1. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
“I imagine that as I keep on losing my memory, you will be able to put aside your own feelings and care for me with the detachment of a nurse, and that you can do that no matter what strange things I say or do — even if I forget who you are. So I ask you never to forget one thing. You are my wife, and if life becomes too hard for you as my wife, I want you to leave me.”
This is a short story that tells a story about a cafe in Tokyo that allows to guest to travel in time, but like all good time travel stories, there are rules or caveat, one of these is that they must return before their coffee gets cold. I’m a big fan of time travel stories, particularly the ones were, they are unable to alter the timelines like this one. It’s 4 different stories all intertwined as all the characters cross paths in the cafe somehow. I won’t give the whole story away but I like how each character while unable to change the present, comes out with a new perspective and outlook on life. It touches on relationships between a couple that is dating, siblings, spouses and parent and children, and the stories are touching. It’s a really small and easy read, and entertaining though I do think there are still a bunch of questions that were left unanswered.
2. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
“Character, then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment”
This books talks about tipping points, which is when things cross a certain threshold or reach a critical mass and suddenly go through a rapid period of growth or scale, be it product sales, audience viewership or decrease in crime. It essentially talks about social epidemics, which is kind of crazy given it was first published about two decades before the COVID-19 pandemic. He draws analogies to biological pandemics which seem drive home the point read it in 2023. He talks about 3 classes of people necessary for things to tip: People that know a lot of people (Connectors), people that know a lot of things and love sharing information with other people to help (Mavens) and people that are great and convincing people to try new things (Salesmen). For each of those the author explains why they possess those traits and why they are important in pandemics. He also talks about the message or thing needing to be sticky in order to be able to spread. In all of this he uses research and anecdotes to drive home his points with examples like the success of Blue Clues and Sesame Street, the rise of Airwalks and Hushpuppies, the sudden decrease in violent crimes in New York. In the book he constantly drives home the point that for things to tip they only require small tweaks or changes which may seem counterintuitive. He also gives real world examples like teenage smoking and what causes it to continue to grow and how with knowledge of that, it can be addressed effectively. Overall it’s a pretty interesting read but for some reason it felt like it was lacking some of the punch I have come to expect from the author’s later works. Would still recommend though, I wonder how much of the researched referenced in the book hold up 23 years later.
3. The Club: How the Premier League Became the Richest, Most Disruptive Business in Sport
“In January 2009, the magnitude of what City were attempting knocked Cook over the head while he was watching BBC News with his American ex-wife. They had perked up when she caught sight of Cook’s name on the news ticker because he’d accused AC Milan of messing up a transfer for the Brazilian midfielder Kaká. But that wasn’t the surprising part. What blew them away was that this item somehow preceded the day’s other important news on the ticker: Barack Obama being sworn in as president of the United States”
“The Club” talks about the origins of the Premier League, and talks through its rise from the early days to its current global domination. It starts by showing how football clubs were run in the early days and how the leagues were structured and managed. It details some small background on the forward thinking owners who played significant parts tried to innovate and eventually led to the idea of a new breakaway league which was a huge deviation from many years of tradition. It showed about the changing attitudes towards football on television as the technology became more prominent, and it also talked about the media players involved in bidding for the rights in early days and how they won. It then shows how clubs managed the years of premier league success as it started to boom, from United becoming a marketing powerhouse, to Wenger managing the financials of a new stadium, to new owners coming in, successful and not, and the little scrutiny on the source of their wealth. It used a few examples to show owners that were successful and those that weren’t. It also talked about the shift when Prem began to lose star players to La Liga and how they also turned that around by hiring the best managers, and then showed how current day dominance of Prem had led to envy from outside the League and discontentment from the big players within which would lead to things like the European Super League. Overall a really good book and easy read, it’s lacking on depth what made the Prem so great, but I guess it’s difficult to pin point the one thing that led to it, so it covers a lot of breadth on the different factors that played a part. It is very educative as it highlights how things we take for granted now such as football and match analysis on TV, modern stadiums, 15 minute half times, transfer day deadline, free agent transfers, transfer gossip, media coverage, revenue split. A good read for any fan of the Premier League
4. Tales from the Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
“Then one day, while watching TV, he saw a studio potter by the name of Yamagishi Katsura. ‘I’ve been making pottery for forty years now, and I am finally satisfied with what I am making,’ the potter said. Looking at the pieces that were shown, Yukio was profoundly moved. It wasn’t that he was dissatisfied with his ordinary life, it was just that from somewhere in his heart he heard, I want to find work that is worth spending a lifetime on”
This is a sequel to the first book “Before The Coffee Gets Cold” which revolves around a cafe in Tokyo that allows customers to travel through time, with certain rules of course, because every good time travel story has rules. While you will be able to follow the second without reading the first, I would recommend reading the first book before this, as the characters are more developed and you feel a much closer relationship with them, and makes for a more emotional reading as certain things are revealed. This book has for chapters. “Best Friend” is about a man who has raised his best friend’s daughter as his own but wants to go back in time so he can get a wedding speech from him. “Mother and Son”, is about a son who missed his mother’s final days and burial because he was going through a very rough patch in life, going back to let his mother know her sacrifices were worth it. “The Lovers” is about a man with a terminal disease going to the future to make sure his partner was happy and had moved on after his death. “The Married Couple” is about a man who blamed himself for his wife’s death after she’d been killed in a robbery on her way back from a date he had cancelled on her birthday. In all these stories, though they characters went in for one reason, the conversations they had with the people they met, completely changed their outlook on life even though they could not alter history or the future. It is definitely a story about love between friends, lovers, parents and children. It shows how much sacrifice people make for those that they love. This sequel also focus heavily on grief, and how people cope with it. It’s a really lovely book, especially if you have read the first one, as it ties up a couple of the loose ends. However, the ending of the book, and of one of the other chapters did not really stick the landing for me.
