I read 13 books in 2023, the most I’ve managed in one year since I was at university. Through the year I’ve been writing notes and small reviews on some of the things I’ve read, and I’ve decided to collect them here.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
An exploration of the crimes and compromises committed in the name of republicanism during the Troubles, using the murder of Jean McConville as its core narrative device. Say Nothing was consciously not wide-ranging enough to serve as a general history of the Troubles. In particular, the crimes committed by loyalists weren’t a focus. Even so, this added a lot to my knowledge of this part of Irish history. This was gripping and full of fascinating characters. But most of all it was just brutally, uncompromisingly sad.
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
This was great and full of stories and narratives about the greater United States that were really jaw-dropping. Like how John McCain was born in Panama canal region and was certainly not a citizen at birth (and so was ineligible for the presidency). And how the word “America” only started to be used as a noun when the US made the Philippines a colony and there was a realisation that “United States of America” didn’t really describe the country.
I learned for the first time the history of territorial expansion in the contiguous US, why the Philippines was a colony but Cuba never was, and about the ongoing colonial status of Puerto Rico. It’s all awful stuff. The last third of the book was a thoughtful and fascinating reflection on the way globalisation has replaced colonialism and done away with many of the needs for it, in ways big and small.
I think the book suffered a bit for its lack of discussion of how Hawaii went from an independent kingdom to a colony and then a state. Overall it was a great presentation of a part of US history that should be front-and-centre and instead is ignored or misunderstood.
A Room of One’s Own
It almost feels absurd to talk about how I feel about this essay. It’s so good that it’s really beyond my ability to evaluate. I loved the prose, each sentence is so precise and enjoyable. The arguments constructed in each chapter are so clear and yet there’s this wonderful sarcasm that comes from its pseudo-fictional framing. The motif of the “room of one’s own” is neatly woven through it but never forced on the reader. Some parts are very funny, like this depiction of masculine writing by people like Kipling:
It is coming, it is gathering, it is about to burst on one’s head … one blushes at all these capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy
Other parts like the reflections on the life of the Elizabethan woman and Shakespeare’s sister are lovely and sad. I wish I’d read this years ago.
Pride and Prejudice
This was a bit of a strange experience, reading for the first time a story I know very well (thanks mainly to the 1995 BBC adaptation). It feels very different told through the voice of the narrator, which adds a humour and gentle sarcasm that’s impossible to capture in adaptation. It achieves this incredible feat of allowing you to chuckle at Darcy’s obtuseness or Elizabeth’s hubris, while all-the-while reminding you of the stalking threat of penury hanging over all the women in the story. In particular, I found the evaluation of Miss Bingley changes a lot through this lens. She comes off as pitiable and sympathetic, rather than conniving and mean. Mary is much more likeable, and Mr Bennett’s relentless teasing of his wife is much less amusing than I’d expected. For mine, though, the confrontation between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine remains the highlight, as it was in the BBC adaptation.
The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal
I love a good book about a financial scandal and this was reasonably enjoyable. Particularly memorable is the parable of David Cameron, and the risks of post-politics politicians. Used to power and influence within the elite, they generally aren’t wealthy enough to move in equivalent circles when they leave politics. But there will be those willing to pay for their influence and contacts. Alas, the Australian angle (especially as regards Julie Bishop) is probably under-explored in this book.
Ten Days that Shook the World
A contemporary account of the Russian revolution by socialist journalist John Reed. It’s sympathetic and clearly flawed, but it’s gripping and in the early days of the revolution it effectively conveys a sense of frenetic energy.
The most striking passage was the account of Lenin and Trotsky securing the end of freedom of the press over the objections of the Left Socialists and some Bolsheviks. The debate ends with a statement from some of the Left Revolutionaries:
We see that this leads directly to the elimination from political life of many proletarian organizations, to the establishment of an irresponsible régime, and to the destruction of the Revolution and the country.
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
This was an effective as a criticism of “bad strategy”, the modern penchant to articular “strategies” that are really just nebulous goals free of specificity. Instead, good strategy must clearly diagnose a problem, make choices between alternative paths and describe policies that enact the strategy. In particular, I appreciated the emphasis on choosing alternatives. A “strategy” that tries to do everything, win every advantage and incur no opportunity cost is content-less and not a strategy. Instead, worthwhile strategies choose a path and are clear about the paths not taken.
The challenge, then is in identifying the choices to be made and getting good at choosing the correct alternative. This book is less effective at telling you how to make the right choice. But this is mostly because, especially in competitive contexts, creating “good strategy” is necessarily hard. The last two-thirds of this book talk about principles for formulating good strategy and are rich in fascinating case-studies. While I wasn’t always convinced that the author’s assessment of every case-study was perfect, I still learned a huge amount about businesses and industries I might never have thought about otherwise.
