A Year in Reading, 2023

What a year it’s been!

Eight months since the year ended and I’m just now catching up on my reflections. I’m closer to ‘books read in 2024’ than I am to 2023. It took a while to write this because last year was a pretty crazy:

• I moved twice in the same year, and not because I wanted to. The first place we moved to had a lot of problems and we had to move again a month later, repacking everything up. That’s five moves in four years across three states and three time zones. Expert library packer here.
• I started an intensive consulting opportunity midway through the year, which turned into an intensive new role as the VP of Product and Engineering at myLaurel. Exciting stuff, but it took up a lot of the time and capacity I had.
• I wrapped up working on Recommended Systems (renamed to Field Report). I realized I didn’t have the time or capital to grow it as a business (as opposed to as a tool) and am instead going to carve out some time to open source the work.
• Dragon Blood Balm had its best year ever: our sales doubled in the beginning of the year... and then doubled again in November and December. This meant a lot of effort was spent on keeping up customer service and fulfillment. I took over and spent some time trying to optimize production in the beginning of the year, but with the work at myLaurel had to hand production (and eventually fulfillment) back off to my partner in North Carolina. We also hired a person to help us out!
• I started training for a marathon, and ran a half marathon. I want to write a blog post about the things I learned here, but the short of it is that training for a marathon is completely unlike recreational running in terms of time and effort you need to put in. I’ve never done competitive sports and this was a big learning curve for me on the running meta, the mechanics, and how to train beyond amateur land. (Spoiler: I didn’t end up running because of moving (again) and the next point).
• And my wife and I welcomed a little kid into the world!

That’s a lot! Reading and my side projects took the biggest hits. I read the least books that I’ve read in any year since 2017, and worked on zero side projects. I wrote nearly zero last year. Life was very much restructured and I’m halfway into 2024 just catching up on things.

Top Picks

Last year’s (2022) top picks left a lasting impression -- “Creative Selection” by Ken Kocienda, “Quit” by Annie Duke, “The Outsiders” by William Thorndike, and “A Mountain Under the Sea” by Ray Naylor. I regularly found myself thinking about these books, recommending them to others, and referencing them. 2022 was a good year.

2023 wasn’t without merit either. My favorite picks were:

• How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner (2023)
  “How Big Things Get Done” left me with an idea per chapter and I’ve been able to apply each idea my professional work. More than anything, it has allowed me and my team to derisk large projects and deliver to spec and to timeline. For a technical book (or the pop-sci equivalent of technical book by an author who has written plenty of technical tomes) it was a pleasant, breezy read.
• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (2015)
  Another wonderful book. It won a bunch of prizes when it came out but I ignored it until after I went on vacation to Hawaii.... and didn’t surf at all. But I still picked it up on the strength of those recommendations, because the trip felt incomplete -- as if I had left a piece of my imagination there, a “what if we stayed here” wishful thought brought about by a long and stressful year that left me burnt out. The books proved to be 100% vibes. I’m not sure how else to describe 500 pages of Finnegan finding and surfing waves across the world, first as a kid and later as an adult, especially when the waves themselves all blend together after a while. Reading it slowly over the course of a few months felt stepping into a daydream.
• Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes (2018)
  Another technical, professional book. Easy to read and digest, and was eye opening for me on how accessibility and inclusive design betters the world for everyone, while unexamined biases end up creating a more painful one, sometimes physically so. Not a month goes by when I don’t think about some of the lessons here. Since I finished the book, I’ve noticed more how the world is largely inaccessibly designed, an observation heightened by new parenthood.
• The Skull by Jon Klassen (2023)
  A children’s book, which starts from the trappings of a traditional Brothers’ Grimm tale and ends... in a very unexpected place. Morbidly funny and surprising, I sought out (and enjoyed) Klassen’s other children’s books, including “Triangle”, and “Where is My Hat”, all of which had the same line of unexpected and dark humor. “The English Understand Wool” by Helen Dewitt was a close runner up in this mode and I particularly like publishing initiative from New Directions: a ‘storybook’ series of novellas intended to be read in a single sitting. Lovely!

