Sabbatical 2021 was like being on school holiday when I was 14, before summer work-life kicked in, in Mum’s sandwich bar.
And, I loved how much time I had to read. So much so, it would probably be fair to add ‘bookish’ in an update to my dating profile.
One thing I noticed was that I really liked building an order for reading, as ideas – and gifts or suggestions – came up during the three months off.
It reduced the ‘twitch-iness’ of one-clicking for something new. One-click’s very brilliance surely adds to the world’s twitch-iness…!
Taking off for DUB from SFO on 8th September with a copy of John McPhee’s delicious Oranges – that I’d started a few years ago while raising capital for a citrus and blueberries fund, and not finished.
Within days of landing I had my second book in the order handed to me as a gift in a pub, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning. Thanks James Anwyl of Machynlleth and Dublin. And I still owe you a trade back of my thoughts in notes…
After re-listening to a beautiful interview between Tyler Cowen and Karl Ove Knausgård, I had one-clicked on So Much Longing In So Little Space about Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist that painted The Scream. So Much Longing is a short introspection, one artist putting himself inside the shoes of another, and offers fascinating insights into Edward Munch.
While in San Sebastian with Dad, I got practical with the wonderful How To Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens. I’d been meaning to read this all summer, after hearing about it. It poked my inner journalist and information hoarder.
Now, something interested bubbled to the surface in the second half of the trip while in Ecuador and Peru, with return to work in sight. Coming into the trip I needed a break from any sightings of the word ‘sustainability’. But as the UN Conference Of The Parties (COP) climate change conference started to get build-up commentary in the press, I wanted to go deep on the fundamentals of energy and to return to climate change and energy economics.
I gorged on articles about Vaclav Smil and his emphasis on the concept of energy density. And then bought Numbers Don’t Lie to help me be more intelligent in wider aspects of how the world works – in data – than in just the energy sector. I’ve made a start since on Energy: A Beginner’s Guide.
While we’re in Peru…
During my eight days at a gorgeous posh surf camp in Chicama – home of the world’s longest left-handed wave – I so enjoyed getting to know Pedro Costa, who got special mention in Postcards From Sabbatical – From Peru, Chicama and Lima.
Pedro too was a keen reader, and shared that for 2022, he was going to pick 12 books in advance, one per month.
I loved this idea, and how much more relaxed and in control it made me feel about getting to books bought or gifted and not finished, and new ideas. So, with thanks to Pedro, copying this as a new point of order and ritual for 2022. I suspect this will be a new habit ’til the end of time for me. You can always squeeze in more, when you finish a book before the end of the month…
So for 2022, we have…
You can see I am front-loaded and back-ended with sustainability business & economics.
Sustainable Futures, by Raphael Kaplinsky, was an FT.com Book Of The Year that presents a historical framing of the economic systems behind the climate change challenge of today, and how adjustments to the same systems are our best chance of sustaining ourselves in an evolution off fossil fuels. Next comes John Doerr’s Speed & Scale that I have just started. Being a venture capitalist with a lifetime of high growth experience, I look forward to this more practically rooted viewpoint on how to grow our way out of this.
While we were together in October, Dad had his head quietly buried in Mark Carney’s highly regarded 2021 tome Value(s): Building A Better World For All. And, he couldn’t resist sharing juicy excerpts on many days – especially from the chapter on Values Based Leadership. Mark Carney is the former Governor of The Bank of England, poached in 2013 from being Governor of the Bank of Canada. And today he has an impressive portfolio of leadership roles in sustainable finance. And, I particularly admire (because it is so needed) his launch of the Taskforce for The Scaling Of Voluntary Carbon Markets in 2020.
This trio of sustainability and macro-economics are holding me up from the much awaited San Fransicko by Michael Shellenberger of the non-profit Environmental Progress given the mess of our streets in San Francisco with open drug-abuse. And then I am back into some investment writing, Ray Dalio’s The Changing World Order on the economic leadership power shift from US to China.
And then back to the ecosystem theme with a New Year shopping impulse-buy – Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature provoked by a post from my great and deeply curious buddy Daniel Husserl on Instagram – following Daniel learning of the biologist’s recent death. Dan shared that E.O. Wilson has been a hero from Dan’s teenage days, I’d heard of this ecosystem biologist, but know little, and so had to buy.
For two years now, David Byrne’s – of Talking Heads – How Music Works has been on my shelf, writing about the fundamentals of the physics of sound and our minds, and the resulting structure of commercial music.
And for the summer months I have also the intimidating philosophy history tome by Bertrand Russell (may need half of 2023 for that, or a demotion to a continuous reference text rather than full read) before a little history The Reason Why – also purchased more than two years ago after reading about it on Ryan Holiday’s reading list.
And I wrap up the year with two climate-oriented science fiction reads for the holiday period, Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (apparently an emerging ‘bible’ with carbon marketeers) and Termination Shock with thanks to Pierre Le Leannec!
I’ll be dropping notes, a short Book Review, on each onto my Notebook page.
