Best reads of 2008

January 4th, 2009 by Jiri

BooksHappy new year to you all. I am continuing with the Best Of theme and today I am moving on to books.

If you measure the quality of a book by how much it changes the way you think or do things, I was lucky to find some truly excellent books. Deciding which one were the best ones was not easy as there were quite a few that had a bit of the ‘my life will not be the same again’ quality, but here it is.

Stephen Clarke: A Year in the Merde

This is a hilarious, and politically incorrect view on French (and British) cultural stereotypes. If you live(d) in France, work with French or even like the country, read the book for your amusement and education. Everyone I spoke about it (regardless their nationality) agreed that it is both extremely funny and at the same time a factual description of many cultural quirks of a Parisian life.

Nassim Taleb: The Black Swan
It would have been enough to read the Black Swan if only for the fact that it foretold the last year’s financial crisis. Yet, Nassim Taleb went a step further and this book gives  a treatment of the subject of predictability (or a lack of thereof) in everyday life and puts up a straw man of a philosophy enabling you to act in a positive manner in a world where ‘noone knows nothin’. Whereas the Black Swan is slightly more applicable to business and investment domain, it is worth checking out his previous book, Fooled by Randomness, which deals more with personal implications of the uncertainty and over-abundance of data.

Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma

What Taleb does for finance and unpredictability, Michael Pollan does for food. Whether you are vegetarian or eat burgers, you will find this book fascinating. The book will make you pause, more than once, to reflect about what you eat and how.

Samuel Hayakawa: Language in Thought And Action

Despite a book on language may seem boring, its subject is something extremely important. Words give us a filter through which we see the world around us. They colour perception with emotions. They enable us to distinguish lie from the truth and give us a windows into the inner world of others’. Their skilful use makes some people charismatic and turns others into spin-doctors. The book paints you the basics of what Samuel Hayakawa describes as ’science of how not to be a damn fool’, explaining the basics of what different usage of words do to you. Overall it is a great self-defence manual to all kind of mischief in the media and a guidebook to a better and fairer use of words.

Other noteworthy books I read in 2008:

Leave a Reply