The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
A great, step-by-step guide through the path from senior engineer through to CTO of a large technology organisation, and everything in between. I couldn’t help but compare this to The Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, which I read years ago and still refer to. Compared to The Elegant Puzzle, The Manager’s Path has a more logical structure (following a typical career path) and a greater focus on people management. I particularly enjoyed the sections on how to be managed at each level on the career ladder, as opposed to just how to manage.
Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s Superpower Future
This aims to be an explanation of how the CCP works under Xi, and of how it has transitioned away from the party of the Hu era. It is explicitly trying to update Richard Mcgregor’s The Party (which I still haven’t read), which has been the canonical text on the party but has fallen out of date as the era of collective leadership has faded.
This was a thorough treatment of what is a really depressing topic. I found the chapter about the narrowing space for academic inquiry particularly upsetting. But as a regular listener to podcasts like The Prince and Pekingology, I felt like I was mostly familiar with the themes dealt with here.
One anecdote I particularly enjoyed was about Xi’s literary insecurity. Xi was sent to the countryside during the cultural revolution and missed most of his secondary education. It seems pretty clear that he’s insecure about his intellectual heft. A few years ago, Hu Dehua (son of 80s liberal reformer Hu Yaobang) publicly expressed concerns about how little the current leadership reads. Within days, state media was writing about how well-read Xi is. On subsequent trips to France, Russia and Greece, Xi has made some patently ridiculous claims about having read Satre, Dostoyevsky and Plato.
Animal Farm
Watching the vox pops on the evening of this year’s referendum, I found myself thinking about the sheep in Animal Farm. So I decided to give it a re-read for the first time since high-school. The best-known lines (“more equal than others”, “impossible to say which was which”) are so well-known that they felt almost trite reading them again. But moments like the question of whether rats are comrades, the discussion of whether wings count as legs, and especially the demise of Boxer are as affecting now as they were on the first read. And of course, the writing is characteristically clean and simple and powerful.
Moby-Dick
This year, on my third attempt, I made it through Moby Dick. I say “made it through” because, as much as I enjoyed it, it’s pretty clear that I never would have completed it without the driving momentum that comes with listening to an audiobook on 1.7x speed. And while I’m pretty comfortable getting through books on engineering management or politics at that pace, it’s pretty clear that for Moby Dick I’m going to be missing many if not most of the references and themes of such a deep text. In the end, I decided that I’d just try it: I think I’m happier having completed Moby Dick, essentially by skimming it, than I would have been if I had just given up. I might return to it one day.
The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It (Quarterly Essay #92)
Alan Kohler’s debut Quarterly Essay takes on the huge problems in Australia’s housing market. It’s current, extreme position is well-illustrated. In addition to the familiar statistics, Kohler expounds on how his experience entering the market differed from that of his parents and children.
The essay also contains a thorough treatment of Australia’s historical relationship with housing and the policy changes that have brought us to this point. Kohler points out that the capital gains concession introduced in 1999 by Costello was intended to increase Australian’s investment in shares and lower the cost of capital for Australian businesses. At least as Kohler tells it, this was the last in a set of policy interventions that set off an extraordinary bull-run in property prices. That bull-run continues to this day. Instead of encouraging Australian’s to invest in Australian businesses, the CGT change pushed them to put even more of their capital into property.
As for solutions, Kohler is candid in observing that Australia has few good options. A rapid fall in prices would be the most harmful way to resolve the current situation, and modest policies that might unwind favourable tax treatment for property are politically challenging. Kohler’s main prescription is an explicit goal of government to gradually unwind the ratio of house prices to income, by finding some way to hold prices fixed over a period of decades while wages catch up. Achieving this can only come when Australian’s no-longer believe property appreciation is the only way to build wealth.
If I had one problem with this essay (and with Kohler’s commentary on housing on his excellent podcast The Money Café) it’s his emphasis on immigration’s effect on house prices and prescription that migration rates should be capped based on the rate of housebuilding in Australia. He proposes that every year, Australia should accept only two migrants for every house that gets built. To me, this seems to fall afoul of something like the Tinbergen Rule. Migration is one of Australia’s most powerful policy levers for increasing prosperity. We would lose so much by using it instead to control house prices, especially when there are more directly-related policy levers. It’s not obvious to me that a world where Australia has fewer migrants and cheaper houses is better than one where Australia has more migrants and more expensive houses.
Reflections on the Revolution in France
The latest in my “making up for a lack of a politics education” reading. I wrote a longer review of this in a previous post Reflections on Reflections.