My reading journey through 2023
Reading is an adventure — reading is traveling without leaving your home, or maybe your airplane seat. Reading is traveling in time. I have always used reading as an escape, and perhaps between bank failures and wars and economic turbulence, escaping the here & now and getting lost in a book felt more welcome this year even than most.
Here’s a few books I really enjoyed in 2023.
“I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks — the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world — and I wanted the world to be just like the movies.”
— Anthony Bourdain in A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines
“It certainly helped my early career that I turned manuscripts around overnight or over a weekend — agents were happy, and authors were happier. I didn’t do it in order to score points, though; I just couldn’t restrain my curiosity.”
— Robert Gottlieb in Avid Reader: A Life
“We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into the other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. You would end up a different version of yourself; in some other town. But it wouldn’t be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what that other life would have looked like. And there you were.”
— Gabrielle Zevin in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Up to this point he had largely accepted the traditional view that the President, once elected, had no direct dealings with the public. His job was to administer the government and to report his actions and wishes to Congress. Presidents rarely left the capital city, except for brief vacations; they almost never made public addresses; and they maintained, in theory, a sublime indifference to public opinion and political pressures…
For the first time in American history citizens began to feel that the occupant of the White House was their representative. They referred to him as Father Abraham, and they showered him with homely gifts: a firkin of butter, a crate of Bartlett pears, New England salmon.”
— David Herbert Donald in Lincoln
“How a work of art ends is just as important as how it begins. A good opening entices us, but a strong finish nails down the experience.”
— James Michener in Journey: A Novel
“Think Brutal. No need to be mean, just brutally honest — and avoid the partial truths while you’re at it. Ask those you interact with to do the same. People will be more focused, more positive, and more productive when they don’t have to guess what you’re thinking. Positive or negative, make honesty the basis of all interactions. You’ll avoid wasting valuable time and energy later.”
— Ken Segall in Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success
“In the end, what’s most meaningful is creating positive, uplifting outcomes for human experiences and human relationships. Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.”
— Danny Meyer in Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
“You may find it an unreliable, even treacherous, companion. These days it has become very elusive. It is often late. Deforestation is one of the reasons for this. Trees help to make rain. Forests seed the passing clouds. Before they cut them down the monsoon was always scrupulously punctual. My grandmother planned everything around it — washing the clothes, drying the grain, visiting relatives — in the certain expectation that it would arrive on the appointed day. The rains were heavier then. Within minutes of the burst small rivers had formed around our houses in which we children sailed paper boats. The monsoon was part of our lives, like sleep. We watched the world being reborn around us while the rain seeped into the house’s foundations, making it creak and wobble.”
— Alexander Frater in Chasing the Monsoon: A Modern Pilgrimage through India
“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 in The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border
“This business works on you. When you were in law school you had some noble idea what a lawyer should be. A champion of individual rights; a defender of the Constitution; a guardian of the oppressed; an advocate for your client’s principles. Then after you practice for six months you realize you were nothing but hired guns. Mouthpieces for sale to the highest bidder, available to anybody, any crook, any sleazebag with enough money to pay your outrageous fees. Nothing shocks you. It’s supposed to be an honorable profession, but you’ll meet so many crooked lawyers you’ll want to quit and find an honest job. Yeah Mitch, you’ll get cynical. And it’s sad, really.”
— John Grisham in The Firm
“Optimism, pessimism, fuck that,” Musk answered. “We’re going to make it happen.”
— Walter Isaacson in Elon Musk
“When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.”
—L. David Marquet in Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders
“When information doesn’t flow, bureaucracy builds and departments become siloed. Stagnation is the inevitable result. “Bigger companies are always slowing down. Bureaucracy is always growing. Corporate headquarters becomes too self-important,” Dimon says. “What you’ve got to do is always have a sense of urgency; always kill the bureaucracy. Make sure that everyone in corporate headquarters knows that they’re there because there is a banker in front of a client.”
— Patricia Crisafulli in The House of Dimon: How JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon Rose to the Top of the Financial World
“War seldom achieves what was expected or hoped for by its participants; even victory often breeds a future defeat. The Middle East from distant times till now is a cautionary story of the failure of war to impose a lasting and just peace. There is never a perfect time or ideal people to bring an end to bloody conflicts, and unlike the talent for war, the ability to make peace has always been rare… Camp David tells us of the compromises that peace demands, and of the courage and sacrifice required of leaders whose greatest challenge is to overcome their own limitations.”
— Lawrence Wright in Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David
“As Keynes observed, there cannot be “liquidity” for the community as a whole. The mistake is in thinking that markets have a duty to stay liquid or that buyers will always be present to accommodate sellers. The real culprit in 1994 was leverage. If you aren’t in debt, you can’t go broke and can’t be made to sell, in which case “liquidity” is irrelevant. But a leveraged firm may be forced to sell, lest fast-accumulating losses put it out of business. Leverage always gives rise to this same brutal dynamic, and its dangers cannot be stressed too often.”
— Roger Lowenstein in When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
“Our reaction times can also be speeded up by relying more on hearing than vision. That may seem counterintuitive. Light travels faster than sound, much faster, so visual images reach our senses before sounds. However, once the sensations reach our eyes and ears, the relative speeds of the processing circuits reverse. Hearing is faster and more acute than seeing, about 25 percent so, and responding to an auditory cue rather than a visual one can save us up to 50 milliseconds. The reason is that sound receptors in the ear are much faster and more sensitive than anything in the eye. Many athletes, such as tennis and table-tennis players, rely on the sound a ball makes on a racket or bat as much as the sight of its trajectory. A ball hit for speed broadcasts a different sound from one sliced or spun, and this information can save a player the precious few milliseconds that separate winners from losers.
If we now add up all the time delays between an event occurring in the outside world and our perceiving it, we discover the following lovely fact. For events occurring at a distance, we see them first and hear them without delay, as we do, for example, when seeing lightning and hearing the thunder afterwards. But for events taking place close to us, we hear them first.”
— John Coates in The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings, and the Biology of Boom and Bust
