In 2022, I wanted to read at least a dozen books. Here are a few notes from this past year of reads. For all of you who subscribed this year, thank you and I look forward to seeing you in the new year.
Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
Don’t we all love it when a trilogy has its climatic ending? There has never been a series I can imagine, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, anything, as epic and heart string pulling as the life of Theodore Roosevelt. This final installment feels more like a tragic resolve than an elated ending, but they’re mostly the uncomfortable things fiction could never teach. What would it be like to send your sons off to war. Not just any war. World War. How would it feel to see the policies, prosperity, and peace you built for a nation, your nation, deteriorate under you hand picked successor, then destroyed by your opposition. Theodore Roosevelt’s life on the biggest stage of the world is made so accessible by Edmund Morris, the sign off is one of introspection. Who could I be if I had the fortitude and focus of the writer, the rancher, the statesmen, and the Colonel, Roosevelt?
This trilogy is a commitment and while I wont have the time to reread it soon, I did find myself enjoying David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback which focuses of Roosevelt before his ascendance to the Rough Riders and ultimately President. I came across Mornings on Horseback while discovering my now current read, John Adams by David McCullough. I look forward to sharing more on that biography in early 2023.
Hannibal by Philip Freeman
As someone who did not have the benefit of a classical education in my youth, Freeman’s biographies of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great were the headwaters for my learning journey into the classics of antiquity. Hannibal is much shorter than the two other biographies in part due to the destruction of Carthage in the 3rd Punic War. Still this book is a detailed look into pre-Roman Spain, Rome as a Republic coming into its own, and an African General who took the timeline of history to the brink of chaining the world forever.
This year I was grateful to read several of Cicero’s works including Tusculm Disputations, and On Duties. Additionally I wanted to know more of Richard the Lionheart and found a biography by W.B. Bartlett that I enjoyed. Generals in some way are the most fascinating people of their time because they’re CEOs, supply chain managers, people leaders, writers, sometimes even artists and architects. But above all, their problem solving on mass scale says something about the age in which they live. Often the solutions are unique, but the desire for resolve is timeless.
Business, Productivity and the Misc stuff
The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan
Read if Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies, DAOs, and the future of the Blockchain interests you.
The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd
I feel very fortunate to have met Paul this year and The Pathless Path may be the four hour work week of this decade. Well worth the read
Build by Tony Fadell
Tony was one of the people that inspired me to work at Apple nearly 15 years ago. This book will sound a bit of the best recantations from Silicon Valley, still it’s a work any product oriented person should read.
Twelve and a Half by Gary Varynerchuck
Gary Vee needs no intro, but Twelve and a Half was a audiobook I powered through on the many flights I took this year. Emotional Ingredients, and Gary’s viceral anecdotes bring otherwise ethereal feelings down to earth to be examined and exercised.
Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
Tiago took concepts that once were only in the hands of people who knew what filesystems and rsync were and enabled a new generation of people to Build a Second Brain. The Capture, Organize, Distill, Express cycle refined my existing processes and will stick with me in some form I’m sure for the rest of my career.
For the Love of Books by Thatcher Wine & Elizabeth Lane
Do you like books? Do you like beautiful interior photography of personal libraries? Then this book is for you. It’ll inspire you to continue reading, collecting, and considering what your books say about you.
Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday
The title is my favorite yet and the stories compiled by Holiday are the perfect playlist of stoic philosophy.
Bonus: Beauty
Near the beginning of the year, I read my first book by Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus. It was well worth the read and delivers on that distance of a subtitle. One of Klavan’s central arguments is not that Shelley’s Frankenstein plays God in creating the monster, but he himself becomes a monster by creating life without woman. It’s a fascinating thread to run through and consider in the backdrop of Byron and others during the English Romantics.
Andrew Klavan’s son, Spenser, hosts perhaps the best niche podcast I’ve ever have encountered and enjoy returning to, Young Heretics. But it was through Spensers show that I discovered Thomas Traherne’s Centuries. Call them poems, call them meditations, whatever, they’re perhaps some of the earliest works of English Mysticism that still speaks and moves the heart today.
With that, Merry Christmas from a freezing, snow covered North West.
-Steven