2022: By the Book(s) 📚

2022 was a busy year for me both personally and professionally, likely impacting my reading time. We moved from South Florida to Colorado over the summer and I don’t think I read at all from June to July. Even after the move, I was pleasantly distracted by the abundance of activities and sites to explore in Colorado (inevitable consequence of living within a short drive of the Rocky Mountains).  

With that said, however, I very much enjoyed many of the books I dove into this year – 18 titles for 8,348 pages (roughly 22 pages a day). Much gratitude to each of the authors for offering a new lens to help me see the world around me with more clarity and perspective.

Here are my top 5 with impactful quotes from each: 

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Stephen Brusatte  

"Descriptions of the doom and gloom could go on for pages, but the point is, the end of the Permian was a very bad time to be alive. It was the biggest episode of mass death in the history of our planet. Somewhere around 90 percent of all species disappeared. Paleontologists have a special term for an event like this, when huge numbers of plants and animals die out all around the world in a short time: a mass extinction. There have been five particularly severe mass extinctions over the past 500 million years. The one 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, which wiped out the dinosaurs, is surely the most famous. We'll get to that one later. As horrible as the end-Cretaceous extinction was, it had nothing on the one at the end of the Permian. That moment of time 252 million years ago, chronicled in the swift change from mudstone to pebbly rock in the Polish quarry, was the closest that life ever came to being completely obliterated."

"Dinosaurs had been around for over 150 million years when their time of reckoning came. They had endured hardships, evolved superpowers like fast metabolisms and enormous size, and vanquished their rivals so that they ruled an entire planet…Then, literally, in a split second, it ended."

Sea Stories by William McRaven 

"As terrible as it sounds, every SEAL longs for a worthy fight, a battle of convictions, and an honorable war. War challenges your manhood. It reaffirms your courage. It sets you apart from the timid souls and the bench sitters. It builds unbreakable bonds among your fellow warriors. It gives your life meaning. Over time, I would get more than my fair share of war. Men would be lost. Innocents would be killed. Families would be forever changed. But somehow, inexplicably, war would never lose its allure. To the warrior, peace has no memories, no milestones, no adventures, no heroic deaths, no gut-wrenching sorrow, no jubilation, no remorse, no repentance, and no salvation. Peace was meant for some people, but probably not for me."

Endurance by Alfred Lansing 

"Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated."

"For scientific leadership give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton."

Pacific Crucible by Ian W. Toll 

"The prime minister’s reaction to the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was unequivocal. He rejoiced. “So we had won after all!” Churchill wrote years later, in the now-famous passage of his war memoirs. “England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. . . . Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.” He had the absolute conviction that Pearl Harbor, by jolting the United States out of its isolationist lassitude, would secure ultimate victory for the Allies. He recalled the words of Sir Edward Grey, thirty years earlier, concerning the entry of the United States into the First World War. America was like a gigantic furnace, Grey had said: “Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.” With these heartening reflections in mind, Churchill went to bed and “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

“We all see nature's wonders every day, whether it be a plant that moves or a sunset that reaches with pink fingers into a sky of deep blue. The key to true curiosity is pausing to ponder the causes. What makes a sky blue or a sunset pink or a leaf of sleeping grass curl?”

“Two revolutions coincided in the 1950s. Mathematicians, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, showed that all information could be encoded by binary digits, known as bits. This led to a digital revolution powered by circuits with on-off switches that processed information. Simultaneously, Watson and Crick discovered how instructions for building every cell in every form of life were encoded by the four-letter sequences of DNA. Thus was born an information age based on digital coding (0100110111001…) and genetic coding (ACTGGTAGATTACA…). The flow of history is accelerated when two rivers converge.”

P.S. I want to thank Mike Hernández for being my reading accountability pal this past year. We created a shared Apple Note and would update our read books in it. It was never a competition (but kudos to him for downing 26 books last year!) but rather a positive motivator. I’d go through stretches where I hadn’t read much in a while and then get little alerts -nudges, really - informing me he had finished another title, pushing me to pick up whatever I happened to be reading the time. I highly recommend you find your own reading pal and I even have some great ideas on how to enhance this beyond a simple Apple Note (more on that later).