I’m Back, Baby
Every year since 2016 I’ve made a list of the books I read that year. That list has taken various formats. Since I started writing this blog consistently, I did it for 2022 and 2023. Unfortunately, both of those years were sort of disappointments when it comes to the volume of reading I got done. Well, after a massive post-COVID slump in my reading habits, I finally broke the curse. This year I matched my all-time-high of reading 41 books from back in 2018. Felt pretty good.
/w=3840,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
When I wrote about my reading habits last year, I said I would “lick my wounds and reflect on how to make more room for reading.” Well, I certainly managed to make more room. As I look back on what made that possible there are two things that I think helped.
Always Be Reading
Source: YouTube
Last year in chastising myself for only having read 11 books, the fewest in one year since before college I think, I talked about a specific quote from Ryan Holiday about finding more spaces in my life that could be filled with reading:
“You should always have a book with you. Always. People often assume something about me: that I’m a speed reader. It’s the most common email I get. They see all the books I recommend every month in my reading newsletter and assume I must have some secret. They want to know my trick for reading so fast. The truth is, even though I read hundreds of books each year, I actually read quite slow. In fact, I read deliberately slow. But what I also do is read all the time. I am always carrying a book with me. Every time I get a second, I crack it open. I don’t install games on my phone—that’s time for reading. When I’m eating, on a plane, in a waiting room, or sitting in traffic in an Uber—I read. There’s no trick, no secret, no shortcut. I like B.H. Liddell Hart’s old line that sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home. If you put the time in, you get the results.”
That is, effectively, what I did this year. I deleted Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, and TikTok from my phone and blocked them. The first few weeks I could feel myself jonesing for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit. But I persisted. Instead, my Kindle app became my #1 app. It’s what I turn to every time I open my phone. For example, in one particular day my Kindle app was 70%+ of my iPhone usage that day:
But it wasn’t just the time spent on my phone reading. I also created reading opportunities in other spaces in my life.
For example, my wife and I have a routine that I love where we make sure we spend at least a little bit of time together every night. Granted, it got interrupted by our new baby, but we’ll get back into the swing eventually. The routine was every night we put the kids down around 8 PM and then from 8-9 or so we would watch TV. We’ve watched Mr. Robot, Fargo, Succession, The Bear, Veep, Nobody Wants This, and on and on. That’s our time together. Tangentially, my wife and I often listen to audiobooks together on road trips and we had started listening to Lonesome Dove on one drive. So I proposed to my wife that, instead of an hour of TV together every night, what if we did 30 minutes of listening to our audiobook together and then watched TV. That’s where we read Lonesome Dove, Demon Copperhead, and Streets of Laredo.
At night, our bedtime routine with the kids is baths from 7-7:30 or so, which leaves us 30 minutes to read scriptures and say prayers. But we don’t always use that whole time, so my wife has started reading with the kids. That’s where we read The BFG and A Wrinkle in Time. We just switched so that now our 8-year old is reading Harry Potter to us at night.
Finally, my gym routine switched so I’m spending an extra hour early in the mornings on the treadmill so that I can read my Kindle while walking and then an hour in a workout class while listening to audiobooks. That’s where I read The Idea Factory, Brave New World, The Man From The Future, Patriot Games, and Without Remorse.
In Pursuit of Something
One other thing I did wasn’t something I deliberately intended to increase my reading habit, but boy did it. For Contrary Research, we spent a year researching and writing a book about Anduril as a company. More on that to come! As part of going deep on the defense industry, I wanted to read some of the quintessential books. So I read Skunk Works and The Kill Chain. Then I wanted to revisit some fiction I’d read about possible future outcomes in a global conflict between China, Russia, and the US, so I re-read 2034 and then I read the sequel, 2054. Finally, I wanted to go deeper into the rich history of technology and defense during and after World War II, so I read The Idea Factory and The Man From The Future. Finally, I wanted to round out my exposure to some of the key conflict areas, like nuclear weapons and semiconductors, so I read Nuclear War: a Scenario and Chip War.
