Sam’s 2020 Book List
Well, I’d say what a long strange trip it’s been, but we haven’t really been able to go anywhere!
I usually try to get this summary prepared over the long New Year’s weekend while at home. Since I’ve “been home” now for 300 days as of January 7th, it doesn’t really matter! Plus, the antics of yesterday (1/6/21 — A day that will live in infamy) haven’t made it easier.
Anyway, I wanted to summarize the shorter-than-last-few-years list of books I’ve read. You see, I usually read books when I’m commuting to my office in Downtown LA on the bus or train, or when I’m on one of my typical once every week or two flights to another office in California or Nevada. Well, the last time I was on an airplane was March 6, 2020, and I haven’t been on a bus or train since March 12, 2020. So, I haven’t had the time to read as much. Instead, I’ve been working from home and balancing keeping two young kids set up with “remote learning” (which is really a joke for any child in Kindergarten or younger), plus trying to keep my wife and family sane and keep the house in some semblance of order. It was tough, and by the end of each long day, I just wanted to zone out. So not as much time dedicated to reading, although there were a few times when I got to sit down and read.
Without further ado, here’s a list of the books I read, with some of my favorite quotes from each book and some thoughts from me, in chronological order.
Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World
by Pema Chodron <Link>
I went into 2020 reading this book and with this line, “His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, ‘When the old pretend to be young and the foolish pretend to be intelligent, it is better to just be realistic.’”
I can’t say this resonated with me, although looking back, I think I approached a lot of the challenges of 2020 by trying to be as realistic as possible!
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
by Erik Davis <Link>
This book was on my list to read for about a year. It focused on three authors who wrote in the 70s and into the 1980s and beyond: H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, and Terrence McKenna. I haven’t read a lot of Philip K. Dick, although I loved the first season of The Man in the High Castle and of course love Bladerunner. I also didn’t know much about H.P. Lovecraft. I was very familiar with Terrence McKenna, and enjoyed those sections of the book the most.
Maybe the most famous is the reference to Terrence McKenna and his prediction based on an interpretation of the Mayan calendar. “Following Terence’s death in 2000, countless ravers, Burners, and neotribal mystics came to set their visionary sights on the apocalyptic goal-post that the Timewave planted on a now famous date: December 21, 2012, the end of the Mayan long-count calendar.”
Fun fact, I corresponded with Terrence McKenna a few times in college via email, as I was taking a few philosophy courses…
Legacy
by James Kerr <Link>
Leadership stuff… You know, the kind of book you buy in an airport book store and read on a plane. Read this preparing for a leadership team meeting in Las Vegas. Had a big group dinner at the steakhouse inside the Golden Nugget Casino on Fremont Street before spending a few hours playing craps and blackjack with a colleague. We flew out of Vegas the following evening, looking down at the lights of the Strip. We had of course heard about the Coronavirus, and had heard grumblings about concerns about travel and human interaction, but nothing close to quarantine was even considered at that time. My how things would change!
Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen
by Rita McGrath <Link>
What a book to read on the brink of the pandemic lockdown! “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”
Good advice for business as we entered the COVID-19 world: “Navigating through an inflection point often means working on two massive challenges at once — bringing the core business forward in its competitive capability and creating new capabilities that will be relevant to the future.”
(Everything above is “Pre-COVID Quarantine)
Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between
by Eric Nusbaum <Link>
Great book about LA history! I loved how the book related the story of kicking the primarily Mexican-American residents of Chavez Ravine out of their homes to make way for the building of Dodgers Stadium. I loved how the book related that process to the broader growth of LA, with two quotes sticking out:
“In this sense the rise of baseball in the American consciousness isn’t that different from the rise of Los Angeles: both willed into existence by a bunch of opportunists printing the legend at expense of the fact and both growing into something bigger and messier and more interesting than their boosters could have ever imagined.”
“Los Angeles is always repurposing itself. Destroying its own history and straining toward the future.”
Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation)
by Don Mitchell <Link>
Very academic, and a bit heavy-handed in the message: Capitalism by nature means there will be homelessness — “The structures of capitalism require a large, growing, surplus population.”
“homelessness is best understood not as a problem of individuals (as something rooted in their characteristics and their characters) and not in the first instance as a problem of housing (though this is a phenomenal form that it takes), but rather as rooted in how capital circulates and is accumulated, and of the limits to capital itself.”
“The result is a massive problem of management as the necessary, and necessarily growing by-product of capitalist accumulation litters city streets,”
“Where — if anywhere — does the right to simply be in public space exist within the American discourse and practice of rights? And if it can be found, does that right to be in public have any chance at all of trumping the right to property, especially now since so much of the political economy (the very ability to circulate and accumulate capital) is based in property itself?”
The Stand
by Stephen King <Link>
Of course I read this book when I was in High School, going through what I expect is pretty common with a lot of young teenage males who discover Stephen King. Reading it again during the early months of a global pandemic was fun, and I’m looking forward to watching the new CBS mini-series someday!
Where the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens <Link>
This book was recommended to me by a colleague at work via Goodreads. It was a fun read, with a very interesting twist ending. I’d recommend it for anyone looking for something to take their mind off the craziness in the world.
