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.

Because I Said So by Ken Jennings

I’m getting a lot a of book recommendations from podcasts these days. It seems all my favorite non-fiction authors have a podcast: Michael Lewis has the excellent Against the Rules, Malcolm Gladwell has Revisionist History (and he’s even an owner of a podcast company) and Stephen Dubner has Freakonomics Radio. Steve Levitt, Dubner’s academic buddy, recently launched his own podcast - People I Mostly Admire, if you’re curious - and Ken Jennings was a guest on a recent episode. If I had a time machine, I would go back in time 5 years to tell myself that everyone and their aunt has a podcast show now. I wouldn’t believe it and I barely do now. Yet, the heavy hitters above must be on to something.

Ken Jennings is famous for being a champion of the American game show Jeopardy. I’ve never watched Jeopardy - I assume that no one in Europe has - but I was obsequios enough to listen to his interview. It was vaguely compelling to hear how meticulous someone could be about appearing on a television game show. Jennings has intricate knowledge of how the buzzer that contestants use to answer questions works. He has a replica at home that he uses for practice. He applies the same obsessiveness to all aspects of the game. 

Jennings turns that overflowing curiosity to parenting and old-wives tales in Because I Said So! The premise is simple. Our parents pass down all kinds of funky facts to us. Don’t give children too much sugar or they become hyper-active! Sitting too close to the television causes myopia! Never run with scissors! It’s essentially a well researched trivia book about child rearing. Jennings digs into the data (research papers, mortality rates and government regulations) and reveals that scissors do cause countless lacerations to children, but sugar doesn’t actually make them go ballistic.

It’s familiar territory for fans of Snopes.com and Mythbusters. Jennings has gathered an impressive collection of claims and evidence. There’s just enough meat on each entry to make this more than a reference book for scientifically inclined parents. Sometimes the full story is even stranger than the claim that it backs. The US army studied how the body emits heat and came to the conclusion that insulating the head was critical. They made recruits stand outside in the cold without hats and noticed that almost all of the heat loss was coming from the head. The catch, of course, is that the research subjects were otherwise properly clothed. With that flawed experiment, a myth was born.

Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

 

I think I’ve finally figured Malcolm Gladwell out. He’s always been as divisive as he’s been celebrated. He’s often criticised for being too simplistic, for leaving out vital bits of information and for making wild conjectures. I realise now that this is a feature and not a bug of his work. His podcast Revisionist History illuminates his world view better than his books. There, his voice betrays a droll and sometimes nihilistic approach to life. His propositions are meant to be divisive. They are supposed to make you argue over the effectiveness of police reform or the Elvis oeuvre. He cares less about being right than about making us think. This inevitably frustrates those who read his books as they would read actual social science research, which Talking to Strangers is not.

Talking to Strangers is Gladwell’s darkest work: rape, police violence and racism all make an appearance. It is very much of this time. Although it’s never explicitly mentioned, Trump’s presidency looms over many of the social phenomena describe here. Gladwell’s central thesis, that we make predictable but dire mistakes when judging others’ behaviour, applies well to the millions of people who fall for a demagogue’s charm. First of all, we expect others to act truthfully (default to truth), and hold on to that belief as long as possible, often to our own detriment. Second, we assume that we can predict someone’s intentions from verbal and facial cues. Gladwell expertly shows that this emphatically isn’t the case. Third, context, and location especially, change our behaviour in ways that are difficult to admit. Add these three theories together and you get an enlightening, but not especially thorough look at our psychology in groups.

Going into more detail here is not necessarily worth it. Gladwell is almost a genre unto himself, a somewhat self-contained, nerdy universe, where readers take a tour of psychology research and recent history. The experience is not unlike going to the zoo. You walk around for a few hours, read a few placards, pick up some tidbits about the different animals on display. You feel a little more knowledgeable after. Hopefully, you enjoyed your time. Reading Talking to Strangers is mostly a walk in the (zoo) park.

