The best books I've read this year
With only the tiniest rant about Goodreads
I can only assume that Amazon has literally forgotten they acquired Goodreads (in their defence it was ten years ago so possibly it has been so effectively amortized that they are now invisible to the naked eye in Seattle). The site has inadvertently become a shrine to the early 2000s internet, both in terms of overall UX but also general response times. I suppose it’s a reflection of just how fragmented the content ecosystem is, that a single alternative hasn’t displaced it? Anyway. This really, really didn’t mean to start as a rant but rather to share the top books I’ve read this year.
Actually, before I get to that, here’s my list of essential reading for founders. I keep it updated although the bar is high.
Okay, back to 2023. Here are six books that I’ve found either either very useful or interesting or occasionally both this year (not all are newly published):
The Laws of Trading by Agustin Lebron
Increasingly (and entirely obviously) I’m finding excellent recommendations in the references of other excellent books. Ignore this title, even though this was written by a (former) public markets trader, its frameworks for decision-making are applicable to everything. Think of it as a slightly more investment-y version of Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets but with broader scope. It’s extremely well written and I’m going back for a second read soon (it also made my founders list).
Unless you are currently attempting to piece together a grand unified theory of Mesoamerican ancient history, this is unlikely to be immediately useful. It is, however, supremely interesting. A years-long journey by an enthusiastic (and hands-on) historian to understand the US Southwestern Anasazi people, who they were and where they came from. If you’ve ever read any South American history, this will immediately light up a bunch of connections.
Generations by Jean Twenge (also writes a good newsletter)
My most highly suggested book to other people this year and it’s not even close. Jean is an extremely accomplished psychologist and aggregates an enormous amount of data on the last five generations of Americans. As context for behaviors and traits of Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, it’s invaluable and for anyone managing people under 30 this is essential reading.
Nassim is a pretty well known entity at this point but it was only this year I properly got to grips with him (unlike his editor). Antifragile builds on his previous work on systems of finance and economics and I found a full 50% of his text to be thought provoking and interesting (the rest was predominantly score-settling and talking about weightlifting).
Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
With so much writing on LLMs, I wanted to understand a little more about the original neural network. Sacks has written excellently on so many psychology topics and this was an effort to understand the sheer scale of varying kinds of hallucinations (both visual and auditory) that humans encounter. The level of phenomenon is such that you could almost describe hallucinations as part of the average human psyche.
Scaling People by Claire Hughes-Johnson
Humans can be tricky and in the context of building companies can be very tricky. I have been flicking through parts of this for months and it’s not only very well written but also extremely well designed (exercises and frameworks). At this point I’m just buying it in bulk for management teams (pairs well with Elad Gil’s High Growth Handbook).
If it’s useful (technical shortcomings aside) my Goodreads feed is here, thoughts and suggestions always welcome. Oh and if you need a soundtrack, here’s my 2023 rap playlist (new releases only)
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