Runners Up

I always enjoy Joan Didion’s writing, including “Where I was From” (recommended by a reader – thanks Justin Duke!). “Nike: Better Is Temporary” was one of those useful corporate monograms that left me inspired, though the title is what I come back to the most. “Craftland Japan” is a constant reminder of the heart of craft, though I worry that for me it simply perpetrates a fantasy of a life I never lived nor likely will ever live. “Masters of Doom” and “Blood, Sweat, and Chrome” were great as well, for reasons I go into later.

Craftsmanship and Making Things

I found myself gravitating to books (and newsletters, articles) on making and makers. “Craftland Japan”, “Masters of Doom”, “Make Something Wonderful”, “Born Standing Up”, “No Filter”, and “Blood, Sweat, and Chrome” all went deep into the creative process and the business around it. Other books - the Nike monograph, “How Big Things Get Done”, “Echo”, “There and Back” are reflections on or compilations of produced work and stories from the production process.

I don’t have to like the subject matter; I’m not a Steve Martin fan (his movies or his comedy) but I enjoyed reading about how he developed and evolved his craft. I have only two pairs of Nikes (and a hat) but I loved the dive through their archives even if I don’t want to buy any of it. I hated Doom and Quake as a kid and was reluctant to read about Id Software and the Johns, but I found the pieces on John Romero’s buildout of game engines some of the most interesting technical reading that year.

The industry doesn’t matter either: making shoes and apparel, traditional crafts, video games, movies, and internet software all share similar creative pains and tensions. The deep exploration of processes across all of them created moments of serendipity: drawing a line from building 3d graphics engines (“Masters of Doom”) to connect or contrast that to building the real-world stunts of Mad Max (“Blood, Sweat, and Chrome”), or the content moderation challenges of Instagram/Facebook (“No Filter”) back to the pop culture impact of video games. And all of them on the long and winding road to overnight success and/or the denial of it.

The Disappointments

I typically don’t finish books that are disappointing; I’ll leave them midway done and donate them during my next move. But some books are disappointing not because they’re bad, but because they’re just... not good? Or don’t live up to what they could be based on an author’s prior works? Teju Cole’s “Blind Spot” was disappointing in that sense. I love Teju Cole’s early fiction and his non-fiction writing, but “Blind Spot” – a collection of photographs paired with reflective paragraphs — was just not great and I had to push myself to finish it, hoping for a reward on each page and getting it only once or twice. The stylistic throughvein of W.G. Sebald was on display, but I think Craig Mod has done it much better.

Other books were disappointing because they had interesting concepts but hit cliche after painful cliche, or were plain sloppy. “Fistful of Pain” was a comic in that vein which – if not for its brevity – would have been more pleasant to use as kindling for a fire. Sorry guys. (As an aside – I’ve been doing most of my writing on iA Writer and have a mode turned on which highlights all my cliches and unnecessary words... I hate how often I reach for cliches and noticing is the first step of change.)

Other books were disappointments because they did not live up to the hype. I’ve heard so much about the Culture series of books, loved the concepts for each one and the high concept Iain Banks brings to the table, love the wiki summaries and long dissections online about the novels, but... I hate the books. They don’t pull me in. They’re adequate writing but a slog. I gave up on “Consider Phlebas” halfway and it took me three years and a series of very long flights to finish “Player of Games”. “Excession” is sitting in my to-read pile and again – I love the concept – but I pick it up and my eyes glaze over. I’d take a Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson book any day. Which speaking of – many people criticized Stephenson’s “Termination Shock” as tired, not as dense, bitter, and not as good as his other books... and while they may be right, I enjoyed it all the same.

Less Parables, More Specifics

The more I’ve read, the more I’ve spotted patterns across books, both fiction and nonfiction.

