Even though I read less in 2023 than I normally do I still managed to squeeze a few books in here and there while sitting on airplanes, waiting for airplanes, and winding down in hotels. Business travel is the best time to read.
Here’s what I consumed this year.
Non-Fiction
Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To by Dr. David Sinclair
I read this book at the start of the year when I was on a three day retreat without technology. I was in the middle of a bit of a personal crisis over my health and needed to reset a few things. Thinking about my body as a system and rebooting my base habits with longevity in mind helped pull me out of a mental spiral. I’m a long way from becoming anything approaching a specimen of physical fitness. The thinking in Lifespan helped me snap out of a pretty intense slump and for that I’ll always be grateful for this book.
Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger
Bob Iger has had an incredible career. It’s too bad this book doesn’t match his accomplishments. Every page felt like it was cleared with a room full of lawyers. I would love to understand the real work that went into deals as monumental as the Marvel and Star Wars acquisitions, opening new theme parks around the world, and pushing Disney into the world of streaming. Instead Ride of a Lifetime is plagued by page after page of mile wide inch deep insights that you can find in any other business book in a Hudson News.
The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare by Christian Brose
February and March of 2022 were weeks where a decade worth of military technology shifts happened. Ukraine has gone on to prove that massive numbers of attritable munitions can go toe to toe with the (maybe not so) exquisite systems of the past. Go read Kill Chan if you want to understand how this philosophy could play out for the rest of the 21st century.
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal
I’d like to accomplish more in life than I can do by myself so I need to be a part of a team. We’ve built a pretty great one at Lumafield, but we can be better. Most advice on how to build a team comes from people who have done it once and made a lot of money out of the process. McChrystal approaches the subject from the point of view of a leader who had to radically change his team structure in the middle of life or death stakes. Highly recommend if you want a new perspective on how to build fast paced teams.
Chip War: The Quest to Dominate the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller
I studied semiconductor and micro-electrical mechanical system fabrication before dropping out of my PhD at the University of Illinois. My academic experience gave me a solid background on the theory and technology breakthroughs that drive modern integrated circuits. This book filled in many of the gaps around the social, political, economic, and business evolution that powered the days of clean room time I clocked in 2011 and 2012.
Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
I’ll start with the obvious: judged exclusively by results Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur of the 21st century and it isn’t even close. SpaceX and Tesla have completely re-shaped two of the largest industries in the world and neither of them would exist in their current form without him. I’m not in love with the cloud of drama that surrounds so many of the things that Elon does, but if that is the price we have to pay for electric cars and American made space transportation than I think I can put up with a few antics every once in a while.
This book commits the sin that most contemporaneous biographies commit - it focuses far too much of the narrative on the period of time the author had with the subject. Some insane percentage of this book is dedicated to Elon’s purchase of Twitter and only a few chapters on his life in Silicon Valley before SpaceX and Tesla. Scant few details are here about PayPal or X.com. Other than that it’s a great read.
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis
“Have you ever noticed that when someone who is incredibly accomplished in one field talks about something else it usually sounds exactly like the same conversation you have about that topic with your friends over dinner?”
Another CEO whispered that to me in the middle of the one and only time I was in the same room as SBF in late October of 2023. SBF was talking about AI or pandemics or something else – I forget what exactly he said because it was so incredibly inane. It was pretty obvious that he was not an expert in the things he was discussing. As it turns out the main thing he was an expert at was committing large scale fraud.
Michale Lewis’ book on SBF is a primer on how easy it is for otherwise impressive people to be duped when presented with a story they want to believe. If you create enough FOMO, amass a seemingly large fortune, and look like what people expect a genius to look like you can play by a totally different set of rules than the rest of society.
It’s worth taking a second to contrast SBF with Elon Musk since that’s something that seems to come up pretty frequently. I think it’s easy to tell them apart: one of them is a convicted felon and the other one has launched astronauts to space multiple times.
