A Short Update

For the first time in the history of this blog, I'm having trouble keeping up with what I've read. Two small kids, a challenging job and the overall misery of COVID have prevented me from sitting down and writing the usual updates. The good news is that I still have time to read; in the dark, with my Kindle backlight on, after the kids are asleep. The bad news is that I don't know if I'll ever have time to clear my backlog of unwritten posts.

But I don't want this blog to decay. So I'll sporadically write short updates on what I've read and add them here for general interest. Here's what I've read this autumn. The books are in reverse sequence (newest first), and perhaps the sequence itself says something of my changing routines.

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling) - The best in the series so far. Explores complex themes like power, class and camaraderie in the frame of a murder mystery. What's more, there is a fun and unexpected left turn midway that takes the story in an exciting direction. Much better than the HBO adaptation.

A Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling) - The weakest link in Rowling's detective saga. Too long by half and repetitive in its delivery. Feel free to skip this one and move on to Lethal White. The Goblet of Fire is the most apt comparison. Luckily Rowling has been able to make up for plodding narratives in later entries to both series.

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith - The second outing for private eye Cormoran Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott. The first (The Cuckoo's Calling) was set in the world of high fashion. In a twist as good as any, The Silkworm is a macabre fantasy murder that revolves around a scandalous roman-a-clef. You'll have to read it to know what I'm talking about. It's as if Rowling decided to push the boundaries of detective fiction just to see if she could pull it off. It works well enough.

Range by David Epstein - Epstein makes the compelling case that specialisation is damaging to the modern world. Generalists are needed to bridge knowledge between distant domains, but generalism itself is rarely rewarded. Range is an easy target for criticism - it makes broad claims about diverse topics like sports, science and business - but personally, I consider it a study in being specifically wrong but generally right. An excellent read if you have the patience to look past some obvious weaknesses in its arguments.

The Premonition by Michael Lewis - I enjoy Lewis's writing as much as the next reader, and the Premonition doesn't disappoint. But it does show the limitations of his approach. The characters are, again, the heart and soul. Yet, The Premonition is not the definitive story of the pandemic like The Big Short was of the financial crisis. It's a character driven drama focused on a few aspects of the defining global event of the decade. I'm still waiting for an equivalent to Too Big to Fail to come out for COVID.

Behave by Robert Sapolsky - A masterpiece and probably more useful than a Bachelor's degree in Biology. One of the first chapters starts with the remark that those who haven't studied neurology should turn to Appendix 2, a 45 page introduction to the brain. That's more or less all you need to know. Comprehensive, intellectually titillating and almost unending in length. I hope to add a full review some time in the future.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries - I'm embarrassed to admit that I had not read The Lean Startup before. It's a central work in understanding modern companies (or perhaps emulating them) and I sort of hope my boss doesn't read this blog (Slack me if you do!). Eric Ries lays out many of the principles that I need in my day-to-day work in a tech company. Much of the content is familiar from work that came later - and the general zeitgeist! - so The Lean Startup is not as mandatory as it used to be.

Press Reset by Jason Schreier

Video games have been around for ages, yet somehow, they're still not considered "main stream". What I mean, is that hundreds of millions of people play video games daily, but it's rare to see anyone explore the cultural landscape around games. Most other media treat Twitch, a popular streaming platform, and Unity, a game engine and monetisation platform, as curiosities. At any given time, over a million people are using Twitch, but you'll be hard pressed to find a non-gamer who has heard of it. Those are just two examples, and I'm not cherry picking in any way. Perhaps it's hard to describe these media - and their appeal - to someone who's never experienced them before. Everyone has been to the movies, so movies are a cultural touch stone. But video games are already bigger business, even as they are completely unfamiliar to some.

Press Reset tries to bridge that gap by describing the video game industry from the point of view of its employees. There are few books that give an authentic account of video game development, so it's refreshing to see Schreier explore the theme from so many angles. He tracks several different game studios through boom and bust cycles, misadventures and successful game launches. His thesis - that studios needlessly mistreat employees and leave them high and dry - could have been made in a shorter format, but I still welcome the diligence with which he studies the subject. 