In fiction, there are certain tropes and hero-journeys a reader can come to expect. In non-fiction, there’s a format that gets more mileage than a grizzled trucker: the kind where the author starts with a personal anecdote to draw you in, ties that back to the theme of the book, brings in research to justify their anecdote and subsequent conclusion, and moves on to the next chapter. I’m okay with that and I’ve gotten pretty quick at glossing over the routine filler bits that pad what could have been an essay into a book.

Beyond that, I’ve started to notice (and find incredibly annoying) how certain case studies repeat themselves across books. An example that I saw frequently over the last few years was a California rail project between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I saw that case study used to illustrate:

• Cognitive fallacies
• Knowing when to quit/walk away
• Poor project planning
• Government waste
• How political processes go
• Infrastructural complexity
• A certain Californian wishfulness
• What should be invested in (one political reading)
• What shouldn’t be invested in (different political reading)
• ... and more.

It feels like the story of blind men groping an elephant and coming to different conclusions about what it is: a rope! A tree trunk! A boulder! A fan! A snake!

On one hand, the world is complex and a single event can be illustrative of many different things. In this reading, consider John Salvatier’s “Reality has a surprising amount of detail”.

On the other hand, it is lazy writing. There is so much world out there! And yet, authors are relying on the same few stories. This is not just the California rail project... think about any pop-business book you’ve read in the last ten years doesn’t make an obligatory (and often gawking) reference at Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, or their ilk in describing excellence and performative differentiation. I’m guilty of that as well because it’s easy. But it’s lazy, and after you read enough of the references, it’s boring.

These anecdotes are also wildly western-centric! I started to notice this as a byproduct of going out of my way to read non-white, non-American, non-male writers. What of the businesses in Asia, or South America, or Europe, or Africa? What of smaller, non-titanic businesses? Are there so few examples in the world that we can’t be bothered to identify them? Cedric Chen’s work across Commoncog is amazing in this regard: he writes about Koufu, of competing rice conglomerates, of the “Chinese Businessman Paradox”, and of building a point of sale system in Malaysia. These stories can illustrate unique and differentiated complexities about the world, and are more interesting to read because it’s not the same tired anecdote, repeated ad nauseam.

Those anecdotes eventually become secondhand and thirdhand stories, devoid of nuance, taking on almost mystical proportions. I mean, did you know that Mark Zuckerberg used to tell his teams to ‘move fast and break things?’ Did you know Netflix had an extremely critical performance evaluation culture that eventually even pushed out the creator of that culture? Did you know Google had 20% time that led to the creation of Gmail? Over time, these stories turn into parables.

Perhaps more gratingly, they are parables that no longer reflect the state of things. Facebook no longer moves fast and breaks things – it is slow and broken. Google no longer has 20% time, it has 20% layoffs and work done for exclusively for performance evaluations. Apple’s build culture is different today than what it was with Tony Fadell, Jon Ive, and Steve Jobs. Things change. I wish more books would take those stories and follow through to see what became of them. What happened to the turtle who won the race against the hare? Maybe the hare woke up to its mistake and never repeated it. Maybe the turtle never won another race. Is the lesson from that parable still valuable in such a future? Or is the lesson no longer “slow and steady wins the race”, but instead “exploit your competitors temporary weaknesses if you want to win uneven races”?

Anyway, I talked about this last year and again the year before when I wrote about the reflexivity of skill and how certain genre “classics” have not aged well. This continues to be true.

So aside from bitching about it, what’s the alternative?

Seeking out different perspectives is an option (and I do mean “seeking”, because these are not easy to find). So is specificity of experience. Consider Ken Kocienda’s “Creative Selection”: an author saying “I can’t give you persistent truths/truisms, but I can tell you about what it was like to make this thing, what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned along the way. Here is a story of a particular moment in time.”

In that vein I loved “Blood, Sweat, and Chrome” about Mad Max. It didn’t tell the story of all movies, just the very particular challenges of making one (amazing) movie. It didn’t attempt to draw huge life lessons, but to tell the interesting details of a very singular experience, not to MBA-ize it into a case study. And in telling that story, it revealed the complexity of the world. It is “to see the world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower” (William Blake). Instead of 10 thematically different books referencing a well worn parable, it is a richly-detailed specific experience that can be the read 10 different ways, depending on the lens you bring to the table. It has no agenda except to present the messy world as it was, as people experienced it.

