My top reads of 2019.
The five books I’ve read this year that made a difference…
Barbarian Days
I’ve never surfed and know very little about the sport — yet I was completely seduced by this memoir of a lifelong obsession with catching waves. William Finnegan, a respected journalist, grew up in the 1950s between California and Hawaii where the sea was always on his doorstep. Dropping out of a prestigious university, he instead teamed up with a pal to embark on a journey to catch surf around the world. Their epic story takes in established surf towns in western Australia but more remarkably, a quest to find unridden waves in remote islands around the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean. This was in the 60s and 70s before mass tourism to all corners of the earth, before the internet and even before media coverage for pursuits like surfing. Finnegan says he wrote the book primarily about surfing but I found so much more in it than that. There’s a coming of age story, meditations on the pursuit of one’s passions, the beauty and importance of spending time doing something that serves no functional purpose, and the challenge we all face of how to reconcile the frivolous with the necessary, as age and increased responsibility test the soul.
The Overstory
I usually find it pretentious when books are described as ‘important’ but The Overstory warrants the term. The challenge in describing it is how much it encompasses. This novel weaves together the story of nine very different American characters, over the course of several decades. Only one thing links them — the presence of trees in their lives. As their lives inevitably intertwine, what unfolds is a sprawling, cosmic saga that poetically and tragically narrates the damage we’re inflicting on the natural world. Eventually, it becomes clear why these strangers have been united, and by this point, you’ll feel like you’re fully on this mission with them. It’s a story that plucked at my emotions and conscience, mainly for the lead character — the planet we live on. By the end of it, I looked at the trees on my street in a completely different light. If Sir David Attenborough was a Pulitzer grade novelist, this is the book he would write.
Mountains of the Mind
I have an attraction to the mountains that has always felt partly inexplicable, but no longer. Robert Macfarlane, a lifelong hiker and mountaineer, eloquently describes the human fascination with mountains despite the dangers they bring. He traces the history of our relationship with mountains, first as our projections of the evidence of God, then as places of wonder to be observed close up and eventually as nature’s ultimate challenges to be relentlessly conquered. In one short piece of prose, he neatly surmises that experiencing high mountains up close presents to us not only a scale that reminds us of our fragility but also a visual representation of timescales and forces that are mind-boggling to comprehend. We are, after all, a blink in the history of this planet.
Make Time
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky are the former Google Ventures professionals who wrote the excellent ‘Sprint’, a guide to the methodology they’ve used at hundreds of tech companies and startups to rapidly develop and test product ideas — in an under a week. This new book focuses on a broader challenge: how to get important things done when you feel you have no time. I have little appetite for reading time management books and this isn’t one. Instead, it’s an easy to read, and very practical set of tactics that you can pick and choose to ensure you’re making time for the things that will really make a difference to your life, whether that’s starting a side hustle, writing a book, learning an instrument or spending more time with your family and friends. I’ve tried some of them and can vouch that they make a difference.
Feck Perfuction
There’s a category of books I often read that should be called something like ‘pocket wisdom’*, something you dip into regularly and want to buy for other people — Feck Perfection sits in there. James Victore is an artist, designer and teacher. He’s also an unconventional thinker. This book is a collection of 76 musings, lessons and provocative thoughts on how to get the best out of yourself, your work and your life. On one page he’ll exhort you to ‘Run from comfort’ and on another, he’ll propose that you ‘Make work that is meaningful to yourself first’ even ahead of clients. Each topic is covered in a page or two, accompanied by striking imagery and designs. It’s become a regular gift for other people and if you want to challenge your ways of thinking, give it a try.
*See also: I’m Not For Everyone, Neither Are You; The War of Art; It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be
