Still not sure how I hit 25 books last year. Raised my target from 12 to 15 this year.
10. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup By John Carreyrou
“Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry. But it’s crucial to bear in mind that Theranos wasn’t a tech company in the traditional sense. It was first and foremost a health-care company”
Summary: The tale of how a young woman dropped out from Stanford to start a company called Theranos, that would revolutionise healthcare by creating a device that could run hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood from a fingerprint. Only problem was that it was all built on a lie. The book dives into how she was able to keep the lie going as long as it did. It has a detailed timeline of key events and red flags throughout the history of the company. It is a story of dishonesty and deceipt, arrogance and vanity, fear-mongering and intimidation. Elizabeth and her #2, Sunny, went to extremes to prevent the truth from coming out so special praise should be given to the brave souls who came forward with information that exposed the company for what it really was and prevented more people getting in harm’s way.
Fun fact: I had heard about Theranos a few years ago and thought it was great what they were doing so I was suprised when it got exposed as a sham. Also my first read on a Kindle!!
9. Taking Up Space: The Black Girl’s Manifesto for Change By Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi
“The pressure of feeling as if you’re obliged to constantly fight for your people can become a burden… Learning to say no to this ‘obligation’ is difficult. Not only are we always expected to fight, it is assumed that all we care about is fighting, and that we will always want to fight. But sometimes we want to rest and recover and focus on staying sane in what is already a troubling environment”
Summary: This is a book primarily targeted at black girls coming of age as they go into universities or other essentially predominantly white institutions. The authors describe their experiences mostly in university and offer some advice to those that might be going through the same things. . It talks about topics like the general whiteness of academia, mental health, activism, fitting in and even desirability and relationships. The quotes from other interviewees in the book also help reiterate some of their points. The little tidbit stories they use also helped follow the narrative of the experiences. A lot of it feels like things I have heard somewhere else (maybe at uni) but the points definitely still need reiteration. Lovely read but a bit lacking on concrete solutions, for me. However I would still thoroughly recommend it! I’ve always found it interesting reading other people’s experience of university.
Fun Fact: Believe it or not, I actually feature indirectly in this book haha. Strange reading a book about things you also lived through, well sort of anyways.Go support these lovely ladies, it’s a great fun book.
8. The Black Market By James Patterson
“There’s nothing you can believe in anymore. After Watergate, you couldn’t believe in the President. After Viet Nam, you couldn’t believe in our military’s moral stance. You can’t believe in Church leaders anymore. Now? Now you can’t even believe in the almighty dollar”
Summary: Starts off with a terrorist attack on Wall Street and ends similarly. Thought this book would be a great read from me because I generally like espionage/thrillers but I found that it took way too long to get going and the big bang at the end was more of a whimper. Must say the book was written in 1984 so some of the references were a bit dated. It did give Wall Street and politics a lot of sick burns with the critiques of them in the book. And shined some lights on the plight of Vets from the Vietnam war. I did not really feel a connection to any of the characters so this book was easily forgettable, a bit of a shame because it started and finished off so well
Fun Fact: Got this on the book swap from a friend. He said it seemed like the kind of book I would enjoy and he was right. I did think the same as well when I started.
7. Brief Answers To The Big Questions By Stephen Hawking
“If the laws of science are suspended at the beginning of the universe, might not they fail at other times? A law is not a law if it only holds sometimes. I believe that we should try to understand the beginning of the universe on the basis of science. It may be a task beyond our powers, but at least we should make the attempt”
Summary: The final book by Stephen Hawking before his death. It is a book that is essentially a collection of his responses to 10 big questions. Some are deep questions where we come from like “Is there a God?” and “How did it all begin”, others are about what is theoritically possible like time travel and predicting the future. There are chapters where he predicts the future of things like surviving on earth and AI outsmarting us and others where he offers recommendations like how to shape the future and whether we should colonise space. It is a really well written book and easy to follow, though some of the science (quantum physics and the physics of black holes in particular) was admittedly harder to follow. For the questions relating to religion, he is very respectful of others faith .He breaks things down simplistically and with some subtle humour and in general his answers offer optimism. He really lived an incredible life.
Fun Fact: 3rd book in a row with ties to a movie. Well a bit of a reach for this but have not seen Theory Of Everything. If this is anything to go buy, I will be adding “A Brief History Of Time” to my reading list.
6. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo [Fiction] By Stieg Larsson
“I think you’re wrong. It’s not an insane serial killer who read his Bible wrong. It’s just a common or garden bastard who hates women”
Summary: Another book with a movie I haven’t seen. This one revolves around Mikael Blomkvist a disgraced journalist and the girl with the dragon tattoo, Salander: a badass detective. Blomkvist ends up investigating the death/disappearance of a business mogul’s daughter which happened many years ago. That there were some of the turns I was able to predict, is usually a bad indicator for a crime mystery but I still really enjoyed this one. The focus on other themes like financial impropriety, guardianships, mental health and Swedish Nazis were really insightful. The focal point on this book however, is really to highlight how much violence, especially of a sexual nature against women there is and how much of it usually goes unpunished. To drive home that point, each of the four parts of the book begins with a statistic about sexual assault against women in Sweden. Extremely tempted to buy the sequels after reading this.