Instead, I would recommend Revisions History, Gladwell's podcast. Not all episodes are worth your time, but many are excellent and provide a more realistic context to the audience: newsreels, interviews and other contemporary evidence improve the immersion and often strengthen Gladwell's argument. For example, in "Hamlet was Wrong", a recent episode, Gladwell explores his personal views on recruiting. He interviews his past employees about their experiences working for him. The resulting discussions are hilarious and heartwarming. The episode doesn't try to be an authoritative study of the ins and outs of hiring. It's a love letter to nihilism and random encounters. That is Gladwell at his best. Personal, anecdotal, charming and not entirely off the mark.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

I had a very vague idea about who Anthony Bourdain was before I picked up his first book Kitchen Confidential. I'm always on the lookout for something to read about restaurants or food production, and I remembered hearing that Bourdain first established himself as a writer before going on to star on television, so picking up this bargain bin paperback was an obvious choice. Kitchen Confidential originally came out in 2000 and how things have changed! My version included useful notations, forewords and afterwords that expanded on Bourdain's original work and made an effort to modernize some of the original work's idiosyncrasies. Bourdain's own handwriting lined the margins (from the grave no less) to inform me that squeegee bottles are no longer popular or that Madeira is not a required component of a sophisticated mise en place anymore.

Kitchen Confidential follows the beginning of Bourdain's career in New York City. He temps at a popular vacation destination restaurant and ends up studying at the Culinary Institute of America (the ambitiously abbreviated CIA). He works for every and any restaurant that offers him money and the status of chef: mob joints, doomed brasseries, huge chains and his own eccentric restaurant. Drugs are used, waitresses are mistreated and owners ridiculed. Les Halles - a traditional French restaurant in New York that has since closed - eventually offers him a permanent position as head chef. In a sober afterword, Bourdain reflects on a life of culinary adventures.

Kitchen Confidential was a big success in its day and catapulted Bourdain into a career in television, and it's no wonder. It's packed with hilarious anecdotes ("What do you know about meat?"), colourful personalities and an abundance of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Bourdain's band of crooks work the backroom kitchens of great and not that great restaurants, their irreverence and antics in contrast to the buzzing but dignified atmosphere of the restaurants themselves. Bourdain has to cope with a smashing hangover, missing produce deliveries, stealing waiters, wise guys and desperate owners on a daily basis. He makes restaurant work sound exciting and terrifying at the same time. Luckily, he's quick to dissuade hopefuls that kitchens are miserable places that pay poorly and rob you of your health and free time.

As said, Kitchen Confidential shows its age. Bourdain advises chef hopefuls that calling in sick is out of the question, no matter how high your fever. That sounds bonkers, especially now. He also quietly disparages women from working in restaurants (other than as waiters), because they supposedly can't cope with the daily debauchery and abuse. That view must have already been on its way out in 2000. Today, it sounds positively medieval. Despite its deficiencies, Kitchen Confidential manages to entertain. Bourdain is an able guide to the hospitality world. Just remember to take everything with a grain of salt.

The Last Leonardo by Ben Lewis

Apparently, I'm into art now. Walter Isaacson's biography of Leonardo da Vinci - the starting point of that interest - is full of the things that typically bug me about the art world: attempts to put more meaning into pieces than they warrant and mystifying the artist to make their work seem larger than life. However, Isaacson, together with two excellent podcast episodes by Malcolm Gladwell (Dragon Psychology 101 and Hedwig's Lost Van Gogh), succeeded in rousing my interest in the art world and its calculated strangeness. Did you know that much of the world's renaissance art is stowed away in airport warehouses (especially in Switzerland) and used to avoid taxes? Also, did you know that the most expensive painting ever sold, the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, is probably not by the master himself and even if it was, it barely retains any of its original paint?

The Last Leonardo, by art insider Ben Lewis, dives head first into the latter question. The Salvator Mundi, sold to Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi Prince, for a staggering 450 million Euros in 2017, is a portrait of Christ as the saviour of the world. It was "discovered" at a minor auction by two experienced art dealers, who, according to the very extensive legend that already surrounds the painting, could clearly see that beside the obvious overpainting and damage, the piece had an inexplicable charm. They paid around one thousand euros for it in 2005. After extensive efforts to clean and restore the painting, it first sold to a Russian oligarch looking to hide money from an impending divorce settlement and later to the aforementioned Saudis albeit, even then, under mysterious circumstances. As of today, its whereabouts are uncertain.

Lewis tracks the painting from its supposed creation through the centuries. There are possible clues throughout the ages as a "picture of Christ by Leonardo" is catalogued to be in the possession of Charles II, king of England in the 17th century. But, as Lewis deftly shows, art attribution was even more troubled then than it is now. Overzealous dealers tended to attribute studio works to masters and sometimes repair damaged works with less than impressive results. In the same vein, Lewis picks apart much of the evidence that supports the Salvator Mundi's attribution to Leonardo. As he peels back the curtain, there is very little definitively shows it to be an original.

