My Books of 2016
Compared to previous years, I read a record number of books this year. Previous versions are here — 2013, 2014 and 2015.
The Best Ones
This year I cant decide on a winner because 2 books I read were so good it is impossible to pick one over the other.
Any country that does not have a Professor Tombs to chronicle its history needs to borrow one. His book transported me to completely different eras. Magnificently written in the way that you learn something on every single page (this is no exaggeration). A country with documented history of 1,300 years is never going to be easy to fully understand but this did a wonderful job of illumination for me on this royal throne of Kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty.
How did this tiny wind swept island which had been on the receiving end of some brutal treatment by the Romans and William The Conqueror come to influence and dominate so much of the world?
All countries can claim to be special in their own way but very few have the history to back up their claims. Hard to excerpt but if I was to pick a favourite page in the whole book, it’s this one:
The most amazing thing about Professor Gordon’s book is the sheer amount of data he managed to collect to show the incredible economic transformation that happened in America between 1870 and 1970 — The Special Century as he calls. The world has not seen this kind of rapid economic transformation before. And as I say — if you are looking for an economic development model, there is none better than America, especially for a country like Nigeria. Some of the stuff is amazing — around 1900, 30% of American women were fetching water from the stream and almost half of all children did not go to school.
Yet, here we are today.
Biographies
I also read a number of biographies this year. The genre lends itself well to audiobooks and I happened to do a lot of driving this year. If you’re thinking about getting into audiobooks, start with biographies.
I’ll easily go with Titan as the pick of the bunch. It was written in 1999 so I’m very late to the party. Still, Ron Chernow did a wonderful job of chronicling the man’s life with a very even hand. Highly recommended.
The ones that surprised me the most were Alibaba and Elon Musk. I approached them thinking they would be just the regular books — half interesting and easily forgotten. I ended up being surprised at how good they were. Both are not that long but the authors clearly had access to the subjects and were able to obtain a lot of information not previously private. For entrepreneurs in Nigeria, I’d say Alibaba is the one you should read. There was nothing in the company’s history that predicted it would be the juggernaut that it is today.
I came away from Andrew Carnegie somewhat disturbed by the man. He made his money very early and had a COO — Henry Clay Frick — who was highly competent allowing him to pursue many other interests. A lot of them were undoubtedly good — the libraries and pianos he donated. But some of them read to me like a bored billionaire not knowing what to do with his money. He once offered to pay the American president a pension once he left office. This unwittingly led to the institution of a pension for retired American presidents as people felt there was something not quite right with a billionaire offering to pay a sitting president’s pension once he was out of office. Then one time he funded a group who wanted english words to be spelt the way they were pronounced. So enough would be enuff and so on. Thankfully it didn’t catch on.
None of this can take away from the man’s amazing legacy which is evident from South Africa to South America to America itself. But if ever there was a contest to vote for your favourite historical billionaire, I’d probably cast my vote for John D.
Single Subject Matter
These books covered a single subject matter. I like books like these because you can pick them up and be educated deeply on some random stuff. Every single one of these books is worth your time, no exaggeration.
Have you been thinking about starting your own drug business but you don’t know where to start from? Help is at hand in the form of Narconomics. Everything you need to know about running a drug cartel is here, from how to hire drug mules (Trivia: Nigerian drug dealers pioneered ‘race based’ hiring of drug mules) to how to beat law enforcement. More seriously, this books lays bare why the current ‘war on drugs’ has been such a failure and a waste of time.
Lesser Beasts taught me that the biggest problem pigs have had is bad PR. They are easy to rear and provide a lot of meat for cheap. Yet due to a combination of religious and historical factors, they can’t shake off their reputation as dirty little things (to be fair they have not helped their case by the fact that they simply eat anything but they mean well). Compare them to cows who do nothing but eat and sleep all day and only give you one calf at a time after 9 months gestation (pigs can give you up to 12 after just 4 months gestation). And they are also very intelligent.
The rain that is currently beating Nigeria in terms of oil prices did not start today. It began as a drizzle around 40 years ago in America. The Frackers chronicles how a bunch of crazy guys in America kept on perfecting the technology over and over until shale oil ‘suddenly’ became a nightmare for oil producers around the world in 2014. OPEC is now a price taker as opposed to a price setter. This is the world we now live in and this book tells the story of how we got here.
How Music Got Free would easily have been my book of the year in any other year. It’s a breezy history of how the music industry kept enjoying its cosy profits and refusing to change until technology and music pirates eventually completely disrupted their world. You dont even have to like music to enjoy this. But you’ll come across so many things that will make you say so that’s how that happened in this book.
The best reason why you should read The Everything Store is that Jeff Bezos’ wife — Mackenzie — gave it a 1 star review on…Amazon. How Amazon went from a crappy idea selling books to the global giant it is today is indeed a remarkable story. The company nearly died several times but somehow survived. A good fun read.
Economics Etcetera
One must always read books on economics you know. It’s in the constitution.