5. Billion Dollar Whale by Bradley Hope and Tom Wright
“In our global financial system, where trillions of dollars move daily and huge institutional funds are looking for the next great investment, sovereign wealth funds can raise inordinate sums at the drop of a hat — in 1MDB’s case, even without a track record or a plausible business plan. Low’s genius was he sensed that the world’s largest banks, its auditors, and its lawyers would not throw up obstacles to his scheme if they smelled profits. It’s easy to sneer at Malaysia as a cesspool of graft, but that misses the point. None of this could have happened without the connivance of scores of senior executives in London, Geneva, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere. Low straddled both these worlds — Malaysia and the West — and he knew exactly how to game the system.”
Billion Dollar Whale is an investigative story that follows Jho Low the mastermind of the Malaysia 1MDB scandal and how he went from nothing to running one of the largest fraud cases ever — which stole about 5 billion dollars from the citizens. It chronicles the scale of his fraud and explains the different mechanisms available in a global market which he used to perpetuate his fraud and launder the stolen money. It looks into how politicians in countries with weak states can steal resources from the country and use to curry favours and buy elections. It highlighted to me just how much everybody, especially celebrities are for sale. That may be money or that may be access to what money allows like artistic freedom, for example Di Caprio befriending Low led to the funding of Wolf Of Wall Street. All in all it is a story that covers many sectors all culpable of one thing: not letting due diligence get in the way of making money. It shows that a lot of the incentives are misaligned from financial services, 3rd World Countries, Tax Havens, Legal firms, Audit companies, the art world and even Hollywood.
6. A Spell of Good Things by Ayobami Adebayo
“He stared back at her, unconcerned. She had always marvelled at his calm assurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things”
Was a big fan of the author’s first book, I thought it could very easily be made into a (Nollywood) movie with all the drama. I would echo the same sentiments about this book but rather than ending with “To God Be The Glory” into would end with “Watch Out For Part 2” as it felt very incomplete to me. I thought I was about half way through when it ended so was a bit disappointed by the ending though on the flip side that disappointment probably speaks to how much I was into the story.
It follows two families from different classes and kind of highlights how despite that difference, they still face similar problems when it comes to dealing with money, starting and raising a family, parents managing relationships with and responsibility for their kids (particularly when it comes to education choices) and the relationships between siblings both as children and how that changes through adolescence and adulthood.
It touches a lot on patriarchy, domestic violence and the shame around it and how marriage seems to be the final boss for Nigerian adults to finally let young adults be. It also shows the cascading effects of political ineptitude and how that affects all classes, from schools with no teachers being a pipeline to political thuggery to under resourced hospitals leading to deaths of both doctors and patients
What I enjoyed the most about the book though was probably seeing a perspective of parent- children relationship from the perspective of the parents. Also I quite liked how it touched on topics like dyslexia and depression without ever mentioning those words, which reflects how little awareness there is about them in Nigeria. Overall a decent read.
7. Surviving The Drive by Guenther Steiner
“Some people still believe that Drive to Survive is staged — or that some of it is staged — and let me assure you it isn’t. You can’t rehearse the shit I come out with. It’s impossible! I know it’s an overused sayng, but what you see is what you get on there. At least with me. Some people seem to like it, which is great (they’ll probably need therapy one day), and some people don’t, which is fine. Seriously, I do not give a shit either way”
If love the Drive To Survive then you love Guenther Steiner and if you love Guenther Steiner then you’ll love this book. If you don’t know about him, then you’re probably not into F1 and you might not enjoy it as much though I would still recommend it. It reads exactly like how he sounds and it’s just as entertaining. The book is less a biography and more like Guenther’s journal through the 2022 F1 Season, so you see things through his lens. It’s fascinating seeing what the teams that are closer to the end of the pack are fighting for because it’s something I always pondered.