The question remains. What exactly is the Salvator Mundi if not an original Leonardo? According to Lewis, it is a studio piece - a collaborative project by Leonardo's pupils - based on Leonardo's design and, possibly, with some input from the master himself. We know that Leonardo must have been involved in the project, since many of his students have painted versions of the Salvator Mundi and there are a few sketches of it in his notebooks. However, the attempt to elevate the painting to the level of an autograph work seems wishful if not disingenuous.

The Last Leonardo makes for the perfect companion piece to Isaacson's look into da Vinci's whole life. Lewis had unprecedented access to all parties involved, with the obvious exception of the Saudis, including Yves Bouvier, the flamboyant ex-art dealer to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, and the oligarch himself. It's the story of the art market, in its current incarnation, as much as it is the story of the Salvator Mundi. I could go on, there is so much to say about all of these topics - are other Leonardo's misattributed? - but I'll let Lewis be the guide. The Last Leonardo is the quintessential guide to high art today; impressive, well researched and full of intrigue.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Psychologists and sociologists, philosophers and other clever people have come up with hundreds of theories about how people interact, how they fall in love and how they decide who to stick with. Somewhere outside the edges of those theories is what you might call chemistry. It's not always possible to explain away why we love who we love and why we reject someone who might be a perfect match.  Some of the elements are obvious and some are not. Sometimes, an inexplicable force ties you to another person without really showing you why. Normal People taps into that force in an intriguing and perceptive way.

Normal People follows Connell and Marianne from high school to College in Ireland, as they hook up, quarrel, drift apart, drift back together and so on. Connell is athletic, handsome and popular, but harbours a secret love for literature. Marianne, born into wealth, is coquettish but prone to traveling the darker alleys of her mind. Their story is relatable and believable in a way that few novels are. Connell struggles to understand how he feels about Marianne - very much something that young adult men go through - and ends up hurting her. They learn about each other and grow up together and realise that their chemistry is something they only share with each other.

Rooney does a lot with very little. Normal People is positively brief, especially compared to other stories of teenagers growing up (don't drop Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 on your foot). Chapters skip forward in time, offering the reader glimpses of the characters' lives. Rooney knows her craft and offers just enough clues for the reader. For example, Connell's missing father gets barely a nod, even though he might be blamed for many of the son's mistakes. It works brilliantly but for a few passages. Marianne's brother, who bullies and torments Marianne, is given so little time on the page that his actions mostly left me confused. Here a longer format might have helped. 

So what exactly is Normal People? In one corner of the Internet, critics dismiss it as just another piece of "chic-lit"; naive books for young women in the style of Jojo Moyes and other bookstore top 10 staples. Normal People does share many of the genre's tropes. Connell is drawn to literature (can't writers imagine any other profession than their own?), is a top student at Trinity College and is invited to continue his studies in New York. New York as a metaphor for success is as vanilla as it gets. Paris is the city of love, Spanish is the language of lust and New York is the aspiring artist's inevitable destination. Some have mentioned Normal People as a generation defining love story. It obviously isn't. My generation (I'm very much the same age as the protagonists) doesn't care about high literature or write long emails to friends during summer vacations. We browse Instagram, not The Communist Manifesto, miscommunicate over texts and live in a constant state of FOMO (fear of missing out).

Nine times out of ten, the story ends there. A bestselling will-they-or-won't-they isn't a likely place to find graceful storytelling. Yet, there is an inexplicable allure to Normal People. We watched the TV series with my wife, which led to several deep discussions about our relationship and how we'd met. On several occasions, I thought about Normal People before going to bed. There are stylistic and thematic similarities with Hemingway's A Sun Also Rises; the sparseness of the storytelling, the frail inner life of the characters and the uncertain ending. And as with Hemingway, and human chemistry itself, part of Normal People's allure is physical and best left unexplained.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I read The Corrections for the first time ten years ago. I didn’t enjoy it, maybe I didn’t really understand it, so I stashed it away and forgot about it. Epics make for great summer reading so I decided to give it another go, considering I always loved Franzen’s other work, especially Freedom. For whatever reason, I barely remembered any of it. I thought it took place in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, but it concerns itself with the 2000 tech bubble instead. Most of the scenes, and even many of the characters felt completely new. I might as well have read it for the first time now.

