Books Read in the Second Half of 2024

~ loganfrederick

I tend to read books in themed batches. Unfortunately the topic for the last six months was politics. I’m usually pretty arms length from politics, but the twisting narratives had me hooked and wanting to understand a field I’d normally write off as uninteresting. So I apologize in advance to those who’d rather forget 2024 for how politically heavy the content here is. However, if you’re trying to make sense of the past year, the top two books are must reads.

Three Stars

The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story – by Sam Wasson

Last year, the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now released what may be his last film, Megalopolis, his dream project he had been trying to get made for decades.

Path to Paradise covers two parallel stories in Coppola’s life: the day-to-day production of Apocalypse Now (which was an infamously brutal experience for everyone involved trying to shoot a war movie in Southeast Asian jungles in the 1970s) and Coppola’s later attempts to start his own film production company American Zoetrope.

The format of alternating chapters between the two stories doesn’t quite work as well it did for Wasson in The Big Goodbye (a book by the same author I gave a ⅘ in 2021). The gist in both cases is that Coppola is always living his own vision of auteurism, an iconoclast whose ambitions and visions either produce legendary works of art or destroy the lives of the people around him. I’m not sure this book gave me much more understanding of the man, but it earns its rating for the wealth of stories and source material about a living legend.

The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Speaker of the House – by Nancy Pelosi

Well, I think this one was planned to be published at a different time with a different 2024 election outcome. In this new memoir, the former Speaker of the House states that she intended to retire in the mid-2010s and only stuck around longer to reduce Donald Trump’s impact. Despite her best efforts, the jury is still out on determining how effective she has been in that goal.

What is good about this book (which feels ghostwritten due to bland writing) is that it does convey Pelosi’s admirable strengths. She’s a smart woman who knows how to effectively navigate games of power. 

Most memorable for me is an early chapter where she explains how she got the “ban on gays in the military” repealed in the mid-2000s. She admits this was accomplished by inserting it as a requirement into an additional military spending bill, likely meaning that more federal money would be spent in Red states where defense contractors are located. For this reason, she faced resistance from other Democrats who did not want to sign a bill supporting more war spending. 

She simply had to remind her party members that what their constituents would care about is the win on gay rights and not what it cost to accomplish. It is this type of arguably cynical, but ultimately correct, understanding of deal making which was part of what made her so effective and is a savviness which Democrats will miss when she is gone.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness – by Jonathan Haidt

Haidt has been making the media rounds promoting and discussing this analysis on why the kids don’t seem alright, pinning most of the blame on helicopter parenting and cell phones used for social media and mindless entertainment. Paradoxically, this book is probably both his weakest and most mainstream. Upon release, there have been numerous reports questioning the analytical rigor and broad applicability of the claims made in the book. At the same time, his suggestions for improving kids mental health with reasonable restrictions on the frequency of their social media consumption seem completely reasonable and intuitively correct. The moderate recommendations are in balance with the possible weaknesses in the supporting evidence.

Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass – by Ramin Setoodeh

Could Donald Trump have become President if he hadn’t hosted a reality TV show on a major broadcast network?

Probably not. And so author Setoodeh, who is the co-Editor in Chief of Variety magazine, embarked on the worthwhile journey to chronicle The Apprentice. This is a (conveniently quick) biography of arguably the most important TV show of all time.

Setoodeh’s interviews with former cast and crew remind the reader of why Donald Trump was more universally popular before running for the Republican party. With most people one on one, he’s charming and complementary. He takes the TV show seriously but himself less so.

Most importantly, his numerous interviews with Donald Trump emphasize the traits that helped Donald win. He’s a rare billionaire who has a lot of time on his hands and a willingness to talk to anyone. For decades, he made his money solely by being accessible and marketing himself to the public. It was the perfect training ground for politics.

A Very Punchable Face: A Memoir – by Colin Jost (Audiobook)

Ordered this one as his Weekend Update with Michael Che is the only Saturday Night Live segment I watch. A great audiobook for listening to funny stories on your commute.

The Canceling of the American Mind – by Rikki Schlott and George Lukianoff

Do not let the title of this book deter you, even though “Cancel Culture” is a phrase that’s been repeated ad nauseum. It took until 2023 for a good definitive book on the subject to be published. Schlott, who dropped out of college partly to pursue this book writing independently and partly because she disagreed with the culture she was on NYU’s campus, partnered with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Lukianoff to critically document what “cancel culture” really was. They’ve written a great history on how anti-free speech became intellectualized inside academia, and make a strong case for why we need to fight against mob mentalities on both sides of the political spectrum.

