My Favorite books from 2020

2020 was a busy year - and so I'm writing my top five books list in February, 2022 - fourteen months late....I'm also ~20 reviews behind on Goodreads. Not a good sign...

Anyway, doing this is how I stay on top of my reading; producing, not simply consuming, and drawing the connections between books that make reading fun.

1. All the King's Men

Turns out there's a reason why this is considered one of the best American novels. It was a well-written story with characters who were frustratingly relatable in frightening and intriguing ways. Hard to say more than what's already been said, but for me, the beautifully oblique way that the unreliable narrator slowly revealed information over time so that I was constantly trying to figure out what was going on and how reality was being filtered through the narration, as well as the tragic interconnectedness between all of the characters was simply sublime.

2. Achieving Our Country

This book is a solid meditation on two formations of liberalism - the progressive liberalism of Dewey and Whitman set up against the anarchist, Marxist liberalism of the anti-Vietnam 60s. It's the final act of a philosopher who embodies one of my favorite traditions, American Pragmatism, and is of particular relevance in its prescient analysis of the dangers of hyper-woke politics.

3. The Eighth Day Of Creation

A very engaging and beautiful story of the discovery of DNA and the invention of microbiology as a sub-field. The greats like von Neumann and Watson and Crick and Monad and Schrodinger show up, but as humans, people, working on science, not as members of the pantheon. More than anything, this is an ode to the power of theory - and to Francis Crick, the ultimate theoretician. Pairing nicely with The Innovator's Solution, it's a book I go back to regularly, wondering why we haven't cracked the code past the Central Dogma...multicellular life is just fundamentally...different.

4. The Innovator's Solution

Ah, Christensen - the first business theorist I really jived with. Read his Innovator's Dilemma years ago, and this is a great update, extending his theories of modularity and integration (very Kuhnian in his own way). As a consummate defender of big businesses, working from the inside, he did a good job describing how to invert the paradox he identified earlier.

My favorite books from 2021

It was a year of Caro, and a year of change. I left California, and moved to Colorado with my future wife. I found myself more unfocused and disconnected than I expected, still working in a hybrid capacity which didn't come naturally to me, and with less of a social community than I wanted. I was also growing up, beginning the slow transition from a culture taker to a culture maker, realizing that I was becoming more of a leader than a follower. Perhaps this is why the biographies of Caro spoke to me in this moment. The raw unfettered potentiality of youth was fading.

1. Where Is My Flying Car?

Perhaps the urtext of what has come to be called the e/acc movement, this was a radicalizing book which inspired me to become more frustrated with the status quo. Something about reading it in the wake of leaving California and the COVID pandemic made me specifically angry, and this book grounded the anger in specific complaints about GDP, watts per capita, safetyism and other critiques. Presaging works like Abundance and Breakneck in 2025, this was a techno-utopian manifesto before that term became popularized by a16z and the American Dynamism movement.

2. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

I'll admit that Kuhn's work didn't click the first time I read it. But by 2021, I had settled into my natural state as a theorist, and was working through a longstanding paradigm shift within Palantir, consolidating the ontology systems across Gotham and Foundry and ushering in a new era of the Ontology. This book was very helpful, especially in the concepts of incommensurability and the way in which many paradigms were rejected. The concept of anomalies, and of the formalization which ossifies and then gives way to more plastic eras was formative for me.

3. Master of the Senate

Some great men seem relatable; Johnson is not, for me. Kicking off with a beautiful ode to the institution that is the US Senate, in a world where traveling to and from it was not a simple quotidian flight, this was a book which stuck with me in its unabashed, not quite admiration, but perhaps awe, at its subject. Larger than life, Johnson was at the peak of his powers, a legislator with no peers. Also relevant for thinking through how the Senate actually worked!

4. The Power Broker

The worst best book - an incredible work of fact that reads like a work of fiction, perhaps one of the most destructive books in the history of the 20th century, a harsh counterposition to Storr's technological positivism. There isn't a book like it, and it was a beautiful read - a book I wished had gone just slightly differently, and a book which tells the story of the delicate intertwining of technology and humanity - the car and the man who bent the world into compliance with it.