In keeping with last year’s format, I will do a book summary for the final email of the year. I read quite a few books this year (actually, the most I’ve ever read in a single year) and as always, some were much better than others.
One of my favorite genres is biographies, and the best one I read this year was Rebel Yell, about Stonewall Jackson. While I believe Sherman had a better overall grasp on the Civil War - not only militarily, but politically, economically, and socially as well - from a tactical standpoint, Jackson was second to none.
Runner up goes to Damn Right!, a bio about Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charles Munger. An inveterate reader himself, he said “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter) who didn’t read all the time - none, zero.”
Honorable mention goes to Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and to Jonathan Schwartz’s autobiography All in Good Time. Schwartz is the long-time New York City disc jockey whose program can still be heard on WNYC-FM on Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons.
While fiction accounts for less than 10% of my reading, I did read several good novels this year. Two (A Falcon Flies and Men of Men) were by Wilbur Smith, a prolific author who writes primarily about Africa. I had never heard of him, but a reader of this newsletter suggested him and I’m glad she did, as he is an excellent story teller.
His books led me to King Leopold's Ghost which led me to Joseph Conrad’s classic novel, Heart of Darkness. Another novel I enjoyed was Judy Blume’s In the Unlikely Event, based on the true events of three plane crashes in two months at Newark Airport in 1951-52.
But my favorite novel of the year was The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London. First, I had never read anything before by London, and he is a terrific writer (I also read one of his short stories, To Build a Fire, which was also excellent). Second, Wolf Larsen is one of the great villains of American literature.
The best business book I read was The Checklist Manifesto. It was written by Atul Gawande, a surgeon who studied the checklists of pilots and construction companies to devise one for the surgery department of his hospital, which has since been implemented by numerous hospitals around the world.
Sources that I use for potential reading material include http://ryanholiday.net/reading-list/ , https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/newsletter/, http://delanceyplace.com/index.php, and of course Amazon. If you have a book(s) or author(s) that you particularly enjoy, then shoot me an email. My current reading queue is quite long so I may not get to it for a while, but I am always on the lookout for a good read.
There will be no emails the next two weeks, but they will resume on January 5th. I wish all of you the happiest of holidays, and thanks for reading.