Trump in Exile – by Meredith McGraw

What was Trump up to in the aftermath of the January 6th riots? That’s where this book picks up the Trump story, starting with Biden’s inauguration day and running through the 2024 Republican primaries. The window of 2021 through 2022 could have been the moment when the Republican party moved on from Trump while he was living a reclusive life at his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate, slightly distracted by business opportunities such as Truth Social and LIV Golf.

And yet, he marched along with his planning for another run, empowered by his team’s polling numbers that showed he was still the most popular politician in the GOP, even if his handpicked midterm candidates couldn’t win.

The insights into Trump’s team, particularly campaign manager and soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, showed that Trump took his revenge tour far more seriously than he had his 2016 campaign by surrounding himself with real experienced political operatives. And it will frustrate Democrats to realize how much momentum the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago and lawsuits in 2023 gave his campaign.

Ultimately, it’s Trump’s ability to unilaterally make decisions for himself, especially about when to announce he was running again and how to crush Ron DeSantis before primaries had started, that make him such a distinct and effective politician separated from all other run-by-committee campaigners.

Cultish: The Language of Fanatacism – by Amanda Montell

Maybe my most “fun” read of 2024, Amanda Montell makes a great case for the importance of language to the ability for cults to exist. She writes quick chapters on a range of cult concepts, such as the classic religious groups, through fitness, pyramid schemes, and conspiracy theories. A mix of academic research and anecdotal interviews with former cult members blend together well.

Four Stars

The Handmaid’s Tale – by Margaret Atwood

This was required reading for some English classes back when I was in high school in the mid-2000s. Sadly, it was not on my curriculum. Having come around to it now (due to its potential prescience) I was pleasantly (maybe not the vibe Atwood was going for?) surprised by how breezy a read the book is despite the heaviness of its content. This is a compliment to her writing style, which manages to build an alternative future world that’s detailed without getting bogged down in details. Without opining on its contents, I can see why it’s a book that would be taught in English classes; it invites discussion.

Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP – by Patrick Ruffini

For anyone surprised by Trump’s electoral victory, they shouldn’t have been. A lot of the evidence was already present in the 2020 election. Ruffini, a Republican pollster and Bush administration member, dove into the 2020 data and wrote this book largely to help explain to himself how Donald Trump had taken over his party. What he found after the 2020 election became extremely relevant in 2024: minorities and lower income voters were drifting Republican in most elections since 2016. Anyone on the left who wants to stereotype the GOP as less intelligent really has to contend with Ruffini, who packed this 2023 book with stats and charts that really exemplifies how Republicans have an understanding of electoral trends that counters the Democrats “ground game” approach.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure – by Jonathan Haidt and George Lukianoff

Is every new generation of kids “softer” than their parents were? While adults have been saying this since time immemorial, professors Haidt and Lukianoff started seeing a particular spike in softness amongst their university students in the mid-2010s, and by 2018 compiled their analysis of the causes and solutions into this book.

Without overly spoiling the book’s contents, they exposed what they call “Three Great Untruths” that millennial and Gen Z kids were taught, making them unprepared for adulthood and setting back society:

  • “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker” – Kids are taught to shrivel or run to adults when faced with challenges, directly contradicting older wisdom we used to teach like “confronting your fears” and “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me”.
  • “Always trust your feelings” – When there’s a big body of research and old philosophy about how we should use our rational capacities to manage our emotions, not feed into them.
  • “Life is a battle between good and evil” – Teaching kids that anyone who disagrees with you is evil eliminates the ideas of debate, nuance, and perspective, all of which are much more necessary for a functioning society than a tribal “us versus them” mentality.

In general, it seems like society has forgotten that kids are stupid and need raising by adults, not coddled to.

Five Stars

The Revolt of the Public: And the Crisis of Authority in the New Millenium – by Martin Gurri

If anyone best understood the rise of Donald Trump before it happened, it was Martin Gurri publishing this book in 2014, one year before Trump announced his candidacy. This book is not explicitly about Trump, though his specter looms large when reading it today.

What it is about is the downfall of authority figures, and the implications that would have for politics. Gurri didn’t come up with this insight out of thin air. He was a CIA analyst who saw how social media was used by the public during the 2011 Arab Spring to revolt (hence the title) against half a dozen Middle Eastern governments. His big predictive leap was expecting that trend to hit Western nations given the internet technology would only continue to spread.

This also greatly explains the recent losses of the Democratic party since 2014. They positioned themselves as the defender of the old authority order, not realizing that no existing government could control its policy narratives in the new social media age and any weaknesses would be exposed and attacked mercilessly by the public.

Like many profound ideas, all one had to do was look in the right spot and extrapolate to the future. For its prescience in 2014 and ability to make sense of the past decade, this is a five star book.

The Best Book Read in the Second Half of 2024

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion – by Jonathan Haidt

This book tackles a question, critical and universal to humanity, suggested by its subtitle: How is it that there are so many various opinions among people, and yet everyone seems so certain their one opinion is correct?