I randomly picked up Inner Lives of Markets and read through it very quickly. It’s really enjoyable and the authors went out of their way to convey economic thoughts and principles in as simple a language as you will find anywhere. I didn’t like the way they ended the book but there is plenty to learn from the book.
Every African policy maker should read Made in Africa. I wrote a full review of the book here. Everyone wants to industrialise and manufacture things and create jobs. But talk is cheap and the work is very hard but not impossible. In the meantime, Audu Ogbeh continues to tell us that imported honey is the problem afflicting the Nigerian economy.
What more can be said about Professor McCloskey? Someone described her as having read everything that is worth reading. Her breadth of scholarship is quite something to behold. She’s also an english professor so you come for the economics and end up with a twofer. Bourgeois Equality is the final part of her trilogy and it goes a long way in answering the knotty question of why some countries got rich and others didnt.
Professor John Kay’s Other People’s Money is a searing rebuke to the financial services industry across the world. This is the industry that pays my bills so it was quite painful to read. Yet, it is difficult to disagree with his diagnosis of an industry that has often lost its way and forgotten its core function.
Can’t Fit In a Category
These ones don’t lend themselves to a particular category but I enjoyed them anyway.
In this category, I think Sapiens comes out tops hands down. A fantastic and entertaining tour de force about how we humans got here. We have indeed come a long way through a combination of luck, tragedy and accidents of nature. But here we are today — smart enough to create artificial intelligence. Is the story of humans now coming to an end? Who knows. But what I do know is that this book is a must read if you havent read it yet.
Oyinbo people have now decided to disrupt the work of babalawos and religious leaders who claim to be able to predict the future. The concept of Superforecasting is simple — get some really good forecasters to make predictions based on currently available information and then synthesise their views into a single prediction. Professor Tetlock has been producing some remarkable results with this technique. It’s not jazz, just data and science. Might have to fire your pastor soon.
Carlo Ancelotti hardly has any enemies in football. He’s one of those seemingly nice guys who manages to produce results wherever he goes. In Quiet Leadership he tries to share the management tips and tricks that have shaped his career. Fun read even if you don’t like football but are interested in leadership and managing people.
If you like any Malcolm Gladwell book, you’ll probably like Originals. Procrastination is apparently good. When you read this book you’ll know why, among other things that make non-confirmists successful.
What I can say about Intellectuals and Society is that even though it was written in 2010, it almost perfectly predicts everything that has gone on in the world this year with populist movements in Europe and America. Intellectuals — defined as people who trade in ideas and ideas only — have been hugely influential in shaping modern societies for better or worse. Yet, they have huge blind spots and big gaps in logic. But even leave that aside — everything Dr. Sowell writes is worth reading.
The Advance of African Capital is probably the definitive book on commerce and industry in Nigeria. Some parts of it made me feel nostalgic for a seemingly lost era when private enterprise and efforts solved real problems and spurred growth in Nigeria. Yet, here we are today with an economic model where government is not only a parasite on the rest of the country but is in effect a roadblock to growth. A lot of the names are familiar but some of the origin stories may not be. That’s why you should read it.
Unfinished Business
Life is short so a lot of books get started but never finished. But I definitely intend to complete some of the books I didn’t manage to finish in the year.
I started reading Genghis Khan earlier this year and the amount of blood and treachery on every page made me ease up. I’m not squeamish so I will go back to it. It’s definitely interesting based on the few chapters I read.
I didn’t finish Professor Mokyr’s Culture of Growth for lack of time. But this one is a must read for me as it’s about an era that I’m trying my best to know as much as I can about. How did growth explode in Europe and then spread to America but not other places?
Another one not finished for lack of time is The Slave Trade. I cheated a bit by skipping to some parts in the middle and the end to read the parts on Nigeria. There were hardly any heroes in this stain on humanity but some were worse than others. It’s a really big book so will take my time with it.
End Notes
2016 has been an amazing year for me. I read more than I have ever done and wrote even more. I don’t know which way causality runs — did I write more because I read more? Or did I read more because I was writing more? Either way, those are the facts.
I’ve been writing for free for like 10 years now. If you add up everything I’ve ever been paid to write before this year, it is a fraction of what I got paid this year for my writing. It’s weird but it seems as if my writing somehow became valuable in 2016. Beyond the money, it is the opportunity to write for larger platforms than just my blog and to work with editors who sharpened my writing (Salute to the brother, Yinka Adegoke at Quartz Africa).
My boss at work for the most of this year is the kindest and most decent person I have ever worked with. Not only was the work rewarding, I also seem to have had a lot of time to do various other things unrelated to my day job.
All told, it has been a remarkable year that has enriched me in more ways than I can say.
I say this for a good reason — 2014 was probably my worst year on record. It tested me in so many ways that I was not even ready for and left me with scars that only healed this year. Everything that could go wrong in 2014 did. Everything that could go great in 2016 did.
If you’ve had a bad year, be encouraged. Lift your chin up. Some things can only be fixed by time. It’s a cliche but it is no less true — joy really does come in the morning.
I wish you a great 2017.
FF