The premise feels somewhat conceited - a mid-western family gathers for one last Christmas together - which I still find off-putting. Once you jump in, however, it quickly becomes clear that Christmas is perhaps the least important theme in a book chock-full of late 90s Americana. Enid and Alfred Lambert are the ageing parents of Gary, Chip and Denise. Alfred’s declining health (Parkinson’s and dementia) forces the family to confront lingering conflicts as it prepares for the holiday season. Chip has lost his comfortable academic job after a very ill-advised affair with a student. Gary treats his proto-depression with alcohol and tries to maintain his status as head of his own family. Denise is a higly successful chef but can’t bring herself to live an otherwise normal life.

Chapters run for a hundred pages or so and focus on one family member at a time. Alfred is, perhaps, the most compelling character. A stoic, once handsome man, he’s perpetually misunderstood by his wife and children. Enid married him for the looks and the comfortable income of a mid level executive. Gary can’t see past Alfred’s disease and Chip thinks Alfred disapproves of his career. Yet, the man himself is burdened by a debilitating disease and an introverted personality. His grumpiness and distant demeanor are a reflection of his inner life and not his attitude towards others. In his actions, he is loving and dependable. In his words, he is angry and sometimes confused.

In the end, the correction is inevitable. Denise is fired from her restaurant for seducing the owner’s wife. Chip’s surreal Lithuanian detour comes to an abrupt end, and so on. Each of the Lamberts is forced to reckon with the consequences of delaying and ignoring the inevitable. It’s not unlike a parable. Each of the characters is seduced by greed or power or lust or denial. Their ploys work - Enid forces Alfred on a cruise even as his health deterioirates - for a time. The tension grows, as the reader starts expecting the unforgiving backlash that is sure to follow.

I was most surprised by how topical The Corrections still is. It’s fitting that I thought it took place in 2008. Greed, especially, is ubiquitous as everyone and their neighbor is making money in a rising market. In 2000, the mechanism was technology stocks. In 2008, it was homes. Today, once again, seeing others succeed drives us to reach too far, to take on too much risk and, inescapably, start the clock on another correction.

Samsung Rising by Geoffrey Cain

One of the biggest surprises in Samsung Rising has to do with the nature of Samsung, the company, itself. Samsung is not a traditional (to westerners, at least) conglomerate with a head office, assorted business units and one set of shareholders. It is, in fact, a chaebol, a South Korean multi-industry entity, where individual companies have cross-holdings of shares that are ultimately tied to a controlling family. If it sounds complex, it is. This web of ownership was built with the express intention of keeping control of the company within the Lee family whose patriarch, Lee Byung-chul, founded it in 1938.

Samsung is entwined with the South Korean national identity in much the same way that Nokia used to be in Finland. It accounts for more than ten percent of South Korea's GDP and employs over three hundred thousand people. It is, perhaps, best known for its smartphones today, but it also produces heavy machinery, offers insurance and manages hospitals. Samsung Heavy Industries is the second largest shipyard in the world (right after Hyundai, a hometown rival). It is revered by locals. Mothers want their sons to work for Samsung.

The central theme here is control. When Galaxy Note 7s, advanced mega-smartphones, start exploding in users' hands, Samsung doesn't acknowledge fault. It blames suppliers, delays a recall and, mostly, stays mum. A heavy culture of obedience and top-down management had created a situation, where nobody dared to acknowledge. As airlines started banning the product, Samsung’s management slowly came around and issued a full recall. But what mysterious consortium made the decision in the end? Unfortunately Cain’s access doesn’t extend that far.

Geoffrey Cain is not Korean and, therefore, an outsider. This both benefits and hinders the story. Cain wasn't born into the cult of Samsung, he moved to South Korea as an expat. This makes the story easier to follow. Cain slowly teaches the reader the same things he had to learn about Samsung and its legacy. The company is the source of intense pride, and more recently, scrutiny. The story of Samsung is the story of South Korea's rise from an agricultural society to the world stage. After the second world war, South Korea was poor, even poorer than its northern sibling, and painfully undeveloped. Now, it is a global leader in technology and engineering.

