Well into January 2024, here is my 7th annual list of the top 10 books I read over the past year. There’s the first entry in a crime trilogy that has been described as “The Mexican Godfather,” and a comprehensive history of the CIA. In between those two epics, there’s some Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, a parenting book, and the best business biography I’ve read in years. Enjoy the recommendations.

The Power of the Dog

By Don Winslow

"'Do you know the real difference between America and Mexico?' Art shook his head. ‘In America, everything is about systems,’ Barrera said. ‘In Mexico, everything is about personal relationships.’”

The Power of the Dog is the first book in Don Winslow’s Cartel Trilogy, and the best book I read last year. The three-novel series documents several decades in the ongoing War on Drugs in Mexico and the southern United States. Loosely based on real events, the book is a thrilling and shocking look at what that war has cost both countries over the years. Winslow, who might be the best crime writer alive, brings his characters to life whether they are grizzled DEA agents or Mexican drug kingpins. I already tore through book two of the trilogy (The Cartel) in December, and am looking forward to reading book three (The Border) early next year.

The Fish That Ate The Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

By Rich Cohen

“When he arrived in America in 1891 at age fourteen, Zemurray was tall, gangly, and penniless. When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans sixty-nine years later, he was among the richest, most powerful men in the world. In between, he worked as a fruit peddler, a banana hauler, a dockside hustler, and the owner of plantations on the Central American isthmus.”

The best business biography I’ve read in a long time, and a strong contender for my favourite book of the year. I had never heard of Samuel Zemurray when I started this book, but I’ll never forget his story after reading it. Zemurray started his career as a teenage Russian immigrant buying unwanted ripe bananas on the docks of New Orleans and finding a way to get them to northern markets before they rotted. He ended his career as the President of United Fruit (now Chiquita), and one of the most influential businessmen of his time. In between, he became the bad guy who successfully overthrew multiple governments in Latin America, and effectively created the term “Banana Republic”. One hell of a story.

Demon Copperhead

By Barbara Kingsolver

“She asked me what I wanted to be whenever I grew up. I had to think about that. We went past some barns and tobacco fields with their big yellow-green leaves waving in the sad evening light. She looked over at me and said, Hey, why so glum, chum? I told her nobody ever asked me that question before, about growing up and what I wanted to be, so I didn’t know. Mainly, still alive.”

Dickens’ David Copperfield reimagined in a contemporary rural Appalachian setting ravaged by the departure of the coal mines, and the arrival of the opioid epidemic. Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel will both captivate and devastate you. The tale of Damon (Demon) Copperhead’s childhood in rural Virginia is a vivid illustration of the America and Americans that got left behind over the past 30 years. If you liked Empire of Pain, Dopesick, or Painkiller, this is a book for you.

Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

By Kim Ghattas

“Women presenters were yanked off television. Newspapers had to blot out the faces of women in any pictures they published. The authorities also cracked down on the employment of women, which had always been theoretically forbidden but tacitly approved. Even Saudi branches of foreign companies had to lay off female employees. The handful of small makeshift cinemas in Jeddah were closed. Beach clubs patronized by Saudis and foreigners alike on the coast outside Jeddah were mostly shut down. Gone were the television and radio broadcasts of Fairuz concerts. The religious police started to strictly enforce prayer times, wielding their whips and righteousness.”

If you’re interested in the modern history of the Middle East, and the forces that led to the changes that have swept the region since 1979, I couldn't recommend this book strongly enough. Drawing a parallel between Khomeini’s ascension to power in Iran in 1979, and the Grand Mosque Seizure in Saudi Arabia in that same year, Ghattas illustrates how many of today’s problems in the region can be tied back to the longstanding regional rivalry between those two countries.

A Confederacy of Dunces

By John Kennedy Toole

“’Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age,’ Ignatius said solemnly. ‘Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books. I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.’”

This one had been on my Goodreads’ “Want to Read” list for several years and I finally got around to picking it up in 2023. Laugh-out-loud funny in parts, this is the story of perpetual loser Ignatius Reilly and his series of misadventures in 1960s New Orleans. Written in a way I’ve never seen before, the book is as famous for the story around it, as it is for the story in it. Toole wrote the book in his 20s only to see it rejected by several publishers. He then took his own life at age 31, and the manuscript for A Confederacy of Dunces sat untouched in his mother’s house for years. She eventually made it her mission to get it published, and finally accomplished this feat in 1980, 11 years after Toole’s death. Since then, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, sold millions of copies, and has entered the American Canon.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

By Tim Weiner

“It fell to machines, not men, to understand the other side. As the technology of espionage expanded its horizons, the CIA’s vision grew more and more myopic. Spy satellites enabled it to count Soviet weapons. They did not deliver the crucial information that communism was crumbling. The CIA’s foremost experts never saw the enemy until after the Cold War was over. The agency had bled the Soviets by pouring billions of dollars of weapons into Afghanistan to help fight the Red Army’s occupying forces. That was an epic success. But it failed to see that the Islamic warriors it supported would soon take aim at the United States, and when that understanding came, the agency failed to act. That was an epochal failure.”

