The Best Books I Read During Quarantine: From the Wandering Mind of a Woman in Venture Capital
I’m one of those people who, despite the occasional bouts of pandemic-induced neuroticism, relished the year of quarantining. I spent it doing what we extreme introverts do best: reading. I had always been a lover of books. I had once relied on them to escape that insufferable period of social awkwardness that often befalls that unfortunate class of people called teenagers. Back in those formative years, out of that well-known adolescent search for self-identity, I had read only those nineteenth-century novelists whose names automatically bestowed on the reader a mystique of worldliness. But now, into my 30’s, seeking no social validation but that from my husband and very geriatric cat, I was open for anything: fiction, non-fiction, low-brow, high-brow, science fiction, classics, histories, and even graphic novels galore. There was no direction in my book selection, just the aimless wandering of the imagination.
I would be lying if I told you that there weren’t any books I couldn’t muster the strength or attention to power through. I gave up, two-hundred-something pages in, on a history of the 1917 Spanish flu. Joseph Heller’s beloved classic Catch-22 also bested me, and now that book still sits pristinely in mint condition, collecting an ever-growing layer of dust on the shelf. There were also many books that I trudged through, more slowly and less passionately but out of a sense of duty. Those books clearly did not make this list.
Here I share with you my favorite books that I read throughout the quarantine out of some inexplicable, idealistic sense that wonderful books just ought to be shared. And perhaps I share out of self-interest as well — that you, seeing the types of things I like to read, also might share a title, sparing me the regret of another hastily-made Amazon purchase and additional wasted hours trying to force myself through some encyclopediac tedium. Call this a form of quid pro quo. Here I give my favorite books of the quarantine, and now I officially oblige you with the duty of sharing your favorites as well.
The Part of the Pandemic Spent in the Solace of Nonfiction
Spy and The Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre.
This is the book that made me want to drop all current career aspirations and become a CIA analyst, which, if you guessed it, never ended up happening. The Spy and the Traitor is about a Soviet KGB officer, Oleg Gordievsky, who starts spying for M16, the British intelligence service, during the Cold War. Gordievsky became one of M16’s most important Cold War assets and a favorite of the then-PM Margaret Thatcher. This is an absolute page-turner nonfiction book that reads like a spy novel.
Factfulness: Ten Reasons Why We’re Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
This was one of the most fun nonfiction books I read during the pandemic. It mixes statistics and global trends to show you that, despite all media talk of impending global disaster, the world is actually becoming a better place. Over the last century, income levels across the world have been rising; the standard of living has been improving; more women are getting advanced education, resulting in fewer babies being born. It’s a feel-good, stats-driven book. If you don’t read this, please at least check out Rosling’s Ted Talks, which are absolutely superb.
Homo Deux: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari
Work in the Silicon Valley tech scene but haven’t read Yuval Harari yet? Well, then you will need to read at least his first book, Sapiens, if you want to meet the bare-minimum level of intellectual pretentiousness to impress all the tech folk at the holiday cocktail parties. Once you have that done, then you should check out Harari’s follow-up book, Homo Deux, which gives you a glimpse of what human society will look like in the future. Holiday tech parties here we come!
No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal
Unlike many accounts of Afghanistan, which treat the country as some sort of object that can be militarily sterilized, No Good Man Among the Living tells the story of America’s war on terror through the lives of three different Afghans: a lost teenager who rises to become a leading insurgent in a Taliban; a violent warlord backed by the U.S. military; and a housewife who learns to cope in a quickly disintegrating social order. In this milieux, nobody wins. As different factions gain power across the country and the U.S. botches one military operation after the other, everybody is just trying to survive. National Book award finalist. This book broke my heart.
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice by Bill Browder
Red Notice is the crazy story of the former hedge fund manager and political activist, Bill Browder. In the early 2000’s, Browder co-founded Hermitage Capital Management to invest in Russia’s emerging capital markets as the country moved to privatization after the fall of the Soviet Union. Along the way, Browder tackles Russian oligarchs and ultimately goes head-to-head with Vladimir Putin. Absolute page-turner. Even if you don’t like reading, you will love this book, and you will finish it faster than you’ve finished any other book.
