My reading journey through 2020

I welcomed this year in Japan, skiing at Hakuba Valley. The snow sucked, which was a shame, but traveling to Japan was amazing. On the way back, the flight had us connecting in Hawaii and I remember debating opting for an all-day layover to have time for the beach on the way back from skiing, and how cool that’d be (we ended up not).

Then 2020 happened. Jan 1 feels like a decade ago now.

On the flight back, I was finishing up Robert Massie’s Peter the Great: His Life and World. I remember reading of how Charles XII, King of Sweden, had escaped to the Ottoman Empire after his loss in Poltava, overstayed his welcome in Turkey, and was planning his way back to Sweden. He couldn’t go through Poland because the Russians had occupied it, and — and this was an offhand comment I thought weird at the time— he couldn’t pass through Austria-Hungary because the whole place was under quarantine at the time. Turns out, there was something called the Great Plague of Vienna and you just didn’t go there for a few years.

We learned how those things go this year.

No more travel, no connections in Oahu, no skiing in exotic locations. But at least it made time for reading. If you are looking to pick up a book, check one of these fifteen books out. Or pick one from past reading lists.

“…the best we can do is to try to align ourselves with what we feel is right and construct some meaning out of our confusion, and with grace and nerve play at each moment the hand we’re dealt.”

— Barack Obama, A Promised Land

There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, there are thousands to prophecy failure;

There are thousands to point out to you one by one the dangers that wait to assail you.

But just buckle in with a bit of a grin, just take off your coat and get to it;

Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing that “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.”

— Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power

“Dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford.”

— Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent

“The people did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island.

They were already citizens.

But where they came from, they were not treated as such.”

— Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

“You know the difference between news and gossip, don’t you?

News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.”

— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“When hiring, try to surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. Genuine decency — an instinct for fairness and openness and mutual respect — is a rarer commodity in business than it should be, and you should look for it in the people you hire and nurture it in the people who work for you.”

— Robert Iger, The Ride of a Lifetime

“The lecturers back in Moscow might tell you that radiation has no odor or taste, he explained, but they’ve never been to Chernobyl. Intense gamma fields of 100 roentgen an hour and above — on the threshold for inducing acute radiation syndrome — caused such extensive ionization of the air that it left a distinctive aroma, like that after a lightning storm; if you smell ozone, his colleague said, run.” — Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl

“Holbrooke wanted more. He wasn’t a grand strategist, but his frenetic public presence made him the embodiment of certain ideas in action. He believed that power brought responsibilities, and if we failed to face them the world’s suffering would worsen, and eventually other people’s problems would be ours, and if we didn’t act no one else would. Not necessarily with force, but with the full weight of American influence. This was the Holbrooke doctrine, vindicated at Dayton. But it didn’t come out of government experience, much less analytical rigor. His views, like everyone’s, emerged from his nervous system, his amygdala, the core of his character, where America stood for something more than just its own power. He was that rare American in the treetops who actually gave a shit about the dark places of the earth.” — George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and The End of the American Century

“At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have: enough.”

— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness

“The timeline of a pandemic is much more rapid than that of other public controversies about science, like climate change, meaning the reality…and consequences of political acts that are divorced from scientific reality present themselves much more immediately for all to see.”

— Nicholas Christakis, in Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”

— Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

“The company is a ship that comes into port periodically to report on business. The board members come aboard for the meeting but trundle safely ashore afterwards, while ship, captain, and crew go back out to sea facing whatever is out there. We are the ones lashed to the mast; we will go down with the ship. The board holds interest in a whole fleet of ships, but we, the employees, just have this one we’re on.” — Frank Slootman, Tape Sucks: A Silicon Valley Growth Story

“While nobody complains about extra money, a bonus does not offer the same incentive to top players. The more powerful incentives are to appeal to their competitive instinct, the pride they have in their profession.

Bonuses get spent.

Medals are for ever.”

— Alex Ferguson with Michael Moritz, Leading: Lessons from Life and My Years at Manchester United

“Infill might be smarter, greener, and cheaper to service, but sprawl means building houses where people aren’t, and infill means building houses where people are.”

— Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

Before the Mac launched Adam Osborne of Osborne Computers kept asking Jobs, “What’s this Mac we’re hearing about, is it real?”

Finally Jobs replied,

“Adam, it’s so good that even after it puts your company out of business, you’ll still want to go out and buy one for your kids.”

— Michael Moritz, The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer