Business

• Four Steps to the Epiphany: Steve Blank
• The Checklist Manifesto: Atul Garawande
• The Innovators Dilemma: Clayton Christensen
• The Innovators Solution: Clayton Christensen
• Positioning: Al Ries
• Lean Thinking: James Womack/Daniel Jones
• Perfect Pitch: Jon Steel
• Complete Guide to Accelerating Sales Force Performance: Andris Zoltners/Prabhakant Sinha
• Principles of Product Development Flow: Donald Reinertsen
• Hacking Work: Josh Klein
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Al Ries

If I’d only read one of these books it would be Steve Blank’s, though the books I found myself quoting most were Clayton Christensen’s. Lean Thinking was one of my honeymoon books and got me thinking about my business in a totally different way. Perfect Pitch confirmed all my biases against powerpoint.

Design

• The Art of Game Design: Jesse Schell
• The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Alan Cooper
• Serious Play: Michael Schrage

Jesse Schell taught me about the importance of balancing game mechanics; Alan Cooper’s book was great in many ways but also showed its age in a world of agile methodologies.

History

• The Ascent of Money: Niall Ferguson
• Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia: Michael Korda
• Team of Rivals: Doris Kearns Goodwin

Team of Rivals was another awesome Honeymoon book that gave me some insight into how to manage a team, Michael Korda’s Lawrence of Arabia biography shone a largely uncritical light on Lawrence but was a comprehensive account of his life and achievements.

Fiction

• The Count of Monte Cristo: Alexander Dumas
• The Broken Window: Jeffrey Deaver
• Unseen Academicals: Terry Prathchett
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Stieg Larssen
• The Girl Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larssen
• The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest: Stieg Larssen
• The Burning Wire: Jeffrey Deaver
• Breakfast of Champions: Kurt Vonnegut
• Siddhartha: Herman Hesse
• The Diamond Age: Neal Stephenson
• Juliet, Naked: Nick Hornby
• A Man in Full: Tom Wolfe

Stieg Larrsen’s series were read over the course of four days so I think I must have liked them a lot, but the best fiction books for me were The Diamond Age and A Man in Full (part of my minor stoic obsession).

Philosophy/Psychology/Religion

• A Guide to the Good life, The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: William Irvine
• Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot: James Stockdale
• Flow: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• The Evolution of God: Robert Wright

Irvine provided a great intro to stoicism, while the Evolution of God put our beliefs in their proper historical framework. Flow is simply amazing for anyone wanting to understand how to get things done and be happy doing it.

Science

• E=MC2: David Bodanis
• Electric Universe: David Bodanis
• Physics for Future Presidents: Richard A Muller
• The Grand Design: Stephen Hawking
• Bursts: Alberto Lazlo Barbasi

E=MC2 and Physics for Future Presidents were the clear winners here. Bursts was intermittently interesting but spoiled by the shoehorning of pointless narrative. Hawking blew my mind but I started to understand less as the book went on.

Apocrypha

• The Intellectual Devotional: David Kidder
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman
• Becoming a Writer: Dorothea Brande
• The Black Swan: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• I live in the Future: Nick Bilton

Amusing ourselves to Death kicked off my year totally changing my position on how we build for the Internet and what it means. The Black Swan provided great material for a future talk. The Intellectual Devotional is the best bathroom book out there and I learned from Nick Bilton that I apparently live in the Future too.

Pinker’s principal beef is with the concept that man is born a blank slate and it is largely his environment that shapes and defines him. He argues that it is all very nice for us all to believe this and it means we can wax lyrical about our equality and ability to perfect man, but it just isn’t backed up by the evidence. Pinker argues that the vast weight of scientific research into the nature/nurture debate comes down heavily on the side of nature, and reports on the other side are often guilty of scientifically-biased wish fulfilment.

Pinker spends a large part of the first half of his book outlining and explaining this evidence, using examples from one scientist’s study of universal human behaviours, responses and mental characteristics (as widespread in Mongolia as in Manhattan) to the classic experiments with twins who have been separated at birth. Apparently, twins in this case often meet in later life to find themselves both owning the same tie, whistling the same song and having married similar women at roughly the same age. Their personalities, while not set in stone, were largely formed before they had even left the womb.

Moreover, people who have suffered damage in specific parts of their brain often have completely changed personalities as a result. The experience of Phineas Gage is a classic example of this. Pinker’s evidence is largely boiled down to a set of ‘laws’ of the mind. The principal one of which is that your genes are responsible for at least 50% of your personality and play a far more weighty role than your environment. This is not to say that we have no control over our personality, nor that our environment plays no part. Merely that they play a far lesser role than previously realised.

