Pirulainen by Tomas Gads

In its original Swedish, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Män som hatar kvinnor: Men who hate women. Tomas Gads - actually a duo of Finnish women - could perhaps borrow that title for their translation of "Pirulainen". A police thriller, very much in tune with Stieg Larsson, Pirulainen begins with the death of an industrialist in the Turku archipelago in western Finland. Police have a hard time telling if it's murder or an accident, but the victim's family and business life all point at problems just beneath a pristine surface. And, in the end, it's the women who have it worst.

Turku is a surprisingly good location for a crime thriller. It's a city, but small enough to have some small town vibes. It's not the small town from The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, but it's also not the metropolis of so many police thrillers. Turku's archipelago is a massively underused setting in Finnish literature. Each July, Finns hop on boats and travel the thousands of islands, staying in idyllic villages and enjoying the rugged beauty and untouched nature of the national park. But once the holiday season is over, and especially as the winter months set in, the islands are a hostile home to a few thousand inhabitants, who sustain themselves on fishing and boredom. Most winters, ice surrounds the islands and makes travel difficult or impossible. Only the eccentric seem to survive the whole year. Most of the action in Pirulainen takes place in the city of Turku, but the opening drama - and a memorable mid-book detour - make use of the archipelago.

Pirulainen stands out from many crime thrillers by focusing on the police charged with the investigation and not the killer. At the center is Halme squad, a relatively diverse group of detectives that share the spotlight. There is even an Enid Blyton moment as the cast is introduced one by one: their conflicts and quips are what drive the action, especially when the investigation hits a bump. Gads is surprisingly merciful to his cast: their weaknesses are not only humane but also hilarious. The IT guy is a desperate ladies' man. The single mother, previously a big-time business leader, is addicted to online video games. The latter has an affair with her daughter's football coach (goalie coach to be exact), who turns out to also be the coroner assigned to the case. It's funny and heartfelt, but doesn't take away from the book's overall mood.

My biggest gripe is stylistic. Gads plays it fast and loose with points-of-view and the effect is jarring at times. Most people won't mind, let alone notice, but when the story follows the police to an interview and the perspective suddenly shifts to the interviewee's point-of-view, it feels off. The focus is deservedly on the police, so a shift into someone else's thoughts sticks out. Also, chapters focusing on the police are interrupted by someone visiting a shrink and the musings of the killer. Combining so many voices in one book strains the reader's attention. It's a minor annoyance in an otherwise exciting book.

Gads is clearly laying the groundwork for a follow-up. In addition to the (relatively minor) twist ending, there is a lot left to unpack within the squad itself. Sergei, a Finn with a Russian name and a history of working the eastern border, is perhaps the prime candidate for a continuation. Novel characters are hard to come by, especially in police thrillers that tend to rely on familiarity for effect.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Where would we be without Michael Lewis? Few authors can claim their work to contribute as much to the global vocabulary on finance, sports and analytics. Moneyball, The Big Short, Flash Boys and, now, The Fifth Risk have become shorthand for step changes in their respective industries. You can't talk about the 2008 financial crisis without talking about The Big Short and any conversation about sports analytics is bound to mention Moneyball. In addition to these landmark books, Lewis has also written the best outsider's view of behavioral economics (The Undoing Project) and recorded one of the best non-fiction podcasts of 2019 (Against the Rules). I've reviewed Lewis several times on this blog already, but I can't help feeling a little giddy everytime I see a new release from him. He's just that good.

The Fifth Risk, a look into three misunderstood US federal agencies, is not teeming with fascinating characters like The Big Short and doesn't evoke the same warm feelings as The Undoing Project, but it does leave you with a genuine sense of bewilderment and disbelief. In a telltale anecdote, a US presidential candidate singles out The Department of Energy as one of the governmental agencies that he would close if elected. But what exactly does the DOE do? With a budget of over 20 billion dollars, it must be an example of government waste, goes the thinking. The DOE is, in fact, in charge of maintaining the country's nuclear material and weapons, a task that any presidential hopeful is likely to applaud. Throughout the book, Lewis shows how an orthodoxy of small government has blinded us to some of the obviously good and necessary work being done within it.

The Fifth Risk - explained as the risk that comes from neglecting unlikely long term risks like nuclear accidents - is split in three sections, each of which addresses a different governmental agency: the aforementioned DOE, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce. Unlike most of Lewis's books, the characters don't transcend their roles and are confined to individual sections. It's my only squabble. The Fifth Risk reads more like three excellent pieces of investigative journalism than a fully realized book. I first read parts of the DOE chapter in Vanity Fair (and loved it!), but The Fifth Risk takes the story only a bit further.

As with Lewis's work in general, there are multiple levels here. The Trump administration's disinterest in actually running the government is the obvious starting point. It's only the surface. In a concise 200 pages, Lewis addresses many of the ails of the modern United States. Politics is untethered from reality and policitcians are unable to perform some of government's most rudimentary functions. Blatant cronyism has suddenly become acceptable. "The free market" is expected to right wrongs that are clearly beyond its control. Somehow, freewheeling fools and disingenuous charlatans are given government positions that they barely understand. The whole polity is obsessed with regime affiliation, and so on.

It's a grim read with black humor that would make for a great Cohen brothers movie. The Fifth Risk is, among many other things, a reminder that details matter. It's easy to deal in imperatives and principles. It's much harder to gain a genuine understanding of an issue and work years to address it. It's a critique that is first directed at a number of political movements in the Western world - the Republicans, populist Europe, modern monetary theory - but it's not limited to them. Understanding and working with dirty details is perhaps the best vaccination against tribalism and government dysfunction.

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Leonardo da Vinci barely needs introductions. He is one of the poster children for genius alongside Einstein and Newton and his Mona Lisa is the best known work of art in the world. You would think that his story has been repeated ad infinitum in previous biographies. Isaacson, however, justifies this book's existence well. He is best known for his era-defining look into the life of Steve Jobs and, given his generalist background, he has the right background to deliver a balanced recounting of the polymath's story. After all, Leonardo's life is a combination of flamboyant brilliance, as seen in his best known paintings, grinding procrastination and an overall search for truth in a country on the cusp of a scientific revolution.

