Books of 2021

December 31st, 2021
6 min read

I like books that are hard to summarize. Hard to explain why they make sense. That challenge our use of language because the words we are reading don’t fit with our narrative of the world we live in.

2021 was a year of challenge, and 2022 will be a year in which we have to rewrite many of the narratives we have told ourselves over the years. Where we live, how we live, how we communicate with people, where we work, how we work, and for whom.

This year, reading each of the books below helped challenge me to think of a new narrative for the future.

Hoping you all have a great start to the new year and that these books can help guide you on a new path for what is turning out to be a whole new world.

- Kaushik

Monoculture by F.S. Michaels

A book that describes the ever-smaller circles that our culture is creating.

”Over time, the monoculture evolves into a nearly invisible foundation that structures and shapes our lives, giving us our sense of how the world works. It shapes our ideas about what’s normal and what we can expect from life.”

“Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.” —LEO TOLSTOY

A game of birds and wolves by Simon Parkin

A remarkable story of how one man and a group of very intelligent women saved England and Europe from defeat in the Second World War.

”This was not the hyperbole of propaganda. Of the 39,000 men who went to sea in U-boats during the Second World War, seventy percent were killed in action. By contrast, only six percent of those who fought in the British Army died in combat.”

“This was Roberts’ masterstroke. By repeatedly playing through recent action at sea and using a game to understand the situation from all angles, he would be in a strong position to see where the British commanders had misunderstood the U-boats’ behavior. The process would enable him to formulate the first universal set of defensive tactics for the navy to use against U-boats, encouraging escort ships to work together like team-mates, rather than individuals.”

Ask Iwata by Satoru Iwata

A fascinating book about the philosophy and management style of Nintendo’s late CEO.

“This is why I spent my first month as president interviewing everybody at the company. The discoveries were endless”

“So how do you know when a project is going well? When someone points to a gray area in the initial plan, then asks you “Hey, can I take care of this?” and follows through.”

"A good idea is something that solves multiple problems in a flash.” This is something that Shigeru Miyamoto taught me at Nintendo about making games.”

Dune by Frank Herbert

A focus on planet ecology and ancient cultures make Dune a unique read.

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

“Give as few orders as possible,” his father had told him…once…long ago. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”

Maigret at the Coroner’s by Georges Simenon

Maigret comes to America to find out about police methods and finds a whole lot more.

If you have never read a Maigret mystery then please do, they transport you to Paris between 1930 and 1970 and give you a tremendous feeling for the city, its people, and the culture. In this book, Maigret takes a break from Paris and is visiting America on an exchange program for police officers to learn from each other’s methods. What he discovers is a new world of both Victorian values and booze-soaked 60’s free living. He finds a new style of policing all about relationships, networks, and consumerism and I am not sure he likes any of it.

Lila by Robert M. Pirsig

This follow-up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a deeper dive into the metaphysics of quality while sailing down the Hudson River valley.

“Cultural relativists held that it is unscientific to interpret values in culture B by the values of culture A. It would be wrong for an Australian Bushman anthropologist to come to New York and find people backward and primitive because hardly anyone could throw a boomerang properly. It is equally wrong for a New York anthropologist to go to Australia and find a Bushman backward and primitive because he cannot read or write. Cultures are unique historical patterns that contain their own values

and cannot be judged in terms of the values of other cultures. The cultural relativists, backed by Boas's doctrines of scientific empiricism, virtually wiped out the credibility of the older Victorian evolutionists and gave anthropology a shape it has had ever since.”