Books I read in 2023

My book reading picked up in 2023.  My habit of starting many books, but only finishing a fraction continued, however.  Here’s a list of books I liked a lot, in no particular order.

When We Cease To Understand The World by Benjamin Labatut

I first heard about this book through rave reviews in the New York Times and New Yorker.  Through the lives of scientists Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzchild and Werner Heisenberg and mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Labatut captures the tremendous creativity involved in their discoveries but each of these scientists were also tormented by madness.  The book forced me to confront the question: does creativity inevitably encroach into madness? Labatut shows how the human soul is often more mysterious than the deep scientific puzzles that these men pursued.

The book seamlessly blends factual accounts of its protagonists’ discoveries and life events with fictionalized narratives about their inner lives.  The storytelling is tense and rich with detail.  At less than 200 pages, the book is a quick and engrossing read.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner

Many consequential professional and personal decisions require us to make guesses about future events.  While some future events are by nature unpredictable, there are many that are amenable to good guessing by applying data, logic, analysis and good judgment.  Tetlock and his colleagues identified superforecasters – those who forecast performance in terms of accuracy and variance were consistently better than the rest which included specialist intelligence analysts with classified information on the topics.  Superforecasters are not professional forecasters, but rather shared a style of thinking that proved effective.  They give weight to multiple perspectives and aren’t afraid to change their opinions. They are curious, humble, self-critical, and less likely than most other people to believe in fate. And although they seldom use math to make their predictions, all are highly numerate.  While I am trained in methods for making good decisions, the book showed me that personal attributes of humility, willingness to change one’s mind and being self-critical matter as much.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

A book that I started and set aside a few times, before finally reading all of it this year. This book requires a certain frame of mind.  It tells the story of twins Estha and Rahel, “physically separate but with joint identities” growing up in a small town in Kerala.  Ultimately the book is about love thwarted, in Roy’s words, by love laws that laid down “who should be loved, and how. And how much.”  The book is unremittingly tragic – the twin’s family and those they love, regularly experience the cruelties of the social structure of the time and place enacted through a toxic mix of caste, class and politics.  Arundhati Roy is a close observer of the small injustices that are a constant feature of the experience of people of the wrong gender, caste or class, and thanks to her evocative prose, as I read the book I felt some of her anger.

Roy grew up in the locales of the novel and her language is highly evocative of the place.  Roy plays with language and structure: she uses palindromes, alliteration, rhymes, coinages, split syllables, re-formed words, and unconventional capitalization. Chronology is subverted by regular use of flash-forwards and flashbacks.  A great first novel, the book is well worth a read.

The Master and Margarita By Mikhail Bulgakov

A highly regarded classic and masterpiece, but not as well known as other Russian classics (Bulgakov is actually Ukrainian), perhaps, due to its complexity and magical realism.  The book was published only decades after Bulgakov’s death.  The initial published version was censored and had several pages removed, but later versions include the full text.  While magical realism is generally associated with Latin American writers, soviet writers such as Gogol and Bulgakov were earlier to write in that style.  The book features the devil in human form, a giant talking cat with a fondness for vodka, Pontius Pilate, Jesus and many others.  Characters fly through the air, rubles fall from the sky only to turn into bottle labels. The book has two interleaved parts – one set in Moscow of the 1930s and the other set in Yerushalayim (Jerusalem). With allusions to Faust and the Christian Gospels, this is a disguised criticism of Moscow society under the iron grip of Stalin.  Laced with humor and commentary with many quotable lines like the one most quoted: “Manuscripts don’t burn”.  I had to read a companion to the book to fully appreciate the multi-layered narrative.

Poverty, by America by Mathew Desmond

Mathew Desmond, a sociologist, addresses the question: “Why does a country as rich as the USA have so much poverty?”.  The United States is nominally the richest country on earth, but has more poverty than other advanced democracies.  Desmond himself grew up poor.  His childhood home was foreclosed.  A professor at Princeton University, he researches the lives of the poor and the causes of poverty.  Popular discourse blames poverty on the book.  Desmond’s answer: Poverty persists in part because those of us well-off, have, with varying degrees of self-awareness, decided that we benefit from its perpetuation.  The well-off perpetuate poverty by actions like: voting against affordable housing in their neighborhoods, lobbying for tax breaks that starve anti-poverty spending, supporting corporations that resist minimum-wage laws.  A big surprise for me was the extent to which the USA's tax code benefits the rich a lot more than it does the poor.  An eye-opening book.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This book is featured in so many book lists that I suspect most readers of books would have read it already.  Written in the style of a children’s book, it is deceptively easy to read, but like skating on a frozen lake one is wont to miss what lies below the surface. On the surface the book is about the importance of human relationships and the primacy of emotions and feelings over rationality (“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye”).  Adam Gopnik wrote in an essay that it took him several years and several readings before he understood the book.  He believes it is a fable about war – the emotions associated with conflict: isolation, fear and uncertainty which can only be alleviated by intimacy and love.  One lesson from the book: one cannot love abstractions – only particular things (Gopnik paraphrases: “You cannot love roses. You can only love a rose.”)