However, as an outsider, Cain doesn't have the same access as a local might. The chaebol are secretive and impenetrable and Cain doesn't enjoy the same kind of insider information as Mike Isaac did for Super Pumped (the Uber expose). Nobody is texting him from clandestine board meetings or sneaking him stolen files. He manages to land a few key interviews, a Lee family relative, a retired top executive, but many of the central players are missing. As a result, Samsung Rising isn't as revealing as some of the other business books featured on this blog (notably the aforementioned Super Pumped and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood).

Cain’s timing is impeccable. Samsung’s current vice chairman, Lee Jae-yong, is on trial at this very moment. He faces charges of bribery - the full charge is too long and bizarre to repeat here, but involves olympic race horses and the South Korean president - and he seems guilty, by all accounts. The plot thickens, though. Lee hardly seems like a criminal mastermind and he definitely isn’t a John Rockefeller or a Masayoshi Son when it comes to business acumen. So the question remains: who is in control? Who is the man behind Samsung’s curtain? It’s a question that Cain leaves unanswered.

Dead Lions by Mick Herron

Earlier, I praised Slow Horses for its tone, humour and characters. Dead Lions continues the story and only improves on the original. Slough House still stands and the slow horses - washed up spies dejected by MI5 - still take care of menial tasks like archiving and background checks. There's Jackson Lamb, the out of shape cold war relic with bad personal hygiene. River Cartwright is as close as the series gets to having a 'straight man'. In Slow Horses he took centre stage and seemed destined to anchor the series. Here, he's merely one of half a dozen spooks, all equally interesting and engaging.

Senior spies at MI5 have made contact with a Russian oligarch who might be willing to spy for the British in exchange for political support. The mission is expedited, a meeting is set up - in what absolutely sounds like The Shard, but is not identified - and the intelligence community salivates in anticipation of the coup of the decade. Yet something is amiss. A retired British spy is found dead on a country bus. A long-disbanded Soviet spy ring may be rearing its head. The synopsis would fit any number of John le Carre's novels, but the result is fresh, funny and exhilarating.

The strangest thing about Dead Lions is that it's almost needlessly short. It could easily be stretched to double its actual length (some 350 pages) without feeling bloated. There's a subplot involving a small village in the Cotswolds that, in itself, would make a full length crime novel. A picturesque town, forgotten by time, home to a a few hundred retired Londoners. Yet, the only clue leads there, to what can't possibly be a dead end. It makes sense to leave the reader wanting more, but I could have easily gotten lost in the relationships of these characters. Here, they operate in pairs, some at Slough House and others in the field. Some, like the newcomer whose name I forgot, seem destined to star in subsequent entries to the series.

The best trick in Herron's arsenal is something that can only be described as an inverse Ocean's Eleven. (Look away now if you ever intend to read Dead Lions). Ocean's Eleven is an elaborate heist movie, where the protagonists trick Casino owners out of their money. The viewer is fooled too, the crux of the plan is hidden until the very end. Dead Lions imagines that scenario from the casino owner's perspective. They must realise that something nefarious is going on. However, they are not privy to the plan and must wait for the crooks to reveal themselves. It's an ingenious way to build suspense. You know you've been had and you desperately try to understand how.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of those books that isn't about finance, Wall Street or bond trading but often makes its way onto lists of books about those very same topics. On the surface, it's a satire and character study set in 1980s New York. Sherman McCoy is an up-and-coming WASP Wall Street trader who, in a series of mishaps and bad decisions, sees his life disintegrate. There is much else at play. The Bonfire of the Vanities is both quaint - in its description of local minorities especially - and oddly prescient. It's also one of the best books I've read in a long time.

It was a wrong number that started it. Sherman, married and a father, mistakenly dials his wife instead of his mistress. This small error ripples across Sherman's life. The self-titled Master of the Universe, head of bond trading at Pierce & Pierce (a Goldman Sachs stand-in perhaps) slowly loses his cool and starts doubting his abilities. This small lapsus triggers a newfound doubt in his mind. Is everything, from his lavish 5th Avenue apartment to his infidelity, really under control? Most importantly, he gets lost driving in the Bronx at night. As Sherman and Maria, his lover, search for an exit ramp, their way is blocked by two black teenagers, who may have it in for them. Maria hits the other with the car but the couple end up escaping. Once the machinery is set in motion, however, it's hard to stop.