Again, this wasn’t deliberate. I needed to go deep on defense and I wanted to do the work to read the books. It just so happened that that exercise led me to reading 8 books on the subject. Later, I read an essay by Packy McCormick that touched me deeply, called Read More Books. In it, he perfectly captured the experience I had going deep on defense. He explains the approach this way:
“Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel has this idea about building a “white hot core” when starting a marketplace. The idea is that you shouldn’t try to serve everyone at once, at the beginning, but should begin by nailing the product for a very specific, constrained problem or niche. Prioritize retention over growth. Then, and only then, once your small niche of users really loves your product, you can expand outward into adjacent niches and problems. I’ve always been a little jealous of the way that it seems people like Byrne [Hobart] and Ben Thompson’s brains work. From the outside, it seems like they have a scaffolding in their brain, and then, whenever any new information comes in, they can simply hang it on that scaffolding. That’s why they can write five excellent essays a week when I struggle to write one. I haven’t asked them about this, but what I think is actually happening – other than just raw horsepower – is something similar to Sarah’s white hot core idea. Read a lot of high-quality stuff on a certain topic or time period. Recognize connections, reinforce them, prioritize retention over growth. Then, and only then, once your core is established, expand outward.”
Understanding what “white hot cores” I’m trying to develop is a key way to read more. What do I want to learn more about? And what books would contribute to that knowledge base? And then go nuts.
While defense is certainly the most extensive knowledge core I focused on this year, this is a good segue into something I do every year anyway. But thinking about it through the lens of a “knowledge core” has been instructive. Here are some of the themes inherent in a lot of the reading I did over the course of 2024.
Themes
Defense
Obviously already unpacked this one above. But I’ve got to say, having never really read much about the defense industry, it actually feels like a fairly effective scaffolding to expand into just about any other knowledge area. Human history is built on conflict. Those conflicts have become more complex over time. Increasingly, things like technology, diplomacy, economics, human psychology, and culture have played an even deeper role in how these conflicts play out.
Books like Skunk Works are a crash course in the psychology of how to build an exceptional engineering organization. While Skunk Works is part of Lockheed, this excerpt from our Anduril book is instructive, though it uses Boeing as the example:
William Boeing, who founded Boeing in 1916, held a very high standard for his company, enforcing a culture that prized quality. “After noticing some shoddy workmanship on his production line [he said] that he would close up shop rather than send out work of this kind.”
But this long standing culture of excellence was watered down in August 1997 when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell Douglas was known for building military planes, but had a questionable reputation, at best, for commercial planes. Douglas launched a commercial airliner called the DC-10 in the 70s, for example, which over the course of its life resulted in 1.2K fatalities! Quartz later described the merger like this:
“In a clash of corporate cultures, where Boeing’s engineers and McDonnell Douglas’s bean-counters went head-to-head, the smaller company [meaning McDonnell Douglas] won out. The result was a move away from expensive, ground-breaking engineering and toward what some called a more cut-throat culture, devoted to keeping costs down and favoring upgrading older models at the expense of wholesale innovation.”
Innovation doesn’t just happen. When people talk about how programs like defense and space exploration have pushed the edge of technological innovation forward its the kind of engineering-first organizations that defied the odds. The stories of Bell Labs in The Idea Factory and DARPA in The Man Who Knew The Future outline similar cultures.
But increasingly we face incredibly complex issues like the threat of nuclear war, geopolitical chokeholds like Taiwan, increasing volatility in nations around the world. So much of what you could possibly be interested in learning are often tied up in the question of how do the nations of the world regard each other.
Trauma
This year was my first experience with therapy, both marital and personal therapy. And in part because of that, but also in part because it was some of the fiction I was drawn to, I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about trauma. Books like Demon Copperhead, Boy Raised as a Dog, and Braving The Wilderness were filled with stories, both real and fictional, that illustrated some of the experiences people have had and what impact that had on their ability to function as an individual. More than anything, reading about other people’s trauma put into perspective any hardship of my own. It’s just not anywhere near as bad as it could be.