The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades
by Roger Crowley <Link>
Read this book in a day or so! I love history books, and this one has been on my list to read since before it came out. I loved how it talked about this specific crusade and incident in history and related it back to how the world was changing in the 14th through 16th centuries. The book makes a great assessment as to why the Crusades ended in “the material benefits of long-distance trade with Europe had overridden any unified call to holy war.”
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt
by Steven Johnson <Link>
Also read this book in a day or so. Really enjoyed it. Very interesting read about the specific time in history, and loved the little facts like:
“stop over at the trading port of Mocha, near the mouth of the Red Sea in modern-day Yemen. With the newfound craze for coffee raging across the capitals of Europe, Mocha enjoyed a flourishing economy as one of the central nodes in the international coffee trade. (Modern consumers savoring their Mocha Frappuccinos at Starbucks pay a distant tribute to the city with each order.)”
“There were three distinct categories: pirates, corporations, nations. No one was quite sure where one began and the other ended.” (This hasn’t changed!)
“For suffer pirates and the commerce of the world must cease, which this nation has deservedly so great a share in, and reaps such mighty advantage by.”
(Although the quote is from a British man, he was talking about America too, maybe.)
American Dialogue: The Founders and Us
by Joseph J. Ellis <Link>
Very interesting concept: What would the founders of the US say to us? Mr. Ellis guesses, and a few zingers I liked were:
“In 1792, soon after the first ten amendments were ratified, Congress passed the Militia Act. It required every able-bodied white male citizen between the age of eighteen and forty-five to enroll in a state militia. It also required them to purchase a gun as well as a complete outfit of equipment essential to perform their military duties, thereby making gun ownership not an individual right but a legal obligation.”
“For those disposed to unpack the Second Amendment for the original meaning of “bear arms,” it has collective implications that lead not toward the right to own a gun, but toward mandatory national service.”
To give us a glimmer of hope in 2021, remember that “the American founding, most especially the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, was always a messy moment populated by mere mortals, whose chief task was to fashion a series of artful political compromises.”
Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock
by Steven Hyden <Link>
This author is nearly the exact same age as me, and we were clearly shaped by many of the same musical influences swirling around white suburban America between 1977 and 2000.
I loved this quote, because a family friend gave me a copy of this album before I left for college! “Quadrophenia should be issued free of charge to every fourteen-year-old misfit.”
This was me too! I remember seeing this on “Headbangers Ball” on MTV late one Friday or Saturday night. “Seeing the video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on MTV for the first time remains my greatest lightning-bolt moment of all time,”
And this one hit home, “Before I loved Phish, I loathed them.” It’s true. Phish fans were a “thing” in my high school, and I was too cool to be interested in something other people liked; I liked the blues, dammit! Well, fast forward to me seeing Phish live, and yes, I’m a Phan! “Is it possible that my interest in Phish stems from a deep-seated midlife crisis that I don’t want to acknowledge? Maybe.” The author said that, but it could possibly be me (my wife would agree).
Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation?
by Steven Hyden <Link>
Another great book writing about a topic — esoteric, maybe — that is very specific to me!
LOL — the very first live concert I ever saw was Urge Overkill on their tour supporting the Saturation album. “Corgan and Phair have both disappointed their followers over the years, but Urge Overkill seemed not to have any followers, save for those of us that still like to break out Saturation on sunny summer afternoons.”
And this is truth: “if you spent time in a dorm in 1996 and ’97, all you heard was Sublime, Odelay, and Dave Matthews Band. The memories alone give me a contact high.”
I loved the sections about Woodstock ’99, as I worked there over the summer before my final year at college. It was a fun job, and a wild event! “The most commonly cited moment for when Woodstock 99 officially went off the rails came during the festival-closing set Sunday night by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” I was actually on the stage during this, and remember seeing the fires in the crowds and mobilizing our shuttle bus system to get people out of the concert venue.
And I loved this line: “(like the one about the stolen Mercedes Benz that somebody somehow snuck through the gate and drove to within 80 yards of the stage).” Pretty sure he’s referring to this car, as shown in the photo below that I took the morning after the closing night of Woodstock ‘99.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
by Annie Dillard <Link>
This book caught my interest via a daily email I get from Plough Publishing, which sends out sort of daily religiously-tinged inspirational notes. I liked what I read from this book and checked it out. It is definitely a meditative book, and it was most interesting to me to read as a true meditation — sort of a constant stream of thoughts from the author. The author described it as such: “I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much.” Yep, pretty much!
This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s “Kid A” and the Beginning of the 21st Century
by Steven Hyden <Link>
Yes, I went on a Steve Hyden kick, mainly because I LOVE THIS ALBUM! And I loved this early intro: “Dedicated to the person responsible for putting the video for ‘Creep’ in the MTV Buzz Bin. Without you, none of this would have happened.”
And this, because it’s me too! “The same goes for my twenty-three-year-old self, another guy who is now otherwise unknown to me. That’s how old I was when Kid A was released.”
Eisenhower in War and Peace
by Jean Edward Smith<Link>
I’m still reading this, and wanted to read it after I learned a little bit of tidbits about “Ike.” I knew he was the Allied Commander over D-Day, and I didn’t know much about his presidency or his life prior to WWII. I’ll say that from what I’ve read so far, Ike is the definition of the right person in the right places at the right times!
Hopefully I’ll have more time to read in 2021, although I likely won’t be diving into anything too much until after January 20th! Stay safe, everyone!
