My Year in Books

Reflections of a Bibliophile

George Steiner says that we should not rely on book reviews, but should go directly to the source. I agree. Still, in an effort to codify and distill some of what I’ve learned this year, I’m going to go through some that left a mark.

1. Draw Me After by Peter Cole: Letters have personalities and meditating on their visual and sonic hieroglyphics is both a way to intimate God, ourselves, and the history of communication.

2. Conversations with René Girard ed. by Cynthia Haven: Girard was a brilliant thinker with range and depth who trained as a historian, but came to believe in a trans-cultural, trans-historical truth, namely, that history is mostly written from the point of view of the scapegoaters, not the scapegoated (except in the Bible, where the scapegoating mechanism is demystified). Three things jump out as worthy of thought: 1) Girard was adept in fashionable postmodern theory but came to be a devout Christian thinker. 2) Girard thinks the left goes awry in scapegoating religion for problems of human nature. 3) Girard agrees with Maimonides that the proper legacy of Biblical monotheism is or should be not more spiritual belief, but less superstition and less violence.

3. Thinking in Bets and Quit by Annie Duke. Decision-making is one of the most important but understudied life skills and probabilistic thinking is a useful aid. Take a small number of bets that might have tremendous outcomes, even if the chances are unlikely. Conversely, quitting when it’s the right time to quit is a virtue. Most people who are good at grit don’t know when to quit and vice versa. Decision-making is not taught in school, but should be.

4. Strategy by Edward Luttwak. In war, good things aren’t always good, and bad things aren’t always bad. Paradox and irony abound, which means war is sort of like the philosophy of Kierkegaard (or conversely, Kierkegaard imagines life as a kind of spiritual warfare). Lots of things go wrong in war and fuzzy intangibles like “morale” may matter a great deal. The result is that David beating Goliath is not actually uncommon, but par for the course.

5. Midlife and Life is Hard by Kieran Setiya. The idea of a philosophy of a midlife crisis is amazing, and, it turns out, sound. We can’t derive our sense of wholeness from achievement of goals. Philosophers who aspire to the good life typically discount brokenness and pain, usually leaving these to spiritual writers, but a good life involves pain and crisis and we shouldn’t be embarrassed by them.

6. Wittgenstein’s Ladder by Marjorie Perloff. Wittgenstein is best read as a poet, despite being relatively ignorant of poetry. He inspired a generation of avant-garde artists directly and indirectly. Words don’t have fixed meanings, and those who try to fix them end up in trouble. We need to practice “beginner’s mind” in our use of language.

7. Outsiders by William Thorndike. The best CEOs eschew the limelight, disdain perks, are suspicious of baroque markers of status like large headcount and headquarters, and are basically corporate monks with single-minded focus on increasing share-holder value. Often they bought back their own stock when it traded cheap—because they correctly believed in themselves when the market didn’t. Pairs well with Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

8. Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf. We still live in the world left to us by German romanticism, whose excesses involve narcissism but whose discoveries involve an appreciation of selfhood, independence of mind, and artistic innovation by way of classical re-discovery. Of course, the romantics also got us nationalism, which is a kind of spiritualized “emancipatory” politics. The reason Germany produced such great thinkers and poets was because it was decentralized. The despots talked a mean game, but couldn’t enforce it, unlike in France, where repression led to an equal and opposite backlash in the French Revolution.

9. What We Owe the Future by Will MacAskill. This is the Effective Altruist’s guide to “long-termism.” If you think there is a long-term future and that we can make a big difference in whether it turns out great or terribly then you will prioritize accordingly. I read this before the SBF/FTX blow-up, which MacAkill has since distanced himself from. I question whether we can know how our actions will turn out in the very long run such that the very long-term can be morally salient now. I also have a love of intangibles such as art, spirit, and culture, which the quantitative bias of EA often discounts. The long-term future is something we should care about but it will depend, in my view, as much if not more on soft things like creativity and EQ than on converting more people to the cult of Peter Singer. I see myself as a pluralist so I find EA good within the moral portfolio, but bad insofar as it wants to concentrate the portfolio entirely with a utilitarian outlook.

10. Professor of Apocalypse by Jerry Muller. Astounding biography of Jacob Taubes, who was both a fraud and a genius, and whose academic influence is endemic. It’s probably best read as a cautionary tale—better than most fiction.

11. Authority and Freedom by Jed Perl. Whatever it is about, Art is always also about the struggle to be artistically free within constraints. This is also a good metaphor for life, which means that the pursuit of freedom and self-expression in one’s life requires constraints with which to struggle.

12. Strange Rites by Tara Isabella Burton. The void left by the decline of institutional religion is being filled by e-witches, Goop influencers and dead-lifting, bug-eating, Jordan Peterson acolytes, often (though not always) with nefarious consequence.

13. Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross. If you can spot talent, no matter your field, you’ll have an edge over those who take short-cuts and/or don’t really know what to look for. Some questions, like “What windows are open on your browser” are quick ways to get a sense of what someone cares about. All assessments can and will be gamed, so find lines of enquiry that can’t be.

14. The Deep Places by Ross Douthat. Illness, especially chronic illness, remains a mystery. The body-mind connection is real, but still mysterious. Many suffer in silence and it’s easy to forget. Social media hides and maybe intensifies our loneliness. We have become a culture that is so performative, we even perform our pain, but such performances are usually curated and fake. Pain is a private language, but suffering is our vernacular.

15. The Genetic Lottery by Kathryn Paige Harden. It’s possible to believe that genes matter a lot more than is politically correct and also be an egalitarian rather than a Nietzschean. This books tries to make the leftist case for genetics. I like books that bother people on all sides of the aisle, and this book does that.

16. Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos. It’s not Heidegger, but it is fascinating that Bezos knew from the beginning how big the internet would be, and understood the long-term value creation that would come from investing in customer loyalty. Few have a 20+ year plan, and fewer carry it out. It’s easy to look back now and say victory was inevitable, but Amazon made many controversial bets over the years and now more than half of the U.S. population uses Amazon Prime.

Conclusion: Range is good for the spirit. A barbell strategy of some dense stuff and some light stuff is where I want to be. I’m glad not to be stuck reading only philosophy or poetry. Conversely, a diet of airplane books might turn me into GPT-2. My advice to myself for 2023 is follow your curiosity.

Happy 2023 and thanks for reading!