A standout is the story of 38 Studios. Founded by a celebrity baseball pitcher with no experience in the industry, 38 Studios burned through tens of millions of dollars without ever releasing the game it was developing. The day before its bankruptcy, employees were told that everything was fine. Then, the next morning they received an email saying that it was all over. Even more, they received no severance and weren't paid their last month's dues. Those that had moved to Rhode Island just to work on the game, found themselves without a job and a home as the complex benefits agreements with the company expired. The state of Rhode Island, which had made a foolish subsidised loan to the company, was also left empty handed.

Schreier demands change. He goes through the standard ideas, unionising especially, without making a convincing argument that change is indeed coming. The problem seems to be endemic to industries that share the mercurial combination of art and business; movies and, perhaps, music. Creative work, like designing video games, is so compelling that it attracts many more talented workers than it can employ. So workers end up being treated poorly, almost interchangeably. The hours are long but many don't mind because they're working on something they love. In the United States, where the balance between employers and employees is already severely skewed, loving your job leaves you open to being exploited by the system.

Several interviewees come to realise that barely anyone over 40 is still working in the industry. Many leave game development because of burnout or a pronounced inability to build a family while going through grueling cycles of "crunch"; an interminable sprint to finish a game before its launch date. All this should discourage you from considering a career in gaming and Schreier drives that idea home. It's not enough to carry a full book, though. The virtual world needs it own Bonfire of the Vanities or Moneyball - books that explain the inner workings of unfamiliar industries (banking and sports management, respectively) - otherwise it's destined to be overlooked in the broader cultural landscape. Press Reset is just the first step in that direction.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

 

The Martian was a fun, self-contained space drama that became a mega bestseller and, eventually, a Hollywood movie starring Matt Damon. Project Hail Mary, from the same author, takes the same context - a lone scientist, shipwrecked in space - and ups the stakes. It's science fiction with an emphasis on science unlike almost anything else I've read. If you've seen Matt Damon planting potatoes on Martian soil and using his own feces as fertilizer, you'll know what that means.

I mostly steer clear of spoilers on this blog, but it's hard to describe any part of the plot of Project Hail Mary without immediately revealing a few of its many twists. So I'll make an exception this time. Ryland Grace wakes up from a medically induced coma with no memory of what has happened. It's a trope and, luckily, Weir quickly moves on. Grace realizes he's on a spaceship and, as his memory returns, replays in his mind how humanity slowly understood that our sun was dying. And he's the only person who can do something about it.

The first half of the book flies by. The sun is slowly being eaten by an invasive alien organism, the Astrophage, which means that Earth will freeze solid in a matter of decades. Grace, who's research earns him an unlikely front row seat in the global effort to stop the Astrophage, is one of the first people to put their hands on the culprit. He wakes up just as his spaceship reaches Tau Ceti, a nearby start system and the likely source of the Astrophage, only to realize that the rest of his crew has passed away during the journey. As he prepares to investigate Tau Ceti, he makes contact with someone from another planet who's there for the same reason he is. Several equally unlikely twists follow.

Weir focuses on the minutiae of research and engineering that might go into all of this. Project Hail Mary is almost an attempt to guess how the scientific community might react to extraterrestrial challenges and it painstakingly describes things like lab experiments, biochemistry, cell cultures and centrifuges. Grace is a teacher by vocation and at times it felt like Project Hail Mary was a sneaky attempt to get teenagers excited about a STEM education. Weir's style works wonders during that exciting first half. It almost feels like a police procedural or a murder mystery, except that the sun is the victim. Unfortunately, being so meticulous has its downsides. Some latter parts fall into a cycle of tedium: a new problem emerges, Grace overcomes obstacles to piece together a solution, that solution creates a new, even bigger problem. At times, paragraphs sound like flight checklists and a leaner format would definitely have been more digestible.

