Skip to main content

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

More Posts

The Dhandho Investor by Mohnish Pabrai

Worth reading, and rereading, and re-rereading. An elegant book that teaches fundamental principles of value investing, and much more. The Dhandho Investor  also has the highly unusual quality of being useful at a wide range of reader sophistication levels: you can gain tremendously from this book as a beginner or as a deeply experienced investor. I'll single out Chapters 5 and 6 for particular mention: Chapter 5 describes author Mohnish Pabrai's investing framework, with nine interlocking and synchronistic rules. Chapter 6 describes in very simple language all of the gigantic structural advantages of investing in the stock market, as it offers low frictional costs, a tremendous selection of possible businesses, and, most importantly, periodic incredible opportunities. These two chapters explain why you will take a pass on almost all investments--but then, once in a while, make large bets on specific situations that meet your requirements. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon ...

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch [spoilers]

A first-rate central concept inside a second-rate plot wrapper. After reading two Blake Crouch novels , Crouch's gift for concept is obvious, but writing believable and well-resolved narrative arcs is an area for improvement. We'll start with this novel's concept layer, the multiverse: the idea that there are an infinite number of possible universes, and with every choice we make, every fork in our road, a new separate universe will exist for any and all of these possible choices. Dark Matter is a story about a physicist, Jason Dessen, who figures out a way to place a human being into "superposition," enabling him to move from quantum universe to quantum universe, and even to choose which quantum universe to inhabit. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commis...

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Tedious, weak, and worst of all  "riddled" with errors  and oversights. Do not read. I recommend instead  Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction  by J. Allan Hobson  for information about the REM/dreaming stage of sleep, as well as  Restful Sleep  by Deepak Chopra  for readers interested in practical help for improving sleep quality. Unlike Why We Sleep , both of these books are short, direct, readable and clear. Sadly, I also have to spend a brief few sentences  on Alexey Guzey's devastating criticisms of this book . Alexey's entire post is very much worth reading, but if you want to see just one glaring example of atrocious academic ethics, you can start with a chart Matthew Walker uses in Chapter 6 to prove a linear relationship between sleep loss and sports injury-- except that he cuts off the part of the chart that disproves his argument . This is childish middle school stuff, way beneath the line of a Berkeley and Harvard professor, a...