📚My Favorite Books of 2023📚
Welcome to issue #12 of Indiscrete Musings
I write about the world of Cloud Computing and Venture Capital and will most likely fall off the path from time to time. You can expect a bi-weekly to monthly update on specific sectors with Cloud Computing or uncuffed thoughts on the somewhat opaque world that is Venture Capital. I’ll be mostly wrong and sometimes right. Views my own.
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If you know me, then you know I love to read. For each book below, I’ll be including the most profound quote that stood out to me personally. This is a list of books that were my favorite, or by definition, worth reading in entirety. One of the best habits I’ve adopted in recent years when it comes to reading is quickly letting go of books that don’t interest me; time is finite, and the drudgery that comes with “finishing a book” compared to being taken by one is immensely different. I hope you enjoy and grab a new title that you haven’t read yet! Oh, and if you have any recommendations, please shoot me a note! Enjoy!
Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon: William D. Cohan (Amazon)
The story of GE’s glorious rise and distressing fall is not just the story of a power company or a jet engine company or a TV network or a finance behemoth. It’s a cautionary tale about hype, hubris, blind ambition, and the limits of believing—and trying to live up continuously to—a flawed corporate mythology.
And There was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle: Jon Meacham (Amazon)
The task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger (Amazon)
The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good.
The Candy House: A Novel by Jennifer Egan (Amazon)
Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig (Amazon)
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America by Christopher Leonard (Amazon)
Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. This observation would seem to be particularly true of Koch Industries, which has been led by one CEO since 1967. Charles Koch’s control of the company is complete. His portrait hangs in the company’s lobby, and employees are trained with his videotaped speeches. Every employee must embrace Charles Koch’s highly detailed philosophy called Market-Based Management. But Emerson’s quote captured only half of the truth about institutions. They are shadows of people, but they are also shadows of the political and economic systems in which they exist.
Best of Friends: A Novel by Kamila Shamsie (Amazon)
The problem with childhood friendship was that you could sometimes fail to see the adult in front of you because you had such a fixed idea of the teenager she once was, and other times you were unable to see the teenager still alive and kicking within the adult.
More than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places by Micahel Mauboussin (Amazon)
The only certainty is that there is no certainty. This principle is especially true for the investment industry, which deals largely with uncertainty. In contrast, the casino business deals largely with risk. With both uncertainty and risk, outcomes are unknown. But with uncertainty, the underlying distribution of outcomes is undefined, while with risk we know what that distribution looks like. Corporate undulation is uncertain; roulette is risky.
Sea of Tranquility: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel (Amazon)
Sometimes order can be relentless.
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain (Amazon)
Only once the parents die, transforming into objects of yearning, do the children have their adventures and claim their hidden birthrights. These tales resonate because we’re all subject to illness and aging, breakups and bereavement, plagues and wars. And the message of all these stories, the secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.
Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.
The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All by Mary Childs (Amazon)
Being a bond investor was about seeking safety, calculable certainty. Optimism was for stock investors, people who had zero claim on the assets, who bought a story about growth, potential, and the future and hoped to ride it to the moon. Their upside was hypothetically infinite, but their investment could go to zero. They bet on faith in corporate management, instead of the black-and-white promises of bond documents, the covenants that limited the borrower’s ability to make dumb choices.
Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller (Amazon)
This book argues that ideas from other disciplines need to be added to economics. High on this list of disciplines are the humanities, like history and literature. Humanists are well aware that the human mind is something far more complex and inscrutable than any machine that is programmed to compute optimal expectations for economic quantities.
Malady of the Mind: Schizophrenia and the Path to Prevention by Jeffrey A. Lieberman (Amazon)
One of the long-standing mysteries of schizophrenia is its emergence at a specific stage of life, a narrow window beginning after puberty and extending through adolescence to young adulthood. It occurs rarely in children prior to puberty or in people over age thirty. The timing of its appearance suggests that something happens during adolescence in brain development that unmasks the illness or triggers its manifestation; this usually occurs gradually over months or a few years but, less frequently, can seem to come out of nowhere, descending within a matter of weeks, or even days. In either case, schizophrenia changes a seemingly healthy young person into someone troubled by a disordered mind and beset by delusions and hallucinations.
Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond (Amazon)
Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you; that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed.
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr (Amazon)
Trader Joe’s, just like trader Joe, has perfected the ability to project integrity while simultaneously offering a very similar class of mass-produced goods that its competitors offer. It is no accident that the real dynamite deals at TJ’s have always been in the frozen aisle, or the canned goods, the jar of cookie dough spread, or the bacon-cheddar-flavored popcorn, those hyper-packaged exemplars of mass consumption that achieve the most special aura of all by appearing on Joe’s shelf: decency. A side effect of this is an image
How to Invest by David Rubenstein (Amazon)
Focus. The ability to focus on the most important factors in an investment decision is one that great investors tend to have in common. They are not as easily distracted by the unimportant factors, and have the ability to concentrate at unusually high levels. The ability to ferret out the key elements of an investment is something the great investors seem to be able to do exceedingly well. Reading. Great investors seem to feel there is never too much knowledge one can acquire, and that some of that knowledge can help with perspectives on whatever issue might be raised by an investment. Great investors tend to be relentless readers of books, magazines, newspapers, and curated materials that fit their interests. Some may have had or have dyslexia; but these individuals tend to gather wide amounts of information through other means, often through frequent phone calls or video contacts with industry experts or other investment professionals. Stated another way, great investors have an enormous amount of intellectual curiosity, and want to learn as much as they can about any subject that might remotely relate at some point to their investment’s activities. They seem to have a view that any piece of information can in time help shape a better investment decision, or inspire greater creativity or insight.