In the end, Weir is able to rescue the story (and the protagonist), but only barely. There's not much to see beyond the midway point, unless you're really excited about the exact way to breed nitrogen resistant amoeba. I'm not joking. Try swapping Project Hail Mary for the movie Arrival once you hit that point in the book. There are several overlapping themes and, unlike Project Hail Mary, Arrival has genuinely compelling characters and a plot that excites from beginning to end. Or better yet, wait until the Hail Mary movie comes out - they cast Ryan Gosling as a nerdy science teacher! - to enjoy a few genuinely exciting surprises without the need to constantly manipulate your centrifuge or adjust the angle of attack of your spacecraft.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

 

I was not expecting this. It's easy to be prejudiced toward presidential memoirs and biographies. Politicians are uniquely long-winded, self-serving and capable of distorting reality. But Obama's memoir, A Promised Land, is as refreshing as you can expect a sweeping presidential memoir to be. Sure, there is a lot of the fluff I did expect - endless lists of campaign employees and staff who need to be named and liturgy about how America is still the land of freedom in spite of its racial divides - but it's easy enough to skip those paragraphs and focus on what makes A Promised Land good.

As far as I can tell, Obama wrote most of A Promised Land himself. Most celebrity memoirs are written by ghost writers, but Obama wrote two books before his presidency - Dreams from my Father and The Audacity of Hope, neither of which I'll ever read - which give his post-presidential releases more credibility. The very positive surprise is that he is a skilled writer who expresses himself clearly without dumbing down topics. Many passages are beautiful and thoughtful. Obama describes the American political landscape in a way that is approachable enough for outsiders but detailed enough for veterans. Clarity of thought isn't usually something you associate with politicians.

The beginning of his presidency is a standout part of the book. The Republican Party was already well on its way to becoming the disingenuous, anti-intellectual cesspool it is today, but not all the top republican politicians were converts yet. Obama's idealism and somewhat foolhardy bridge building lurched the Republican party further right and further down the road it's on today. He inherited a country in economic turmoil - his campaign coincided with the scarring financial collapse in 2008 - and had to quickly come up with a rescue plan. Though it seemed adventurous at the time, the TARP program effectively ended the Great Recession in the United States, while the EU, who opted for austerity, took years longer to recover. Much of the response has stood the test of time.

Obama's literary voice reminded me of Bruce Springsteen's memoir. Springsteen is less eloquent and more exuberant in his delivery, but the two men have surprisingly much in common. Both had absentee fathers - literally in Obama's case and psychologically in Springsteen's - and both opted for black and white pictures for their hardcovers. Both look thoughtful in those photos, and simultaneously young and road worn. Springsteen's ability to connect with a crowd and intuit the fears of his generation is matched by Obama's need to connect with humans everywhere he goes. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the two had released a joint podcast. I haven't listened to it yet, but a headline put it well: "The Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama Podcast Is Just Two Guys Talking About Hope".

Another thing I didn't expect; A Promised Land is not the definitive account of Obama's presidency. It tracks his life from Honolulu to Chicago to the White House. But it ends with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011 and not the end of his second terms, as I thought. It's a brick of a book, and hard to hold up in bed, so it's surprising that it only covers half of what I wanted to read about. A second volume is sure to follow, but it is somewhat annoying to wade through more than a thousand pages of political back and forth to understand Obama's monumental presidency.

Pintaremontti by Miika Nousiainen

 

It's unlikely that Pintaremontti is ever translated to English. That's too bad. It turns modern worries - finding a presentable partner, finding happiness and finding the right baby clothes - into Greek comedy. Miika Nousiainen is a well established Finnish author, journalist and TV personality. Pintaremontti - the title is perhaps best explained as "some surface renovations" - is much more fluid and natural than a previous work from him that I read years ago. It's genuinely funny, observant and a great guide to relationships in a world, where the pressure to conform is stronger than ever.

Sami has been looking for a partner, one that's ready to have a family and settle down, without much luck. He's the archetypal young male: indecisive, non-committal, yet harbours high hopes that one person could lift him up. When he sees his girlfriend get on a motorcycle with another man, he takes his frustration out on a row of well-kept Harley-Davidsons. Though it turns out that the man on the motorcycle was his girlfriend's brother, the owners of the Harleys are not as docile. It's all farcical, and just the beginning of a fun, light-hearted journey, and Nousiainen never lets up on the jokes.