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos
Despite my obvious Chinese-American-ness, I had grown up quite incompetent when it came to matters of China. My China knowledge had extended to the superficial level of food and select holiday traditions, along with a general understanding of a cultural value system that privileged at all costs nation and community over the individual. I had seen glimpses of China in my family, but, as the daughter of a Hong-Konger and a Chinatown American, I never really knew or lived China. Age of Ambition gave me my first deep glimpse into a China I had only known in some distant way. The book documents China’s momentous growth as a nation over the last half century, a remarkable feat given that in 1979, China was poorer than North Korea and had a per capita income one-third of that of sub-Saharan Africa. That growth has come with many costs: rampant governmental corruption, a regime of political censorship, and a governmental order of authoritarian capitalism. If you need a starter book about the rise of modern China, start here.
Educated by Tara Westover
There was a point during the pandemic where it seemed like almost everyone was reading Tara Westover’s Educated. It’s not a surprise, given the book made it onto Bill Gates’ and Obama’s reading lists (but perhaps only Obama matters anymore), and, in my opinion, is one of those stories of female empowerment and overcoming that really helped to soothe that anxious feeling of oncoming apocalypse during the craziest days of the Trump era. Educated is a memoir of a woman who grew up in middle-of-nowhere Idaho to a homeopath mother and a survivalist father bent on prepping for the next apocalypse. Her parents (think isolationist survivalists) don’t allow her to go to school, and yet, through sheer will and self-study, she ends up going to college and eventually to Cambridge on scholarship. If you like memoirs, this one’s for you.
The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury
It’s now common knowledge that China will overtake the U.S. in the near future. What is not common knowledge is that this has been China’s plan all along — to obtain redemption from the Century of Humiliation (1839–1949) wrought by decades of imperialistic subjugation by Western powers and Japan. Written by Michael Pillsbury, a former national security analyst and advisor to the likes of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, The Hundred Year Marathon is a harrowing account of China’s efforts to rise to the status of leading global superpower by 2049 — the hundred year anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The book tells the story of a new Cold War in the making — this time between the China and U.S. Don’t let the lame-looking appearance of the book’s cover deceive you. One Hundred Year Marathon was one of the most fascinating nonfiction books I read during the quarantine.
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
If you are reading this, I will bet you a frothy mug of beer that you didn’t come to this point in linear fashion. That is, you probably read bits of the intro here and there, scrolled down to a book title, hopped to another, and then another — not reading all the text I have spent all these long hours formulating in the most optimal way to keep you interested. Well then, you are a living example of how the internet has rewired your brain to the point where you have lost the skill to read and think deeply. Even I, writing this on my laptop at the present moment, am fighting the urge to check my phone, refresh my email, and give my brain another dopamine rush with a good old LinkedIn newsfeed scroll. The Shallows, as you likely have guessed, is about the effects of the internet and new digital media on our neural circuits. After reading the book, I’ve been on the self-mission to digital detox, but at last, I think I’m eternally F***ed.
The War on Normal People by Andrew Yang
Agree or disagree with him, it’s hard not to like Andrew Yang — that self-deprecating, nerdy cool guy who inflames the political and media establishment in all the positive, non-Trumpian ways. OK, so I admit it. I read the book because Andrew Yang was the author. I didn’t expect to take much from it. Until I did and became a fan of Yang’s thesis: that the loss of jobs due to AI-enabled automation makes universal income the only viable solution to stem a broader crisis of economic dislocation across vast swathes of American society. After all, the proof’s in the pudding: of the five million manufacturing jobs lost since 2000, four million of that was due to automation. Many of these workers (41% according to a Department of Labor study) left the workforce entirely. I’ll save you from the nuances of why exactly universal income will be needed in the future, but the basic takeaway is this: automation is going to take our jobs so we as a society better start thinking about what to do sooner rather than later.
Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang
My husband likely thought it was a strange request (well, let’s just say “different”) when I asked for Factory Girls for one of my birthday books. The book ended up being one of my favorite non-fiction reads throughout the quarantine. Factory Girls is about the 130 million migrant workers, the vast majority of whom are young women, who leave their villages in China’s rural hinterlands each year to work in the factories at the urban centers. You follow the lives of two young women, who the author tracks over three years as they try to rise from their low-paid, high-intensive work on the factory floors of the industrial city of Donguan. With Factory Girls, you get a never-before-seen look into the human side of China’s sweat shops. One of the best investigative journalism works I’ve read in my life.