Haidt’s answers this question gradually and methodically, bridging the fields of biology, psychology, and political science into the cohesive new theory of Moral Foundations. 

It belongs in my short list of “books I wish I had written”, where I’ve discovered that ideas loosely floating around my mind have already been rigorously considered, tested, and communicated better than I would have. The world would be a more peaceful, understanding place if every high school senior had to read this book.

Books Read in the First Half of 2024

~ loganfrederick

As a reference, my grading scale is:

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, traditionally I would pick one book as the “best book of the past six months”. Due to the delay, I’ve selected my top two books of the past two years at the bottom of the post.

Three Stars

Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life – by Arnold Schwarzenegger

Picked this up as I’ve been thinking more about what life advice to give my 16 year old brother. Arnold’s succinct thoughts are practical and as good a set of answers as one can find. He’s also a big fan of thinking while walking, which I strongly support.

Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (And Why That’s a Good Thing) – by Salman Khan

This is the first book from Sal Khan, founder of the fantastic online education platform Khan Academy. He was an early adopter in using Youtube as way to teach the masses, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise he’s been deeply involved with the AI companies in experimenting with the application of AI to teaching. The book itself is pretty optimistic with a neutered bent, a lot of “AI will provide high quality custom one-on-one student tutoring on an infinite scale, as long as we don’t let it completely replace our children’s brains!” Which, yes, I agree with, but not what most people will consider a major insight. It is however a comprehensive cover of all the areas of education AI will touch.

Blood Sweat and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made – by Jason Schreier

A really fun and swift survey of a dozen videogame companies telling their industry stories, primarily through the 2000s and 2010s. There are distinct lessons to take from each of company featured, from how a solo dev can make millions to the bureaucracy artists face when pushing a game over the finish line in a big tech company. A very good read for anyone interested in the videogame industry.

60 Songs That Explain the 90s – by Rob Harvilla

Discovered the podcast series this book is based on from Spotify’s popular Ringer network and was pleasantly surprised to discover the author lives in Columbus, Ohio. Harvilla writes an impressive narrative that ties the songs together through unexpected themes, making this much more than just a “top 60” list. Plus, I am a sucker for nostalgia.

The Making of Prince of Persia – by Jordan Mechner

As I’ve spent the past few months teaching myself game development, I had to read one of the definitive diaries of game development. Mechner, an industry legend for his pioneering work on Prince of Persia at a young age, publicly publishing his private journal is such a gift to any aspiring creator. That he shows so much raw honesty and his own flaws in the process of generating greatness should inspire everyone: he had huge doubts about whether he wanted to make the game or try to be a film maker, his indecision on this subject dragged out the whole process across three years, and meanwhile computer technology was rapidly shifting under his feet the entire time between Apple, PCs, and consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System. I and many others are very thankful to Jordan for opening up his life and showing us that the road to meaningful work is a bumpy one, and that’s okay.

Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind – by Andy Dunn

A cofounder of men’s apparel brand Bonobos tells his story running a startup while suffering from bipolar disorder. Some people may dislike the story for its after-the-fact apologizing for hurting people along his journey to success. As someone who has gone through the venture capital-backed startup experience though, I can relate to how crazy it can drive someone even under the most manageable circumstances and appreciated his retelling.

Cinema Speculation – by Quentin Tarantino

I could listen to Quentin Tarantino review movies and discuss the history of cinema for hours. In fact, I did.

The Storm Before the Calm: America’s Discord, the Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond – by George Friedman

To start, this book has flaws, and I rate one of the author’s previous books higher in this list and would recommend that it be read first. Friedman, a political scientist and former Dickinson College professor, published this book in October 2020, essentially at our lowest point of the pandemic and before the Biden election. He spends too much of the book over-matching cyclical patterns through history, which wonks like him and Ray Dalio are wont to do. What he does seem to freakishly nail as a primary prediction is that the elections of this decade would feature a candidate representing the last of the old “technocracy” coastal elite guard trying to hold onto power, resisting a new trend of re-empowering the middle of the country. Given how the Biden presidency and his candidacy have gone, this seems eerily prescient and thus makes the rest of the book worth mulling over.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI – by Ethan Mollick

A professor at the Wharton business school has written his overview of applying AI to life and work, based on his applied experience in research and classrooms. He takes the pragmatic position of “the tech is here and not going anywhere, so the questions are about how to best integrate it into our lives.” If a laymen were to ask me what to read first about understanding what impact AI will have on their life, this would be one of my goto starting point recommendations.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant – by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

Considered a classic in the “business book” category, I’m happy to finally be able to check it off my list. The insight from these INSEAD institute professors is that it’s possible for companies to create entirely new markets, even where people think businesses already exist. Examples highlighted include Cirque du Soleil finding the gap between circus and theater, NetJets between first class travel and private jet ownership, and Curves between home workout tapes for women and intimidating weights-oriented gyms. For the techies, it’s very much aligned with the Thiel-ism “competition is for losers”, except pre-dating his statement by many years given this was originally published in 2005. This concept is then formalized into tools any executive can use to help them think more creatively about their business.

