This year I slacked on my book-reading habit. What was once a consistent 30-50 books a year slipped to 11 in 2023! With a second kiddo and a new doggo in the household, I’m finding it more and more challenging to find the time and circumstances where reading can happen.

I used to read before bed for up to an hour, but that has been swapped with my reading books to my 4-year-old (or just catching up on chores). I used to read in the morning while drinking my coffee, but that has been replaced by making a school lunch, doing dishes and getting my son off to daycare. I’m also walking a lot more, as we adopted a second dog – Koda – this summer and he is as energetic as you could imagine an 18-month-old Corgi-German Shepard mix to be! I stopped listening to audiobooks, as I find that I don’t focus on and retain information as well as compared with reading. So when I walk, I just – GASP! – try to enjoy the scenery instead of ignoring it!

Oh well, books aren’t going anywhere. I’ll turn back to more of them when the timing is right. This year, I managed 11 books, not including several that I abandoned (e.g. “Be Useful” by Arnold Schwartzzenegar) and others that I’m still slowly working through (e.g. “Jerusalem” by Sebastien Montefiore and “Deep” by James Nestor).

Scanning a few notes I took about each, I’m struck by how many were good, but not great. I rate my books from 1 to 5 stars; the average rating was 3.5! There were a few stellar books in there, and several that I should have abandoned, but the sunk cost really kept me slogging through! My insight here is to be better at abandoning books that aren’t up to snuff and do so quickly.

YMMV, but below is a look at the books I read in 2023, in chronological order, along with a few thoughts about each and my highly subjective rating. Perhaps you will find your next read in this list!

As always please let me know in the comments if you have any book recommendations for me – especially the ones that you absolutely loved!

2023 Book List

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Happiness at Work by Srikumar Rao

Professor Rao held what was at one point (perhaps still is?) the most attended class at Columbia University Business School, one of the few that has its own alumni program! The book distills many of the lessons from the course in the form of parables, blending ancient wisdom (from the Vedic tradition of South Asia) with modern goals of achieving professional success and happiness. Unfortunately, I found that the writing style and use of parables didn’t do it for me. While the book will make you think (the sign of a great book!) I just couldn’t get engaged with the writing style.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

This is among the best books on time management and productivity that I’ve ever read, and I’ve read them all! Very philosophical, just the way I like my books to be. This book is short on tactics and deep on introspection. If you like to think and reflect while you read and create your own tactics and how-to’s (instead of being told what you must do), you will love this book.

Getting to Yes with Yourself: (and Other Worthy Opponents) by William Ury

I’m a William Ury fan, and he is legendary in the world of negotiation and mediation. This book was decent with some excellent stories about how to agree with oneself (and others). Nothing ground-breaking here, but a nice read/skim.

Part of my 3-star rating (good but not great) is that the stories included were already mentioned in previous books/talks from the author that I was familiar with. I find that this often happens when people create a “series” of personal development books building on a few seminal ideas and stories, after you have read a few, they stop being as interesting! If this is your first exposure to the author’s work you might find it more interesting.

The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning by Paul Bloom

The punchline is pretty quick to get – that suffering isn’t all that bad, and in the right doses (at the right time!) it actually helps make life worth living and adds meaning. My primary issue with the book is that it was a hodge-podge of research and quotes and stories from other works, and didn’t flow super well. That said, I do want to dive deeper into some of the sources/citations.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

A fascinating book about an important person of our time. Love him or hate him, no one can deny that Elon is doing much to push industries and civilization forward. This book is an exercise in empathy, to be able to look at someone and all their good and bad parts, woven together to create a tapestry that’s rich, and difficult to assess in a single “tweet”.

What I love about biographies is that they are not self-help books. They are also not how-to manuals. Instead, they create a rich story of a person, allowing you to appreciate the good, while serving as a warning for the bad. I feel that the author did not pull any punches in his storytelling, and left me with a much more nuanced understanding (I sorta feel sorry for Elon) of the world’s richest person. This is not a hero-worship puff piece.

Can you have the good without the bad? That’s for you to decide.

The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer by Christopher Clarey

This is a fascinating look at someone who achieved absolute mastery of his domain while making it appear effortless. The book demonstrates the importance of understanding one’s mind, and staying calm and relaxed in order to perform well. This isn’t to say that Roger was always relaxed, he wasn’t. However, it contrasts his method of gameplay and understanding of how to do his best with those of other champions – people who did not have nearly as much mastery over their most important asset, their state of mind.