There are surprisingly few contemporary accounts of Leonardo and even those greatly embellish his life. Isaacson relies on Leonardo's notebooks for context, and with good reason, as those provide the best view into the mind of the artist. Leonardo was an obsessive note taker and his notebooks, the majority of which have survived for posterity, are filled with amazing sketches and thoughts written in his peculiar mirror-script. Paper was precious at the time, so he would revisit old drawings and continue a different topic on a used page. Or he would combine two drawings in unexpected ways: curly hair evolving into a water eddy or a tree evolving into a human circulatory system. Isaacson gracefully includes pictures of the relevant notebook pages, which is one reason to buy the book in hardcover and not Kindle format.

Isaacson proclaims that the notebooks are the primary inspiration for his interpretation of Leonardo. It's a good starting point, but it also underlines his weakness in interpreting Leonardo's art. At least for a layman, Isaacson's description of Leonardo's main oeuvre is too flowery and comes too close to some of the cliches that circulate about art criticism. He takes his interpretations one step too far and often repeats himself unnecessarily. His description of Leonardo's and Michelangelo's rivalry is much more interesting than the description of The Battle of Anghiari, a lost Leonardo that was commissioned to sit across the room with a Michelangelo. Leonardo's work and personality are best viewed in the context of another genius of the era, and it's a shame that Isaacson spends so little time on Leonardo's contemporaries. Leonardo is dandy and outgoing, but so fixated on perfecting ephemeral elements in his art that he often forfeits his commissions and leaves work unfinished. He would spend as much time perfecting a piece's perspective as he would on painting some of the figures. Michelangelo, on the other hand, slept in his clothes and, occasionally, in his boots. He would complete the largest and arguably most famous religious painting in the world: the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

I have a fundamental disagreement with Isaacson's description of Leonardo. He views the artist's inability to finish some of his main works - namely, The Battle of Anghiari and The Adoration of the Magi - as another display of his brilliance. According to his interpretation, the works were dropped because Leonardo could not find the perfect way to work out a particular detail in the painting; an artificial perspective or the right painting material. Leaving imperfect paintings unfinished means, in this oblique logic, that all finished paintings must be perfect, thus proving his genius. The same reasoning is applied to his inventions, like helicopters, crossbows and other apparatus, which were mostly untested in the field. For me, Leonardo was seminal in spite of this trait, not because of it. By being a fraction less demanding on himself, he would have produced even more great pieces of art without much reducing its quality. Art criticism often focuses on minutiae - which perhaps explains its love of Leonardo - but the world in general would have benefited if this particular genius had a slightly less perfectionist approach to life.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point may have been one of the first non-fiction books I read. I borrowed it from a friend in high school as he described it as a "modern classic", whatever that means in the context of modern non-fiction. In a way, I've been on that path ever since. I've never been a disciple of Malcolm Gladwell in the way that some people seem to be, but I do follow his writing and, more recently, his podcast Revisionist History. I recommended The Tipping Point to my wife - it's succinct, entertaining and touches on some of the cornerstones of sociology - but ended up reading it myself once it landed on my bedside table.

It hasn't aged well, but it still has surprisingly much to offer. The Tipping Point describes a theory about social epidemics that Gladwell has amalgamated from academic studies and his own thinking. A social epidemic is how fidget spinners, high (or low) waisted jeans and Instagram suddenly became central fixtures of western societies without any seemingly deliberate plan behind them. Gladwell lays out the three key components in compellingly simple terms: it's about the people, the context and the content. Certain types of people are vastly more powerful in spreading a social epidemic. Mavens learn every minute detail of a new product and act as data banks. Connectors spread the message by, well, being connected. Salesmen convince others to act on the information curated by mavens and distributed by connectors.

It may not be worth it to explore the contents of The Tipping Point in more detail. The theory itself has held up well over time, but the anecdotes and other trivia are hilariously out of date. The dramatic drop in crime in the United States was a recent phenomenon at the time of release, but today it is being studied as if it were ancient history (and the reasons behind the decline are perhaps better explored in Freakonomics). Hush Puppies and Airwalk have not been in the public mind since more or less since the release of this book. The Tipping Point was released in 2000 at the height of the dot-com bubble. Social networks wouldn't properly exist for another decade. Their existence would increase the speed of social epidemics by an order of magnitude: today, tweets travel faster than seismic waves (https://xkcd.com/723/).

Gladwell's framework for understanding social epidemics seems to do well in today's world of Facebook, Brexit and Trump. What it lacks, though, is a compelling exploration of a single phenomenon that would showcase the theory in action, starting from the first person who reacts to a coming social epidemic. The author doesn't show us who were the first people to adopt Hush Puppies. He only speculates about their existence. This increased focus on the people in social epidemics would be a great way to study contemporary phenomena. For example, why is Naziism resurging on the political right? Why do some environmental initiatives surge (reducing plastic or carbon compensation), while others never find traction (emissions trading or reduction of meat production subsidies)? The Tipping Point could benefit from a complete rewrite, not because it describes the world poorly, but because it was ten years ahead of its time.

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

How to Stop Time is the absolute opposite of what I normally read. I picked it up at the airport - a gift for my wife - on the relative strength of its funny back cover. Most casual reading tries to hide behind a facade of sophistication. The plots are too complex, they try to pander to trends set up by better works or they might simply overplay their hand. I'm looking at you The Woman in the Window. How to Stop Time was the exact opposite of that. It put its silliness in plain sight - the last line on the cover is "as long as he doesn't fall in love" - and doesn't pretend to be more than the most casual reading at an airport newsstand. An About a Boy, Nick Hornby for the 2010s.

Here's the gimmick. Tom Hazard is essentially immortal. Having reached puberty, he barely ages. He was born in medieval France and has since lived in dozens of countries under hundreds of aliases. His mother was executed as a witch and, ever since, he's been on the run from suspicion and superstition. During the years, he's conveniently met Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He's been a grade school teacher, a pianist and a stage musician. The premise is just as exciting as a really good nap, and the plot never really shakes things up beyond what you might expect. Historical events and people are duly mentioned. Lost loves and family are central but never explored further than the generic: "will she be found?". There is a very mild surprise at the end related to mild villainy.

For the casual reading that it is, How to Stop Time is not entirely without merit. Haig conjures a sense of pain arising from living longer than one's time. As Hazard's life spans multiple generations, he sees the circularity of time and becomes complacent as mistakes are repeated and collective memory fades. Other "albas" - people with the same condition who, like albatrosses live beyond our expectations - show a credible variety of approaches to living forever. One passes time by surfing in southern Australia, another is consumed by anger. The most memorable one has built a society to protect others of his kind, but ends up managing it through charisma tinged with conspiracy. Living forever is a curse and not a blessing in How to Stop Time.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

In the past, stock bubbles have usually been popped by flagrant misdoings or scandals. Worldcom and Enron downed the dot-com bubble and Lehman Brothers and AIG kicked off the global financial crisis in 2008. The latter, of course, was more than an accounting scandal. It was a result of the realization that financial instruments and consumer debt had changed beyond the control of regulators and financial markets. Theranos, the choice corporate evil in Bad Blood, seems now like it should have triggered a similar reckoning in the venture capital and startup world.

For a while, Theranos was one of the most valuable private companies in the world and Elizabeth Holmes, it's founder and CEO, one of the youngest self-made billionaires. After a series of classic investigative pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Theranos quickly unravelled and suffered a massive public humiliation. Its value dropped to nothing, as did its founder's. John Carreyrou, the journalist behind the reveal, wrote Bad Blood as a bookend to the story, a final testament to the absurdity and con-artistry of the company and it's backers.

Theranos made its name by claiming to have solved a key problem in medicine: the use of venipuncture needles. It's technology could supposedly run hundreds of blood tests on a pinprick sample from the tip of a finger. The promise was substantial but the product was terrible. Theranos ran almost all of its tests on the conventional laboratory equipment it had bought from competitors and never settled on what it's business model or product actually was. Yet, with the support of the prominent individuals on its board, it was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of financing with a valuation of 9 billion dollars. The scale of the fraud is staggering and it still strikes me as nuts. How were Holmes and her paramour-COO Sunny able to project revenues that were so obviously non-existent? Why didn't investors do the basic due diligence of checking up on the "deals" the company claimed it had made?

Holmes herself is the key element in this mystery. Initial stories indicated her charisma as the reason she was able to pull it off. Carreyrou shows that this is only the first part. Her parents, rich and well connected, were able to support her claims by making connections and possibly pulling strings. To make things even more ridiculous, her father was a vice president at Enron when the company went bankrupt. That detail would be too on-the-nose if it was fiction, but alas it is not.

Bad Blood accidentally showcases the general decay of the American corporate system. A company built on the back of inherited wealth and power makes its way to the top of Silicon Valley by faking it without ever making it. Theranos' only successes - it's deal with Walgreens - can be attributed to a health care system that puts emphasis on revenue generation and not patient health. Its pitch - a disruption of laboratory testing - was nowhere near realistic. As the secrets were spilling, Theranos hired the most expensive lawyers to harass and discredit potential whistleblowers.

To get back to my initial thought, the question of a startup bubble seems more pressing today than it did when Theranos failed. Uber, Lyft, Impossible Foods and other venture capital companies have gone public with grossly inflated valuations that are nearly impossible to justify. Uber seems especially unlikely to be worth this much in a few years. It's businesses are unprofitable despite slowing growth (a Silicon Valley anathema) and the company has not been successful in building the kind of "moat" that it promised investors even a few years ago. Theranos should have been the scandal that killed these kinds of valuations, but it didn't, so we might need to wait a few more years for the end of this bubbly era.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

I forget why I decided to reread The Big Short on short notice. It could have been that I felt like reading something short and entertaining after struggling with a few other books, both of which I ended up not finishing. I guess it takes a very specific type of person to consider The Big Short "entertaining" though. It's a dissection of the financial instruments that created the financial crisis in 2008 and a character study of the people, who saw it coming. Dozens of paragraphs are dedicated to describing how mortgage bonds, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps work. It's absolutely obligatory to understand these products to understand the inner workings of a bonkers financial system. It does mean, however, that some readers will be bored out of their minds by the technical aspects of the banking system.

Apparently that was never me; I've been fascinated by the financial sector for years, despite never working in it and only having taken a few introductory courses on the subject. I was in high school in 2008 and I distinctly remember reading news about the banks and companies that were going bankrupt all over the world. There was a finality in the air as no one really knew what part of the financial infrastructure would fail next. Even though I had no money at the time and didn't own a credit card - and had little to lose - the drama felt more real than wars in the Middle East or famine in North Korea. I've always found it difficult to explain why some things are compelling and others are not. Some interests seem ingrained and a fascination for financial markets seems to be (just one of) my soft spots.

Michael Lewis is, of course, a titan of the non-fiction journalistic take. It seems completely absurd that three of his to-the-point and unembellished books have become Hollywood movies starring actors like Brad Pitt (twice!) and Sandra Bullock. Today, people use the word Moneyball - the name of another Lewis book and movie combo - to describe the use of analytics and statistics in the management of sports teams. For years, his contributions have had an outsize impact on the intellectual community. His recent podcast "Against the Rules" proves the versatility of his approach. Fascinating and often oddball characters catch readers (and listeners) off guard. Simply guiding readers through theory rarely elicits strong reactions from a general audience. Lewis can address almost any topic on earth, no matter how complicated or obtuse, because he approaches it from a human point of view.

Having read most of his other work, I still consider The Big Short to be the crown jewel. It's relatable not only because it's characters are relatable, but because Lewis has an intimate and personal understanding of the industry and its problems. His prologue is not unlike the prologue in Slaughterhouse Five: it puts the author in the midst of a cataclysm that he knows is coming but cannot stop. Even now, we know that the global financial system is far from fixed. Over one trillion dollars of bad student debt has been handed out to Americans. Uber and Lyft have sold shares to the public at grossly inflated prices. European banks have been more than happy to launder money for Russian oligarchs. Any or all of these pieces may fall once the next catastrophe brings fear back into the market. When that day comes, Lewis is sure to be on the frontlines to explain where we, once again, went wrong.

Paranoidi Optimisti by Risto Siilasmaa

Risto Siilasmaa is one of the few business people in Finland, who is also a public figure. His predecessor at Nokia, Jorma Ollila, is another. "The Paranoid Optimist" recounts how Siilasmaa saved Nokia from certain bankruptcy by selling off key business and changing the company down to its core. It also, somewhat inadvertently, pits the two icons against each other.