Four Stars

Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead – by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Leopold was a researcher at OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) focused on “safety” and “alignment”, that is to say how AIs can be developed in ways that they’ll do things humans want without inadvertently killing us.

However, he was fired for essentially speaking to outside media that the AI research labs were not doing enough to secure their research from foreign adversaries and not investing enough (according to him) in these safety research projects.

After his firing, he published “Situational Awareness”, a 150+ page PDF which I read and is long enough to qualify as a book. It’s a mix of a manifesto and a prophecy for where AI is taking society. Some of his messages are mixed, as is common among AI researchers. Essentially, he claims to not be a pessimist (known as “doomers” in the tech world). But then spends one hundred pages explaining how AI is a national security and societal safety concern which is controlled by a very small number of individuals with questionable motives. Most people would interpret this as alarming.

But it is for that reason that I highly recommend reading this. It’s written in pretty plain spoken language so one does not need a lot of computer science expertise to follow along, and it is one of the best overviews of the risks associated with AI.

The Three Body Problem – by Cixin Liu

For years before the Netflix series was announced, friends were recommending this as a must-read, so the show’s release served as a good forcing function to make me do it. 

The plot is the old “War of the Worlds” mixed with modern physics. What it does uniquely well is be able to take core complex physics concepts like the real three body problem and repurpose them into clever plot devices and a real mystery plot which kept me hooked However, if one has already studied or at least read books in physics, I don’t think the scientific cleverness hits as hard.

I feel similarly about this book as I did Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (which I gave three stars a decade ago): very interesting ideas told through terse prose and pretty one dimensional characters. Cixin’s characters are a little more developed than Asimov’s, and he is able to make the book’s pacing feel a little more alive by playing with time and the character focus in the vein of Station Eleven, except that book had unparalleled heart which Three Body Problem slightly lacks.

What This Comedian Said Will Shock You – by Bill Maher

Maher is a controversial figure, I think more so for how obnoxiously or smugly he makes his points rather than the substance of his statements. His newest book is a collection of the “editorial” sections he’s done at the end of his “New Rules” segment on his Friday night HBO show “Real Time” for the past 20 years. Even if you disagree with these comedic takes on our country’s major political issues, the format invites you to think through precisely why you disagree, because Bill has spent countless hours thinking over every essay. 

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance – by Rashid Khalidi

Going into October 7th, it’d be fair to say that I knew more about Jewish culture based on my friends and life experience. Then a friend from undergrad with Middle Eastern ethnicity recommended this book and I’m glad she did. The author, whose family has a history with the many different past Palestinian governments, does a very good and fair documenting their cause over the past century, why they view Israel as a colonization, and also why the Palestinians have failed at promoting and defending their cause. There are surely other books out there that would give an Israeli perspective, but I’d recommend this for the Palestinian. 

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A Novel – by Gabrielle Zevin

When I mentioned to friends that I was studying videogame development, I had three separate people (none of whom are really gamers) tell me I should read this book. And I’m glad they did.

Tomorrow is the best representation of intermingled coworker friendships I recall reading in a novel. Two young kids start a videogame company together and Tomorrow follows their journey as they try to maintain their relationship as the tug of the outside world, both business and pleasure, work to pull them apart. This novel is the most emotional I’ve read since Station Eleven.

An Inconvenient Minority: The Harvard Admissions Case and the Attack on Asian American Excellence – by Kenny Xu

Even before the covid pandemic contributed to a spike in terrible Asian American abuse, a court case had been working its way through the justice system for most of the 2010s before reaching the Supreme Court in 2023. A nonprofit group advocating on the behalf of young Asian students and their families sued Harvard over the fact that Asian students were being accepted at lower rates into the Ivy Leagues than other ethnicities, despite outperforming them on grades and the various standardized exams high school students take and intelligent extracurriculars. The Ivy leagues counter that there is more to university than grades, chess, and piano-playing, which kind of begs the question: What criteria are you using then?

Journalist Xu uses this lawsuit as his framework for discussing the long history of Asian segregation in America, the unfair stereotypes labeled on Asian men and women, and how white America contributes to pitting Asians against the hispanic and black communities.

I probably rate this book higher because I partially identify with the community being 25% Filipino with Asian relatives, and strongly believe in the ideas of intellect and family stability.

The reality that many Americans don’t confront at face value is that Asian cultures are very effective at both excelling academically and building communities. The solution should be for everyone to respect some shared virtues like those of intelligent work balanced with supportive families, not casting Asians out of our prestigious institutions.