The book would probably be a five-star book if I was playing tennis actively today and following the sport. I used to play tennis but I’ve lost touch with it. Therefore, many of the pages went into intimate details of specific matches and were quite boring. I appreciated the stories between matches about how he trained and lived his life. I did end up skipping about 30% of the book for this reason. If you are a tennis nerd and followed the sport closely during Federer’s heyday you will love this book.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

I read this book after hearing it mentioned with gravitas in Elon’s biography by Isaacson. Apparently, it was a seminal book in Elon’s life and has guided his philosophical approach to life and business in a deep way.

It was a good read with some parts that were laugh-out-loud funny. Lots of irony and poking fun at things that would normally be deadly serious. I’m sure on the second or third read more nuance would emerge, though I’m not so sure I’d be reading it again. I struggle to see how Elon (or anyone!) pulls such deep and life-changing meaning from it. That said, it was enjoyable and an influential part of our culture, therefore worth reading.

Instant Motivation: The Surprising Truth Behind What Really Drives Top Performance by Chantal Burns

This book is particularly relevant for coaches who approach their work from a “three principles” or “inside-out” perspective where one’s state of mind and innate potential is seen as paramount in the attainment of higher performance. Easy to skim. Relevant for business audiences as well. I’ve read many books covering the topics covered in this book so much of what I read here wasn’t new, but it was a nice refresher. Oh, the title “Instant Motivation” is terrible!

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis

If you like books by Michael Lewis (The Blind Side, Liars Poker, Moneyball, etc.), you will love this book. It’s fast-paced with twists and turns that will surprise you even if you’ve been following the SBF/FTX story of growth and the downfall of Sam Bankman Fried’s (SBF) empire. There were so many nuances and back stories that have never been reported before.

The author has a clear stance on the level of guilt of SBF. He portrays him and the other leaders as well-meaning genius kids whose business simply runs away from them. They made mistakes but were not villains. They were moving fast and breaking things but also built something innovative and successful. They were the victims of bad luck and poor decisions. This is the take the author conveys based on his interviews and time spent with the main characters in the story.

I don’t know what I believe about this, as I think there is justice that needs to be served and responsibility that comes with safeguarding people’s assets. you still need to be held responsible, even if you’re moving fast and breaking things to make society better. It’s also clear that the Author was hoodwinked (as were many others) as he embedded himself with Sam and his crew, thinking that he was telling the story of the next great business tycoon. In his wildest dreams, the author couldn’t have predicted how life would crumble around the subject of the book he was writing, and it shows.

Regardless, of whether you believe the authors conclusions or not, the book is still worth reading to understand just how wild businesses can be. Fact can be stranger than fiction.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux

I read this immediately after reading “Going Infinite” by Michael Lewis. While the book by Lewis was a glossy puff piece that paints the FTX crypto innovators in a somewhat positive light, as young kids who made mistakes but were simply in over their heads and not villainous, this book does the opposite. 

The author is very cynical about the value of crypto and motivates many of the leading characters. It provides a much broader exploration of many of the scams and charades that resulted in a massive crash of crypto asset values that affected people worldwide.

Even though I’ve been following the crypto markets closely for many years, there is much in this book that was new to me, and the writing style was engaging and fun. If you choose to read the book, know that the author is a cynic about all things crypto related, and then enjoy it!

The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by Gavin de Becker

This book might save your life.

Intuition is powerful, and the human fear response is wisdom rising from the depths of our being to help us navigate the world. Unlike anxious and worried thoughts, real fear is a gift and something to be paid attention to. Ironically, real fear readies the body and mind to act in ways that logic cannot compare with.

The book was most interesting for the detailed (and at times graphic) stories of violence and deconstruction of the signs and signals that were present but went unheeded by people who have learned to ignore their intuition (which is great at detecting real danger) and instead live in perpetual worry (created by the mind) or mindlessness when they need not.

I’m not joking when I say that this book might change your life and save your life. Just read the first 50 pages and I think you’ll get the point. I found that after that, the book got a bit repetitive and burdened with frameworks, but you can get the punchline in the first several chapters, and it will leave paying attention to your intuition in a way that you never have before.