In the time span of a few years, Nokia went from being the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world to being a side note in trade magazines. When smartphones were new, it produced more than half of all units in the world. At its peak, the company employed tens of thousands of people in Finland alone and accounted for over one percent of national GDP. It was a national icon in the same way that IKEA is for Sweden. Finns could say that it was acceptable that foreigners didn't know Finland as long as they knew Nokia. The speed with which that changed gripped the entire country. After a few catastrophic years, Nokia sold its mobile phone division to Microsoft in a deal that, at the time, felt like the end of a hegemony.

Siilasmaa was at the center of the fight, first as a board member, then as the chairman and later as interim CEO. When he joined the company, Ollila embodied the soul of the company as its chairman and the person most credited with building it into a juggernaut during his time as CEO. Siilasmaa criticizes Ollila mercilessly and, at least in part, this seems to be justified. Ollila ruled the board rigidly and with little discussion or discovery to explore changes in the industry. Even if you control for the hindsightedness - it's easy to see the rise of Apple and the iPhone after the fact - Ollila did go against most management doctrines by limiting board members' exposure to what was actually happening in the company and the industry. His officious approach obstructed genuine discussion and prevented management from seeing serious problems until it was too late.

The Paranoid Optimist is in no way the definitive history of Nokia - a history, which spans over 150 years and products from rubber boots to toilet paper - but it is an excellent opinion piece on a critical part of that history. Siilasmaa stretches the reader's interest a bit by introducing the Alcatel-Lucent acquisition, which seems a little shoehorned in. For most of the book, however, he is able to hold the reader's interest. His management views follow Richard Rumelt more than Michael Porter, and provide nice anecdotes for director-level discussion. Hopefully his unassuming tone and clarity of thought are taken up in the business world. With The Paranoid Optimist, Siilasmaa shows that he is, not only, one of the foremost management thinkers in Finland, but also relatively grounded and sensible in his writing.

The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre

Keeping with the theme of cold war spy thrillers; The Spy and the Traitor. If you've read (or seen) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre, you'll know exactly what's going on. The difference is that this time it's all real (and personal). The Spy and the Traitor is a spy thriller that also happens to be the real deal. Oleg Gordievsky is a KGB agent stationed in Copenhagen, who starts to have misgivings about his masters. As he rises in the communist ranks, he establishes an elaborate double agent routine with MI6 in the United Kingdom that comes to form the backbone of western intelligence on the Soviet Union for almost a decade. In a cruel twist of fate, he is undone by an alcoholic CIA agent with an expensive wife, who sells his identity to the KGB. In a frantic covert operation behind the iron curtain, MI6 tries to smuggle Gordievsky across the Finno-Russian border to save him from a certain death.

It is sometimes difficult to identify this as non-fiction, based solely on the story and characters. Macintyre does an excellent job of building a presentable cast of support characters. He's the Michael Lewis of spy thrillers and in some ways, this is Flash Boys but with spies. He has the same ability to make the most mundane details seem worthy of prolonged consideration as Mr. Lewis, and in his hands, a story that could be told dully, is suddenly gripping. The author's own excitement with the details is what really sells the story. Will a KGB informant see Gordievsky standing on a Moscow street corner and identify the Safeway plastic bag, his signal to British intelligence, and comprehend that it's not something an observant communist would sport? Did a nappy, conveniently soiled by the baby on board, distract the dogs at the Finland-Russia border crossing?

Macintyre's inquisitiveness also left me pondering the value of the global intelligence game. Most of what Gordievsky exposed relates to the KGB and their armada of spies. So what is gained from this massive machinery? Spies watching spies is just another variant of a dog chasing its own tail. Gordievsky ousts his own as lazy: they invent contacts and operatives and name government officials as informants when they are anything but. They gather data from regional newspapers and pass it off as insider intelligence. As the KGB was partly faking it, why should I assume that MI6 was not? Granted Gordievsky did genuinely help foreign relations by helping Margaret Thatcher understand the Soviet leadership, but even then it is hard to see the benefits outweighing the costs.

Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) by Jeff Tweedy

Jeff Tweedy is the frontman of alt-country group Wilco. I had the privilege of seeing Wilco at Pori Jazz a few years ago here in Finland. The group almost never comes this far north, but the Finnish summer did not relent even for them. It was barely 10 degrees outside and occasional rain guaranteed that unprepared festival goers were regretting showing up. I made my way to the front of the stage barely ten minutes before the band walked on. After a few songs, a rainbow broke out over the festival area and Tweedy made a joke about singing sad songs in the rain. Overall, it's one of my favorite concert experiences.

Now, Tweedy has written an autobiographical novel and complemented it with a companion album, Warm. For the Wilco fan, this is as good or even better than the band releasing a new album. Tweedy has always been the emotional center of the group and in Let's Go he recounts his life all the way from his childhood to the present day. Wilco, however, is not your average rock band. They've always been closer to a jam band than The Rolling Stones and this shows in Tweedy's light touch with the pen on both album and book.

Let's Go is really funny. I was chuckling mid-sentence several times, to the annoyance of my wife, who was trying to nap next to me. Tweedy has an off-handed way of writing that is in stark contrast to his songs, which can be musically complex and lyrically inscrutable. Early days Wilco was known for setting the bar extremely high in the recording studio, but Tweedy has since matured and loosened up and this is in full effect in his writing. He transcribes conversations between him and his wife into parts of the book, which - coming from someone else - could appear half-baked. Here, however, these passages are some of the most entertaining and heartening in the whole book.

Tweedy may not be the most trustworthy source for everything, though. He subscribes to radical honesty and describes his comfort level with being vulnerable a "superpower", but some passages raise questions about wilful forgetfulness. Tweedy coolly fired original drummer Ken Coomer via phone after stumbling on Glenn Kotche. He admits to his mistake in handling the incident, but devotes less than a paragraph to it. The same goes to his falling outs with fellow band members and Jays Farrar and Bennett. The way he tells it, neither was his fault and both men abandoned the band due to their own demons. But it's hard not to imagine the other side of the argument.