Outlive: The Science of Art of Longevity by Petter Attia, MD (Amazon)
At a deeper biochemical level, exercise really does act like a drug. To be more precise, it prompts the body to produce its own, endogenous drug-like chemicals. When we are exercising, our muscles generate molecules known as cytokines that send signals to other parts of our bodies, helping to strengthen our immune system and stimulate the growth of new muscle and stronger bones. Endurance exercise such as running or cycling helps generate another potent molecule called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, that improves the health and function of the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays an essential role in memory.
End of Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin (Amazon)
When the social pyramid becomes top-heavy, this has dire consequences for the stability of our societies.
In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman (Amazon)
There comes a day for most people, I think, when they see their parents through the same lens as they see others, as human beings who stand alone and apart with aspirations for their own lives, and with all the flaws that are laid bare by defeated hopes. Such an epiphany can come in a moment, in a fraction of a second, in which everything is compressed and laid out at once. When it comes, it could, I suppose, be unsettling, as if heaven lifted its veil. I remember learning what Islam teaches: that on the day of judgment no family ties are recognized and that each of us stands apart before the maker, only for himself.
The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss by Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt (Amazon)
There is no other truth to depend on, no other certainty. It is as inevitable as birth. Death is the price we pay for being born. How we die is another matter. If terminally ill, we have the choice to take our own life. Secretly somewhere inside me lies the notion that I will slip away quietly in my sleep.
Hello Beautiful: A Novel by Ann Napolitano (Amazon)
“Grief is love.” Now Alice thought: Forgiveness is too. The mother and daughter held each other in the quiet hallway in a house thundering with life. When they pulled apart, Alice said, “I’m scared.”
Build the Life You Want: The Art of Science of Getting Happier (Amazon)
Despite individual differences, the overall reason for this emotion is that humans make progress and prosper when they learn new things. Thus, evolution favors the people who love learning and rewards them with pleasure.
Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It (Amazon)
We tend to make decisions using the information before us, ignoring irrelevant or distracting information. That habit of focus means we tend to neglect the importance, or even existence, of information that is absent. A tool known as a possibility grid can help us notice when we’re being misled by the information we aren’t considering.
The Librarianist: A Novel by Patrick deWitt
“Why read at all? Why does anyone do it in the first place? Why do I? There is the element of escape, which is real enough—that’s a real-enough comfort. But also we read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of our being alive. To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind is to see the human landscape in all its odd detail, and the reader says to him or herself, Yes, that’s how it is, only I didn’t know it to describe it. There’s a fraternity achieved, then: we are not alone. Sometimes an author’s voice is familiar to us from the first page, first paragraph, even if the author lived in another country, in another century.”
Rethinking Narcissism by Dr. Craig Malkin
“Alternatively—and paradoxically—subtle echoists can suddenly become clingy and inconsolable. The easiest way to get rid of need, after all, is to get it met immediately, without delay. For people who dread needing anything from anyone, a sudden surge in their desire for support or understanding or even comfort can be frightening, driving them into chaotic efforts to feel better.”
Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky (Amazon)
No matter how thinly you slice it, each unique biological state was caused by a unique state that preceded it. And if you want to truly understand things, you need to break these two states down to their component parts, and figure out how each component comprising Just-Before-Now gave rise to each piece of Now. This is how the universe works.
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Willer (Amazon)
Every one of us must undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. We must learn the art and craft of grief, discover the profound ways it ripens and deepens us. While grief is an intense emotion, it is also a skill we develop through a prolonged walk with loss. Facing grief is hard work. . . . It takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss. This is precisely what we are being called to do.
When we were able to see times of loss as inevitable and, in a very real way, necessary, we are able to engage these moments and cultivate the art of living well, of metabolizing suffering into something beautiful and ultimately sacred. It may be strange to imagine grief leading to beauty, but imagine, for a moment, the shining face of someone who has just released his or her cup of tears standing before us naked and cleansed. We are seeing someone as beautiful as Botticelli’s Venus or Michelangelo’s David.
Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II by Arthur Hermann (Amazon)
In effect, Thomas Jefferson had been as right about business as he had been about political constitutions. The best corporate government was the one that governed least. “Decentralization [is] analogous to free enterprise,” Sloan later wrote, “Centralization, to regimentation”39 The best way to run a complex corporation was to have the boss at the top providing only an overall direction and oversight, while turning the entrepreneurial instincts of his top executives loose on the problem of how to produce cars and bring them to market. Meanwhile, the chief executive’s job was not to give orders but gather information, in order evaluate the company’s overall progress, anticipate problems, smooth out bottlenecks, and, as Bill Knudsen might have said, keep all noses pointed in the right direction.
Notes on Grief: A Memoir by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Amazon)
Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
“Optimism, pessimism, fuck that,” Musk answered. “We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.