What did I read in 2022?

I’ve just published my annual round-up of my non fiction reading for 2022 here. Do go and read the whole list, but here are my favourites for the year (or at least the ones I keep telling people to go and read). A variety of topics, from history, public policy, life advice and some token fiction so I hope you’ll find one you like.

Butler to the World: The Book the oligarchs don’t want you to read: how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals, by Oliver Bullough

This book is a fascinating analysis of all the ways the UK, particularly London, supports the dodgiest people in the world – the title is a perfect description. The UK financial sector, the legal sector, and many other aspects of the professional classes in the UK provide, as the book says, butlering services of pretty much anything needed to support the very rich people around the world whose wealth comes from dubious sources – gambling, failed states where those in charge are stealing billions from their people. Pretty much any set of people who need services from people who won’t inquire too closely into the source of their wealth.  Hard to summarise the whole book, but the shock for me was in reading how little funding and interest there seems to be in enforcing even existing laws and treaties designed to stop evil people being able to use the financial infrastructure of the UK.

Just one example – money laundering. Here in Australia we are by no means perfect (the most egregious issue is that anti-money landering enforcement doesn’t apply to real estate agents) but having spent a bit of time working in a bank which had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for not properly enforcing anti money laundering rules, the contrast with the UK regime (theoretically signed up to the same treaties) was a bit shocking, where anti-money laundering enforcement seems to be a part time job for a wide variety of different enforcement agencies.

Britain has essentially outsourced responsibiity for stoping money laundeirng to the money launderers, and is failing to stop dirty money as a result. Much of the time the same bodies tasked with regulating professionals’financial transactions are also charged with lobbying government on their behalf, while also relying on those same professionals’membership fees to keep solvent.

There are a lot of reasons why Britain in particular has taken on this role, but the most surprising to me was the weird way in which their colonial history has left a bunch of available legal frameworks to be exploited to get access to the British legal system without too much of the pesky enforcement or regulation. From Gibraltar to the Cayman Islands and many places in between, aspects of the legal system that don’t apply in mainland Britain have been exploited to make the grey parts availalbe for shady deals of all kinds.

Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession and Genius in Modern China, by Jing Tsu

A history of chinese writing and how people in China tried to adapt it to the modern age of typewriters and computers sounds a bit dry, but it is a fascinating lens through which to view the history of modern China. I’ve always had a very amateur interest in language and linguistics (despite my inability to speak any other languages) plus I feel I should know a lot more about Chinese history so this scratched both those itches for me. In addition, it gave me a new appreciation of the importance of chinese writing to chinese culture. I still wonder whether it would have been possible to create a more alphabetic system of writing that still looked chinese (the way the Koreans did) but most chinese languages are phonically very different from european languages, so the roman alphabet is really not that easy to use to represent chinese languages.

It took me a while to get into, but I really enjoyed this book, and while I can’t quote particular anecdotes it was one of the better books I’ve read on modern Chinese history.

Four Thousand Weeks: Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count, by Oliver Burkeman

This is definitely my pick of the productivity genre that I’ve read in the last few years. Oliver Burkeman is a recovering productivity book addict, with a profoundly different way of thinking about productivity – coming back to the ancient philosophers of how you can think about living your life.

The title is really the introduction to his thesis – four thousand weeks the average length of a human life these days.  It is strange that that seems so much shorter than 80 years. But the key point of that is that time management shouldn’t be about how to get more little things done (like getting to email zero). It should be about how you decide how to spend those four thousand weeks. So this book is a great intersection of the Getting Things Done style books and big picture philosophical books. And it turns out that the toughest skill of all is deciding not to travel all the paths. How do you decide to choose what to do with your time, and more importantly, what not to do.

His point is that you should be thinking about what you are deciding to do, rather than how to do as much of it is as possible. You will never do everything you want, so take a step back and think about the big picture of how you are spending your life. Too many of us are waiting for something to happen before we take charge of what we want to do.

A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional – as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future, just over the horizon, and your life in all its fullness can begin as soon as you’ve put it, in Arnold Bennett’s phrase, ‘into proper working order’. Once you’ve cleared the decks, you tell yourself; or once you’ve implemented a better system of personal organisation, or got your degree…. that’s when you’ll feel in control at least, you’ll be able to relax a bit, and true meaningfulness will be found.

This is a book that bears rereading, particularly if you are feeling overwhelmed, as it is provocative, but at the same time philosophically calming.

What’s Wrong with Boards: Rethinking corporate Governance, by Fred Hilmer

Fred Hilmer wrote Strictly Boardroom nearly 30 years ago. This year he decided to revisit Australian Boardrooms after a wave of corporate scandals where the popular view was that Boards were missing in action. He generally agrees with this, but also points out how hard the role of the Board director can be, with the classic mistakes made almost being opposite from each other. Hilmer argues that there are four major sources of failure:

• Failures of performance – the acceptance of marginal perforamnce – or in otherwirds the failure of Board to generated long-term returns that meet investor requirements and community expectations;
• “can-kicking”, or a deliberate unwillingness to confront failures in an existing business model or strategy. In short, this governance error is the equivalent of ignoring a problem in the hope it wil go away.
• Unethical conduct – acting unethically towards customers and suppliers can be a route to increased rewards for both firms and executives, and these rewards can last for some time.
• Clearly illegal activity, such as deliberate concealment of problems by management from the Board. While most manager take their duty to properly inform the Board extremely seriously, there are times when management conceals performance issues it wasnts to keep away from the Board. This can happen when there is a perforamnce or accounting problem that management hopes remedial action will fix

Hilmer argues that most suggestions for improving governance amount to more-of-the-same. And much of this involves asking Boards to improve governance by focusing on confirmance matters, in increasingly prescriptive detail. So his recommendations are somewhat nuanced, and depend on the issues facing a firm at the time.

• Jettison the notion of best practice – and substitute the idea of “best fit”. Different firms are facing different challenges, and so the best governance for each company is unlikely to conform to one idea of best practice.
• When doing that – look at a number of other potential governance models that aren’t the classic listed company view of an appropriate Board, and think about which one is most appropriate right now
• Focus vs delegation – it is impossible to do both, so be quite rigorous in choosing which topics and areas need focus vs delegation to management
• Consider carefully the role of the Board chair, and choose someone who can guide the organisation through the choices above.

The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay & Disaster, by Sarah Krasnostein

I’ve been wanting to read this book for ages, as every review I’ve read raves about it. It is the story of Sandra Pankhurst, who runs a trauma cleaning business. But that bald statement doesn’t cover the ebulliance of this book which shifts from depicting the disgusting consequences of years of hoarding, and how to navigate the cleaning when the hoarder is still in residence to the extraordinary life of Sandra herself, a trans woman who was adopted, as a replacement for a dead child, but then basically rejected when her parents had another two children, forced to live in the backyard and scrounge for food. Hers has been an incredible life, and Krasnostein illustrates the elegance of Sandra Pankhurst, but at the same time her ruthlessness at maintaining the life she has now.

A summary is impossible to write, but I loved this book, and wish I had read it sooner.

And finally, a book of fiction.

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

This is unclassifiable, but probably closest to fantasy, but with a side order of philosophy and mythology. I found myself unable to put it down after the first half, so I have been recommending it to people right left and centre. My friend Naomi recommended it to me during one of our periodic book zooms this year.