Food for Thought 2019 - The Life-Sparring Books of the Year
It feels as if 2019 flew by even faster than previous years, so fast that I didn't manage to complete this article before the year concluded.
Dominated by a lot of work and long commutes, I lacked the energy to write much over the past twelve months. However, if there is one blog post, I don't want to miss writing; it is the annual "Food for Thought" book review. This article marks the fifth consecutive time I am posting a review of the most exciting books I read in the outgoing year. I guess from now on I really can call it a tradition.
As usual, I tracked my reading on the Goodreads app. The app improved quite a bit over the past years and now also directly shows annotations and highlights from Kindle. Goodreads’ “My Year in Books” is a pretty neat statistical breakdown of my book reading in 2019. Remarkably I read precisely seven pages more than in the previous year (6,357 vs. 6,350), across 24 books. As it looks, my reading volume has been steady over the past few years.
As in the previous editions, this Top 5 list is compiled from the books I finished reading within 2019, disregarding when they were initially published. While some books on the list are new releases, others are decades or even centuries old.
So, let's look at the Life-Sparring books of 2019:
5th Place: Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell, 2019
“The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.”
If you listened to a few episodes of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast "Revisionist History" you might experience the same as me: while reading "Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know," your brain creates an audiobook, reading aloud the book in the voice of Gladwell. The book reads just like an extended podcast episode.
Talking to Strangers is not a revolutionary book. Still, it is a smooth read around an important idea: humans are not great in understanding each other, and errors in judgment can lead to severe negative consequences. Be aware!
Gladwell is a masterful storyteller, and just as in his podcasts, he brings his point across by tying multiple, highly emotional stories to academic research. While Gladwell surely has his point of view, "Talking to Strangers" does not provide simple answers but instead stimulates thoughts.
4th Place: Mastering the Market Cycle, Howard S. Marks, 2018
“Cycles are self-correcting, and their reversal is not necessarily dependent on exogenous events. The reason they reverse (rather than going on forever) is that trends create the reasons for their own reversal. Thus I like to say success carries within itself the seeds of failure, and failure the seeds of success.”
If I remember it right, I got introduced to the Memos of Howard Marks by my MBA Professor at Cornell, before later hearing the name also in an interview with Warren Buffet and in the Tim Ferriss Show. Howard Marks, Founder, CFA, Director, and Co-Chairman of Oaktree Capital is a true investment legend with a focus on anti-cyclic investment in distressed debt. His investor memos (thankfully openly published via Oaktrees Website) are an absolute treasure trove of investment wisdom, well-crafted metaphors, and sharp one-liners.
Reading Marks' memos for years, I was reasonably excited about seeing him publishing a new book. And the master did not disappoint. "Mastering the Market Cycle" is a must-read for everyone interested in investing. In his typical metaphor-rich style, Marks explains, why he believes in a cycle-driven investment strategy, and not in macro analysis. His approach is not that much based on trying to buy at the bottom, but to alternate between a more defensive and a more aggressive portfolio, depending on the phase the investment cycle is in.
“So if targeting the bottom is wrong, when should you buy? The answer’s simple: when price is below intrinsic value. What if the price continues downward? Buy more, as now it’s probably an even greater bargain. All you need for ultimate success in this regard is (a) an estimate of intrinsic value, (b) the emotional fortitude to persevere, and (c) eventually to have your estimate of value proved correct.”
There are countless books on investing out there, many of which make bold claims on having it all figured out. I put my money on people like Howard Marks and David Swenson, who do not toot their own horn much and instead explain fundamental principles that guided their long successful careers.
3rd Place: Barking Up The Wrong Tree, Eric Barker, 2017
"Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong" is a pretty entertaining and well-written book on extreme performance and success in general.
Barker presents research and anecdotes that make you see (perceived) success from a different point of view. That I marked sixty highlights over 312 pages illustrates that "Barking Up the Wrong Tree" is not a typical non-fiction title with a single thesis and a lot of repetition to drive it home. Rather, Barker looks at different drivers of success and touches on aspects like intensifiers - negative qualities that can lead to extreme performance, the difference between good and great leaders, the relationship of happiness and success, and the influence of optimism and pessimism on success.
“It’s a matter of basic statistics. When it comes to the extremes of performance, averages don’t matter; what matters is variance, those deviations from the norm.”
Barking Up is a wise book with the potential to make you more successful or at least happier with yourself.
