Favorite books of 2022
📖 The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul
Read for: Permission to step away from your computer to do your best thinking, jostling your assumption that the brain is a computer, a challenge to the “growth mindset” concept
This book challenges the idea that thinking happens only in our brain. In the first part of the book, the author explores “embodied cognition” — the role of the body, our senses, and even gestures in shaping our thinking. The middle part explores “situated cognition” and the role of the environment, including why spending time in nature improves our cognition. The last third covers “distributed cognition,” or how our mind interacts with other people. This podcast episode is a good intro to the book and can help you decide whether you want to dive in.
One concept I liked from this book was the idea that human brains are “loopy.” The author shares an example: computers would never print out an idea, re-read it, talk about it with colleagues, and refine it over multiple drafts. Computers work in a linear and efficient way. And because we often talk about the brain as being like a computer, businesses love to work on ways to make humans more efficient and human processes more linear. This book shares some ways to work with, not against, our human nature by intentionally looping ideas in different ways through the body, our environment, and other people.
Read with: 📖 Deep Work by Cal Newport, for practical tips to implement similar ideas
📖 How the Other Half Eats by Priya Fielding-Singh
Read for: Debunking your myths about food deserts, uncovering the sociological drivers behind food choices
This book is the culmination of the many hours that the author, a sociologist, spent interviewing and observing families’ relationship to food. What she finds is both counterintuitive and makes total sense in retrospect, which I see as the marker of a great insight.
Early on, she knocks down several explanations for “nutritional inequity” that are overused: food deserts (not the main problem), misunderstanding of what healthy food is (she found more agreement than disagreement), or that healthy food is always more expensive (the lowest-income family she observed said “that stuff is cheap!”)
Instead, she describes other reasons that lower-income families consume less nutritious food. One surprising motivator for food decisions is…being a good parent. (Specifically moms, who are overwhelmingly responsible for what to feed the family). For wealthier moms, being a good mom means giving your child a good school and a nice home — while teaching them discipline and self-restraint through food. For many low-income moms, who may not be able to afford the big stuff, being a good mom means spending time with your kids in the evening instead of cooking. Or being a good mom means giving your child a few bucks to buy a tasty treat.
She concludes that broader safety-net interventions — like a living wage — would “shift the symbolic meaning of junk food for lower-income parents. With more time and money to spend on other things for their kids, a bag of Doritos would go from being a potent symbol of love and care to being, well, just a bag of Doritos.” The book is full of interesting insights into our collective relationship with food, the role of food marketing, and more.
Read with: 📖 Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman, for insights into how the other other half wrestles with abundance
📖 From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home by Tembi Locke
Read for: A cozy companion on a rainy afternoon; to immerse yourself in a story of love, grief, repair, and Sicilian food
I picked this book up at a library book sale and read it without knowing much about the story. You should too. Dive in with a hot mug of tea and enjoy a cinematic love story in print form.
Read with: 👨🍳📖Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables by Joshua McFadden, for Italian-inspired ways to love seasonal vegetables.
📖 Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown
Read for: Expanding your emotional vocabulary, a book that you can skim in short bursts
I think Brown’s content is most effective when you’re looking for ways to expand your emotional vocabulary, during transition phases, and if it’s been a while since you’ve looked at her stuff.
This dictionary-like book popped up at the right time for me. I snacked on the short chapters, savoring interesting nuggets like the fact that most people can only name three emotions (happy, mad, sad). I also found it interesting that while TV shows portray disappointment as a horrible outcome, disappointment is actually a very common emotion. We constantly build up expectations in our mind, which are then unmet, leading to disappointment. The 87 emotions in this book can equip you with the tools to help others through tough times as well.
It is also enjoyable in audiobook form; less so in the HBO Max TV series format which is more like a college class lecture.
Read with: 📚 Books that made me float in a sea of emotions; 📚 Leigh Bardugo’s fantasy books (Six of Crows series and King of Scars series) which hit a wide range of emotional beats and are full of interesting mental health metaphors
📖 The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Read for: A trip backward in time to alien, fantastical worlds that happened on our own planet, a sense of optimism about the incredible range of human possibility, an antidote to the grim determinism of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens
This long, meandering book was a fun reimagining of “pre-history” — a period stretching for 3 million years, including “phases of thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominid activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of knapped flint.”
It clarified for me the power of the stories we decide — or decide not to — tell. Given the thin evidence, any book about human history is inherently selective. These sweeping books often say more about the writers than about the billions of other humans past and present. You can tell almost any story you want:
a pessimistic fable about how we’re a destructive species poised to doom ourselves (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari)
a story about diversity and mixing and migration (A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes by Adam Rutherford)
a tale of conquerers and ancient races (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Sciences of the Human Past by David Reich)
a case for the enduring appeal of cities through the ages (Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz)
The core story told by Graeber and Wengrow is that humans are and have always been self-aware, political actors making conscious choices to shape society — not passive subjects whose destinies are determined by where and when we live. There was no one “state of nature” or original form of human society — over millions of years, the only thing we can know for certain is that there has been an incredible creativity and diversity of human social arrangements. They sketch in this vision with digressions into Çatalhöyük (an ancient city in what is now Turkey), Kondiaronk (a famous Native American orator), Cahokia (a site of massive and mysterious earth mounds in rural Illinois), a challenge to the concept of the “agricultural revolution” and much, much more over 700+ pages.
It also approaches the question about “why inequality exists” from a different dimension. Instead of arguing about the right amount of inequality based on the way “stuff” is distributed (e.g., calories, money), isn’t true equality about whether we have equal capacity to contribute decisions about how we live together? About having true freedoms — the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, the freedom to create and transform social relationships? It’s in these topics that the book reveals more about the anarchist philosophy guiding the authors’ work, beckoning readers to imagine a wider range of possible futures.
Read with: 📖 Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes our Past by Sarah Parcak and any of the books mentioned above.
📖 Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
Read for: A sense of what endures in the human experience through time and extreme duress, insight into a book that has influenced millions of people
In an age in which everything feels new and urgent, I’ve tried to read books that expand my sense of time. This influential book, written after WWII, is an unflinching look at the horrors of the Holocaust and curiosities of human psychology. It tells in slow-motion the shock of living in captivity, the apathy and survival instinct that takes over the mind, and the conflicting feelings of survival. It echoed the accounts I’d read of people who had survived North Korea’s famines.
It also reinforced this idea that the stories we tell matter. We can choose the stories. Stories can shape our future. In Frankl’s case, the stories he told himself, along with some luck, led to his very survival.
Read with: 📖 Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick; 📖 Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays by Adam Hochschild
📖 Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by Paul Hawken
Read for: Reversing the effects of climate doomscrolling, learning about science fiction-like (but real!) technology
Easy to skim, with 100 short chapters on different solutions to reach “drawdown” — the point in the future when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline. It was a good way to learn some of the basics about renewable energy sources and a fun dive into sci-fi-like emerging technologies, like smart glass that automatically adjusts based on weather conditions.
Read with: 💻 Carbon Switch, for inspiration on ways to take climate action within your own home