Intellectual Faith
Each year, I try and find books that touch on aspects of my faith in addition to the things I read for work or entertainment. Books like Leap of Faith, Restoration: God’s Call to the 21st Century, Witness and a Warning, Faith of a Scientist, and Stretching Heaven largely revolve around this question of “why do I believe?” I’ve never identified with the radicalized religionists of modern Christianity who use a fuzzy picture of Jesus to bludgeon other people with their beliefs in the name of “freedom of religion.”
Increasingly, I’ve tried to embrace the nuance of my religion. I think The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints offers one of the most interesting and compelling cosmologies of any system of belief with which I’m familiar. And I don’t think I have to be dumb or believe in magic I can’t see. My experiences in life open up my heart to the possibility of a soul, but the presence of a soul touches on things that compel me towards certain answers. And these types of books are aspects of that feeling. That feeling that faith and reason don’t have to be at odds with each other.
Knowing America
Finally, I found myself engaging with a number of books that took me on a tour of America’s character. From the establishment of America through the settlement of the west, with Blood Meridian, Lonesome Dove, and Streets of Laredo, to the modern trappings of what’s going on in America, whether its an under appreciation of our physical assets, like in A Walk in the Woods, to the raging opioid epidemic that touches the loves of the characters in Demon Copperhead.
Reading as a Parent
Beyond a tradition of revisiting themes, I have another tradition when it comes to reflecting on my reading. Each year, I always come back to wanting to clearly state how important reading is to me not just as an individual, but as a parent.
I’ve frequently seen people point to claims like ones in this 2010 study, saying “Books in home as important as parents' education in determining children's education level.” Others saying that even a modest number of books in the home, like 20, can have a material impact on a child’s educational outcomes. I haven’t dug into the data or methodology here so who knows.
But my gut tells me that if you take a couple with children who never read and you drop 20 books in their house it won’t be nearly as impactful as having parents who have actually read 20 books (at least.) My perspective is that its not just the presence of books but of bookishness. The more reading you do as a parent, the more you open up your child’s neurological pathways. The more capable they become of creating new connections, new ideas, and expanding their brains.
So, as I reflect back on my reading from the past year, I do it with that in the back of my mind as well. I’m not just reading for me but so that my kids have a reader as a Dad.
The Books I Read This Year
The year began with a re-read of probably the single book that has best summed up my religious perspective. Being a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints requires a leap of faith. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t without some evidence that can make the leap just a little bit easier. This is the kind of religious writing that I strive to support, provide, and consume.
A key theme throughout the year was focusing on diving deep into the defense industry and Skunk Works felt like the best starting point. While innovation in American defense has stagnated, Lockheed’s Skunk Works was the golden standard for how to build complex things. One of the best culture of creativity books out there, and a key insight into defense primes before they got carried away with perverse incentives.
Next up in my defense binge was the book written by Christian Brose who was a former senior advisor to Senator John McCain and is now the Chief Strategy Officer of Anduril. He perfectly captures what the defense paradigm has become and what needs to happen if America is going to maintain strong enough military capabilities to ensure conflict deterrence.
As part of trying to create more space in my life for reading I’ve started to take advantage of the morning hours before I take my kids to school. I already love Brandon Sanderson’s other books, so when I found out he’s also written children’s books, that felt like the perfect place to start. Now, for 10-15 minutes before the boys head off to school we read a book like this.
This has been on the list of books I needed to read for a long time. This is an impressive book on its own, but its particularly mind bending when you find out it was written in 1992. This was the first audiobook I listened to this year and it felt like exceptional world building. A combination of the underlying foundation of VR, a massive mystery, and the ramifications of mass consumerism all wrapped into one.
I’ve been trying to dive deeper into the rabbit holes of my own religion. A commonly cited work around understanding The Book of Mormon as a key part of any testimony for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is this one. A quick read, but one that was important as I went deeper into the rabbit holes around what I believe and why.
My wife bought me another book by Bill Bryson called The Lost Continent that I read in 2018 and since then I’ve been hooked. Not just on travel writing, but specifically on Bill Bryson. He’s one of the most enjoyable authors I read, and this one was no exception. Especially finding that America became a theme for me, in particular exploring and understanding regions like Appalachia, it was a perfect fit.