Tom Wolfe deftly introduces several main characters whose lives coalesce in the end. Peter Fallow is an English expat and journalist. His alcoholism is on the verge of killing his career, but he lucks into a lead on a juicy story: a hit and run in the Bronx. Tommy Killian is a crafty defence attorney with Irish roots. He eventually picks up the McCoy case. Larry Kramer, an assistant district attorney, barely makes ends meet with the meagre government salary, but he uses his position to woo young female jurors. These actors, among several others, are so well conceived that The Bonfire of the Vanities barely needs a central plot thread. Wolfe originally wrote the story in the style of Charles Dickens: as individually released chapters in a monthly magazine. He needed every chapter to be self-contained and compelling.

Wolfe delights in showing the contradicting behaviours of his characters. Killian dresses in colourful pinstripe suits and showy hats but mutters "Whaddaya, whaddaya" under his breath and happily ventures into the grey areas of law. Kramer puts on a show, flexes his honed muscles and frames himself as the keeper of peace in the Bronx. In a hilarious scene, his pomp and posturing ruin a dinner date. He's so focused on entertaining that he forgets to watch his audience. Everywhere, male insecurity shows up like it's the 2010s.

Some of the chapters drag on - descriptions of laughter at a dinner party or a brief stint in jail - but this enhances the immersion rather than slowing down the narrative. This is by no means a short novel. Wolfe uses that length to its fullest. The Bonfire of the Vanities is a sweeping study of an era of life in New York with its players, its hustlers and its vanguard. The strangest part is how distant the 1980s feels. Some parts of the city were off-limits to the middle class due to the risk of crime. Racial tensions were high, not in an abstract modern way, but in a "there are protesters on our street corner"-way. Italians, Irish and Jews were notable cliques. Just 40 years ago, Americans still identified with their European descendants. Today, I imagine, that kinship is all but forgotten.

On a side note, an ill-advised Hollywood adaptation cast Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy, the aristocratic socialite and financier, and Bruce Willis as Peter Fallow, the British reporter and drunkard. It was directed by Brian De Palma, better known for spy and gangster films like Mission: Impossible. I haven't seen the movie, but it sounds like a trainwreck. By all accounts, it was. Considering the girth of The Bonfire of the Vanities (it's a sturdy 700 pages), perhaps a 10 part Netflix show would do it justice. Who knows? The world certainly hasn't grown tired of finance yet.

Food: The History of Taste by Paul Freedman

Sometimes I pick up books based solely on their covers. Some of those turn out to be much needed departures from my narrow preferences. Others fail to delight. Food: The History of Taste falls in the second category. It's less a non-fiction book than a series of essays by different academics, mostly historians, that explores the history of food. Chapters are arranged in chronological order, from the archaeology of food to modern cuisine, to convey a sense of progress. It quickly becomes evident, however, that in addition to the different subject matter, chapters also differ in style and quality.

Some of the chapters are exquisitely boring. I skipped Chinese and Islamic cuisine completely and skimmed others. The two final chapters - "Dining Out" and "Novelty and Tradition" - are especially painful. They focus on the last 100 or so years of culinary tradition, which I expected to be the most interesting part. Dining Out, for example, is a 30 page explanation of what a restaurant is. Not how restaurants function or how meals are prepared or how menus are designed, but a stoic academic definition that mostly serves as a reference to other academics. It is inadvertently hilarious at times: "Most restaurants do not open for breakfast and those that do specialize to some extent in this meal." and "The clientele of a restaurant come with their friends, sit apart from others, and pay for a specific meal when they are finished". Leave it to academics to find the least interesting angle to a story.

Novelty and Tradition does somewhat better, by focusing on a surprising driver of food innovation. On one hand, chefs and diners look for traditional foods and tastes that match their expectations. Traditionalists follow recipes to the word, fight to protect regional specialties (like parmesan, feta cheese or falukorv) and look to the past for inspiration. On the other, innovators work to add new things to existing cuisines by improvising and appropriating elements from elsewhere. It's a dynamic process. Today's traditionalists started out as innovators. The public is quick to adapt new trends but never loses its appetite for more novelty. Yet, even this chapter is perhaps twice too long. It's also peppered with mind-numbing sentences like: "To discover when and why and which groups welcomed or rejected various food innovations in the post-war period is an ambitious research programme and hardly any actual investigation has been done in this field."

