2021 was a strange year. My first year as a dad changed how I spent time as well as the topics that interest me, and the second year of the pandemic made this year seem almost static. I started and ended the year sitting in the same desk for more hours of more days that I ever have before or will again. I read 110 books but only 53/63 of my target books, and did 100% of my reading in English. Next year I’ll hopefully get through more in Arabic and Chinese.
A big focus this year was growing the real estate business, as we tripled our number of employees and doubled the size of the portfolio. I discovered that the genre of real estate books (Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings, Best Ever Apartments) is mostly garbage, and even business books for targeted subjects such as hiring (Who, Hiring A Players) are of uneven quality. It’s still cheaper to learn from mediocre books than the school of hard knocks, so I’ll continue reading these books next year.
At some point in 2019 I wanted to understand what caused modernity. This year was perhaps the first time that I was able to tackle that question, both in reading the Durants’ uneven 10,000 page Story of Civilization, and also taking side trips through civilizations that either never achieved modernity or had it forced upon them. Rome (Gibbon), India (The Anarchy), the Islamic World (Islamic Empires) and China (Empire of Silver, In Search of a Modern China, Imperial Twilight, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom). Combined with Hobsbawm’s history, I can now claim to at least have touched most of the story of Western Civilization. The only way to encapsulate this knowledge into something digestible is to apply the maxims of Growth (Vaclav Smil) — advancement is the competing forces of self-reinforcing phenomena (science, economic output) built within the constraints of the system (environment, calories) following predictable paths — it just happened to be that Western Europe found the breakaway point first.
Through reading Arkady Martine’s excellent novel a Desolation Called Peace and general escapism from being upset, I made it through a substantial amount of genre fiction. Nothing quite lived up to Martine, though Black Water Sister, the Curse of Chalion, and the Calculating Stars came close.
This being my 7th year working in big tech, I was of course interested in reading more here. Reporting on Meta continues to be abysmal (An Ugly Truth), Chinese tech is underappreciated (Young China, Attention Factory), and Amazon’s relentless rise continues with or without Jeff Bezos. So much of the American economy is now dependent on Amazon in particular, (Nomadland, Working Backwards, Amazon Unbound, Invent and Wander) it’s disappointing to watch simple narratives of big tech dominate dinner table conversations. Perhaps the best book about the drawbacks of big tech was an endorsement of anarchy in Seeing Like a State.
Next year I hope to skew a little more towards books written before the 21st century, a little more towards books not written in English, and actually following through with the goal of eschewing movies, tv, and print news entirely. Having finished a long overview of history, I’d like to dive more into ethics and virtue next year, we shall see where that leads.