My Books of 2017 (Fine Sentences Included)
The days seem to run faster than I can count them now. Another 365 days have gone by but thankfully I have the books I read to show I didn’t just sit down doing nothing the whole year.
Previous lists — 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.
Sometimes I enjoy a sentence (or sentences) so much I highlight it and then go back to read it over and over again. Some of these sentences made me stop reading and just think as deeply as possible about the words I just read. I am going to include some of those sentences this year.
The Best One
This was by far the best book I read this year. The word seminal is overused to describe books but in this case it is truly merited. You start to appreciate the ‘seminality’ (is that a word?) of a book when you start to see the arguments made in it in all sorts of places. In a time of Trump and Brexit, this book helped to open my eyes to the motivations of the ‘other side’ and the arguments I had missed. It also helped me understand my own political motivations better.
Why do people believe what they do about politics and religion? The answers are surprising and interesting and quite eye opening.
Here’s a random fine sentence:
McNeill studied accounts of men in battle and found that men risk their lives not so much for their country or their ideals as for their comrades-in-arms.
A sentence that challenged so many things I had previously thought.
Britain
There’s still so much to learn about Britain where I live. One year at a time, I try to keep digging into the past while keeping up with the present.
As an explanation of Brexit and how the vote came to be, I’m not sure you’ll find better than David Goodhart’s The Road To Somewhere. A vote like that never happens in isolation or ‘suddenly’ — people carry history inside of them, whether or not they know it, and this book traces how such a vote came to be. It also ends with some interesting policy recommendations. A calm and sensible analysis of modern day Britain.
The typology of Anywheres (mostly people who voted Remain) and Somewheres (mostly those who voted Leave) is probably the best one so far in helping us understand what the hell is going on in the western world. Here’s a fine sentence:
People are prepared to trade economic gain for political agency and the prospect of a society that takes them more seriously
I can’t believe I only just read my first book — Victorious Century — by Sir David Cannadine this year. This entertaining and magnificent book definitely won’t be the last one I read from him. As someone on twitter said — the past is not fixed. You can read a book that changes the past for you by unlocking things you previously didn’t know. This book did just that for me. Every page was interesting, every sentence was good.
Reading about the way that democracy and government evolved in Britain over time caused me to rethink a lot of things I have thought about Nigeria and Africa in general. There were too many good sentences in the book but here are a couple:
And here is another fine sentence on surely one of Britain’s greatest ever Prime Ministers — William Gladstone:
He reduced the tax on tea and abolished the excise duty on soap, thereby promoting the righteous causes of temperance and cleanliness.
And finally, a paragraph summarising Queen Victoria:
She had given her name to her age, bestowing on it what was in many ways a misleading unity; her reign had coincided with Britain’s economic pre-eminence and global greatness; and during the last two decades of her life she had been venerated and apotheosized as the Gas-Lit Gloriana, the doyenne of European royalty, and the matriarch of the world’s largest empire.
Phew!
Religion
This year was the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. It was also the year I retraced my steps back to religion after a 4 year ‘break’. By pure luck, I picked 3 books that richly rewarded the time and effort I put into them.
Ok, I must confess — I haven’t quite finished Professor MacCulloch’s incredible A History of Christianity. It is so richly detailed and researched that I used to feel physically tired after reading a chapter. You have to concentrate and after reading the section on Jesus’ birth and death, I felt like someone had just assaulted and intellectually bullied me. Still, I found that it put me at peace with the question of faith — it really is a personal thing and you just take it or leave it.
Here’s a fine sentence on Israel:
And this:
Christianity has never ceased to debate the relationship between truth revealed from God in sacred text and the restless exploration of truth by human reason, which on a Christian account is itself a gift from God.
Rabbi Wolpe’s David: The Divided Heart was a delight to read. I grew up reading the bible (or so I thought) and there are many angles to the rich story of David that I only came to appreciate after reading this book. There is bible study and there is bible study.
God is invoked so often that even some skilled readers fail to notice that, with the murky exception of raising Samuel from the dead, there is not a single supernatural miracle in the entire story of David, the longest continuous narrative about a human being in the entire Hebrew Bible.
And here is the coda on David:
He is rarely directly guilty in the downfall of his foes but they do indeed fall. And the swift certainty of their fall inevitably gives rise to theories. To the faithful, it is the hand of God. To the suspicious, David’s plotting. To the generous (or the credulous?), astounding luck.