The second re-read of the year, I decided to revisit this one as part of my defense deep dive. It was also a good lead-in to reading the sequel, 2054. This one, more than the sequel, always captures my attention because it feels so possible. Despite how foreboding it is, its based on realistic parameters in geopolitics, and feels important for anyone trying to day dream about the future of conflict.
My therapist recommended this book to me and it was certainly a crash course in understanding how much trauma shapes who we are and what we’re capable of. From exceptionally distressing trauma, to light neglect, there is so much context to anyone’s brain chemistry that is important in understanding who they are and who we are as well.
The sequel to 2034. It was certainly interesting, especially given how much I love Ray Kurzweil. But just like any exercise in forecasting, I think the further you get from the present the harder it is to anchor futuristic science fiction in current existing facts. The same was true here. This was just too far afield for me to get as much out of that felt practical. That being said, it was still plenty enjoyable.
My wife has been recommending Barbara Kingsolver to me for a long time and last year even got to go see her in person. After the number of times she talked about this book, I decided I had to read it. And it was a thoroughly powerful book. Speaking of trauma, this was certainly a massive undertaking to capture the frustrations of an upbringing that, unfortunately, many people have experienced.
Another recommendation from my therapist, this was one that helped me unpack the courage required to not hate yourself. Being able to understand how much everyone is, in reality, alone, and how much courage it requires anyone to try and accept themselves.
I had the privilege of reading an advanced copy of this one. I’ve never been a big crypto fan, but boy am I fan of drama and Nat supplies that in spades. Having done some trading and felt the anxiety of timing the market, I could literally feel Nat’s blood pulsing through the pages. I anxiously went for my phone to check my own brokerage accounts more than once.
Final therapist recommendation, this one I’ve got to say… I’m not sure I really got.
First stumbled across this on a recommendation from Patrick Collison but I’ve got to say its one of the most frighteningly compelling books I’ve ever read. It’s a combination of non-fiction explanation and fictional scenario drama. This is, I think, one of the most important books anyone could read that doesn’t appreciate the hair-trigger world we live in.
I’ve been hearing people apply the “hell yeah or no” framework for years, but it wasn’t until a year or so ago that I found out it was a book! Derek Sivers is one of my heroes, in large part because of the philosophy with which he lives his life. I’ve spent far too much of my time worrying about things that I’m lukewarm. But per Derek Sivers’ advice, and in the words of the good Lord himself, “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
In late 2023, I launched a podcast called Research Radio as part of Contrary Research. After a few episodes I had more respect for exceptional interviewers than I ever had before. When I thought about people like Patrick O’Shaughnessy, I found myself reflecting on what made them so good. After asking several folks who had done a number of high-profile interviews, this book was recommended more than enough times to convince me that I needed to read it.
I’m a big fan of the Founders podcast and, in particular, love the way he connects ideas across very different characters. But one story, in particular, stuck with me. Not just because of how impactful it was, but because it was so close to home. I went to BYU, I had met Gail Miller, and I had bought my first car as a married man from a Larry H. Miller dealership. So when the podcast talked about how, in Larry H. Miller’s autobiography, Driven, he ends it with an honest and heartbreaking admission of regret, that stuck with me. And in June 2024 when I was writing The Hardening of the Great Softening, the concept was just too relevant for me to not read the book for myself.
As part of our new tradition of reading with the kids at night this was the first book we chose. And the chance to get to read the book and then watch the movie with our kids was quite enjoyable. In particular, our very sharp 8 year old was quite good at spotting the ways the movie differed from the book, and deciding what he liked or didn’t like.
Each year, I try and read some things that explore the relationship between faith and scientist. I certainly consider myself an actively faithful person who believes in a specific God and a surrounding mythos. But I also consider myself a relatively logical person, and I don’t feel dramatic inconsistencies between my faith and science. So reading about how others have balanced those things is a good way to explore that kind of perspective.
I feel like I’ve been assembling my perspective on Bell Labs like a puzzle over the course of years. From Bill Shockley and the Traitorous Eight to Claude Shannon, I’ve come across this pieces of the puzzle. But this book brought it together. Right up there with Skunk Works, its an exceptional overview of how incredible cultures are built. Not to mention how much it helps to have a monopoly like AT&T supporting your ability to innovate.
