What I read this year

Treść źródłowa

The two books that took me the longest to read weren’t an input in any project, and I had no immediate reason to read them. They were also the ones I enjoyed the most. Many people had recommended Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Finally, the constant chatter about Xi as an outlier from the kind of policies that started with Deng made me pick it up. It is so vivid and detailed that I couldn’t skim or hasten it. This is how I wish all the political history, economic history, and biographies I read were written. Also, Deng is remarkable, but that’s almost beside the point; it felt like the biography of a country, culture, and political movement and not just an individual.The second was Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I started reading it during the run-up to the Oppenheimer movie buzz, but I finished it months later. Unlike Vogel, thankfully, this one was on the Kindle, and traveled with me. I felt like a fly on the wall, watching them pull together a heist in the middle of a war with the craziest geniuses. Students, podcast listeners, EV winners, and others often ask me what I am reading, how I choose the books I read, and how I read. As an economist, I read/skim too many papers for the list to be valuable. In this post, I’ll focus on non-fiction books - about 90 percent of my book reading - and start with the last question first.ShareHow I readI read multiple books at the same time. Few books, TV series, movies, etc., keep me engaged for hours. So, if I set the standard as “this should engage me start to finish, in one shot, and be …