In contrast, Tweedy is painstakingly open about his opioid addiction. He stole morphine from his wife's ailing mother. He disguised his addiction behind migraines, which he did really have, and hid the truth from his wife, who found out only once an acquaintance, who was more familiar with opioid misuse, pointed out that her man was a junkie. Incredibly, all of this can be heard on the album A Ghost is Born, which was recorded during the worst part of Tweedy's addiction. His voice is uncharacteristically bland and forgettable and the songs lack the charm of Summerteeth or the quirks of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It's impossible to listen to the album now without hearing Tweedy's addiction in each song and he admits as much. Spiders (Kidsmoke) was recorded in just two takes, because that was all Tweedy could get the energy for.

Tweedy outlines his life after recovering from addiction in a way that lends additional context to the music he has recorded since. Many of his albums after A Ghost is Born have received less critical acclaim, but the truth is that they were not meant to. Tweedy has consciously lowered the bar for his musical output to focus more on his family. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot may have been the global experimental breakthrough, but Sky Blue Sky (and the song Sunday Morning) are unforgettable pop epics. They mark another turn in a musical career that has spanned over three decades.

The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre

2018 may look like the year I read the least books in the history of this blog (just 10 entries dated last year), but it's far from the truth. First of all, I finished a record three books during a Christmas holiday in South Africa, the reviews of which have been on my backlog for the past two weeks. The real number for last year is probably 13; over one book per month. Second, last year included some of the longest books that I've ever read - 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster and Hamilton by Ron Chernow - which definitely set me back in pure numbers but contributed to a total page count that is most likely way above my yearly average. Karl Ove Knausgård may have dampened my enthusiasm for the long form, but 2018 was a success in terms of page volume.

The books themselves were great too. Many of them had a profound impact on me and a few have been in my thoughts ever since. The Pigeon Tunnel from spy-thriller veteran John le Carré was refreshing and charming, but probably not among the books from last year that will keep me up at night in the future. Le Carré is best known for the cold war espionage of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which I've previously featured. His CV is impressive as is the number of film and TV adaptations that have been made from his books. These books seem like they were written by a confident auteur; someone who could bend people and words into new shapes and surprise readers with intrigue built on the frailty of man. The Pigeon Tunnel shows an altogether different side of le Carré (or David Cornwell, his real name). His prose is still pristine, but the person behind it is much more nuanced.

The Pigeon Tunnel is a collection of anecdotes from Cornwell's life. Some focus on the real world inspiration for his best known characters. Others recount his travels abroad and meetings with world leaders. The longest one, and the last chapter in the book, is devoted to his father, a confidence man and criminal, who's lies and vagary left le Carré permanently seeing two sides to people in his life: the one they try to show you and the one they don't. In these stories, Cornwell is insecure but warm and describes his journeys more through the lens of his constant conviction that he is way out of his league. There are parallels to Bruce Springsteen's autobiography: a man driven to entertain by an absent father and a sense of not doing enough.

In addition to the harrowing tales of his father's misdeeds, I was most struck by an acute generational gap between me and Cornwell. A battalion of cold war diplomat-spies was unleashed on the world with the overt goal of stopping communism. Behind this laudable facade, however, not much was done to the general benefit of western countries and Cornwell admits as much. Young diplomats would attend lunches and dinners, interview locals and file reports that may or may not have had as much informational value as the local newspaper. In reality, the western intelligence community tricked itself better than it could trick the opposing spy agencies. In today's world, the same spies would compete to work 60 hour weeks and write elaborate reports: meaningless work done exceptionally well.

It is difficult to pin down what The Pigeon Tunnel is about. Cornwell's life is better told in a sanctioned biography. The le Carré novels do a better job of animating the cold war. It is not a autobiography by any means; the stories are too vivid and wonderful to be assumed unenhanced by their masterful author. As part of the oeuvre, The Pigeon Tunnel is more evidence to the writer's skills in semi-retirement. In itself, it's impossible to recommend to non-fans.

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

High Fidelity, the movie, has somehow become a sort of comfort food for me. I watch it every now and then, and even though it's become exceedingly familiar, it continues to entertain. It seems the same may be happening for the book version. This was the second time I read the Nick Hornby novel, which, I guess, makes for a total of almost ten repeats of book and movie. High Fidelity is up there with The Truman Show for entertainment that I have yet to tire of. There is nothing wrong with repetition, but there is some irony in going back to reread books about being afraid of moving on in life.

Rob is a music geek who, with a pair of attendants, one anodyne and one aggressively insecure, runs a low-key used record store in London. His store is losing money and, as the story opens, his girlfriend Laura has left him for the guy upstairs. In an effort to understand why he keeps striking out with his loves, he tracks down his "top five" breakups, starting from high school. To exercise his demons, he hooks up with an American musician, because he (and I'm quoting from memory, either book or movie) "had always wanted to sleep with someone who had a recording contract". Along the way, Rob has to contend with his insecurities and learn to be a decent human being. Hornby's tone hides the fact that the main character is a genuine jerk for most of the time and, once the realization hits the reader, it's a nice way of realizing how immune we are to bigotry when the bigot is us.

It's a Nick Hornby novel, so the characters have whimsy and depth and the plot is gentle, but a little preachy. It shares a space with other contemporary fiction, like The Martian and The Cuckoo's Calling, that is approachable, funny and moderately well reviewed by critics. It doesn't take itself very seriously, which all but precludes it from winning a Pulitzer or making it to any best-of-the-decade lists. But in terms of quality - of writing, character development, insight or tone - High Fidelity is an excellent work and not to be dismissed.

It's difficult for me to talk about High Fidelity, the novel, in isolation and without reference to my beloved movie adaptation. While I was reading, I could hear John Cusack's voice speaking the part of Rob and Jack Black singing Let's Get It On. Some of the lines are shared word for word between the two medias. At times it seems like the movie is more a reading of the source material - it even shares some of the music references! High Fidelity has been there to support me through several stages of my life. In adolescence, I could sympathize with the terrible breakups. Now, as an adult, I'm more a sucker for the "Where is all this going?" -part. I keep finding new levels.

A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgård

I read the first part of Knausgård's My Struggle series a few years ago. I had every intention of moving on to the second part immediately, but there was something to the opening pages of A Man in Love that put me off. I put reading the book on hold indefinitely. Now, I suddenly felt that I was ready to face the familial themes of Knausgård's autobiographical work. The book opens with a passage, where Knausgård takes his first child to the playground with his wife. In all its ordinariness - I even struggle to remember the exact contents - it's a great introduction to a book about love, lust, morals, family and masculinity that is tied to the world of early 2000s Sweden.