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke
This book is a great primer on incomplete information decision making. I found the most compelling section was at the very beginning of the book. I won’t attempt to rehash everything Duke covers here. Instead I’ll just say that I’ve been reflecting on the idea that it is possible to make bad decisions and achieve good outcomes as well as good decisions and bad outcomes. We’re trained to associate success with good decision making. In the abstract that concept makes sense – cause leads to effect. When you play a repeated game over and over again achieving one good outcome because of a bad decision means you are prone to make the same decision and under perform in the future. Thinking in Bets helped me remember not to become overly confident in success or overly depressed in failure.
How to Win the Bachelor: The Secret to Finding Love and Fame on America's Favorite Reality Show by Chad Kultgen and Lizzie Pace
If you made it this far down the list you might be surprised by this addition. I have never seen an episode of The Bachelor and I don’t plan to start soon. However, I am huge fan of the Dudley podcast and was surprised to learn that Chad Kultgen not only co-hosts one of the largest bachelor podcasts but also co-wrote an entire book on how to win the competition. Kultgen and Pace examine, explain, and define every nuance of a hugely popular reality show over the course of the book. Their description of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th audiences that every contestant needs to keep in mind is eye opening and (sadly) relevant for anyone who is competing in a subjective world.
Generative Design: Visualize, Program, and Create with JavaScript in p5.js by Benedikt Gross, Hartmut Bohnacker, Julia Laub, and Claudius Lazzeroni
I often joke that I’m bad at the “handmade arts and crafts” part of engineering – cutting wood, welding steel, etc – so you can imagine how artistically inclined I’ve been since grade school. Digital tools are a totally different world though and I’ve loved playing around with 3D printers, CAD, and photo editing software to produce a few things for myself over the years.
I started creating generative art with Python in 2018 after leaving my last job. Scripting functions to change the color of every pixel from scratch was a rewarding challenge, but it resulted in a workflow that was hard to scale and more difficult to translate into something shareable. I found myself poking around with p5.js one day in 2021 after finally getting sick of my old stack of poorly implemented functions and never looked back.
This book has excellent examples that help an inexperienced artist like myself imagine new ways to bring my ideas to life. The Processing foundation has gone through quite a bit of upheaval this year. I hope they find a way to move past the issues in the community and continue to serve all of the great artists that use processing to express themselves.
Fiction
Devil’s Hand, In the Blood, and Only the Dead by Jack Carr
To paraphrase Dr. No, all of these books have the subtlety of a brick through a plate-glass window. They are over-the-top action movies translated into a written format. Jack Carr’s writing is easy to digest and a fun way to spend a transcontinental flight. I have as much in common with James Reece as I do with George Washington but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the ride.
Red Winter by Marc Cameron
The posthumous Clancy universe books are a sad shadow of his work in the 80s and 90s. I could probably re-read The Hunt for Red October each year and still enjoy it. I don’t imagine that I’ll think about Red Winter again after I finish writing this sentence
Wool and Shift by Hugh Howery
I picked up these books after watching the Apple+ series that came out this year. Without spoiling anything, Hugh Howery creates an entire society based solely in a massive underground silo. Are there plot holes and inconsistencies on every level of this story? Yes. Do I really care about that while I’m racing to find out who is going to be sent outside of the silo to clean next? Not at all.
Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson
I’m ashamed to admit that I never finished this book before this year. Our current reality is only different from the Asia-centric, fully digitally manufactured, artificially intelligent world that Stephenson constructs in Diamond Age by a matter of degrees. Even though I don’t think this matches some of his other work (Seveneves is my favorite hard sci-fi book of all time), Neil Stephenson easily cemented his place in the pantheon of the greatest sci-fi authors of all time after the hat trick of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptomnomicon in the 90s.
Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
Corey Doctorow is one of my favorite authors. He’s a tireless advocate against big tech’s bullshit, a great speaker, and a pretty nice dude from the brief interactions I’ve had with him IRL. Even though Red Team Blues felt like a pretty big departure from a few of the books that I have enjoyed the most from him (Makers and Rapture of the Nerds are must reads for anyone who works in hard tech) I still found myself enjoying it throughout. Read Red Team Blues if you want to go back to a time when crypto meant encryption instead of cryptocurrency.
That’s it!
Happy reading in 2024!