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

At nearly 500 pages, this is a thick book on the Venture Capital Industry. However, Mallaby tells great stories that make this book a page turner.  Mallaby with privileged access to the people who run the top VC firms – Sequoia, Kleiner-Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Benchmark, Andreesen-Horowitz takes us from the origin of the practice in the San Francisco Bay Area to what it is today – a model replicated across the world particularly in China and India.  Mallaby describes the personalities of the men (yes it's mostly men) who make huge bets with the hope that at atleast a few will pay off big.  He talks about the hubris, the intrigue, the triumphs and the busts. To Mallaby, in sum venture capital is a positive force that has shaped the technology industry of today.  However, missing are some of the reasons for why Paul Graham for instance has a “Theory of VC Suckage’, and the rise of new types of investors like YCombinator and 500 Global (previously 500 startups).

Man From The Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya

This book is a new biography of the man widely regarded as the smartest man of the twentieth century: John Von Neumann.  The mind boggles at how one man could make important contributions to so many fields: quantum mechanics, pure mathematics, atom bomb design, game theory, and computing architecture.  Bhattacharya’s biography is the first that attempts to explain his contributions to a non-specialist reader.  And I believe he has succeeded admirably.  Each chapter is a capsule intellectual history of the field, placing Von Neumann’s contributions in the context of the scientific work that preceded and succeeded his own.

A Swim In A Pond In The Rain by George Saunders

Saunders selects seven stories by Russian masters: Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev, that he considers “the high bar against which I measure my own '' to illustrate what he feels makes a story work. The full text of each story is included followed by a detailed analysis of the story.  It's all about close reading of the text – great writers make each sentence count.  When I read Saunders’ analysis after each story, I realized how much I had missed.   For instance, Saunders explains how a piece of frozen laundry flapping on a line signals the ill-fated nature of a journey in a snowstorm.  This is a book that I am going to read and re-read.

Overrated Books

Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder by Nassim Taleb

Taleb coined the word anti-fragile to fill a void – no word to describe the opposite of fragile.  According to him, adaptive and robust don’t capture the precise meaning.  A fragile object breaks when exposed to a shock.  An anti-fragile entity becomes stronger – essentially the idea that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Taleb takes a concept in finance called “convex pay-off function” and tries to apply it to everything under the sun.  But many of his examples don’t hold up.   A convex payoff (financial return) function has higher returns at the extreme values of the underlying asset and lower returns at values close to the average value of the underlying asset.  That is, a portfolio with greater volatility (i.e. higher risk) will have higher returns than another with lower volatility.  In Taleb’s words, antifragility is “behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet.”  The problem though is that he rarely analyzes an example in depth, so it is difficult to understand how it illustrates anti-fragility.  A culture changes (the old giving way to the new) as it is exposed to “shocks”.   However, is change always for the better?  A favorite example is how bones (and muscles) get stronger the more they are stressed (by weight-lifting and exercise).  However, when we train for strength, we adopt a structured regimen, gradually increasing the weights we lift.  A disorderly regimen could cause serious injury – exactly the opposite of his definition of what it means to be antifragile.  

I don’t believe antifragility is what we need or how we design systems.  We humans have thrived by manipulating our environment to reduce the risk of extreme shocks (e.g. hygiene, sanitation, pasteurization) and by our innate ability to adapt.

David Ranciman has a critical review of the book that I agree with: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/21/antifragile-how-to-live-nassim-nicholas-taleb-review

Books I Am Reading Now

Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire 

About the Riemann Hypothesis, one of the most famous unsolved problems in math, and why it is important.

How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

Why big projects go over budget and miss timelines and how to do them better

The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton

Borges, Kant and Heisenberg and their search for the nature of reality.

The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart

Spinoza and Leibniz and their philosophical battles about the fate of God.