Five Stars

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past – by John Lewis Gaddis

Kudos to fellow Ohio State alum Andy Sparks for recommending this after I reviewed another Gaddis book last year. The meat of this book is focused on the subtitle: how do historians do their jobs? And what is the job?

This being my second Gaddis book, I noticed a pattern emerging in how I read them. First, I had to take notes on every other page. Second, I realized those would not be enough and would require re-reading, which is rare.

One pleasant insight by Gaddis, which I strongly agree with and would need a whole other essay to elaborate on, is that historians have more in common with natural scientists than social scientists. This is an important conclusion and this book can serve as a great bridge between those who work in the humanities and STEM.

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class – by Rob Henderson

Henderson and his memoir have become something of a mini-celebrity in right wing circles for sharing a story and ideas that shouldn’t be nearly as controversial as they are.

His is a story of an abandoned orphan bouncing around foster homes in impoverished upstate California, hanging around drunk and drug dealing teenagers through adolescence, escaping this upbringing through the luck of walking into Air Force recruitment, and leveraging his innate intelligence to test into Yale from the military, eventually earning a Phd from Cambridge.

As someone with a quasi-similar background (coming from a half-broken home with an abandoned parent and thrived in life largely due to math aptitude), I deeply related to his journey.

What has gotten him into Democrat hot water is his later chapter titled “Luxury Beliefs”, which is a concept he developed during his Yale experience after being exposed to the “liberal elite”. The essence of his theory is that there are a collection of ideas that the wealthy will hold that both signal their class status while actively undermining those below them in a way that makes this undermining less transparent.

A concise collection of these “ideas that rich liberals believe and why they end up hurting people” which resonated with me:

  • Monogamy is outdated and people should experiment with their relationships, nevermind that when it occurs in poor communities it results in broken homes and children without parents.
  • Technology creators who sell products to the world while they restrict their own kids from using at home. They’ll defend this saying people should self-discipline their tech usage, sidestepping that the poor have the least free time and energy to manage this.
  • Defunding police doesn’t impact upper class communities who can afford other methods of protecting themselves, and then it opens the door for lawlessness endangering lower classes, women, and the elderly.
  • Patriotism is thought to be for simpletons and George Bush supporters, which divides people in the same communities further apart, rather than bringing everyone together to discuss what America should stand for.

Discussing the multiple sides of these issues should not be controversial, and yet democrats’ unwillingness to think through these is at least partially why they lose support in core parts of the country. 

Best Book of the First Half of 2024

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century – by George Friedman

My little known fun fact is that I took Russian 101 in college. I needed language credits to graduate, didn’t want to do Spanish because it’s cliche, and I had just serendipitously picked up The Next 100 Years at the college bookstore in 2010 (when it was published). Fourteen years ago, Friedman wrote that one of the prime conflicts of the 2010-2020s would be with a resurgent Russia attempting to reclaim what it had lost from the Cold War.

I never finished the book back in school, but when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it naturally resurfaced to the top of my mind.

The book is roughly split into thirds: First, a review of the prior 20th century such that it sets up what is to occur in the 21st century; second, his projections for the near future between 2010 through the 2040s; and lastly, what the second half of this century will look like until 2100.

Normally it’s difficult to rate “prediction” books highly because A) they are so often horribly wrong, and B) written in a way that is self-promoting of the author’s own interests. However, Friedman overcomes these hurdles by already being quite correct on numerous predictions nearly fifteen years after publishing, and his cause of American optimism which is one I’m inherently inclined to support.

Without spoiling too many of his predictions, the important emphasis of the book is not on the specifics anyway, it’s the thought process which is one I subscribe to. Politics is driven, much like economics, by the incentives and capabilities of the parties involved. Following people’s interests can make predicting behaviors much more tractable, if one is only willing to look at the facts with reduced bias. And this reality scales up to the macro decisions of nations.

There have been and always will be conflicts, because that is human nature. Through the luck of America’s geography and cultural history, it is in such a position of strength relative to the world that it is highly unlikely to be displaced as the top world power for the foreseeable future. This should be a calming message to Americans and allow us to focus on bringing that bright future to fruition, rather than staring at our own feet as much of culture does today.

Books Read in 2022-2023

~ loganfrederick

I haven’t posted book reviews in two years due to starting a business and going through Y Combinator. But this holiday season provides enough respite for me to do a catch-up post and share everything I’ve read since the last post. Most of the books were read either in the first quarter of 2022 and the last quarter of 2023, with a major lull during the bulk of my “starting a startup” time, with the exception of AI-related content in the first half of the 2023.

Also, due to the backlog of reviews to write, I’ve changed up the format to only provide reviews for the top recommendations and provide a list of all the books. So if any in the list pique your interest and you want to hear more, reach out to me!

