Reviews Section

Hillbilly Elegy was deservedly named one of the best books of the year by The Economist, The New York Times, and nearly every reviewer worth their salt in 2016.

It lives up to the hype. It’s well-written. It’s engaging. It’s thoughtful. It brings nuance and complexity to issues that need both. It helps advance the conversation even where other thoughtful writers have a different take.

The book is timely and provides an interesting, human perspective about a real-life ongoing crisis occurring across large swaths of America.

If you like to read non-fiction at all – then you should have this book on your reading list. I wish I had read it sooner.

Either way, I took away so many lessons from this book that it’s really hard to distill them down into a proper review.

Instead, I’ll simply share the notes that I took chapter by chapter. These are all ideas that I took from the material. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with these takeaways. But every single one gave me pause and a new perspective to consider. [Read more…] about Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance Book Review

Paul Theroux is one of my 3 favorite travel writers. I read this book in 2014 almost as soon as it was published. I loved his Dark Star Safari – it remains one of the few travel books that really stuck with me.

Last Train To Zona Verde is his first travels to Africa since that books was published in 2004.

It chronicles his journeys around the west coast of Africa from Capetown (where Dark Star ended) up through Namibia and Angola. [Read more…] about The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux Book Review

From 2007 to 2012, I read 263+ books. But I did not stop there. I haven’t kept up the same pace – but have kept on tracking every book I’ve read since. Ideally, I’ve also written a short lessons learned or review of each. Here’s the books I’ve read this past year.

*all the links below go to Amazon for convenience, but I definitely recommend purchasing books from Alibris. They support local booksellers, and often have even better used pricing.

This post covers books read in 2016. You can also read from,

2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | Most Recent Full Reviews

I read Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist during my flurry of post-college book reading. It was a powerful novel that was also written simply, beautifully and powerfully. It really stuck with me.

I had had How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia in my queue for quite some time before buying it and actually reading it.

Oh wow. I should have read this book even sooner.

It’s received tons of praise from nearly every part of the book critic world. In some ways – it was an almost suspicious amount of praise.

Nope.

This book is one of those books – the kind that draw you in quickly and force you to see the world in a new way through someone else’s eyes.

The book is set in South Asia – though it could be either Pakistan or India. Many of the details of the book are purposefully vague. You never know any names or specific places.

Instead, the entire book is written in 2nd person. “You decide to take a stroll with your sister” or “you are taken with a friend” or “your father is ill” – which creates an incredible effect of putting yourself inside the character.

The novel is structured like a self-help book with chapters like “find a mentor” or “focus on the fundamentals” but also chronologically in the life of the main character. [Read more…] about How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid Book Review

I picked up You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice by Tom Vanderbilt solely because of his excellent book – Traffic.

My choice to pick the book up could have been an anecdote in the actual book – “why did I choose to read that book when the topic didn’t suit my usual reading habits?”

Taste is one of those highly abstract topics that gets really weird and really “meta” – very quickly. But it’s also a topic that drives our economy – and our lives. Arguably, our very identity nowadays is just a bundles of tastes.

Tom Vanderbilt addressed odd and counter-intuitive concepts in Traffic – and did so again in You May Also Like. Once I got into it, the book was a fascinating read – providing plenty of “hey sweetie, you won’t believe this” factoids, anecdotes and ideas. [Read more…] about You May Also Like by Tom Vanderbilt Book Review