The strangest thing about Knausgård's novels has been that they make me distinctly bored at times, and not for insignificant amounts of time. In A Death in the Family, a new year's foray to a friend's party seemed to drag on forever. In this one, discussions of German philosophy could cause an onset of somnambulism. Yet, both books have been immensely rewarding all the same. The slower pace of his novels forces the reader to sit down for longer periods and adjust their rhythm to the pace of the writing. There is an element of victorian drama to it all: when everything is deliberated and considered, and the drama plays out in chapters and not paragraphs, even the slightest changes in tempo have an immediate impact on the reader.

Part of what makes A Man in Love, and all of the other books in the series, magical is the way they subvert your expectations without leaning on tropes or plot twists. Most other novels are built around traditional drama rules, things that you would learn in art school or drama class. If a gun is introduced, someone must pull its trigger. Emerging love interests need to be resolved or rebuffed. Tension is built up, then released. A Man in Love adheres to none of these. Drama unfolds as it does in the real world: conflicts are left unresolved and motivations are either left unexplained or are unexplainable. It takes some time to get used to this and as the novel plays with your expectations of what can happen in drama, it gets under your skin.

Nowhere is this more evident then when Knausgård takes his daughter to a toddler music class. He sits among mothers with their children, chanting silly nursery rhymes and feeling emasculated. Anger builds up inside him, because he is unable to act on his instinct to make an exit. He feels humiliated in front of the attractive instructor, a young woman that barely acknowledges him. He wonders if he could make advances on her after class. A scene like this would have some cogent resolution in ordinary fiction. But here, nothing happens. Knausgård and the instructor never speak or see each other again. He doesn't charge off cursing.

The sixth and final part of Knausgård's saga was released in English a few months ago and many reviewers mentioned the previous books, especially A Man in Love, as some of the greatest novels of the 2000s. Personally, I'm a bit torn. I haven't actually finished it yet and I'm stuck a few dozen pages before the end. Then again, I already feel that both A Death in the Family and A Man in Love have had an outsized impact on me as a human. I adore books that get in the reader's head, and both novels do that without a hint of trickery. It reminds me of Andreas's effect on Pip in Jonathan Franzen's Purity. Knausgård has power over the reader because he is present more in their brains than on the page. He has charisma, looks and a prickly personality. Keeping him in check is part of the struggle.

The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

I'm even a little embarrassed to be posting this, but I feel it's more important to be honest than to hide something that I actually read. The reason for my embarrassment is insignificant but perhaps a little revealing. The Last Wish is a collection of short stories set in the world of The Witcher trilogy of video games. The books came first and the video games later, but that makes neither no less nerdy nor suspect. Sci-fi and fantasy have been making more excursions into the pop culture world - just consider how big Game of Thrones has become - but the connection is still mostly held together by couplets of video game and book or movie and book. Without its game counterpart, The Last Wish would languish in book shops among hundreds of similar looking fantasy romps, exotic elves or glistening swords or dragons adorning their covers.

That is not to say that The Last Wish is all bad. Its decidedly more mature than typical teenage fantasy books (which is not the only thing it has in common with Game of Thrones). Some of the short stories are genuinely good (especially The Lesser Evil and The Witcher) and they make use of the format's strengths: the increased weight of every line of dialogue, the opportunity to focus on smaller themes and the natural tension of wondering how each story will end. Sapkowski does a good job of giving characters personality even within the confines of individual chapters and the individual stories add to the others as well, as the reader starts to understand Geralt's, the main character's, predicament.

I would never had given The Last Wish the time of day, if I hadn't enjoyed The Witcher 3 video game so much, it's as simple as that, and having read it, it seems unlikely that I'll read any of the four other novels in the series. I couldn't shake the feeling that there is little of consequence in the world of The Witcher. How am I the wiser having read this? The Last Wish didn't really surprise me, nor did it delight me. It's good, but it represents a genre that I tend to categorically discount. It may be beloved in its original Polish, but some of the context is clearly lost in regions that are not familiar with what kind of fairytale monster a striga is. Geralt isn't your average monster slayer, but he isn't that unique either. In the books, at least.

The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn

Summer reading is supposed to be fun and The Woman in the Window is fun, for the most part. At the same time, though, its derivative, predictable and repetitive. It follows the tradition of recent summer romps like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train so closely that despite the pristine prose, I kept feeling cheated: it takes a lot of convincing to show a skeptic like me that this isn't just some calculated effort to run down a trend. Even Daniel Mallory's pseudonym, A. J. Finn, is so similar to Gillian Flynn (author of the much better Gone Girl) that you can't help feeling a little duped. And what's wrong with his own name in the first place? To me Daniel Mallory is a perfect novelist name, albeit a male one that might not look as convincing on the cover of a book about a woman aimed towards women in general.

Anna Fox is an agoraphobic - someone who fears open spaces - and spends most of her time indoors in her town house in Harlem, New York. From her window, she spies on her neighbors with a long lens camera. When she witnesses a murder across the street, she has to deal with her phobia and past trauma to work on finding the killer. The framing of the story is standard Hitchcock by way of Agatha Christie and overall I had a hard time seeing the forest from the referential trees.

Here's a list of references to give you an idea of how The Woman in the Window "pays homage" to other books and movies: almost all of Hitchcock's films (most notably The Rear Window, Vertigo and Strangers on a Train), The Girl on the Train (especially the alcoholism, the voyeurism and the titling),  and perhaps even The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (the interactions between an obstinate protagonist and a good-guy cop). These are just the ones that I recognized. The New York Times review is almost exclusively dedicated to describing how The Woman in the Window fits in with the wider tradition. It's more a gala of dignified references than an actual book review.

As a simple summer read, The Woman in the Window is perfectly adequate and I imagine that the obligatory, fast-tracked movie version will be as good or even better. Its above most detective fiction because it is so well built. Pacing and exposition are excellent, the reader is hooked with shocking revelations and a surprisingly humane touch. A mid-book aside about a skiing trip is haunting and a definite highlight. Mallory overdoes the alcohol and prescription drug aspect of Fox's persona, however, so much so that readers of The Girl on the Train are already plenty familiar with the drill. Was the murder just a product of an over-active imagination and unscrupulous use of medication? The answer won't surprise you.

