Reading List: Our Favorite Books That Made Us Better
To all the books we’ve loved this year.
What began as a bid to digitally detox before bed turned into a reunion with an on-and-off romance: the love of books with real pages in all their printed, weighty glory. Sometimes we sought stories to run away; others satisfied cravings for something closer to home. Either way, our 2020 reading list was full of titles that left us better off for giving them a read.
To understand lived history
The Splendid and The Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz
We know, we know: we’ve waxed poetic about Erik Larson’s brilliant book all year (and then went on to binge Larson’s other books). But somehow Larson’s methodology—doing his own research and sourcing largely from individual diaries—paints a picture of Churchill and England during the Blitz that feels thoroughly of-the-moment as impressions of history are made from the middle of it.
To marvel at a fall from hubris to humility
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
Honestly, after swearing off doom scrolling through the news, some good old corporate malfeasance felt like a holiday. But this tale of Adam Neumann and WeWork’s meteoric rise—and subsequent fall—speaks multitudes about our society’s obsession with the stereotypical young, visionary founder and the people who should have known better.
To see a legend in a new light
You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington
Embracing the “both and” thinking that our complex world demands from grown-ups like ourselves, this biography of George Washington captures the man who was both the war-hero father of our democracy and a slave owner who found it too expensive to grant them freedom. We can only hope more history gets served up this way so we can engage in some much-needed keeping-it-real talk.
To try and catch some zzzzzzs
Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis
This is pretty specific to Gen X women, but since some of us belong to this club, we felt seen and gained a fresh understanding of the cause-and-effect behind our tossing and turning. We appreciated Calhoun’s insistence on finding a relatively diverse set of women to study, giving us a fuller picture of a complicated issue. Imminently readable, we finished it over the course of a sleepless night.
To see inside the bubble (before it bursts)
Some books capture a time and a place so well they instantly become fodder for inclusion in a time capsule (think Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities or Kurt Andersen’s Turn of the Century). Capturing the early days of Silicon Valley’s post dot-com tech web 2.0 boom, Wiener’s writing is so sharply observant and spot on that it's hard to believe she ever wasted her talents working at start-ups.