The actual history of food is surprisingly exciting, and you can catch glimpses of that here. Freedman and his co-authors do a good job of highlighting how today's food industry is dominated by companies founded in the 19th century. These companies were often built on the back of a single product. August Oetker (of Dr. Oetker) invented baking powder. Henri Nestle came up with baby formula and later developed an innovative way to mix milk powder with cocoa beans, which set the chocolate industry in motion. These, and other similar stories, illuminate the everyday world in unexpected ways. Considering the breadth of fascinating material, someone must have written an enlightening book on the history of food. This isn't it.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

I almost forgot to write an entry about The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Often, that means that a book was either no good or otherwise inconsequential. In this case, however, I blame the circumstances in which I read it. Our baby was having a hard time sleeping and I would often bring my Kindle with me when I put him to bed. That could take anything from five minutes to two hours so, for a time, I was blazing through dozens of pages each night. I would hold the Kindle in one hand and sooth our child with the other.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, unwieldy title aside, is something of a modern business classic. It's often included in lists of books that "Every Startup Founder Should Read". CEO hopefuls keep it under their pillow in case some of the wisdom sticks. Ben Horowitz is even more well-known for his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in some of the most successful companies of the past decade such as Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and Lyft. He built his own company, then he helped others build theirs. In a way, Ben Horowitz is the Jay-Z of Silicon Valley.

Horowitz gets a few things right. Per the title, he argues that companies spend too much time worrying about strategy, when most things in business don't lend themselves easily to stale academic study. Sometimes things go wrong and you need to choose between two catastrophic alternatives. Sometimes your company is caught off guard by a sudden market shift. Most management books use hindsight to make everything sound much simpler than it actually was. The hardest decisions are often made after two weeks of sleep deprivation and under extreme stress. Maybe your personal life is just as distressed. Maybe you need to fire your best friend. In the moment, the pressure is much higher than Harvard Business Review case studies let on.

Roughly half of the book describes the story of Opsware, the company founded by Horowitz with Marc Andreessen. The other half is a collection of advice for would-be managers. Some of the advice is genuinely useful: "Hire for strength rather than lack of weakness", for example. Sometimes it's actually pretty funny: "If I had a tattoo for every time I heard a CEO claim that she’d just hired 'the best VP in the industry,' I’d be Lil Wayne.". I appreciate the effort that has gone into keeping the message as simple as possible without dumbing down the content. Again, the bar for business books continues to be low, but you could clearly do worse.

Super Pumped by Mike Isaac

I recently reviewed John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, in which the founder and ex-CEO of Theranos was ousted as a compulsively lying sociopath. Theranos, a Silicon valley startup once worth billions, promptly collapsed as the public became aware of its true nature. Uber, the subject of Super Pumped, isn't as bad a company as Theranos, but it comes much closer than I anticipated.

Super Pumped and Bad Blood have, surprisingly, a lot in common. Both were written by prominent business journalists (from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal respectively) who uncovered scandals within the companies with the help of whistleblowers. Of the two, Carreyrou is perhaps the more successful exposé as his reporting directly led to the end of Theranos. Isaac's allegations against Uber are not as damning, but they touch on the same themes; venture capital's excesses, egotism, founder worship and the normalization of toxic working culture.

Uber is a staple of global business news, so I thought I knew what to expect. Super Pumped is the story of Uber and Travis Kalanick, its founder. Uber started out as a way for limousine drivers to earn extra income while waiting for scheduled gigs. High-flying "ballers" could hail a limousine with their smartphone at their convenience. Most of us know Uber as the low-cost taxi service, where anyone can be a driver, but that came only later. Ridesharing was pioneered by Uber's nemesis Lyft, but Uber quickly stole the concept and beat Lyft to the market. It was the first in a series of dirty moves that many people associate with the company.

Uber has been so controversial that Wikipedia helpfully provides readers with a 21 point list of criticisms against the company. Combine those with the immorality of its founders and management and it's hard to continue using the company's services. I remember using Uber for the first time and being amazed by both the app and the service. Catching a cab with an app was already enticing, but paying less for it than a standard taxi was the real hook. In hindsight, some of the warning signs were there from the beginning. Prices were low because venture capitalists picked up a significant portion of the tab. Since then, driver satisfaction has nosedived as Uber has reduced their fees.

Most surprisingly, despite being one of the fastest growing companies ever, Uber's management made a string of inexplicably bad business decisions. Kalanick saw himself as the first American that could crack the Chinese consumer market. China, however, already had its share of ridesharing apps that understood the market better than an arrogant American rival. Uber ended up burning billions of dollars in China, Russia and other markets it barely understood. Kalanick believed that Uber needed to be the first to enter a market to "win" it. But from the start it was obvious that ridesharing isn't a natural monopoly. Rivals like Bolt, Didi Chuxing and Lyft have shown that stamina matters more than blitz.