As a reference, my grading scale is:

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, traditionally I would pick one book as the “best book of the past six months”. Due to the delay, I’ve selected my top two books of the past two years at the bottom of the post.

Two Stars

Three Stars

Four Stars

Five Stars

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do – by Erik Larson

This book will specifically be an interesting test of human’s ability to predict. Though he doesn’t time-bound his prediction, author Erik Larson makes the case in 2021 (before the release of ChatGPT) that current machine learning techniques will not be able to achieve human-equivalent general intelligence. The thrust of the argument is that there has not been a computer science technique for replicating human’s ability of “abductive logic”. In essence, anyone familiar with ChatGPT knows that you need to input . It can’t (yet) create thoughts without prompting, and is not actively learning through continuous interaction with the world.

The open and not yet knowable question with a book like this is: While he’s correct today, will he ever be proven wrong? Progress in AI research has skyrocketed since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022 and it’s tough to bet against technological progress.

One of the few books I know I will have to re-read to fully ingest its ideas.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall – by Zeke Faux

As someone working in the tech startup world, I get asked a lot about my opinion on cryptocurrencies. And I’ve done a fair bit of studying on the subject. Zeke Faux’s book is now my absolute recommended starting point for anyone who wants to understand what the hell happened in the cryptocurrency world.

What started as a journalistic endeavor to uncover the truth behind Tether, a cryptocurrency whose role has been to be purposefully behind the scenes adding stability and support to the rest of the international crypto trading ecosystem, turned into an ironic takedown of every other major player in the industry except Tether.

The real issues with crypto markets are revealed in a stunning final third of the book, where Zeke physically tracks down international crime rings to their Southeast Asian sweatshops where the poor are enslaved as nonstop international scam machines responsible for all the spam we have to filter out of our inboxes. It is here that Zeke vividly portrays the biggest problem crypto adoption has had from the beginning: its purpose from inception was to be a method of money movement outside the bounds of government institutions. It’s an idea one can sympathize with, but it has trouble confronting reality (governments do not like being undermined) and therefore criminals naturally became the biggest adopters.

The Remains of the Day – by Kazuo Ishiguro

Jeff Bezos has repeatedly cited this as his favorite novel for its core lesson of leading a life without regret. It tells the tale of a British butler serving his aristocratic employer throughout the first half of the 1900s and the goings-on of the estate. It’s an incredibly slow build which may turn off a lot of readers before they reach the emotionally catastrophic final act. I almost can’t say much more about the plot without diluting the power of the ending, other than to say it more than any other book makes one stop and wonder what they’ve done with their life. It is no wonder the author won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Klara and the Sun – by Kazuo Ishiguro

Thirty years after publishing The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro continues to demonstrate a genius ability to create characters anyone can relate to, tug on emotional strings, and yet do so in varying settings and tones.

Klara, a solar-powered “Artificial Friend” (an AI doll) is purchased by parents in the future for their only child Josie. It’s a complex coming-of-age tale for both Josie and humanity’s relationship with technology. For most people this is probably a swifter read than Ishiguro’s other novels, but it packs no less punch as the story reaches both its climax and reflective epilogue.

Where is My Flying Car? – by J. Storrs Hall

The title is self-explanatory to what the book seems to be about, and Hall spends much of it answering the self-imposed question. And yet, somewhat unexpectedly, it’s about so much more.

Through a tremendous balance between the engineering explanations for how flying cars work (spoilers: they already exist, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering how similar helicopters are to the concept) and why they aren’t ubiquitous. The first topic is easier to explain despite it being the technical topic, because the second one is politics. 

Storrs Hall uses “flying cars” as a proxy example for futuristic tech withheld from society due to the bureaucratization of American culture. The regulatory environment would have never supported the Wright brothers from creating the airplane and is the one that has snuffed out the practical possibilities of not only flying cars, but a whole host of economic growth opportunities (nuclear energy being the author’s other primary focus).

It’s this libertarian-esque stance Storrs Hall takes that make me compelled to recommend it to everyone: right-wingers would find the deregulation arguments compelling while left-wingers should be compelled by the portrait of a universal Jetsons-esque future for all.

Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution – by Carlo Rovelli

It was on a small shore of the Helgoland archipelago where it clicked in the mind of a young Werner Heisenberg. “It” being the intuition behind quantum physics, the unsettling realization that it’s probabilities and uncertainties at the foundation of our existence.

As with all of Rovelli’s books, it’s simultaneously concise yet packed with beauty. The simplicity with which he explains the science gives wiggle room for reflection on the wonder of it all. For anyone wanting to understand quantum mechanics, this is the best starting point.

Professor Rovelli is probably the greatest living physics writer.