Fun fact: Again, would like to watch the movie having now read the book. On a sadder note, the author of the book died shortly after sending the manuscripts to his publisher. So tragic he didn’t get to witness the success.
5. Life of Pi [Fiction] By Yann Martell
“[fear] seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine lights of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to futher attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you”
Summary: Boy stuck with Tiger on a boat. That’s all I knew about Life Of Pi before I read the book. But it is really so much more than that. It’s a book about faith. Pi Patel, the main character and a deep curiousity in Christianity, Islam and Hinduism and the religious themes play throughout the novel. He grew up in a zoo and was moving with his family and some zoo animals to Canada, when the ship crashed and thus began that longest 272 days on his life. Stuck on a boat with a tiger. It takes you through how he survived using tricks he learnt growing up at the zoo and does a very good job of painting a picture of how bleak it was out there in the Pacific. But at the end he tells a different darker story and leaves it up to the reader to decide which to believe. Special shoutout to the interview with the guys from Japan at the end of the book, those guys were jokes.
Fun fact: Having now read the book, I would like to watch the movie to compare because how it could make a great movie. Author had me man, legit thought most of the story was real looool
4. Meditations By Marcus Aurelius
“As far as you can, get into the habit of asking yourself in relation to any action taken by another: ‘What is his point of reference here?’ But begin with yourself: examine yourself first”
Summary: Meditations is a series of short observations and reflections made by Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. It read like he wrote it for himself rather than as a way of preaching his way of living and thinking to an audience. These meditations focused on some core themes like the futility of fame, ephemerality of life, being good, going through pain, the right state of mind, truthfulness, community and oneness with nature. I really enjoyed reading it as for a lot of points I would debate whether I truly agreed or not. I could go on for ages about the bits I did and did not agree which is always a good sign of a good book. It really makes you reflect and ponder. Think I’ll write my own version hah. Also special shout out to the translator (Martin Hammond), the notes and references they left really came in handy.
Random Fact: Was impossible to pick a quote from this. Also the first philosophy book I’ve read.
3. The Tattooist of Auschwitz [Non-Fiction] by Heather Morris
“That the two of you have chosen to survive is a type of resistance to these Nazi bastards. Choosing to live is an act of defiance, a form of heroism… I have been given the choice of participating in the destruction of our people, and I have chosen to do so in order to survive. I can only hope I am not one day judged as a perpetrator or a collaborator”
Summary: The book is based on the true story of Lale Sokolov, who a prisoner at a concentration camp tasked with tattooing numbers onto other prisoners marked for survival. He falls in love with an inmate he has to tattoo and the book takes us through how their love carried them through such a hopeless time and the things them and other inmates have to do to survive. The book does well in painting the bleak times and conditions people. The tattooist is in a position of privilege in the camp as he gets extra rations and perks so in one sense he could be seen as a collaborator but he always shares with fellow inmates and looked out for them so then again it could be argued he used that privilege for good. Where do you draw the line. Overall very easy to read and would recommend!
Random Fact: Found out about this book from football twitter. Got this book on a mini book-swap. Traded Principles by Ray Dalio for this. And the author‘s next book will be chronicling one of the characters in this book and I am very excited for it
2. Milkman [Fiction] by Anna Burns
“I’d have lost power, such as was my power, if I’d tried to explain and to win over all those gossiping about me. So I’d kept silent, I said. I’d asked no questions, answered no questions, gave no confirmation, no refutation. That way, I’d said, I’d hoped to maintain a border to keep my mind separate. That way, I’d said, I’d hoped to ground and protect myself.”
Summary: Going to start by saying this book was incredibly hard to read for me partly because of its weird writing style. It is essentially a book about community and the effect of rumours and gossip. The main character was rumoured to be in a relationship with Milkman and seemly everyone seemed to accept this rumour as fact. It talks through how she tried to deal with this rumour and the difficulty in preventing it from going on as long as it did. There was also another subplot of another Milkman, which I found more interesting and showed how indeed parents, no matter how they are now, lived through the same teenage and young adult experiences that we do. It also talked about how the community rallied for each other and how they coped with the ongoing war. It wove bits on mental health, relationships and feminism into the storyline very nicely. Some good bits but overall didn’t really enjoy reading it.
Random Fact: Man Booker Prize Winner 2018. Not sure how this won though.
1. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon [Non-Fiction] by Brad Stone
“He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon — that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company”
Summary: This is the story of Jeff Bezos and Amazon up to around 2013. It starts with Bezos’ beginnings at a hedge fund and then Amazon’s start as an online bookstore and the struggles the young startup faced particularly with the holiday seasons, the dot-com bubble and the criticism from Wall Street. It talks a bit about his childhood and his family and their influence on him growing up as well. It shows some insight into some key Amazon principles, decisions and products like AWS and the Kindle. It also describes its transformation from newbie start up to juggernaut large company. It gives an insight into the ruthlessness of Jeff and Amazon to suppliers, book publishers, competitors and even employees all in the quest to achieve low prices for customers which in turn gains more customers, which is their flywheel of success in achieving Jeff’s original vision for Amazon: a store where you can buy everything.
Random Fact: This was on my list for a while but saw someone reading on the tube and decided to read it. Jeff Bezos and his wife announced their divorce while I was reading this.