The Best Books I Read in 2020

I considered breaking a multi-year tradition and not releasing a top book list this year. My book consumption was way down in 2020—it feels like a lost year in that regard—and I could not remember any book on my list that was worthy of a top choice. At least not until I looked, and then I found there were more than a few decent recommendations. Most were from the beginning of the year, which feels like a lifetime ago.

Reading is one of the most important things to me. Some people exercise; I read—I am obsessive about it. This year I missed the time stuck in airports or alone in a hotel room where a book makes the perfect companion. I also recognize that the news encroached on my reading habits, something akin to mental junk food, time spent that I wish I could get back. Two months recovering from a concussion also did little for my reading—I had two weeks where I literally read, watched, and listened to nothing, a very surreal experience. (It was so helpful, I am considering making such a media fast part of my annual routine, sans the brain trauma.)

I should also say that I spent much of the year working on my next book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: The Strong Towns Approach to Transportation. That book is not yet available for pre-sale but should be coming out sometime around September 1. I’m putting the finishing touches on it this month. Last year’s release of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity did a lot to grow this movement and I’m hopeful that Confessions will keep that momentum going.

Of the books I read this year, here are my top five recommendations along with another five honorable mentions. The entire list of what I read in this and in past years is available on my Pinterest account.

1. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

This is the first book I read this year, back when coronavirus was something happening in a Chinese province I had never heard of before. It scared the heck out of me and shaped a lot of how I processed the early days of the U.S. version of the pandemic. Looking at the book now, it is really eerie how predictable all of this was, a strange combination of preventable and inevitable. 

The 1918 flu pandemic was way worse than what we are going through with COVID-19. Named the “Spanish flu” because, during the Great War, Spain was the first country to report it, all the combatant countries suppressing their media as part of the war effort, it killed the young and the strong, turning their own immune systems against them. Influenza remains with us to this day, a highly-contagious annual killer that is always just one random mutation away from becoming a deadly pandemic. One of many outstanding questions on coronavirus is whether it would go away or become “just another flu,” mutating regularly in an ongoing battle. Let’s hope the former.

I am so grateful to have read this book before March, but if you haven’t yet, it’s not too late to gain the thoughtful insights that Barry’s book provides.

2. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann

This book reminded me a lot of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, a compelling narrative with one revelatory connection after another. If you are bored with the overly simplistic cause-and-effect—eg. Columbus landed in Hispaniola and millions of Indigenous Americans perished—this book will satisfy your appetite. 

Columbus did land in Hispaniola, and millions of Indigenous Americans did perish as a consequence, but it is the connecting of Columbus to the sharing not just of germs but of seeds, worms, bees, and all of nature’s great adapters that broadens the explanation in meaningful ways. We talk about biodiversity being lost and lament that, often with paradoxically unfounded reverence for what came before and a profoundly shallow appreciation for what has actually been lost.

Mann has a book about pre-Columbian Americas—aptly titled 1491—that is at the top of my 2021 reading list.

3. Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All by Arthur Holland Michel

Whatever concerns you may have about government surveillance—and I had a touch of paranoid skepticism going into this book— be prepared to 10x it. I was not anticipating the level of technological advancement detailed in this book, nor for its implications, especially as the technology moves from the battlefield to the nation’s local police stations.

Imagine an AI monitoring traffic over an entire major city in real time, using the stops and starts of people as they drive to develop predictive algorithms of where crime will occur, then dispatching law enforcement to intervene before anything has even happened. This sounds helpful, in some ways, but now layer on the ability to go back days and see all the homes and businesses where those suspects visited, creating an entirely new web of suspects, all ranked according to their perceived threat level. 

I agree with the author that this is likely too far down the road—and too “helpful” in some ways—to be set aside, which means we urgently need to have a national conversation about how it is used. Special props to my colleague, Alexa Mendieta, for recommending this book.

4. Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides

Another book I read in the early weeks of 2020, Ghost Soldiers is an astounding story of bravery and triumph that felt too unbelievable to be real. In the final weeks of the war with Japan, there were concerns among allied commanders that the Japanese were going to execute hundreds of prisoners of war. A group of American soldiers were sent far behind enemy lines to figure out not only how to get the prisoners out, but then to conduct the raid and get everyone back safely. And they did it. It’s an incredible story.

This book was brought to my attention because many of the rescued were survivors of the Bataan Death March, a horrific and treacherous forced-march of American prisoners during the early days of the war. We hold an annual memorial here in my hometown because many of those soldiers were from Brainerd. I would often attend with my late grandfather, a Marine who was among the first into Nagasaki after the second atomic bomb was dropped on that city. There is only one local Bataan Death March survivor still living.

5. Erebus: The Story of a Ship by Michael Palin

Josh McCarty, one of my good friends with Urban3, came through with another great recommendation: The Terror, a 10-episode show about the final voyage of the ships Terror and Erebus, which were lost in the Arctic while trying to find the Northwest Passage. When I learned there was also a book—another Josh recommendation—and it was written by Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, I had to read that too.

Get the audiobook because Palin narrates and it is a beautiful tale, but go ahead and watch the series first -- I did it in that order and it was deeply satisfying.

Honorable Mention:

• The Great Leveler Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel—Wealth inequality is an unstable condition that is rarely resolved through desirable means. Be careful what you wish for.

• Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood by Colin Woodard—My youngest daughter has insisted since grade school that Woodrow Wilson owned slaves, an assertion I found absurd and used to gently jest with her about her ahistorical understanding. I had to apologize to her, and admit my ignorance, after reading this book, which added a lot of color to the American narrative.

• The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn—In a prior year, this book might have merely added to a list of works that affirm my bias. In 2020, as billionaires get bailouts while my friends and neighbors struggle, it made me deeply angry. We should all be angry. (Note: I had a delightful interview with Denise Hearn about this.)

• One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias—I thought the premise of this book was absurd, and maybe it is, but the substance is real. It is not the approach I would default to, and the underlying growth model is not a Strong Towns approach, but One Billion Americans is nonetheless a thoughtful and coherent plan worthy of your time.

If you’d like to see all of the books I read this year, do make sure to check out my list on Pinterest. You can also go back and see my recommendations for 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.

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