Sam’s 2023 Book List
This was quite a year. There was consistency and continuity in terms of work and life (i.e., no mid-year job changes, no global pandemics), and at the same time an incredibly busy and stressful year in terms of work and life. It was a year of many car commutes to the westside of LA, which meant less time on public transit and reading, though I was able to establish some more regular meetings in downtown LA where I could use transit and get some reading done. We also had a full year of our office book club, which allowed me to read some books I would have never considered, which I think expanded my mind a bit. Last, it was a year of self-discovery and learning, and I am thankful for both the opportunity to learn and for learning the things I have.
Without further ado, here’s my book list for 2023 (in chronological order of reading):
Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation
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I love reading books where people I know, have met, or have worked with, are mentioned. This was one of those books, and it took me back to the mid 2000s when I first moved to the LA region and worked on a major project to align multiple public agencies and their priorities to improve the freight and goods movement infrastructure across Southern California. Lots of familiar names from that time period were mentioned, and lots of relevant data for my current role. One great statistic mentioned: As of the writing of the book in 2017, “on an average day UPS will make 1.2 to 1.3 million deliveries in Southern California, more than [eight] percent of the UPS worldwide total.” Also, relevant to my current work, there’s the following quote: “Jim McNamara, a sergeant with the California Highway Patrol, [says that] officers spend 80 percent of their time responding to car wrecks…”
Black Cake: A Novel
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This was the first office book club selection, and a fun read. I haven’t watched the series on Hulu yet, though. Great plot twist, in my opinion, and I liked how the book flashed from “present day” to the past.
How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between
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This book was recommended to USDOT senior staff by the Secretary of Transportation himself, Pete Buttigieg. It was recommended to me by one of those USDOT staff members, so it’s almost like Mayor Pete himself recommended it to me (Thanks for granting me a total fanboy moment!). When I started reading the book, though, it was kind of funny how the first project the book discusses is the California High Speed Rail project. This is a project I was somewhat involved in during my time at WSP, and the book presents it as an example of how NOT to do big things! Of the project, it says, “what California had in hand when the project got under way could at best be described as a ‘vision’ or an ‘aspiration.’ It’s no wonder that problems started multiplying and progress slowed to a crawl soon after delivery began.” I couldn’t agree more.
This is a good book with a good message. I’m not sure how many people would get the message, though, because I feel like a person needs to have direct experience delivering and completing a complex project to understand all the challenges explained in the book. For example, there’s a great line in the book where it says, “Planning is a safe harbor. Delivery is venturing across the storm-tossed seas.” If you haven’t ventured across those storm-tossed seas (either literally, as I’ve done while securing docks and 2,000 pound moorings during a November Nor’Easter, or figuratively, in terms of delivering a complex infrastructure project like a new light rail system), the message may not resonate. I also loved the line: “Projects are how goals are achieved.”
I’ll end with this quote, because it is so relevant and correct, for any project:
“no matter how many risks you can identify, there are always many more that you can’t.”
Dreamers and Schemers: How an Improbable Bid for the 1932 Olympics Transformed Los Angeles from Dusty Outpost to Global Metropolis
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A fantastic and relevant history for me, discussing the first Olympic games held in Los Angeles in 1932.
A great quote by Billy Garland from before the 1932 Games, ““It is difficult for the average citizen of Los Angeles to grasp the great scope of these games and the full significance of their meaning to this city of ours…” I’d say this quote still holds true for the LA region of 2023.
Some statements about the 1932 Games that could apply to 2028 include: “Near the Coliseum, sidewalks for blocks on end were thick with vendors and street traders.” and “the announcer, in fine Los Angeles style, had asked the crowd to give the athletes the opportunity to drive away without a traffic jam.”
Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty
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For a break from history and nonfiction, I turned to my love of music. This book is for people who love music, and it gets into some of the theories about why we like certain styles of music or sounds. Probably not a book for everyone, and I enjoyed it.
Of all the quotes in the book, this one was so relevant to me and my tastes in music. Further, this statement perfectly sums up the sound of some of the best live Grateful Dead recordings from the 1970s: “Betty Cantor-Jackson, the Grateful Dead’s live recording engineer, has said this about her preferred sound mix: ‘I want you to be inside the music; I don’t want stereos playing at you, I want you to be in there, I want it around you … When my mix is right, and the space is properly formal, or should I say expanded, I consider that place as getting ‘clear’; when I’m really clear, I can walk around between the instruments.’ Her mixes are remarkable for the separation and space among the music’s elements, and what seems like an architectural arrangement of them.”
Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing
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This was a year where I embraced both what I knew and more importantly, what I did not know. It was an important growth process for me, to reflect on and recognize that all of the experiences and skills I’ve developed in my nearly 25 years of professional work have given me to tools and techniques I’ll need to be successful in my current role. At the same time, it is important to recognize that neither me nor anyone else who will be involved in any way with the 2028 Games has ever done anything like this at the scale we’ll do it at. Therefore, there isn’t someone out there who knows the perfect plan and perfect way we’ll succeed. Rather, we need to make sure everyone involved has the right skills and knowledge, combined with the right preparation, to achieve success. For those reasons, Iloved the message of this book: “in an increasingly complex, unpredictable world, what matters most isn’t IQ, willpower, or confidence in what we know. It’s how we deal with what we don’t understand.” If this doesn’t resonate with people, and I’m sure it won’t with everyone, the book also pointed out how a study of brains indicated that “intolerance of unclear information was what characterized the unhealthy mind.”
Proud: My Fight for an Unlikely American Dream
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This was the second office book club selection. I really appreciated how the author described her faith and how it was a part of her life. Like this quote, “Lately, I found myself looking forward more and more to my daily prayers. Those precious moments were the only time in my day when I required myself to slow down, reflect, and remind myself of what was important.” And I appreciated this quote, “If you have no critics, you’ll likely have no success. — MALCOLM X.” Last, I found the closing statement of the book truly beautiful: “thank Allah for giving me this beautiful life, the experiences of joy, of sadness, and everything in between.” I love this, because there is sure a whole lot of stuff “in between” the joy and the sadness of life!
Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder
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I read this to learn more about my daughter, who was diagnosed with ADD earlier in 2023. Immediately, the book described her: “there is another kind of ADD that shows no hyperactivity whatsoever. Indeed, these people can be underactive. This is the child, often a girl, who sits at the back of the classroom daydreaming.” Another line really resonated with me and described my daughter as a person, “who writes a story rich in imagination and insight and is told her handwriting and spelling are atrocious.” Yep, we’re still working on the spelling.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
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This was our third office book club selection, and it was selected as a “lighter” read than the previous books, and because there was a movie version coming out. It was a fun, quick read. I like that it was set in El Paso, Texas, where I spent a lot of time as a child.
A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization
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This was a quick departure from other books, a light read to change things up a bit.
As a music fan, I found this first description of “vice” very interesting: “It’s significant that we’ve been building musical instruments more than twice as long as we’ve been brewing alcohol,” and, “In The Origins of Music, published in 1999, Walter Freeman of Berkeley University suggested that humans might have been making music longer than we’ve been starting fires.” The section on music closed with this: “In an age before drugs, before cities, before any other comforts existed, the dopamine high of listening to really good music was one of the most intense experiences people could make for themselves.”
Plus, I love anytime my undergrad alma mater gets mentioned, when describing an artifact found with a frozen neanderthal: “The owner of this little jar apparently used enough tobacco that, thirteen hundred years later, scientists from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University at Albany were able to run a chemical analysis and find actual tobacco residue in his or her stash bottle.”
This was a strong message to end the book:
“Behind every vice is an impulse. We can sate those impulses in ways that are healthy, that improve our ability to deal with the world, and that help us grow as people. Or we can sate those impulses in ways that numb us to the world and drive us deeper and deeper away from it.”
The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Novel
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Another office book club selection, and I absolutely loved this book. It was one of those books that lets you get inside the heads of the characters, and these were characters struggling with mental health. I found the writing exciting and engaging, and there were times I was really scared that the book was going to go to a very dark place. It didn’t, and that made me like the book even more.
The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight
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This is a comprehensive and engaging book for anyone who works in or is interested in transportation. Too many great segments to highlight or quotes to share. My overall statement regarding the book is that it is a little bit depressing, as after reading it, I realized how much of a role racism played in our nation’s housing and transportation policies, and the challenges will still face as a result of those policies.
The Habsburg Empire: A New History
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I love reading books about history, and especially history I’ve never studied nor what has been shared with me or discussed in school or popular culture. This was that kind of book, discussing the Habsburg Empire from the early 1800s through the end of the First World War. Also called the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was a period in history that I knew very little about. Some really interesting facts were presented, especially considering that this period in history was really not that long ago (in the grand scheme of things). For example, it talks about the civil law code established in the early part of the Empire: “the publication of the civil law code (Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch or ABGB) in 1811 [stated that e]very human being has innate rights… [and s]lavery and servitude, or the use of power to achieve them is not allowed in these territories.” The book continued to say that, “Cold War historians located the origins of what they perceived to be the economic and political backwardness of east central Europe precisely in this period.”