Super Pumped reads like a series of extended newspaper stories. It's standard practice and quite accessible, but it also guarantees that there is little to say beyond the crisp content. I barely got to the juicy details here, and I'm happy to recommend Super Pumped to others, perhaps just to spread the word on Uber. Bad Blood succeeded in taking down Theranos. Unfortunately, there has been no such luck with Super Pumped yet.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

There are a lot of great jokes in Slow Horses, its title included. Slough House is a halfway home of sorts for disgraced MI5 agents; the Slow Horses. Any number of reasons can earn you a transfer to Slough House. Botching an operation, alcoholism, political machination; all might put your career on hold and send you to the drab establishment on the edge of London. Working at Slough House is designed to be mind numbingly boring. The goal is that you slowly realize that quitting is the only way out.

Slow Horses may be written as a spy thriller, but comedy is where it truly shines. I rarely enjoy written humor, but Mick Herron combines excellent prose with classic British comedy in a unique way. Parts of it remind me of the excellent The Sellout from a few years ago, although the subject matter couldn't be more different. Herron succeeds in selling the funny with the serious and in creating characters who are both fantastical and relatable. Established voices like John le Carré rarely go beyond sly and clever in their work. This doesn't mean that le Carré leaves me cold, very much the opposite, it just underlines how well Herron pulls it off.

Jokes are, of course, not to be explained. River Cartwright is one of the ex-spies assigned to Slough House after a disastrous training exercise. His promising career is sidetracked and he finds himself running trivial errands for Jackson Lamb, the rotund traditionalist heading the department. The whole affair seems like a dead end. Nothing of interest has happened at Slough House in years and the other inhabitants (inmates?) seem disinterested or fully checked out. However, as a teenager is kidnapped in front of his home, the Slow Horses are pulled into the intrigue. Saying more would considerably spoil some of the fun.

Slow Horses is the first in a series (six volumes so far), but it barely shows. An extended sequence introduces the cast without feeling like a setup for a second book. Understanding the characters is a payoff in its own right. It's all very self contained, even as the characters are clearly moved into position for the next story. I've often recommended J.K. Rowling's Cormoran Strike Series of private eye novels for people looking for an entertaining but well written thriller. If Herron's follow up, Dead Lions, is as impressive, I might consider changing my recommendation.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

1984 is one of the most widely read books of all time and a staple of the high school English class. Surprisingly, I had never read it. I've always been a fan of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" though. It's the foundational essay of how to write in the 20th century and a handy guide for editing your own writing. I try to adhere to it as much as possible. "Never use a long word where a short one will do" and "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out" are a few of the key ideas. Orwell's advice for writers is as strong today as it ever was.

Politics and the English Language and 1984 have surprisingly much in common. "Politics" is, above all, about how vague language encourages vague thinking. Writing and thought are more closely connected than most people think and embracing jargon, cliches, abstractions and political dada slowly erode a population's ability to think clearly. Often, resorting to a common figure of speech is just a way to avoid understanding what is being said. Politicians are typically the worst offenders - then and now - but academics, CEOs and news media are just as susceptible to lazy wording. The essay is one for the ages, so I'll do something that I've never done before and link it here.

In a way, 1984 is the fictionalized version of that essay. One of its main messages is that language is more than the medium of communication. The way we use language has a fundamental impact on how we think. In 1984, "Ingsoc" - the English Socialist party - has created "Newspeak", an artificial language based on English that is to be used in all official communication. Newspeak is designed to obfuscate ideas. Once Newspeak becomes the de facto language, the theory goes, it will become impossible to think unorthodox thoughts of the party. Newspeak is Orwell's finest argument against totalitarianism. The language is brutalist and reductivist and perfectly reflects the goals of its (fictional) creators.

Hundreds of studies and dissertations have been written about 1984. That doesn't mean that it's an academic endeavour or devoid of casual interest. The narrative is surprisingly compelling and relatable. Winston Smith is a mid-level party member, who finds himself on a slippery slope leading to betraying his party. It's part Philip K Dick sci-fi dystopia and part cold war spy fiction. Trust me, it's fantastic. Don't spend the first quarter of your life having not read 1984.