I was talking to a good friend of mine about how much I loved books like The Storm Testament or Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses and he said, “well, I’m sure you love Lonesome Dove.” Not only did I not love it, I hadn’t ever even heard of it. He was nice enough to immediately order me a copy of the book. My wife and I read it for a while, but its a heavy read so instead we turned to the audiobook version and listened to it together at night before we went to bed. And sure enough, I did end up loving it.
I don’t remember where I first came across Ryan Holiday, but he’s always been at the back of mind as a content creator that I have a lot of respect for. Taking a time-tested tradition, like Stoicism, and helping make it accessible to the masses. Some might dismiss it as being akin to pop economics or pop psychology, but I think instead its the art of being able to act as a window through which other people can look and see how a particular philosophy works.
I’ve enjoyed a lot of Cormac McCarthy from The Road to the Border Trilogy. So much so that I tried to convince my wife to name our fourth son Mac. And Blood Meridian had been on my list for awhile even though I didn’t really know what it was about. But upon reading it, I discovered I was reading the Great American Novel. I also learned that my habit of reading fiction via audiobook doesn’t work for books that are almost as much poetry as they are prose. As a result, as much as I enjoyed this book I most certainly need to read it again with the actual page rather than with a narration.
This one was an indirect recommendation from Patrick O’Shaughnessy. He tweeted a picture of the intro to Amusing Ourselves To Death where it compared the dystopias of Huxley vs. Orwell. I had read 1984 several times, but I hadn’t read Brave New World, though it had come up multiple times. So I decided to read it. Suffice it to say, it is much closer to the truth than the doomsday scenario. The more likely outcome in the world today is that we are subjugated not by pain, but by pleasure. A cautionary tale if ever there was one.
Lucky me, when I bought the copy of Brave New World that I stumbled on in the Kindle app, it was a two-for-one because it came with a collection of essays Huxley wrote years later where he reflected back on Brave New World. One thing that struck me as a cry from a bygone era was his concern about overpopulation. But other than that, it was chilling to hear him reflect on something he wrote before WWII with the benefit of hindsight in a post Hitler world.
Another book we got to read in our pre-bed time family time. My wife, Camden, has always talked about loving this book when she was younger. I had never read it. So reading it was interesting and instructive. I can’t say it was one of my favorite books but I can see why it strikes a tone of wonder for a lot of people.
I’ve always been a fan of Mitt Romney. I was a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when he ran for president in 2012 and it created an exceptional opportunity to talk about my faith. Later, I spent some time working with Solamere Capital, which was run by his son, Tagg Romney. That was where I first got to meet Mitt, only very briefly. But every interaction I saw him in, my respect grew. This book is the perfect encapsulation of why he is such a respectable figure despite liberals not thinking he’s brave enough or Republicans not thinking he’s Republican enough.
I was at Pioneer Book, one of my favorite bookstore, and there was some insane sale. “Buy 7+ books --> get 18% OFF. Buy 24+ books --> get 47% OFF.” My first thought was “who in God’s name is buying 7 or 24 books at once? But then I realized that I could be that person. So I went looking for 24 books to buy. And one series caught my eye: Tom Clancy’s Ryanverse. I remembered watching some of the Harrison Ford movies when I was a kid and I had enjoyed parts of the Jim Halpert version of the stories, so I thought I ought to see what the fuss is all about and read the books and I enjoyed it.
This year has been a year where I read the books of people who I first came across on Twitter, rather than reading the book and then following the person (second one after Crypto Confidential by Nat Eliason.) I started following Ananyo Bhattacharya because I enjoyed his thoughts on Twitter. Only later did I realize he had written a book so I indulged and enjoyed it very much. Coincidentally, it paired perfectly with my defense deep dive and went right along with some of the themes from The Idea Factory.