All that being said, there seems to be nothing stopping The Woman in the Window from becoming a success both in print and on film. It makes for perfectly pleasant reading, especially if you haven't seen Vertigo. Its faults will be pointed out by critics, but as a product of today's pop culture, we could do worse. It's the Bruno Mars or Robin Thicke of detective fiction. You can't really complain about production values, but don't be surprised if copyright infringement lawsuits start popping up.

Rework by Jason Fried

Rework isn't really a book, it's a manifesto. Sure it's packaged like a paperback, has compelling blurbs to go along and seems like your average management-self-help effort. There's barely any structure, for one, which clearly differentiates it from most of the other management books out there. "Chapters" are more like op-eds, covering a few pages at most and only a few paragraphs at least. Where others try to convince businesses based on scientific (or pseudo-scientific) evidence, Rework relies on sound argumentation, passion and chutzpah.

Many of its core ideas are as valid as ever. Working late nights and weekends is useless and often ruinous. Budgets are guesses. Meetings are (mostly) a waste of time. Companies should sell their by-products. All are excellent guidelines for would-be entrepreneurs and business managers. Even when its arguments are backed up by barely more than an anecdote and a few wise words, Rework is convincing. There is a transparency to making bold statements with limited evidence. Most business books leave you with a sense of being duped; their evidence, often in the form of graphs or cherry picked data, is often too neat and too convincing. Rework shows you its weaknesses and is better for it.

I'm always surprised to find out how much the actual world of work differs from that of Rework. Its ideas are sometimes obvious to the point of banality, yet most companies are unable to implement them. For example, there is no evidence that meetings are suddenly becoming less prominent or their content more engaging. Why are we stuck in this imperfect world? I would like to understand what is actually standing between us and the world of Rework. Is it our inability to question tradition, handed down from previous generations of managers? Is it our overconfidence and hesitance to learn and read? Or is it the surplus of poorly formulated and contradicting management advice? Whatever it is, Rework makes a compelling case for a new era of work.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Not many are familiar with him, but most of us have bought the products he inspired. Phil Knight is the founder of Nike, the inescapable, all-around sportswear company. Introducing Nike as a sporstwear company feels like introducing coffee as a beverage; there is hardly anyone that has not heard of it. Most of us even have an opinion of its products. The name of Phil Knight, on the other hand, probably won't ring a bell for anyone except the most ardent Nike fans. His face isn't recognizable either. He once ran into Bill Gates and Warren Buffet outside a movie theather and realized that passers-by could only identify two out of the three, even though his personal wealth is on a similar level.

Phil Knight was brought up in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. At the University of Oregon, he trained under legendary track and field coach Bill Bowerman, who would later become the cofounder of Blue Ribbon, Nike's predecessor. Having graduated, Knight decided to travel around the world to visit spiritual places such as Mount Fuji and the Ganges river. At the same time he dreamed of putting an old business plan in action: importing running shoes from Japan.

The trips to post-war Japan are some of the more memorable parts of an otherwise adequate but not extremely titillating book. Knight took an amazing leap of faith by ordering untested foreign running shoes to import to the United States. He sent most of his money to the Onitsuka company as an advance for his first order. There was no explosive beginning, just a series of years, when Nike grew slowly and struggled to raise cash for growth. First the shoes were sold from Knight's parents' home, then from a small office, then from one store in California. At the time, ordering and producing the shoes was slow, so Knight was constantly on edge, as he waited for the next shipment to arrive.

Shoe Dog is mostly pop culture and meant for casual fans. There is a business book in there somewhere as well. Knight is not an ideal leader, he says so himself, and his gaffs are both heartbraking and hilarious. You can trace his development from a wide-eyed twenty-something into a pin-stripe suited corporate master. As he yells at his colleagues and tries to outsmart his suppliers, you can feel his idealistic past peel off. Whether or not this is intentional, I cannot say. It is this arch from idealism to capitalism that drives the reader's interest. Will he completely abandon his principles at the altar of the goddess of victory?

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

I didn't really know what to expect from 4 3 2 1. I went in barely having read the back cover and blurbs. I was on vacation in Sri Lanka, overwhelmed by the sounds, smells and sights of that wonderful island. The paperback was mostly there as a companion to the beach or for relaxing on a long (and sweaty) train ride. Reading on vacation is often a completely different experience than reading under a bedroom light. Vacations are often simultaneously relaxing and draining. You have time to slow down and let your mind rest. At the same time, I can't help myself planning the next stage of the trip or comparing dinner options. As my stress levels went down, I felt more receptive to literary fiction. It was as if work had muted my ability to focus and now as I huddled in my hammock, it had come rushing back. 

Unlike all of Auster's other work, 4 3 2 1 is a massive brick of a book. Instead of telling a single story, it tells one story four times. Archibald "Archie" Ferguson's life begins as one as his immigrant grandfather arrives in New York. His life takes four diverging but concurrent paths through mid 20th century America. For each stage of Archie's adolescence, four (or fewer) different stories are told that trace Archie from school to college and beyond. The reason for these repetitions may seem unclear or without motive at first, but a satisfying - and typically Austerian - conclusion ties up the loose ends nicely. I especially commend Auster for leaving clues along the way that point toward the end without giving it away.

Auster's previous work could sometimes feel like exercises in vanity. His novels would often crowd out character development for the sake of metaphysical themes like chance and subjectivity. His past works would get stuck on topics like black and white cinema, leatherbound notebooks or obscure writers and while that often served a purely literary purpose, they also interfered with the plot. The plot (mostly) takes center stage in 4 3 2 1, which makes it Auster's most conventional and approachable work. This also showcases his previously less visible talents as a storyteller and yarn spinner. 4 3 2 1 is breathtakingly excellent throughout, and without the small hiccups around the middle of the last third, it would be remembered as a masterpiece of the 2010s with the likes of The Goldfinch.