The descriptions of family life are especially well conceived. You can tell from the details that Nousiainen has kids of his own; he compares different brands of toddler clothes and understands how some brands confer status in downtown parks. Dress your kid in Polarn O. Pyret if you want them to look well off but not luxurious, Reima if you think every piece of clothing needs to have a waterproof Gore-Tex layer or Gugguu for the homemade hipster look. I've been to a few of these stores and I know that Nousiainen knows his material. There's even a bit about how the shoe straps on Reima are superior to anything else on offer, which captures the level of vanity nicely.

Another prominent theme is the struggle to keep up appearances. All of the main characters do this on some level. A popular blogger fakes a happy marriage and joyful children. Her blog, the eponymous Pintaremontti, is a catalogue of eat-pray-love cliches and absurd wishful thinking. In the blog, which perhaps reflects better the internalized pressures of its writer than the real world, her children never eat added sugar, her husband doesn't cheat and a yoga play date has 7 year olds learning about mindfulness. You can guess how this differs from reality. Like any good farce, Pintaremontti forces us to face our real world fears by amplifying them and pushing them to their limits.

Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough

 

I’ve read Barbarians at the Gate before. Or I thought I had. I have an entry here, from five or six years ago, but when I started rereading the book, I barely remembered a thing. Thinking back, I might have skipped or skimmed at least some parts, which partly explains why the material seemed so new. Another reason is that Barbarians at the Gate is so teeming with side characters, sub plots and detours that it’s difficult to retain all of the information in one go. My Kindle version didn’t warn me that there are more than 500 dense pages in this opus. No wonder that Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big to Fail, aspires to write something as thorough.

Barbarians at the Gate is the story of RJR Nabisco, famed producer (at the time) of Oreo’s, Nutter Butters and Winston cigarettes. At the height of the wheeling dealing Wall Street 80’s, it tried to take itself private only to be bought by KKR, a private equity behemoth. Its CEO, Ross Johnson made a fool of himself by very publicly bumbling his way into a takeover battle, making very questionnable statements about his motives for doing so and then spectacularly failing to retain the company that he had personally put in play. The RJR Nabisco debacle came to symbolize different things for different people. For Wall Street, it was the apex of an explosion of new financial instruments, bigger and bigger acquisitions and increasing returns for bankers. For Main Street, it showed that greed had run amok and that bankers had lost touch with what actually created wealth in the country: the real economy.

Burrough and Helyar approach the topic as if it was a sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses (disclaimer: I haven’t actually read Ulysses and don’t know anyone who has). Each individual negotiation, every meeting and every twist in the unlikely story is recounted in painstaking detail. I applaude their effort and tenacity, and appreciate their commitment to high quality journalism, but I can’t help feel out of breath every time I open my Kindle and see the cover. It’s so amazingly detailed that every time you think that the story is converging into its final act, a new player appears on the scene and the story resets. The most obvious example is First Boston’s desperate last-minute bid. The First Boston detour did happen in real life, so some may argue it should be included in the book too, but here it dissipates any sense of momentum.

It’s easy to fault Barbarians at the Gate for being so exhaustive. However, that may be a distraction from its true value. It’s a portrait of a time more than almost any book on finance. Most non-fiction finance sagas (Liar’s Poker, The Smartest Guys in the Room and the like) adjust and omit - as good books do - to a degree that those who disagree with their world view can relatively easily dismiss them. Its love of the finer points of finance make it almost unassailable.

This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay

 

I have a bunch of books that I’ve read but haven’t had the time to review yet. The reasons for this are twofold. First, I’ve read several relatively short novels that I’ve breezed through in a few weeks. Second, I’ve had essentially no time to myself in the past month. I guess that’s what happens when you have kids. It’s easy enough to find time for reading, I suppose. Even after a long day of work and taking care of the kid, I can usually slip in 20 minutes of reading right before I go to bed. Writing is different. If I’m drained after a rough day at work, and trying to make do with less sleep than I would prefer, it’s hard to find the energy to sit down and focus long enough to put something on paper.