He mostly talks through race by race the teams expectations, how they fare in practice, qualifying and the race itself. You end up reliving the highs and the low, especially if you follow F1 races or watch the highlights. That would run the risk of being repetitive but he has little detours which he acknowledges such as the his family, and stories from his pre-F1 days in rally racing, working with Niki Lauda and so much more. He also goes into some of the behind the scenes of racing, like penalties and the arguments/debates between teams in the paddock.
He also goes into the politics of racing calendar, and how circuits/locations make themselves more appealing to the drivers. He discusses things like sponsorship selection, what goes into choosing a driver which were both important in 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine leading them to drop one of their drivers (Russian), and their main sponsor (Russian), which he also mentioned. He talks about the growth of F1 too. When he is talking about F1 and racing is great. He also talks briefly about tangential issues like sustainability, diversity and inclusion but his points there seem very surface level. Overall a good red though
8. Educated by Tara Westover
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
Summary: Educated is a memoir of the life of the author that follows her growing up in a junkyard as part ultra-conservative Mormon family that did not believe in education and modern medicine. The book follows her life and the life of her family through her lens. It talks about the influences around her growing up and how she overcame a lot of obstacles to end up becoming educated and studing in prestigious universities like Cambridge and Havard. It’s a really inspirational story from that aspect. The challenges of her learning to read, write , study etc were interesting to follow. Her adaption into the real world, separated from her end-of-time-prepped father, and how she learnt to fit in and overcome imposter syndrome was fascinating to read about as well.
Although, despite all of that if I had to describe this book in one word, it would be abuse. It is a central theme throughout the book, ranging from emotional and verbal abuse to physical abuse of the author at the hands of her family. The book has a heavy focus on family and the relationship between members and shows how easy it is to experience abuse at the hands of those dearest to you. It also shows how, in the hands of controlling people, religion can be used to oppress and abuse rather than to uplift. It explores how toxicity seeps through the relationships she cherised growing up. It describes how she constantly tried to build a strong persona for herself to convince herself that she actually wasn’t being hurt or that she was not affected by it all. Overall, it is a fascinating read end to end of the journey of the author from a girl who had no birth certificate (and who date of birth is uncertain) to a historian, whilst navigating the emotional and physical abuse of her family who were all she had for most of her life but eventually severed ties with for her own peace of mind
9. The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier
“Why is the tech lead role such a heavy burden? The tech lead has a much wider scope of responsibility than the senior engineer in an individual contributor position. The tech lead is called on to help architect a project, and then to go through the steps of actually planning out the work. The tech lead is expected to make sure the team fully understands the project requirements, the work is planned, and the team is effective and performing well, all without necessarily having any management responsibilities and usually without any specific training. And, realistically, most managers will expect their tech leads to continue to write almost as much code as they did before they took on the lead role. It’s generally a pure increase in responsibility and scope of work. If you’re a first-time tech lead, you have your hands very full”
Summary: This is a handbook that I’ve already gone back to twice since taking up more of a leadership role at work. It talks through various levels of leadership in an Engineering career so not matter what stage you are there will be something for you. From mentoring and managing people, to being a tech lead to leading a team and then multiple teams to the big leagues of being a CTO and setting culture. While all important, would recommend focusing on the parts applicable to you and maybe skimming the rest. Each chapter contains advice from other people in the industry and is full of real life general applicable examples. Being new to such a role, it was very comforting seeing the author describe the challenges and opportunities of the role which I was already experiencing firsthand. It was really useful and had loads of relevant advice for me at this point in my career and I’ll probably return to my notes many times in the coming months.
10. Permutation City by Greg Egan
“Opponents replied that when you modelled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modelled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modelled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed — no real digestion took place. So, when you modelled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur? A computer running a Copy might be able to generate plausible descriptions of human behaviour in hypothetical scenarios — and even appear to carry on a conversation, by correctly predicting what a human would have done in the same situation — but that hardly made the machine itself conscious.
Paul had rapidly decided that this whole debate was a distraction. For any human, absolute proof of a Copy’s sentience was impossible. For any Copy, the truth was self-evident: cogito ergo sum. End of discussion.”
Summary: This is a book set in a future where humans are able to create copies of themselves in world that simulate the real world. Kind of like that Black Mirror episode. It follows a path that looks at the world from the Copies views and how such developments may impact the real world. Eventually, through some weird science that I didn’t understand or didn’t make sense, one of the copies is able to build a standalone separate world that grows infinitely and a few Copies pay him to live in that world forever, ultimately achieveing immortality. There are some other interesting themes like what would you do if you could live forever, if you could alter any of the traits of yourself you didn’t like, would you still be yourself. All in all overall I think while the book does a great job of imaging how a world with sentient life might play out in our world, the overall storyline is a bit of a dud for me.