Not the first time a non-fiction spy story makes this list, and it likely won’t be the last time either. This comprehensive history of the CIA from its creation in the years after World War II, to its early 21st century failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, is fascinating. It’s also eye-opening, in its appraisal of an agency that has consistently failed in its objectives, and often operated without the authorization of the government it is supposed to serve. The section on the CIA’s mistakes during the Cuban Missile Crisis alone is worth the cost of the book.

Everybody’s Business: A New Agenda for Canadian Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century

By Dany Assaf , Walid Hejazi , and Joe Manget

“Every generation of Canadians wants to pass on an even better version of Canada to the next. But in 1967, Canada was the world’s ninth largest economy; today it is seventeenth. In terms of income per person, we’ve fallen from third to fifteenth. What kind of Canada are we really leaving our children?”

 The question at the end of the above quote is at the heart of this book, which I consider a worthwhile read for anyone interested in Canada’s economic future. Walid was one of my favourite professors at Rotman, and I asked him to speak about this book at the CFA Wealth Conference in Toronto last year. If you were not in the room for his presentation, go buy this book today and learn what all of us can do to make sure Canada remains competitive on the global stage in the 21st century. 

Between The World and Me

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

“But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn’t. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson—not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.” 

Framed as a letter to his adolescent son, Coates’ Between The World and Me, is a story of what the black experience in America is today and how it differs from the white experience. The book flips between broad reappraisals of American history, and vivid scenes from Coates’ own life in places like the South Side of Chicago, Howard University, and Paris. Well well-written and absolutely worth reading.

Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

By John Medina

“What should Ethan’s parents have done? Research reveals a simple solution. Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. On the successful completion of a test, they should not have said, ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re such a bright kid.’ That appeals to a fixed, uncontrollable intellectual trait. It’s called “fixed mindset” praise. His parents should have said, ‘I’m so proud of you. You must have studied a lot.’ This appeals to controllable effort. It’s called “growth mindset” praise. More than 30 years of study show that children raised in growth-mindset homes consistently outscore their fixed-mindset peers in academic achievement. They do better in adult life, too. That’s not surprising. Children with a growth mindset tend to have a refreshing attitude toward failure. Rather than seeing mistakes as failures over which to despair, they see mistakes simply as problems to be solved. In the lab as well as in school, they spend much more time banging away at harder tasks than fixed-mindset students. They solve those problems more often, too. Kids regularly praised for effort successfully complete 50 percent to 60 percent more hard math problems than kids praised for intelligence.”

As the parent of a two-year-old, I now have an interest in parenting books that would have been inconceivable to the 2020 version of myself. Unfortunately, many parenting books are outdated, offer conflicting information, or are just straight-up boring. This book is none of those things, as it offers a data and science-based approach to how to raise smart and happy children while still being readable. I was put on to this book after listening to Harley Finkelstein share his reading recommendations on the Rational Reminder podcast.

 

Atomic Habits

By James Clear

“It is remarkable how little friction is required to prevent unwanted behavior. When I hide beer in the back of the fridge where I can’t see it, I drink less. When I delete social media apps from my phone, it can be weeks before I download them again and log in. These tricks are unlikely to curb a true addiction, but for many of us, a little bit of friction can be the difference between sticking with a good habit or sliding into a bad one. Imagine the cumulative impact of making dozens of these changes and living in an environment designed to make the good behaviors easier and the bad behaviors harder.”

I only read this book in December 2023, so I can’t comment yet on how effective it is at actually helping someone start good habits and stop bad ones. With that said, I do feel like I understand habit formation and creating systems for change much better than I did before reading this book. Filled with colourful and entertaining anecdotes, it’s probably the one book on this list that is relevant for everyone.

 

Bonus for the Bourbon Fans

Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

By Wright Thompson

“The breath of racehorses, summer humidity, Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey—the South has many forms of heat, by-products of a place perched delicately on the edge between romance and hypocrisy. The Ole Miss band used to play a slow version of ‘Dixie’ before the game, and even as I winced at the Confederate nostalgia, I also teared up because the song reminded me of my father.”

I’ve been a fan of Wright Thompson and his long-form articles at ESPN since I discovered him through his famous profiles of Michael Jordan (https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story?_slug_=michael-jordan-not-left-building&page=Michael-Jordan&redirected=true ) and Tiger Woods (https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/15278522/how-tiger-woods-life-unraveled-years-father-earl-woods-death ).  I’ve been a fan of bourbon since spending a night in Louisville, Kentucky with my Dad on a road trip from Savannah to Toronto 10 years ago.

This book is Thompson’s account of the multiple years he spent around the Van Winkle family learning the secrets of their famous bourbon: Pappy Van Winkle. Come for Thompson’s incredible ability to craft sentences that make you stop in amazement (see above excerpt), and stay for the story of bourbon’s resurgence and the incredible rise of Pappy Van Winkle.