My reading journey through 2022
I didn’t get to read nearly as much this year as I did the past couple of years. After the strangeness of the Covid years, as for most people I think, my 2022 was a year of far more travel, way more in-person work at far-flung offices and offsites, family milestones such as becoming an uncle (!), and other welcome distractions. But I did get to read and listen to a few great books.
And so, as has now become my tradition, I put together a few of the books I most enjoyed reading this year. Hope you enjoy this whether you’re looking for something to read for yourself, a gift for the holiday season, or just a fun quote or two to read through.
My favorite book of the year was The Kid Stays in the Picture: A Notorious Life by Robert Evans.
Bob Evans was an actor, a producer, and the head of Paramount Studios in the 1960s and early 1970s. His life was crazy, deranged, bizarre, inspired, fun, incredibly successful, and also a total failure, all at the same time — and the same can be said of his writing, which makes for a fun read. During his time at Paramount, he produced Love Story and The Godfather and Chinatown, and in the process he took Paramount from an also-ran to become the #1 studio worldwide, and the first Hollywood studio to have truly global blockbusters.
Love Story cost $2.2m to make and, driven by Francis Lai’s haunting music and a plot that works all around the world, brought $173m in box office receipts. Two years later The Godfather became one of the most successful movies of all time, with its own unforgettable theme and returning over $300m on a $6m budget. In short order, Paramount’s successes quadrupled the stock of its conglomerate parent, Gulf+Western, and Evans did all this while fighting directors, actors, screenwriters, Wall Street, the mafia, his wives — you name it, he was fighting them, and it wasn’t pretty. But what a time in Hollywood, and what a read. They even made a show this year called The Offer about the making of The Godfather with this amazing Bob Evans monologue.
“Fighting is healthy. If everyone has too much reverence for each other, or for the material, results are invariably underwhelming. It’s irreverence that makes things sizzle. It’s irreverence that gives you that shot at touching magic.”
— Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture: A Notorious Life
I really enjoyed Matthew Symonds’ Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle. I’ve never read a biography written by the author with close access to the subject, but with a trade: Larry Ellison had no edit rights, but he got to footnote anything he wanted to comment on. You get an insight into what he agrees with and what he disagrees with, which would be interesting in any biography. You also get fun bits like this:
Symonds: “‘Ellison showed up in shorts and a pink tank top, holding a glass of carrot juice,’ recalls former Oracle vice president Mark Barrenechea of his first meeting with the man.”
Ellison’s footnote: “I met Mark out on my deck just as I arrived back home from the gym. I was wearing a black cotton tank top with a Sayonara logo on it. I have never owned, nor would I ever wear, a pink tank top. This is very important.”
More relevantly, you get some perspective on the software industry that in hindsight seems pretty prescient:
“The arrival of Windows 95 received more media attention than the Middle East peace accords, which were signed that same week. But that wasn’t the only thing I found odd. While everyone applauded Microsoft’s increasingly complex desktop software, I was convinced that every application that could be moved off the PC should be moved off the PC. To me the entire industry was headed in the wrong direction.”
“The road less traveled may not be a dirt road; for some, it may be an Autobahn.
Robert Frost was right, taking the road less traveled can make all the difference, but that road isn’t necessarily the road with the least traffic. It may be the road that we, personally, have travelled less.
The introvert may need to get out of the house, engage with the world, get public. The extrovert may need to stay home and read a book. Sometimes we need to get out there. Sometimes we need to get in there. Some days the road less traveled is a solitary dirt trail. On others, it’s catching the subway on the 7 line.”
— Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights
“The best long-term results come from buying a big, well-diversified portfolio of financial securities, and trading as little as possible.”
— Robin Wiggleworth, Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
“One constant among the elements of 1914 — as of any era — was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.”
— Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
“The renunciation of alternatives is what makes a choice a meaningful one in the first place… when you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel, into the consequences of your choice.”
— Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
“Not all of us allow ourselves to fulfill our dreams of freedom. Maybe you dream of being free from a job, a relationship, a city.… But acting on freedom can be the scariest thing we do. To believe we are so radically free that we can dream the craziest, wildest dreams for ourselves and then work nonstop to make them come true, no matter the odds. No matter the borders we have to cross. No matter how many glass ceilings we have to crash through. This struggle, the restless determination, the feeling of urgency that comes with working to make things better — it never really goes away.”
— Maria Hinojosa, Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America
“In the dead of winter, even a favorite armchair begins looking like kindling.” — Jeff Immelt quoted during the 2008 financial crisis
— William Cohan, Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon
“I’ll eat grass, I’ll eat bushes, I’ll eat cactus, I’ll drink filthy cattle water, I’ll drink nothing at all. I’ll run and hide from la migra, I’ll pay the mafias whatever I have to. They can take my money, they can rob my family, they can lock me away, but I will keep coming back. I will keep crossing, again and again, until I make it, until I am together again with my family.”
— Francisco Cantu, The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border
“Few would describe Baghdad as glamorous as Casablanca was in the 1930s or Berlin during the Cold War, but since 2004, in the aftermath of the US invasion, it became, like those two cities, a magnet for spies. Intelligence agents from around the world descended on the ancient city ravaged by decades of Saddam’s dictatorial misrule and security chaos, in part because of the rising international concern about the burgenoining Salafi jihadi menace posed by Al Qaeda, which by the mid-2000s had turned Iraq into its global terrorist headquarters.
Amid this intrigue, an unlikely man emerged among Iraq’s new security agencies as a key player in identifying and infiltrating Al Qaeda’s networks.”
— Margaret Coker, The Spymaster of Baghdad: A True Story of Bravery, Family, and Patriotism in the Battle Against ISIS
“If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.
But we spend years actually living those stories, and expect our lives to be meaningful. The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.”
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