Finally, Dr. Alec Ryrie’s The Protestants on the history of protestantism is just fantastic and entertaining. He manages to be close to the subject without being biased as it goes from Europe to America to China to South Korea to South Africa and a brief stop in Nigeria. If you are going to read one book on religion, let it be this one. It will really educate you.
Nigeria
Ayisha Osori’s Love Does Not Win Elections was hands down the most important book about Nigeria this year. You can read my review of the book in The Guardian here. Her insights into how Nigeria’s political system is designed as a fortress against outsiders, women and even ‘normal’ people make for sober reading. It’s a good place to start if you want to pinpoint the problem that needs fixing with Nigeria’s political system.
Doing some research on something else and I came across No Easy Row for a Russian Hoe about how the old USSR tried to increase its ideological influence on Nigeria (and Africa) after independence. In essence, Nigeria became a battleground of competing ideologies and the country had no clue what it was getting into. This is what directly led to the ongoing fiasco that is Ajaokuta today. The book has a whole chapter on Ajaokuta and it is an incredibly painful and comical thing to read.
Here’s a twitter thread I did on the Ajaokuta chapter
Update: I have no idea how I managed to forget the late Professor Stephen Ellis’ book — This Present Darkness.
It’s an important book for anyone who wants to attempt answering the question — what on earth is wrong with Nigeria? I don’t claim to have the answer but what this book does is show that a lot of these problems have been with Nigeria for a very long time. I did a review-ish of the book in my Guardian column here.
According to the evidence at hand, “Professor” Crentsil has to be regarded as the first known exponent of the modern Four One Nine fraud, for which Nigeria has become notorious throughout the world. It is ironic that the first Four One Nine fraudster known to history was not a Nigerian at all, but rather a Ghanaian!
The first letter sent by the Crentsil chap was dated 18 December 1920.
China
Every year I try to read about China — it’s a (still) fast growing country with outsize ambitions about what it thinks its role should be in shaping the world to come.
Julian Gewirtz’s Unlikely Partners was one of the best books I read this year. I did a short review of the book in my Guardian column here. It chronicles how the Chinese searched the world for the best economic ideas they could find, carefully testing each one before finding the ones that directly solved the challenges they were facing. It also revealed a lot of unlikely heroes in the Chinese economic miracle. The book can be summarised by this fine sentence attributed to Hu Yaobang:
We must learn to do economic work from all who know how, no matter who they are
And another one credited to the great Zhao Ziyang:
The persistent, erroneous tendency to belittle knowledge and discriminate against intellectuals has gradually been corrected.
I had mixed feelings about Irene Sun’s The Next Factory of The World before reading it — Alhaji Dangote had praised the book which made me very suspicious. But thankfully I overcame that and went ahead to read it. Obviously, Alhaji didn’t read it because I can’t see why he praised it. It’s not perfect (some of the economics is sloppy) but it’s very very good. The Chinese in Africa are able to open up to a Chinese writer in a way that they might not do to other people. The result is that the book contains many eye opening moments.
Overall, I will say that the book has made me more sympathetic towards Chinese investment in Africa — not the state directed one but the investments brought by ordinary businessmen seeking out opportunities (the distinction is quite important). Highly recommended.
Don’t let anyone fool you that because China is not a democracy, there is no politics there. That is what you learn from reading Kerry Brown’s CEO, China. It’s nominally about Xi Jinping’s rise to power but it also details how the Chinese political system works and all the politics required to get to the top. Below is a summary of how the Chinese Communist Party is organised from bottom to top
And this made me realise how strong reversion to the mean is — the land of empires will always be the land of empires:
There may be 200 key power families in China, but perhaps no more than 20 or 30 really have meaningful clout.
America
Cheap Sex was one of the most challenging and bracing books I read this year in the sense that it forced me to think about a number of uncomfortable things. The central argument runs something like this — back when there was no contraception, having sex with a woman was as good as asking to marry her because sex and pregnancy were intertwined. That is, women didn’t have sex with a man unless they considered him ‘husband material’. But with contraception, sex is now a standalone thing not linked to anything else as a result, women are demanding less in exchange for it. By extension, men are becoming worse at being lovers or husbands (“Men are scum”). The whole thing is a mess for everyone involved.
Only read it if you are open to your views being challenged very strongly. I will say I no longer feel the same way about pornography after reading the book — I am no longer convinced that it is just a harmless thing that only affects the person who consumes it. The data and analysis are all from America but I recognised many similar patterns in Britain and Nigeria as I read it.