Try it on for size: read it as a story of creative persistence in the face of repeated obstacles. Or as a management parable of hiring and inspiring people. Or a management parable about how many different people and skill sets come together in different ways to build a final product, where the “director” is a central thread holding things together. Or as a technical manual of how award-winning creativity and stunts came together. Or of how the Hollywood system operates and how it almost killed this film. Or as a story about the unevenness of creative throughput over a career. All of those are readable stories; the world is complex. “I am large. I contain multitudes.” (Walt Whitman)

The “Wet Streets Cause Rain” Problem

The last observation, a corollary to the “write about specifics”, one that friends have tired of my remarking on, is the pain of Gell-Mann Amnesia. Here’s Michael Crichton saying it better than I can:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Right: “Wet streets cause rain”.

Related to this is “Writing as an Operator” (https://lethain.com/writers-who-operate/) by Will Larson, where he cites the “disconnect between operational observations and eventually not having experience to draw on anymore” for why he does not want to be a full time writer. I fully agree!

Many journalists/writers never have operational experience. They try to explain the systems they write about from the outside in. They attribute logic and reasons in ways that make for good storytelling but if you work in the industry, know is often patently untrue or backwards. This calls to mind related patterns, such as “Can a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor” which posits that the methods and tools we have to evaluate complex systems from the outside in are not adequate to evaluate and fully understand complex systems.

Working in business and reading journalism about business, working in healthcare and reading journalism about healthcare, and working in technology and reading about technology heightens this sense for me: writers attribute malice and ill intent where what more often exists is gross incompetence or good intentions with awful implementations. Business, healthcare, and tech are easy to villainize — and oftentimes rightfully so – but the ghost of “wet streets cause rain” and Gell-Mann amnesia has made me more sensitive to giving things I read — and more recently, people I engage with — the benefit of the doubt rather then ascribing to them motives or narratives. (It doesn’t hurt that Hanlon’s Razor — “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” — often applies as well in these scenarios).

That said, there needs to be fair warning about being sucked in to the the logic of the system, what folks call “drinking the kool-aid” and losing the ability to objectively describe the way things are. Executives do this the most, as they are the proverbial kool-aid factory.

So the pithy observation here is that few professional operators are good writers and many cannot be trusted. But many writers are poor explainers and few get things right. So read critically, and don’t believe everything you read… or everything you think. Pith as promised!

The Stats

This year, I read:

• 25 Books or book-like things
• 8 were fiction (two of which were comics)
• 4 can be best described as art books or monographs
• 2 were children’s books
• 6 could be described as memoirs or memoir-like
• 3 were mostly-technical or for-professionals books
• 12 were from writers who probably wouldn’t identify as the default setting in American publishing

And that wraps up my annual reflections.

RK, 2024

The Full List, 2023

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv (2022)

Craftland Japan by Uwe Rottgen and Katherina Zettl (2022)

Blind Spot by Teju Cole (2016)

⭐ Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes (2018)

Where I Was From by Joan Didion (2003)

Nike: Better is Temporary by Sam Grawe (2020)

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021)

Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (2009)

Griz Grobus by Simon Roy (2023)

A Fistful of Pain by Lindsay/Joyce (2023)

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin (2007)

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier (2020)

Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words by Steve Jobs (2023)

⭐ The Skull by Jon Klassen (2023)

Echo: A survey of 25 Years of Sound, Art, and Ink on Paper

There and Back: Photographs from the Edge by Jimmy Chin (2021)

⭐ How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner (2023)

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner (2004)

Mazda Miata 2023 Car Manual

Little Labours by Rivka Galchen (2016)

⭐ Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (2015)

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson (2021)

The Mysteries by Bill Watterson (2023)

Blood, Sweat, and Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan (2022)

The English Understand Wool by Helen Dewitt (2022)