So far, so interesting. But Pinker really gets going in the second half of the book when he applies this learning to various fields from crime to politics to the arts. Are children who grow up in a violent household more likely to be violent because of the environment they were raised in or because they have inherited the genes for violence from their parents? Or to put it another way, all those parenting books that say that parents who smother their children with affection will raise affectionate children might just be talking rubbish if affectionate people are genetically predisposed to have affectionate kids and more distant parents are genetically predisposed to have distant kids. In this case, how parents act with their kids has far less impact than many parents believe.

The argument holds true across a range of subjects as Pinker takes on our political beliefs, feminism, racism and our thoughts on art. Some may think Pinker oversteps his mark, and I am certainly not doing his argument justice here, but to me this was a powerful explanation of why we are the way we are and it sets out an optimistic view of the future for all that it is set in hard realities.

Emerson, a minister himself, was the ultimate non-conformist. He argued that relying on the words of another, be they priest or parent, was a barrier rather than a bridge to God. ‘Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David or Jeremiah or Paul. We shall not set so great a price on a few texts, or on a few lives.’ If we are merely repeating what we learn without engaging our own intellect, without searching for God on our own terms, then our beliefs have nothing to do with a true knowledge of God but instead are based on whatever we happen to learn and interpret from those around us, who likewise learned their lessons by rote from their elders.

Emerson also had little time for a strict reliance on the Bible, he felt that it kept Christianity in stasis forever looking backward. “The stationariness of religion, the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed. . . indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake.” Instead he saw a living, personal relationship with God independent of others’ thoughts or intervention as the only possible course.

Emerson’s views ranged further than just religion, promoting the importance of action as the true measure of man. He urges us to challenge everything, to accept no idea as fact until we have explored it ourselves, but at the same time to see the unity inherent in the world. To trust ourselves to be our own taskmaster, to follow our own star and act as we would in solitude when among the crowds, this is his lesson and I would embrace it wholeheartedly were it not for a sneaking suspicion that Emerson’s spirit would disapprove of my implicit acceptance of his words without challenge. . . .

As you can tell from the title, Behrman does not pull any punches. Cutting back and forth through time as we follow key characters in the struggle against the burgeoning pandemic, Behrman shows how time and time again chances were missed to do something constructive about the catastrophe that is Global AIDS. Reagan’s conservative distaste for ‘the gay plague’, Clinton’s empathy but almost total inaction, and the bureaucratic infighting that repeatedly stymied attempts to do something, anything. As each chance was missed, millions more were infected, millions more were orphaned and millions more died.

I’d always known about AIDS in an abstract sense, known that there were high infection rates in Africa (where my father was born), but it had never truly hit home until I read this book. I have spent my life living through a holocaust and have for the large part ignored it. I can’t do that anymore. I’ve talked to Ben and we are going to try and find some way to raise funds and awareness for the Global AIDS movement when we go for SOUTH. Our expeditions give us a voice and it is time we used it.

For all those who think that AIDS is under control, imagine this. Imagine your child being born already infected with a death sentence. Imagine every third person you see being infected with HIV. Imagine 5-6 million people dying of AIDS in the next two years. Imagine, in fact, that you live in Sub-Saharan Africa. One day our children will ask us what we did about the Holocaust in Africa, let’s hope we have an answer.

Donate to the Global Aids Fund here.

The Metaphysical Club tells the story of pragmatism, possibly the greatest American contribution to philosophy, through the lives of some of its key characters. Beginning with the Supreme Court judge and civil war veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes and weaving in the Logician Charles Pierce, the Psychologist-Philosopher William James, Jane Addams (known as the first social worker) and the Polymath John Dewey.

It is an incredibly elegant book, interweaving the various stories of its protagonists with skill and subtlety. One gets a decent idea of pragmatism’s meaning and importance, but Menand also places the philosophy and its leading lights squarely in their historical context, showing how the civil war and the religious battles of the day influenced pragmatism’s development. The Metaphysical club also gave me a small introduction into the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is someone I intend to delve far more deeply into. The book is rich in beautiful quotes and I’ll leave you with one by Oliver Wendell Holmes that seems appropriate to my line of work too:

“No man has earned the right to intellectual ambition until he has learned to lay his course by a star which he has never seen—to dig by the divining rod for springs which he may never reach…. Make your study heroic, for to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone—when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will—then only will you have achieved...”

Brilliant.