value Exchange: Origins of the VISA Electronic Payment System
“Men live in the now. Eat now, drink now, get laid now. We’re not thinking about the next meal, the next drink — we’re just happy now. Women live in the future — and this you better learn, you dumb mick: The woman is always building the nest. Everything she does, what she’s really doing is gathering twigs and leaves and shit for the nest. And the nest is not for you, paisan. The nest is not even for her. The nest is for the bambino.”— Don Winslow, The Power of the Dog
“Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the “Mexican drug problem” and Mexican corruption.”
— Don Winslow, The Cartel
“The good things in this world aren’t done by saints. They’re done by compromised people doing the best they can.”
— Don Winslow, The Border