The question to ask is why women demand so little of men in return for offering men what they want — what they are willing to sacrifice a great deal for. And the answer is economic: it is because many do not need what men can offer.
Derek Thompson’s Hit Makers was a very entertaining read. When I read it I felt it almost perfectly explained the success of The Wedding Party movie in Nigeria last year — well disguised familiarity.
Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic — curious to discover new things — and deeply neophobic — afraid of anything that’s too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.
I wrote a bit about Professor Tyler Cowen’s The Complacent Class in my Guardian column earlier this year. His argument is that Americans have become chilled and don’t want to be stressed by anything anymore. As a result even new innovations are designed to maintain this state of chill — Netflix means you don’t have to go out, Amazon Prime brings stuff to you, Uber brings the taxi to you. And so on. As a result the country is not really in a hurry to do anything these days. What is amazing (and the subject of my Guardian column) is that a country like Nigeria has seemingly arrived at the same point but without the roads, bridges, electricity and so on that America at least has.
Does this not sound familiar to any Nigerian?
The relative absence of physical construction also makes it harder to put people back to work when bad times roll around, and, at a deep psychological level, it gets people used to the idea of a world that more or less always looks the same […] what has been lost is the ability to imagine an entirely different world and physical setting altogether, and the broader opportunities for social and economic advancement that would entail
Football
Watching football is a lot of fun. But the quality of football books being written now means that reading about it can be a lot of fun, too.
The European Game is a tour of some of the biggest clubs in Europe and documenting their culture and what makes them unique. Quite an eye-opening read. I found the section on Portuguese clubs to be the most revealing — all the money they make from player sales is reinvested in state of the art facilities and technology (they have probably the best technology in Europe)
You play football with your head and your legs are there to help you
That was Johann Cruyff.
The only words I have to describe Michael Cox’s The Mixer are ‘sweet die’. It is interesting throughout and undoubtedly the football book of the year. It’s currently £1.99 on Kindle. Get it now.
The best thing about the book were the tidbits away from the pitch that helped to add colour to the stories. Consider this part on that famous goal by Dennis Bergkamp against Leicester in 1997 (watch it here):
It prompted years of debate about whether it was intentional, and when Arsenal commissioned a statue of Bergkamp outside their Emirates Stadium, the sculptor complained that the goal was simply impossible to depict.
Pep Guardiola gave the journalist Marti Perarnau all access to Bayern Munich in his first season. The result is Pep Confidential — a look at the methods of hands down the best coach in Europe at the moment. It is so revealing that Pep Guardiola’s wife, Cristina Serra, complained that her husband was giving away too much of his secrets. It remains amazing that even with all this information in plain sight, no one seems to have figured out the guy.
Here is a description of how he created Messi as almost the perfect false 9:
He wanted to give the best area of the pitch, the centre-forward’s space, to his best player. But he planned to do it by leaving it free, unoccupied. The area would be his, he told Messi, but only on condition that he didn’t use it except to finish a chance. He needed to get into the zone for the final shot, but he shouldn’t stay there.
Economics
This year I mostly went back to first principles by reading old economics books again.
Eat The Rich is old (written in 2011 about observations in 1997) but it remains incredibly funny and a fun and entertaining way to learn economics if you are interested in the subject.
Those of you who know Buhari should send this book to him and this quote in particular:
We have an opinion. That opinion is a price. And since prices are constantly changing, our opinion is always about to be wrong.
Also this:
Rasputin, a Siberian peasant, was a televangelist. TV had not been invented, however, so he had to swindle people one at a time.
And finally this on the effects of technology on jobs:
When James Watt invented that steam engine, thousands of ten year old boys who had been hauling coal carts were put out of work. However, this left them free to do other things, such as live to be eleven.
Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson is older (published in 1946) and not as funny but it remains one of the easiest ways to begin to understand economics in one book.
Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for.
Uncategorised
Not all books fit neatly into a category. So here are the books I can’t quite place in a box but which I did enjoy reading very much.
Tim Harford’s Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy was excellent. There is so much detail about a lot of the things we take for granted in our modern world that we don’t really know.
But often the older, simpler ideas still work: for example, making the wait for an elevator pass more quickly by putting full length mirrors in the elevator lobby.
That made me chuckle. You humans are so easy to manipulate.
