Favorite Books of 2023

Previously: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

In 2023, I read 100 books, much fewer than in previous years. This is partly due to the fact that we are in a golden age of podcasting, and partly due to the fact that I’m still in the middle of reading some extremely long books. You can view my 2023 reading list on Goodreads. Each year, I blog about my favorite books, an idea I got from the incomparable Aaron Swartz.

Without further ado, here are my...

Top 10 Favorite Books Read in 2023

1) The Founders by Jimmy Soni. This book tells the history of the legendary PayPal mafia. I hung on every word. It’s astonishing that so many of Silicon Valley’s most legendary talent - from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk to David Sacks - were all working together at the same time. The lessons those founders learned would go on to shape the future of the tech industry.

2) The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. I finally read this book after hearing it mentioned so many times in Annie Hall. While the book contains a lot of outdated psychobabble from the likes of Freud and Adler, the core thesis is strong: man's driving motive is his fear of death. According to the author, this fear can be dealt with in two primary ways:

1) People take on “Immortality Projects.” They attempt to write a great symphony, launch a rocket, cure a disease, break a record, or donate a building with their name on it. Others devote their lives to a nation, religion, or cause that will live on after they die. Even having children fits under this “Immortality Project” bracket. If something lives on after your death, then your life was not meaningless.

2) For people who don't find an immortality project, the author believes there are two paths:

A) Hedonism. Some people chase pleasure to distract themselves from not having worked hard at an Immortality Project.

B) Frivolous busyness. Some people devote themselves to working hard, simply to distract themselves.

The author’s goal seems to be to broaden the field of psychology to include "fear of death" as a major driver in people's lives.

3) Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins. I really enjoyed this book by one of the toughest Navy Seals of all time. Goggins’ words pulsate with motivation. Born into poverty, and with a congenital hole in his heart, David Goggins grew up facing a daunting amount of injustice and bad luck. He washed out of BUDS and Delta Force twice each, but he just kept picking himself back up and working harder. One reads this book and wants to go conquer empires.

4) Atomic Habits by James Clear. This is one of the best productivity books I’ve come across. I read it twice this year because there are so many excellent ideas to absorb. I will probably read it again for motivation in 2024.

5) The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe. In 1974, Tom Wolfe realized that each piece of Post-Modern art is really about pushing an edgy concept, and not about the quality of the artwork itself. The art exists to serve the verbal idea. He goes on to describe the path in which artists find success in the past century: (1) look and act counter-cultural and bohemian (2) move to the big city where it's all happening (3) find something new and even more abstract to do in art (4) profess to hate the wealthy bourgeois elites (5) desperately hope to get noticed by them (6) cash in, all while despising them and being anti-elite. When Wolfe relates the history of the art world from the 1930s to the 1970s, it's sad how nothing has changed in this dynamic. Who truly likes Post Modern art? What happened to art that could be appreciated without a pseudo-intellectual explanation? Wolfe presents the New York critics as the kingmakers, and claims that the artists now follow what the critics tell them - instead of the other way around. I believe that history will look back on Pop Art and see that the emperor has no clothes.

6) The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku. This is the incredible autobiography of a holocaust survivor. Eddie escaped Nazi captivity several times during the Holocaust - fleeing a German cattle car and even running away from the 1945 death march. Along his journey, he was betrayal by Belgians, Poles, French people, and his own German neighbors. This really brings home the fact that it takes a whole continent of complicit people to pull off a genocide. Eddie dealt with so much injustice and suffering and yet somehow managed to survive and find happiness.

7) The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. This is certainly the most fun book I’ve ever read about grammar. One of this book’s recurring themes is exposing how many of the so-called grammar rules we were all taught growing up are actually fallacious. For instance, the proscription against ending a sentence with a preposition, or not splitting infinitives, are both examples of over-applying Latin rules to our Germanic sentence structures.

8) Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner. I always assumed the CIA to be more competent than their public record suggests. My reasoning was that the public only hears about the CIA’s failures (like anticipating 9/11), but never hears about the 9/11s the CIA prevents. This book, however, stamped out my optimism…

Armed with interviews and reams of declassified documents, the author’s contention is that the CIA has bungled nearly every job it has ever been tasked with. The CIA believed that the Soviets would never develop the A-Bomb, then failed to find out when the Soviets did build the A-Bomb, and then vastly overestimated how many atom bombs the Soviets eventually produced. The CIA had essentially zero insight into the Soviet Union for 40 years, while the Soviets successfully gained massive and unfettered access to the CIA. The CIA completely missed the Chinese invasion of Korea - one of the most impactful intelligence errors of the last century. The CIA bungled coups, bought elections, or tried to depose democratically-elected presidents in Italy, Chile, Guatemala, Chad, Cuba, Panama, Iran, Vietnam, and Indonesia, to name but a few. Along the way, CIA chiefs lied to congress and to sitting US Presidents in order to hide their mistakes and advance their own foreign policy agendas. The CIA abandoned America’s Hmong allies in Laos, and started the Vietnam war by telling President Johnson that it was the Vietnamese who shot first. The author paints a portrait of reckless incompetence, government waste, alcoholism, and illegal spying on Americans. Due to its clandestine nature, the CIA receives very little oversight, and thus rarely has to acknowledge its mistakes until decades after the fact.

9) The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. An empathetic and devastating critique of how a well-meaning Generation X has raised an often overly sensitive Generation Z. The authors do an excellent job of explaining the apparent insanity that often occurs on college campuses. They compare the campus environment to the Chinese cultural revolution and other witch hunts in history; these movements spring up suddenly, are fueled by the youth, take massive insult from trivialities, demand ideological purity, and create an environment where everyone is afraid to speak up. I found this to be a very convincing book, grounded in research and cogently explained. While nearly every Gen Z person I know in real life does not fit the stereotype presented in the media, this book does address the alarming news-grabbing events that have rocked campuses for the past decade.

10) And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer And Longer by Fredrik Backman. This novella, by the Swedish author of A Man Called Ove, is about a grandfather with Alzheimer’s saying goodbye to his family. The writing is gorgeous, evocative, poetic, and daring. Much of the novella takes place inside the grandfather’s mind as he loses track of his memories. This is the height of good fiction; it is original, tender, funny, tragic, and explores universal human truths. It is very sad to say goodbye to someone who is still there.