I read This is Going to Hurt during a week-long winter holiday. My sister’s boyfriend is a medical student and he had received it as a Christmas present the week before. It was highly recommended by both him and her. This is Going to Hurt doesn’t try to hide what it is; the concept is very straightforward. It follows the career of a graduate doctor from his first year in medicine to his eventual departure from the field (he went into standup comedy, of all things). He works his way up the hierarchy, specializing in caesarean sections and other challenging births. The chapters are brief looks into the average and unusual days of a doctor’s life.

The style, though, is by and large tongue-in-cheek. Adam Kay follows in the footseps of Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential) and Geraint Anderson (Cityboy) by describing the inner workings of a career by exposing its absurdities, intricacies and personalities. Bourdain did an excellent job showing the world what happens in the kitchens of the world’s best restaurants. Anderson didn’t fare as well with bankers. Kay slots somewhere between the two in terms of quality of writing and presentation. This is Going to Hurt is viscerally funny, however, and often had me chuckling alone.

There’s a method to the comedy. Humor is a great way to show how the clumsiness of bureaucracy wheighs down the healthcare industry. Computers are ancient, unattainable or out of order. Yet, doctors spend the majority of their time writing notes about patients and entering information on forms. Just like bankers and chefs, doctors are subjected to absurd work hours only to be told off by politicians or management. Working for the NHS, the British national healthcare provider, is great on paper, but doctors would be much better off going into private practice. There’s an air of sadness hidden in the humor. After all, these are serious issues - both those that happen in the operating room and those that emerge from the policitical process - and that’s what’s left once the jokes subside.

High Output Management by Andrew Grove

 

Typically, I wouldn’t even consider reading something with the words ”output” and ”management” in its title. The rest of the cover hardly gets better. Grove poses next to the Intel logo wearing a blue dress shirt and one hand on his hip. For some inexplicable reason, he’s wearing his employee ID card. To me, everything about High Output Management screams vanity project and CEO grandstanding. Most CEOs seem to end up writing (or, more accurately, commissioning from a ghost writer) some kind of management opus in retirement. A few recent examples include Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Ray Dalio - though Dalio’s Principles is better than most, even if Bridgewater allegedly doesn’t operate as diligently as it lets on.

So what made me read High Output Management? First, it’s almost required reading at work; some managers gift it to new employees and I wanted to find out what the fuss was about. Second, Grove and this book are still highly regarded in startup land, even though most of the material was finished pre internet bubble and Grove himself has since passed away. Later I found out that Grove isn’t your average CEO either. He fled communist Hungary to study in the United States and was the first employee at Intel. In his early work, he focused on research and development and was proficient in the actual engineering of microprocessors to the point of contributing to a college textbook on the topic.

High Output Management isn’t a memoir though. It’s best described as a mix between a college lecture series and a Harvard Business Review article. The first third uses a breakfast diner to explain the birth of the modern manufacturing economy. It’s quite clever and well presented and wouldn’t put off someone who only has a passing interest in what a critical production path is. Imagine you are the owner of a small restaurant that serves eggs and bacon. What steps would you need to take to grow that business into a national chain? Grove walks you through each step and slowly builds a compelling argument for the existence of factories, supply chains and ownership structures. I wouldn’t mind if it was the basis of Introduction to Industrial Engineering at my alma mater.

The rest of High Output Management doesn’t hold up as well. Some parts are hilariously out of date with vague references to how the Internet will revolutionize office communication and possibly upend the fax machine business. Grove, of course, is right in principal but the passages serve no other purpose today than to remind us how difficult prediction is. Some time is wasted on introducing the novel management term: ”task relevant maturity”. No one would guess from the term alone that Grove wants managers to understand that employees need different kinds of support depending on how experienced they are. Junior employees, who don’t have a lot of ”task relevant maturity”, need more regular and explicit guidance from their supervisors. It only sounds clever due to the inscrutable name and dubious acronym TRM. High Output Management is exactly what it says it is: a (somewhat distinguished) guidebook for (somewhat self-serious) middle managers.