2nd Place: Die Erzaehlungen, Rainer Maria Rilke, 1893-1902
In last year's edition of Food for Thought, I introduced my concept of "reading projects." Usually, I read non-fiction titles to learn about a topic of interest and fiction books to relax. Reading projects are bigger reading commitments that at least at times feel more like work than fun.
“Fürchtest du das Sterben?« »Das Sterben? Ja. Aber nicht den Tod.« - “Are you afraid of dying?” “The dying? Yes. But not death.”
Last year's big project was reading Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," an intimidating 685 pages book on economics and capital distribution that took me more than half a year to finish.
This year I embarked on an even more ambitious literary journey by taking on the complete works of German-language Poet and Novelist Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke wrote between 1894 and 1925; his works include letters, Poems, short stories, and novels.
"Die Erzaehlungen," is just one of four compendiums that I read in 2019. So far, I covered about half of his works, about 700 pages of mostly novella's, short stories that I read in my bed, one at a time, just before sleeping.
I had just a rough idea about Rilke when I started reading his works. I was interested in him mainly because of him being one of the major artists of the period before, during, and after the first world war, one of the darkest and most fascinating periods of European history. The more I read; the more Rilke drew me into his works. For the largest part, Rilke's novellas are about death. Death in all its facets, shapes, and forms. Death by the sickness of the body or the mind, death by ruthless murder, death by suicide, death by poverty, and death by being tired of living.
I am planning to cover my thoughts on Rilke in a full-length Life-Sparring round. There is profound wisdom in Rilke's somber perspective on the world. Especially after a stressful day at work, reading one of Rilke's morbid stories has a quite soothing effect. Sometimes reading about other people's death sets your little challenges in perspective.
1st Place: Sapiens / Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, 2011 & 2017
Sapiens has been on my to-read list for quite a while since it was mentioned over and over by influential people as the one book to read. I ended up reading Yuval Noah Harari's newer book Home Deus first, as I got it at a discounted price. I read Sapiens a few months later. Both books feel in a way like one big book spread over two volumes, so I think it only fair to crown them as joint Life-Sparring books of 2019.
84 highlights in Sapiens and 106 highlights in Homo Deus are a strong indicator of the density of both books. Not surprising, given that Yuval Harari is attempting nothing less than recounting the entire history of humankind (Sapiens) and its potential future (Home Deus).
Sapiens is an incredibly popular book, and partially this is because it is also an incredibly "populist" book. Harari not only simplifies human history and tightens it to a plausible and easy to follow narrative, but he also does not even pretend to be a neutral observer of history; Harari's theses are opinionated and controversial.
At the core of "Sapiens" is Harari's assumption that the skill to imagine abstract constructs is the sole differentiator between the homo sapiens and the animal kingdom. This ability to imagine things like gods, money, and nations was the main driver of human development.
Sapiens focuses on four transformative phases, the cognitive revolution (Sapiens evolving the skill of imagination), the agriculture revolution (humans forego foraging to enslave animals and live miserably tied to their lands), the unification of humankind (human imagination leads to ever-larger imaginative units like countries), and the scientific revolution.
“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
Harari matches these phases of human development to dominating belief system: polytheism for foraging societies, monotheism for the agrarian society, humanism (and its variations such as communism and fascism), and scientism for the modern world.
With his negative view on the agrarian revolution, Harari pours water on the mills of all Paleo romantics and animal rights activists; he is firmly atheist and at least mildly anti-capitalist. With this populist approach to a "Brief History of Humankind," Harari naturally attracts criticism from the scientific establishment. In my eyes, that does not take away from Sapiens, if you treat it as what it is: a fascinating, entertaining, and highly plausible thought experiment.
The character of the book as opinion piece is even more evident for "Homo Deus, the unofficial part two of Sapiens. As the subtitle "Brief History of Tomorrow" indicates, Homo Deus outlines the potential future of the species Homo Sapiens. Freed from the pretense of being a history book, Homo Deus is purely speculative. Will humans turn themselves into Gods, through biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings? Or will be become mindless hosts of algorithms that are far superior in making decisions?
“..if we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes:
1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing.
2. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.
3. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.”
What were your books of 2019? And what is your reading list of 2020? Follow me on Goodreads to see what I am currently reading and reviewing.
Still hungry for more “Food for thought”? Find the posts of the past years here: Food For Thought 2018, Food For Thought 2017, Food For Thought 2016 & Food For Thought 2015.