The Nineties – by Chuck Klosterman

“Ecstatically complacent” is how Klosterman comes to describe the decade in which I was born. Luckily it is not a commentary on me as much as it is on my parents and their Generation X.

The challenge Chuck tackles in this book is trying to capture the feeling of the past, in retrospect, without nostalgia. It’s a tall order that I think he mostly accomplishes, but of course it’s hard to judge since I was a kid. That dynamic itself makes this a half-reflective, half-educational read for those under the age of 45. 

In this way, it’s a spiritual successor or perhaps counter-argument to his own earlier book But What If We’re Wrong, which is partially about how people in the far future misremember the past compared to how those living in the time felt about the experience while it was happening. With The Nineties, he is trying to thread the needle: recapturing the experience as someone who lived it, but now in the future.

He explains well the historical context directly leading into a confluence of events that created the 90s; A decadent 80s created a counter-culture, as is always happening with the generational cycles. This was obviously reflected in pop culture’s media: the rise of grunge music, Tarantino and Kevin Smith mainstreaming meta-culture dialogue into film, and the general “Gen X” concept of “selling out” being a unique perspective not shared by prior or future generations.

These somewhat dour ideas were balanced by the quickening computer revolution and the end of the Cold War. The United States, for a time, was the best place in the world in which to live.

So great, in fact, that we neither properly savored it nor were we vigilante enough to protect it. Perhaps that lesson is timeless.

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology – by Chris Miller

The contention around Taiwan is one of the hottest international issues today. And it all boils down to how Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) became the dominant manufacturer of computer chips in the world.

How did this happen? Chip War documents this story, as well as really the history of why silicon is in the name “Silicon Valley”. Author Miller has done a remarkable job intertwining politics and science into a cohesive narrative that starts from loose startup roots and culminates in the tense militaristic situation China and the United States find themselves in. 

This is not strictly a technology book. It’s history, arguably of the most important stories affecting everyone’s lives today. For that reason, it’s recommended reading for everyone.

The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind – by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera

I have to disclaim upfront that the author Bethany McLean is my favorite author and the greatest business journalist who I’ve had the lucky pleasure of meeting multiple times when I lived in Chicago.

Her latest book covering COVID was inspired by her own experience as a mom forced to school her kids from home due to lockdowns. This posed an important and under-reported question: To what extent should we prioritize the perceived safety of the elderly at the expense of decreased education and socialization for our kids? When framed that way, the answer and approaches are much less clear.

This is only one angle in her broad review of how American institutions and society failed during the pandemic. She even handedly places blame on both ends of the political spectrum. A prime example would be the vaccines: Republicans wouldn’t acknowledge it helped, and Democrats oversold its effectiveness.

The overall list of pandemic-related issues Bethany covers is long: how psychopathic private equity ownership ripped out the heart of the healthcare system the past two decades and left the health of our nation’s people at risk, our fragile supply chains, and gutting small businesses with shutdowns while spending PPE money on big businesses and fraud. The Big Fail is the definitive overview of what went wrong in this country from 2020-2022.

Top Two Books of 2022-2023

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective – by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman

I first heard about this book from an interview of Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI (the company best known for ChatGPT). He so loved the book that he hired its author Kenneth Stanley to come work with him and inform their research agenda.

The two co-authors have both been professors researching artificial intelligence years before OpenAI was created. What they created in this short, almost pamphlet-sized, book is their work’s condensed conclusion: many of the greatest human achievements were not accomplished through the robotic pursuit of goals with continuous measurement of progress. It’s creative experimentation and serendipity supported by a small foundation of social stability which allow the best work of humans and machines alike to bubble out of the ether. 

While a couple chapters may have content specific to computer scientists, most of it is written purposefully for a wide audience. This is the manifesto for everyone who has desired to do great work and felt the pressures of unyielding bureaucracies blocking them from bringing to life a better future.

On Grand Strategy – by John Lewis Gaddis

As the book’s excerpts will tell you, the author Dr. John Lewis Gaddis has been teaching a seminar on “strategy” at Yale for over two decades, after an earlier career analyzing the Cold War in the 80s before it had formally concluded. It was this earlier work that took him from teaching at Ohio University to hopping around Naval academies, Princeton, then ultimately Yale.

This 2018 publication was him condensing his life’s work into a brisk 300 page paperback. And it resonated so strongly because he’s articulated more clearly and with historical examples a core idea I’ve been stumbling around in both my book-reading and professional experiences; there is no “one grand strategy”. As he traces the history of major decision made by legendary figures of history, from Xerxes to FDR, there are really only a few similarities someone can draw from studying history: That decisions must be made unique to the context of all the factors of the moment, a decision made by one person at moment can seem incorrect when attempted to be applied in any other circumstance, and that great leaders must learn to discern between contradicting advice to find the appropriate action for their point in time.

