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Best and Worst, 2022

I read 57 books in 2022, and these are the ones that stood out. I stumbled onto a lot of very good books this year--and a few not so good. Each link below will take you to my review and discussion notes.

If you'd like to support my work here, you can feel free to use this Amazon link to do your shopping, I'll be paid a modest affiliate fee at no extra cost to you. Thank you for reading, and all the best for 2023! 


Best (5/5 stars):
The Ethics of Money Production by Jorg Guido Hulsmann
I and Thou by Martin Buber
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Near-Best (4/5 stars):
Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert S. Mendelsohn
The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot
Layered Money by Nik Bhatia
Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann
Discourses on Livy by Niccolo Machiavelli
Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz
The 39 Steps by John Buchan
Greenmantle by John Buchan
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss


Worst (1/5 stars or close):
The Year Without Summer by William K. Klingaman
The Paranoia Switch by Martha Stout

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Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

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Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis by Tyler Disney

Tremendously useful. This is a book about meta-preparation: about what it really means to be prepared when you don't know the future. It teaches readers how to think about skill development, optionality and flexibility--and by virtue of these meta-tools, how to earn true individual self-sovereignty. Deep Response is a sophisticated strategy-level discussion hidden in a simple story: a thirty-something man goes back in time to offer guidance to his twenty-something younger self. Their discussions are engrossing on many, many levels, as the two characters--with radically different perspectives, despite being the same person--work out various life problems. The older character wants to warn the younger man that all of his strivings will eventually cause him to achieve nearly the exact opposite of what he seeks, and worse, if he doesn't adjust, his life will soon lack enough flexibility to do anything about it. The reader is the lucky beneficiary, getting exposure to a wide-rangi...
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By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy by Michael G. Vickers

The least deceptive way to read this endless, muddled and minutia-laden memoir would be to view it as a very long piece of propaganda: a type of limited hangout of all of the covert (and overt) things the United States does globally in its attempts to project power. It can also be read as an attempt at an extended--and I mean extended --defense of the CIA and all of its meddlings all over the world. This is if you actually read the book. Don't. Piled up with words but saying little of substance, this is the most obfuscatory memoir I've ever read. The author's voice fundamentally irritates: he has a compulsive need to share staggering amounts of unnecessary detail, he comes across as a relentless credit hog, and he repeatedly attempts to place himself right in the middle of the action--even when it's clear he wasn't. Perhaps least ethical of all, he has a habit of framing his actions and decisions so they appear more correct and predictive in retrospect than they ac...
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