I found this fascinating: “Around 1880 the world changed. Across Europe communications and transport infrastructures expanded at quickening rates, more goods came to more people than ever before, and people now traveled far beyond their accustomed horizons, both physically and mentally.”
And this last quote, my how this seems relevant to our current lives:
“Expanding infrastructures and new public entitlements compelled the governments of Austria and Hungary to add layers of bureaucrats to fulfill new functions, and then more layers to monitor the effectiveness of the first layers.”
Olga Dies Dreaming: A Novel
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Another office book club selection, and I enjoyed it. I liked the characters and how the main character was a teenager of the mid-1990s. For example, this part from the book, “discovering common ground they had shared while never quite crossing paths: the Kids days of Washington Square Park,” resonated with me.
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
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Another book that included names of many people I’ve had the pleasure of working with or knowing in my career. For example, the book talks alot about Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA, and how, “After four decades at UCLA, Don had retired in 2015 with a party on the top of the parking garage.” I was there! I also loved the book’s title and the play on the song lyrics from Joni Mitchell. This is one of those books chock full of facts and figures, and anyone interested in transportation policy and practice would enjoy this book. So many interesting facts, like this one, “the production of cement is responsible for almost 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.”
Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
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In early 2021 my son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. It was such a helpful diagnosis, at least for me, as it helped me put a label on and understand why my son was behaving the way he does. It led to my wife and I being much more thoughtful and focused on how we parent our son, and also made me pay closer attention to his behaviors.
A psychologist recommended this book, and if you know someone who is autistic, or if you suspect you or someone you know might be on the autism spectrum, I also highly recommend this book.
The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything
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This book was originally part of an organization-led learning effort, and this year I read the book. So many great quotes to ponder in the book, including this great one:
“My life is an indivisible whole, and all my activities run into one another . . . . My life is my message. — MAHATMA GANDHI.”
As part of an organization that is growing and evolving, there were a few parts of the book that really resonated with me:
“Sometimes entire cultures are held hostage by a downward cycle of spin and posturing. This diminishes trust and creates an additional ‘withholding tax’ where people withhold information and keep things ‘close to the vest.’ As a result, companies often have three meetings instead of one: the premeetings (to prepare and position), the meetings themselves (where, because of all the spin and withholding, very little discussion of the real issues take place), and then the ‘meetings after the meetings’ (the smaller meetings where the real discussion happens and the real issues are aired).”
The book also included a lot of good quotes about delivering: “Future leaders will be less concerned with saying what they will deliver and more concerned with delivering what they have said they would. — DAVE ULRICH, BUSINESS AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR,” and “The counterfeit is delivering activities instead of results — e.g., being really busy, but not really productive.”
My biggest takeaway of the book is this quote:
“The overriding principle of societal trust is contribution. It’s the intent to create value instead of destroy it, to give back instead of take.”
Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life
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This was the last office book club book of the year, and it was very interesting to get a new perspective on life from the author, who is a disabled asian woman. As a person who was diagnosed with a disability in 2023, there were things the author wrote that I appreciated and felt aligned with, including, “All responses to the world take place within our bodies,” and “FOMO (fear of missing out) is a form of internalized ableism!” Also, this one has current relevance to me, “I spent much of my childhood and young adulthood finding myself and community. I didn’t have the words or concepts such as ableism or intersectionality that helped shape me into who I am today. Disability pride and identity took a long time for me to develop, and the process accelerated once I started reaching out to other disabled people.”
My Neighbor Totoro
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I read this book because my 10-year old daughter asked me to. She watched the movie earlier in 2023, and then read the book in her first month of school (as this is the first year the students are required to have a personal book to read at all times and have dedicated reading time each day in class). The book is only in printed hardcover editions, and not in my current preferred medium of an ebook, so I put off reading it until I could curl up on the couch. I finally got a chance over the holiday break, and I enjoyed this little book.
Having been an exchange student in Japan in the early 1990s, I really appreciated all the details about the family living in the country, heating their bath, sleeping on futons, and living in a house with sliding rice paper screens and tatami mats. The details of the book were wonderful, and the message about being aligned with the “spirits” of the natural world was a great one. It was definitely not a traditional “children’s story,” (either the Disney or Slick Rick versions), and I’ve enjoyed talking with my daughter about the plot and little details of the book.