This is the Art of War for modernity.

Books Read in the Second Half of 2021

~ loganfrederick

As a reference, my grading scale is:

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

  • History of Movies and The Sopranos
  • Science Fiction
  • Food
  • Authors with Multiple Books Featured:
    • Michael Pollan
    • Shea Serrano
Continue reading “Books Read in the Second Half of 2021” →

Books Read in the First Half of 2021

~ loganfrederick

As a reference, my grading scale is:

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

  • Con Artists
  • Product Management
  • Poker and Las Vegas
  • Chess
  • Debt
  • TV Sitcom Family Ties
  • Amazon
  • Venture Capital
  • CRISPR and Gene Editing
Continue reading “Books Read in the First Half of 2021” →

Books Read in the Second Half of 2020

~ loganfrederick

As a reference, my grading scale is:

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

  • Comedians: I love sitcoms and standup comedy, and I’ve included stories from stars of both related worlds.
  • Netflix: A new set of separate books by the Netflix co-founders teach the lessons learned from launching an entertainment revolution.
  • Mad Men: Two books analyzing my favorite televised drama.
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey: Also two books telling the stories around the making of the classic Stanley Kubrick film.
  • Business of Biotech: Continuing my education in the natural sciences, I focused on learning the histories of Vertex Pharma, Genentech, Amgen, and the broader drug business.
Continue reading “Books Read in the Second Half of 2020” →

Books Read in the First Half of 2020

~ loganfrederick

As a reference, my grading scale is (without any one or two star books this time):

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

  • Technologist Gene Kim: The cofounder and CTO of TripAdvisor now dedicates much of his time to writing books about how to best run technology organizations. Applicable to large companies and startups alike.
  • Uber and How We Work: As part of my research for working at Bluecrew, I delved into the temporary staffing industry, modern “gig economy” companies such as Uber, and some general history of labor.
  • N+1 Magazine: I’ve reviewed books written by the staff of literary magazine n+1 in the past, and this year I’ve added three more to that list.
  • Bill Simmons Colleagues: Simmons is best known as a founder of two successful online media brands (Grantland and The Ringer). After I learned he’s good friends with Chuck Klosterman, I’ve dived into books by more of his colleagues.
  • Adult Entertainment: The confluence of Dave Chappelle Netflix special, a new book by one of my favorite authors, working for Tinder’s parent company, and Hugh Hefner’s semi-recent death all converged into me reading a lot of material around sex. Readers are forewarned.
Continue reading “Books Read in the First Half of 2020” →

Books Read in the Second Half of 2019

~ loganfrederick

As a reference, my grading scale is (without any one or two star books this time):

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

  • “Gig Economy” and Temporary Work: Since I’ve started working at Y Combinator alum Bluecrew moving industrial temp staffing to a tech platform, I’ve dived into the industry’s literature.
  • Accounting: Brushing up my knowledge on the field in which I’ve occasionally worked.
  • The Legal System: Between the current state of our politics and an increase in my own experiences with lawyers over the past year, both personally and professionally, I’ve got multiple books which cover how our legal system works.
  • Japanese Culture: Three books spent time covering Japan, two for a couple chapters and one entirely.
  • Books from Mad Men: The show is my favorite drama and features multiple books from the shows time period. I’ve now read a couple of them.

Continue reading “Books Read in the Second Half of 2019” →

Paul Graham Essays Categorized by Theme

~ loganfrederick

Since I live in a different town from my family, the holidays are the majority of the time I get to spend with my twelve year-old brother (we have a 17 year age gap).

Now that he’s nearly a teenager, he’s almost the age I was when I started thinking independently from family and friends. For me, a big part of that was discovering Paul Graham’s essays. Hopefully one day my brother reads through them (but I won’t force him).

This got me thinking: if I were to recommend them to him, would I want him to read them chronologically? Or should I point him to specific essays based on his interests?

Alternatively, if one were to compile all of Paul’s essays into a collection or a Hackers and Painters sequel, how would it be organized?

So below is my attempt at tagging Paul Graham’s essays by subject matter.

Continue reading “Paul Graham Essays Categorized by Theme” →

Books Read in the First Half of 2019

~ loganfrederick ~ Leave a comment

As a reference, my grading scale is (without any one or two star books this time):

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

  • Chuck Klosterman: I’ve completed the Chuck Klosterman collection, including his two novels.
  • Alan Lightman: A physicist-novelist recommended by my good friend Ritoban Thakur has a unique voice which bridges spirituality with science.
  • Technology Company Growth and Management
  • Stripe Press: A new publishing company with the goal of advancing economic and technological ideas also puts great care into their uniquely designed and high quality physical book covers.

Continue reading “Books Read in the First Half of 2019” →