My second Tom Clancy adventure. I have to say that I really enjoyed this book. It was a pretty interesting story of vigilante justice and I loved it. But the juxtaposition of how much I liked this book to how much I absolutely HATED the movie they made in 2021… it actually turned me off from Tom Clancy books, so I just stopped reading them. The book was such a good tale of justice within sin while the movie was a gobbledygook hodge podge of Russian subplots and grand standing. Read the book. Don’t watch the movie.
Another one that had been on my list for awhile. It was a combination of my defense deep dive and our plans at Contrary Research to publish a piece in 2025 along the lines of “How To Build an American TSMC.” Because of that, it felt like it was a corpus of knowledge that I couldn’t leave out of my “white hot core” of knowledge in these particular areas.
I read Wicked when I was pretty young and didn’t remember too much about it. But with the new movie coming out it stirred in me a recollection of some thoughts I’ve had around revisionist history. And because those kinds of stories are so compelling to me, I wanted to re-read the book to re-examine that perspective. And it didn’t disappoint. I ended up writing about it in What Wicked Taught Me About B2B Sales a few weeks ago.
Along my theme of reading books that explore my faith in a more pragmatic way, this was a book that was a good reminder of a key idea in religion. This is true in just about every organized religion, but its just as true in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — there is doctrine and there is culture, and they are not always the same. This was a good exploration of how my faith has allowed generations of culture to define some core aspects of what we do in a way that probably aren’t requirements for us to feel true to the things we believe.
A friend of mine, out of the blue, recommended the Murderbot Diaries to me and I was hooked immediately. First, I’m a big fan of simple science fiction that leaves open doors to a dramatically expansive world. Second, since I listened to it as an audiobook, I was caught off guard by how short it was. I’m used to 40+ hour audiobooks from Brandon Sanderson and the like. This one I finished in ~2 hours and am planning to start 2025 tackling the subsequent 6 books in the series.
After loving Lonesome Dove, I talked to my friend (the original recommender) about the sequels. “I hated the sequel. Don’t read it.” I was gobsmacked. For as much as I loved Lonesome Dove, how could I not read the sequel? Later, I found a Reddit AMA with Larry McMurtry. One question was about his attempted message and his answer was a critical lens into his perspective: “I’ve tried as hard as I could to demythologize the West. Can’t do it. It’s impossible. I wrote Lonesome Dove, which I thought was a long critique of western mythology. It is now the chief source of western mythology. I didn’t shake it up at all.” So if you go into Streets of Laredo knowing it represents his attempt to, once again, demythologize the west, and make it as harsh and rough as can be, you’ll be better off.
After reading the first book in the Alcatraz series, my kids and I read this one together. First, in the mornings before school and then later together while on a road trip. Brandon Sanderson proves shockingly adept at both mass sweeping stories, like The Stormlight Archive and Mistborn, and engaging children’s literature here as well.
Another book that I read because of a friend I made on the internet. As much of “content creation” is built around other people’s perspectives, I’m a sucker for impactful explainers. And that’s what Kyla offers here. Its not her ranting pontifications on the economy. It’s an attempt at helping people who clearly DON’T understand the fundamentals of economics to better grasp the forces at work in the world around them.
The last book in my theme of exploring pragmatic faith, this is a biography of a man who was not exactly in the mainstream of “Mormon” culture, but had a profound impact on it. This book is particularly good at helping articulate why a “think for yourself” religion is critical. Anytime dogma starts to become the core north star for any group your ability to grow, progress, or learn becomes much more limited. Joseph Smith was an enemy to dogma. But in the nearly 100 years since he was the prophet, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has most certainly struggled with an attachment to dogma over doctrine.
I enjoyed Demon Copperhead so much that when I asked my wife what other books from Barbara Kingsolver I should read this was her first recommendation. And, once again, she proves extremely capable of making me care a LOT about characters who are in a situation I haven’t necessarily been in.
Finally at the very end of the year I got around to reading the book that had made me think I should read Brave New World first. And I can say having read 1984 AND Brave New World it certainly hit close to home the contrast. More broadly, I’ve written before about “becoming unprogrammable” but its clearly easier said than done. The world is set up in such a way that we struggle to kick against the status quo of becoming entertained to the point of moving past feeling.