In the holidays we are all seeking a bit more peace with respect to closing the year and a bit more hope with respect to a future year. Reading a good book to complement those feelings and to unwind has an obvious appeal. 

My good books make me think in new ways and about new things. Those that know me, know my unwinding books come on the serious side of the line. Some folks claim that RCU, my initials, stands for “Really Can’t Unwind,” and there might be some truth to that.

The top trio of books highlighted below come from thinking about the world as a bigger and wider place than we give it credit – this is systems thinking. My hope is that this type of thinking can expand our capabilities to deal with growing challenges because our world leadership often suffers from tunnel vision and doesn’t think ahead. Encapsulated by Peter Senge, one of the systems thinking gurus, when he says that today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.

The second three books give you ‘scaffolding’ content that can elevate your knowledge, skills and abilities to a slightly higher level. And the last two books are simply feelgood reads.

These three are big picture books

(Our language is full of rich ambiguity, my grandkids love big picture books of a different sort)

Peter Senge | The Fifth Discipline. Peter Senge is an MIT professor who is in the business academic superstar category. This is a timeless classic. The first four disciplines are personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, and team learning. These are good, and line up with TAI Superteams principles, but what is really good is the fifth discipline – systems thinking that integrates the other four. The book is full of deep thinking (aka critical thinking). Yes, to a hammer everything looks like a nail, but trust me systems thinking is an enormously important discipline and will play an increasingly big part in our future.

Mustafa Suleyman | The Coming Wave. The content here is a combination of deep thinking on AI and synthetic biology. Together, he thinks, these two ‘will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen’. The DeepMind co-founder sees these breakthroughs, for all their potential, as empowering to multiple bad actors. So, our future, both depends on these technologies and is imperilled by them.

Francis Fukuyama | Liberalism and Its Discontents. I’m ashamed to say I really don’t ‘get’ politics in a bunch of countries, including my own. This book is aimed at explaining how liberalism has increasingly underdelivered, and how populism has entered our world by filling a gap and can only grow and how this balance may play out. So, this helps if you’re like me and you want to learn a bit more where the world is heading.

These are the ‘scaffolding’ books

Ayelet Fischbach | Get it Done. I interviewed Ayelet this year as part of TAI’s Wider Perspectives series. She is one of the world’s top experts on human motivation. It’s fascinating how drilling deeper into human cognition continues to surprise. We are a complicated species. There are a lot of secret sauce things she reveals here in the ever-shifting dynamics of goal pursuit and aligning our choices, decisions, and feelings.

Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein | Noise.  I share the thesis here which is that noise in human judgment has a ubiquitous presence that is consistently under-estimated. The authors write that noise arises for multiple reasons, notably cognitive biases, mood, group dynamics and emotional reactions. This book is heavy going at times but important. By the way, one benefit of AI is that noise can be significantly reduced from what human processes generate.

Dan Ariely | Misbelief. The world isn’t fully post-truth, but truth has been debased for sure in the past decade or so. The link with social media is pretty overwhelming. Here is the explanation of the psychological machine that takes people and changes them in ways that seem difficult to understand. So, this is a good explainer of conspiracy theories. He calls the process “the funnel of misbelief.” The introduction to the book (‘Demonized’) is an amazing story of that effect on Dan himself who was falsely characterised as a villain of a Covid conspiracy.

These are the feelgood books

Mitch Albom |The Five People you meet in Heaven. This is all about a character’s look back on life. Think of a new version of ‘A Christmas Carol’. It has developed a big following over the years by touching on the alternative histories that our lives produce, and the people caught in the connections, like in the film Sliding Doors. How everything we do affects others. It’s a bit schmalzy but it works as an uplifting and thought-provoking piece.

Susan Cain |Quiet. The power of the introvert in a world that can’t stop talking. This feels good because we can cut ourselves some slack by being on the quiet side of the line. In a world where we are overwhelmed with noise and attempts to grab our attention, getting lost in a book is a source of peace.

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude

Marvel Proust

To close, a reflection. The obvious thing about reading is that it’s time on your own, in some level of solitude. Paul Tillich puts it as ‘Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone’. I like that.

Recent research from University of Reading published in Scientific Reports, suggests that solitude has both benefits and costs for wellbeing and there is no clear optimal balance between solitude and social time. The research draws two conclusions. We need both time alone and time with others to experience the full range of well-being. And solitude works best when motivated by personal choice rather than enforced by external factors.

So maybe we should schedule that glorious reading time this Christmas.

May you have a peaceful holiday season with a good mix of rest & recreation, and social & solitude time.

And below is the full list of books that I’ve curated over the years with a bit of grading and narrative to help with priorities.

Top 5 ***= don’t even think of not reading this
Next 10 **= required and essential reading
Next 20 *= essential reading
Next 15 = plain good reading