An interesting thing about 4 3 2 1 is that it has immediate rereading appeal, unlike almost any other book that I've encountered (excluding my adolescent fascination with all things Lord of the Rings). Because it is structured around phases in Archie's life, the next logical step would be to read the stories of the different Archies in character-centric order instead of chronological order. Reading four versions of the same adolescence messes with your head in a satisfying way and has readers looking for similarities between the Archie who lost his dad to a fire and the Archie who's father is a misanthropic millionaire. Mixing up the chapters and focusing on one incarnation of our hero would create a series of more conventional mini-novels.

What I loved about 4 3 2 1 was that it doesn't need to cheat the reader to be as good as it is. It's an excellent novel even without the trickery of the multiple Archies. Chapters are vivid but concise as they draw Archie's life in varying contexts. He's rowdy and inspired, then he's gloomy and sexually frustrated and then he's a young author with a name for himself. His parents support him, then they don't. His family disintegrates and then, in other circumstances, it doesn't. All these instances are there simultaneously, creating a comprehensive character study, across a universe of Archies (and Amys, Stanleys, Roses and Celias). It is hard not to be enchanted.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

It's been over two months since the last time I wrote. You would be forgiven for thinking that I had taken a longer leave from reading or had given up all together. It's true that it has been a while since I last read something that really got to me. For the last year, I've sometimes felt that I'm running out of steam. Reading hasn't given me as much joy as before. Those are not the reasons for such a long break, however. I've been inching through two tomes of epic length simultaneously: Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton and Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 (more on that in the next post). Combined, they make up over 2000 pages. When traveling, you can only take one with you, as the combined weight from the two would surely push your luggage over the weight limit or break the seams of your backpack.

Alexander Hamilton is, naturally, the biography of the United States' first Secretary of the Treasury. Born out of wedlock in the West Indies, Hamilton rose to key roles in the American Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence and the cabinet of George Washington. After years of hard-fought political battles, Hamilton died in a duel with the Vice President Aaron Burr. More than any of his fellow founding fathers, Hamilton's life was a roller coaster of great heights and astounding lows. Even as he left his indelible mark on the country - writing the Federalist Papers, creating the Post Office, the Coast Guard, the Bank of New York, The National Bank and establishing New York as the center of finance and commerce that it still is today - his legacy has often been shrouded by attempts by his detractors to discredit him.

Alexander Hamilton bears some striking similarity to today's world. The first thing you notice is the utter likeness of the 18th century political world to the current one. Political slander in the 18th century was as vicious as it is today with the confounding factor that key members of the president's circle used pseudonyms to trash talk each other in the press. For example, Thomas Jefferson eagerly spread false rumors that Hamilton vied to create a US monarchy and that he was embezzling money as Secretary of the Treasury. The same conflicts that haunt today's America are there as well: the divide between the rural populace and the cities, the feud between the north and the south and the fear of giving too much power to a central government.

Chernow's book is a wonderful work; an enlightening and engrossing read that isn't afraid to ransack archives to prove a point or unearth some new piece of evidence. His prose is pristine and his personal passion for the topic shines through constantly. Quotes from the time slow down the pace a little, but are a critical component in understanding the era which, despite seeming eerily similar to our own at times, is often bewildering in its beliefs, customs and systems.

The last piece of this puzzle is the extraordinary musical Hamilton by Lin Manuel Miranda. It may be mostly unknown outside of the United States, but it has been a source of endless inspiration for me. I would never have read Chernow's biography, if I hadn't listened to the musical on repeat for the last two years. I am unable to say, which of the two should be considered the main oeuvre and which is more a supporting work. Even as the musical is based on the book, it transcends it in every way. The biography hints at the connection to today's America; the musical blows it wide open. I notice that even in this somewhat lengthy review, I have only said a fraction of the things that I want to say about Alexander Hamilton. His life story is a rabbit hole that ultimately explains the modern world as much as it reveals our history.

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

It's taken me an unusually long time to find something to say about Homo Deus. I've been struggling to come up with a way of describing it that would both do it justice and elaborate some of my frustrations with it. Just as its predecessor Sapiens, Homo Deus has been received with almost universal acclaim. It has a sense of gravitas and distinction that raises it above many better books. I couldn't quell a feeling of history-in-the-making as I read chapters on the nature of fiction, spiritualism and data, while simultaneously feeling extremely frustrated with Harari's extravagances and general pomposity.

A friend had an accurate description of Homo Deus: if you take everything at face value, you are either extremely gullible or will never finish it. Harari has opinions. You will agree with some and disagree with others. So expecting to read Homo Deus in the same state of mind as you would read something like Alexander Hamilton's biography (as I'm currently doing), will inevitably result in disbelief at the amount of leeway Harari has taken. Parts of Homo Deus recall editorials in science journals and in some ways the book is just several of those strung together.

I've always been a fan of telling stories through examples, and this is where Sapiens and Homo Deus diverge most. Sapiens was a riveting read, because it could enlighten the reader with stories of early humans and modern history. Those stories were the backbone of the book, and served to prop up other, more speculative, parts. Homo Deus is largely devoid of anecdotes, especially toward the end. This is understandable, as Homo Deus has less source material to go on. The future is unwritten, and Harari's goal is to look as far into the future as possible, so theorizing is the more common mode by default.

All this doesn't mean that Harari's message isn't important, even vital. As humans, we are so focused on daily drudgery that slower changes seem not to register. Harari succeeds at taking several steps back and looking at changes that have been brewing for decades or centuries. With the decline of religion and the lure of individualism, humanity has lost its sense of purpose. If there is no god, and humans are mostly (or wholly) algorithms that react to changes in their environment, how can there be free will or meaning. These questions have been posed by others before, but Harari ties them into a larger discussion of where humanity is headed. It is an important, but partly demoralizing debate.

More than with any other book, I struggled to give Homo Deus its due. I absolutely loathed reading some chapters. Harari goes on for pages in the style of "By equating the human experience with data patterns, Dataism undermines our main source of authority and meaning, and heralds a tremendous religious revolution, the like of which has not been seen since the eighteenth century.". As important as the message may be, his prose is too overbearing at times and he can't resist shoehorning in his personal opinions (on meat production, for instance). I struggled to finish it, because of its faults. Yet, I have a feeling that Homo Deus will come to mark an end of an era, as artificial intelligence overcomes human intelligence. As a guide to that future, Homo Deus is the undisputed leader.