Paying penance for procrastination…these are my favorite books from four years ago. I can’t say I entirely remember my reasoning, but I’ve done my best to reconstruct what I can.
1. Where is Your Body? by Mari Matsuda (reread 2018): A remarkably friendly critical race theory book (wikipedia def: a theoretical framework in the social sciences that examines society and culture as they relate to categorizations of race, law, and power). Where is Your Body? Is a collection of essays looking at Matsuda’s experiences as a Japanese-American woman law professor (one of the only in the country). Although the book is 23 years old, it reads like something that could have come out a few years ago. It earned the top spot in 2017 for its lucidity, accessibility, and compelling presentation of race issues.
2. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman: A classic book in the field of design, Norman gives a thorough exploration of terms and principles. I enjoyed it for giving me a language to understand the design of objects.
3. Smarter, Better, Faster by Charles Duhigg: Duhigg presents eight concrete, but broadly applicable, patterns for more effective work. Duhigg’s journalistic style makes ample use of stories which do an excellent job of illustrating his points while being easy to follow. The book made it into my top five for being “a book I would have written had I gotten there first.”
4. Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock (reread 2019): A book about individuals who were able to predict geopolitical events better professional intelligence agents by a significant margin, and what made those people so good at forecasting. I liked the book for how systematically it broke down the techniques used by Superforecasters. The part that’s stuck with me is how Superforecasters were able to successfully aggregate bits of information from a variety of sources into one cohesive number – it’s an unusually methodical way of knowing.
5. Antifragile by Nicholas Nassib Taleb. Antifragility is the property of something that gets stronger as you introduce disorder, as opposed to fragile things which break when disorder is introduced or durable things which largely stay the same when disorder is introduced. Ex. Your muscles get stronger when you strain them (up to a certain point). The book explores a wide variety of manifestations of this concept. The strength of the single concept is what got the book its spot.
Honorable Mention: Give and Take by Adam Grant (reread 2020): The main thrust of the book is that there are three styles of reciprocity: takers (who try to get more than they give), matchers (who do tit for tat), and givers (who give more than they get). Who gets ahead in the business world? The common impression is that takers do, but as it turns out, givers who are able to look out for their self interest go much further. It’s a great comfort to know that outstanding success aligns more with giving than taking, and the book provides decent blueprints for how giving can look.
Other contenders:
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Pragmatic Philosopher 