The Best Books I Read in 2023

North of twenty library borrows in 2023, once I count the reference books, a couple of novels I picked up for the kids, and the near misses. Designing Your Life. Reality Is Not What It Seems. Chaos Kings. Any of those three would have made a thinner year.

So cutting to six was hard. And the six that survived turn out to be about the same thing, which I did not plan and only noticed in December.

They are all about explanations.

Taleb is about the explanation you invent afterward. Greene is about three thousand years of explanations for power. Forsyth is about the technique hiding under a line you thought was talent. Housel is about the story you tell yourself at the kitchen table. Goggins is about the limit you accepted as an explanation. And Deutsch, at the very end of the year, hands you the test for which explanations are worth anything.

Six books, one subject, and the last one grading the other five.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb’s black swan has three attributes. It is a surprise. It has enormous impact. And afterward, everybody explains why it was obvious.

And that third one is the book. The first two describe the event, and the third describes us.

And his best illustration is the turkey. A turkey gets fed every morning for a thousand days, and every single feeding makes its model of the farmer stronger. Then the Wednesday before Thanksgiving arrives. A thousand data points. A perfect record. The worst possible model.

So was the turkey’s data bad? It was excellent, and that was exactly the problem.

So what is the actual failure there? Confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence, and Taleb calls the retrofitting habit the narrative fallacy. We cannot hold a sequence of events without a story attached, so we attach one, and the story feels like understanding.

I went back a couple of months later for Antifragile. That one is the prescription to this one’s diagnosis, about building things that get stronger from disorder rather than merely surviving it. Read together, they changed what I mean when I say a system is robust.

That’s the first explanation. The story arrives after the event and then quietly claims it was there first.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Greene published this in 1998, and he compressed three thousand years of courts, wars and boardrooms into forty-eight blunt rules, each one illustrated by somebody who followed it brilliantly or ignored it fatally.

And law one is never outshine the master. That is the tone for the other forty-seven. Forty-eight laws. Zero apologies.

Now, this book has a reputation, and it earned it. It is banned in a lot of American prisons, which is either an indictment or a review depending on your mood.

But here’s how it is actually useful. So read it as a field guide rather than a manual. These are tactics you will recognise the next time one is being run on you in a meeting, and recognising it is most of the defence, whether or not you ever pick one up yourself.

So does it work as a description of power? Often. Does it work as a description of a life worth living? That is a different question, and Greene mostly declines to answer it.

That’s the second explanation. Forty-eight rules assembled from three thousand years of survivors, which is a sample with a very particular shape.

The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth

Forsyth takes apart the lines that stuck. Shakespeare. The King James Bible. Bond films. Pop lyrics. Ad slogans. And his claim is that the stickiness is technique, not luck, and that the techniques have names and have had them for centuries.

And the example everybody quotes is adjective order. Opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose, then the noun. A lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. Reverse any two and it sounds insane. Nobody taught you that rule.

And his other one is why it is a big bad wolf. The vowels have to run i, then a, then o. Bad big wolf is grammatically fine and physically painful.

So why does that matter beyond party tricks? Because it means a memorable sentence is a thing you can build on purpose. Talent explains why Shakespeare built more of them. Technique explains how any of them got built at all.

And this one changed my week rather than my year. I write for a living in the way most engineers do, in design docs and review comments, and I started noticing which of my own sentences were carrying weight and which were just long.

That’s the third explanation. What looks like talent is usually a technique somebody has already named.

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

Housel opens with two men. Ronald Read pumped gas and swept floors, and left about eight million dollars when he died. Richard Fuscone had the Harvard MBA and the Merrill Lynch career. He went bankrupt.

But neither outcome is explained by intelligence. So that is the point of putting them on page one.

And the number that reorganised my thinking is the Buffett one. Something like ninety-five percent of his net worth arrived after his sixty-fifth birthday. His skill is famous and his real edge is that he started at ten and never stopped, which is a much less sellable story.

So what is the book actually arguing? That nobody makes a financial decision on a spreadsheet. They make it at a kitchen table, with a spouse, under the weight of whatever they watched happen to their parents.

And it is nineteen short chapters and it skips the formulas entirely. That is exactly why it worked on me, after a decade of finance books that read like homework.

That’s the fourth explanation. Your money story was written by things that happened to you before you had any money.

Never Finished by David Goggins

This is Goggins’s second book, after Can’t Hurt Me, and it goes deeper into what he calls the Mental Lab. The specific practices he built for pushing past the point where he assumed he was done.

And it is not a comfortable read. And the voice on the page is as confrontational as the voice apparently is in person, and there were stretches where I put it down for a week.

But the claim underneath the shouting is the one that earned it a place here. Most of what we call a limit is just the first place we stopped testing. That is an explanation we accepted about ourselves, usually years ago, usually on a bad day, and then filed as a fact.

So who is this book actually for? Somebody who has been coasting and knows it.

Now, the honest caveat. This book will not work on everyone and it is calibrated for a very particular kind of reader. Some people need permission to rest, and this is the wrong book to hand them.

So read it when you need a jolt. Not when you need comfort.

That’s the fifth explanation. The limit you can name is usually the last one you bothered to check.

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

And here’s the one that grades the others. Deutsch’s test for a good explanation is that it is hard to vary while still accounting for what it claims to account for.

His worked example is the seasons. The Greek myth has Persephone taken to the underworld and Demeter grieving, so the earth goes cold. It explains winter. And you could swap grief for rage, or the underworld for a mountain, and the explanation would work exactly as well, which is the tell.

Now try varying the real one. Winter happens because the earth’s axis is tilted, so a hemisphere tilted away gets sunlight at a shallower angle. Change the tilt in that account and you break it. Change the angle and you break it. The explanation has no spare parts. That is the test.

So why does hard to vary work as a test? Because a good explanation has its parts wedged in, and a bad one has them resting on top where anyone can swap them out.

So run the other five books through it. Taleb’s narrative fallacy is easy to vary, which is his point. Greene’s forty-eight laws are easy to vary, which is why they read as wisdom and behave as anecdote. Forsyth’s adjective order is hard to vary, and you can test it on any noun in the room.

So is it an easy read? Not remotely. And it is the densest book on the list by a distance, and I found myself rereading paragraphs rather than pages. Closing the year on it felt right.

That’s the sixth explanation, and the only one that comes with a test attached.

And here’s where I should own the frame. I built the explanations pattern in December, looking back at a shelf assembled from whatever the library had on the shelf that week. Deutsch would call that easy to vary, and he would be right.

That’s my 2023 list, my biggest library year and my hardest cut.

A good story explains everything you show it. A good explanation breaks when you push on it, which is how you know it was load-bearing.