Federico Varese’s Mafia Life was an interesting tour of ‘Mafia’ organisations around Europe. What you end up discovering is that there are many overlaps in the way various criminal organisations are structured. Call it global best practice.
Al Capone, who became the leader of organised crime in Chicago after Torrio’s death, had the habit of testing his own men’s priorities. From time to time he would expose them to willing beautiful women. If they failed to show interest, he would grow suspicious, and assign them less responsibility. ‘When a guy don’t fall for a broad, he’s through’, his biographer reported him saying. A gangster who is so attached to his own wife would refuse to betray her; and he is by implication weak and so easily blackmailed or manipulated.
If you love your wife, maybe this job is not for you.
Dan Jones The Templars is written in a contemporary style. My conclusion is that I should probably not have read this book so as to maintain the myth of The Templars I held in my head. They are not as special as I thought they were. Still, it’s a good read given the recent controversy around Jerusalem.
The notion that churchmen might go into battle armed not only with prayer but with deadly weapons was hardly new. It spoke to a tension that had existed at the heart of Christian thought for a thousand years, as the pacifism suggested by the example of Christ’s life rubbed against a martial mentality embedded in the language of Christian rhetoric and scripture.
Jacques Pauw’s The President’s Keepers is a helluva book. Someone on twitter described it as proof that South Africa is now an African country. How a man like Jacob Zuma came to be trusted with such an important country and economy is a question that will surely occupy future historians. Suffice to say, however, that the man’s political instincts are in the stratosphere.
Some of the detail in the book is simply surreal (although to be fair it’s only because it is South Africa — all of this is still child’s play compared to Nigeria so let’s not get carried away here).
And these two bits about how the man’s personal financial recklessness came to shape the way he governed
The M&G reported that Mandela had identified Zuma early on as a financial ‘problem child’ and had attempted to ‘discipline’ him about his financial conduct.
And
At the basis of his dark journey into patronage was Zuma’s inability to handle his financial affairs. Polygamy and serial philandering come at a price, and both the taxpayer and his financial benefactors had to dig deep to sustain his lavish lifestyle
I am usually wary about books that claim they can liberate you from having to work a 9 to 5 and put you on the beach with all sorts of passive income to fund your lifestyle. But Dorie Clark’s Entrepreneurial You is damn good. It’s very practical and won’t tell you to go and stand in front of the mirror everyday chanting ‘I am great and I will live my life on the beach because I am great’. It simply tells you non-obvious but deeply illuminating things to do to monetise whatever skills you might have or even things you are currently giving away for free.
I started drinking wine this year and Dele Olojede recommended Eric Asimov’s How to Love Wine as a good entry point. It is completely unpretentious and is not about how to sniff the glass or stir the comments like those twats you see on TV. It’s simply about how to enjoy wine.
The primary purpose of wine is to provide pleasure and refreshment. It can do much more than that, but should never do less.
Aye.
If Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci was supposed to make me appreciate the guy more, it achieved the opposite. I came away thinking the guy is way overrated. There are only about 14 or so completed Da Vincis out there and god knows how many uncompleted ones. That summed up the guy — taking money to produce work and never quite finishing them and constantly being distracted by some fanciful invention or the other (which never saw the light of day). And while Renaissance Italy was a long long time ago and I hate the idea of inter-temporal justice, was it really ok for a 40+ year old guy to be living with a 15 year old boy even back then?
And The Rest
Cristina Odone’s Concentrated Parenting — I am a parent but the way I was raised simply cannot work as a formula for raising my own kids today. So one must read as much as possible. I enjoyed this very short book as a result (I think it’s free on Kindle). Dan Drezner’s Ideas Industry is a look into how think-tanks in America shape policy. A bit too America-centric and as such the ideas don’t really travel so I didn’t finish it. I’m still reading David Grann’s Killers of The Flower Moon. He’s one of the most entertaining writers out there and the book carries you along like fiction except that it’s a true story.
I ‘met’ Yossie Paul (“small Yosola of yesterday” — read in Yoruba) on twitter last month and ended up reading her poetry book, Hiraeth: Selected Poems. Poetry remains an acquired taste for me but I enjoyed this collection.
Finally, I read about 35% of Zia Haider Rahman’s In The Light of What We Know before realising it was fiction and abandoning it (don’t judge me). It’s a really good book so don’t let that stop you.
This is probably one of the longest posts I’ve ever written. Maybe I should turn it into a book…
I wish you a happy 2018 with plenty of reading.