The Part of the Pandemic Spent in the Quietude of Graphic Novels
Maus I and II by Art Spiegelman
It’s my serious opinion that not enough people, including yours truly, read enough graphic novels. Graphic novels are seen as a lesser form of literary expression because they convey their messages mainly through seemingly benign comical pictures, but it’s through this playful form that the best graphic novels touch on historical themes and topics that might be too difficult or complex to convey through words alone. Along that vein, the Maus series is one of the most beautifully powerful works about the experience and aftermath of living through the Holocaust. The author, Art Spiegelman, captures the story of his aging father, a Holocaust survivor. In the book, Jewish persons are represented as mice and Germans are cats. It remains the first and only graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Beirut 1990: Snapshots of a Civil War by Bruno Ricard and Sylvain Ricard
I have a deep attachment to Lebanon that you might not expect. It is the place where my husband was born, and, throughout our marriage, I’ve noticed the signs of Lebanese cultural influence seep ever-so-quietly into my lifestyle: olive oil bought by the gallons; sumac and za’atar added to my culinary repertoire; the sounds of Lebanese Arabic becoming a reminder of home, rather than a signifier of some unknown, foreign place. As such, after my husband read Beirut 1990, I read it the morning immediately after. It’s a wonderfully profound graphic novel, a travelogue of two French brothers who travel to Lebanon to provide aid during the country’s tumultuous and very complicated Civil War. The power of the book is that it captures the banality of life during war: for most Lebanese citizens, war wasn’t about direct combat or the explosive, carnal stuff you see on television; it was a game of waiting — waiting for aid, waiting to see a loved one, waiting for the next day. Beirut 1990 captures the tedium of war — something that no novel or other book has ever done for me before.
Tiananmen, 1989: Our Shattered Hopes by Lun Zhang, et. al:
Tiananmen 1989 is a first-hand account of the historic Tiananmen Square massacre, which resulted in the death of hundreds, if not thousands, of pro-democracy Chinese protesters, and of which is well-regarded as the turning point marking the descent of the Chinese government into the form of capitalist authoritarianism that it is today. In China, however, you won’t find any mention of the incident. The censorship machine of the Chinese government has wiped out all traces of the incident (among so many other things) from all forms of public and private discourse, the most notable being the internet through the “Great Chinese Firewall.” Read this stunning story because you should always read what authoritarian governments don’t want you to read.
The Part of the Pandemic Spent in the Comfort of Novels
Kazuo Ishiguro — The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go
This was the year I fell in love with the genius of Kazuo Ishiguro. This man defies all literary genres and plot cliches, and there’s an unsettling realism in his writing, even when he’s writing about dystopian realities that he’s never lived through. He first won me over with The Remains of the Day, a novel that puts you in the mind of a British butler, who, in a really twisted sense (read it to see how), loves being a butler. I loved the novel so much that, out of all the novels I’ve read in two decades, The Remains of the Day is tied for the number one spot for my favorite novel of all time (One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is my other #1).
Naturally, after discovering the wonder of The Remains of the Day, I followed it up with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a brilliant gem that follows the lives of a group of orphan kids who later realize, in necessary dystopian fashion, that there’s a mysterious purpose for their sheltered existence at a boarding school. In my serious opinion, if you read just one thing this year, please pick up an Ishiguro.
Waiting by Ha Jin
Even before that whole media explosion of “Stop AAPI Hate” jargon made me— as an Asian person — some sort of cultural fixture requiring protection, I had made a deliberate effort to add more Asian authors to my library out of that peculiar, gnawing sense of Asian guilt of my anglophilic reading preferences in high school. Waiting was one of those gems that I wish I hadn’t dismissed for so long. Set in communist China, it follows a military doctor who must wait 18 years before he can divorce his child’s mother and marry a nurse, his longtime friend. Waiting (for very good reason) won the National Book Award in 1999.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
I remember reading The Poisonwood Bible the last time I took MUNI train on the way to work before that whole experience of taking public transportation came to a screeching halt. A finalist of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, The Poisonwood Bible is a book told in the perspective of the wife and four daughters of a fiery, evangelical Baptist preacher who uproots his family from their lives in the American South to embark on a religious mission in the Belgian Congo. This is one of those beautifully written books I’ve read in my life and ranks in the top five novels I’ve ever read.
Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
First published in 1968, this book was the inspiration of the BladeRunner movies. That should be enough to get you to read this. You really should read this.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
To read Fahrenheit 451 in the days of the pandemic era of the Trump presidency was to gaze at the possible dystopian future that our society was heading towards. Many Americans read it in high school, though I never did. Taking place in a post-apocalyptic U.S., the book follows a protagonist whose job as a firefighter is not to extinguish fires but to locate and burn books. If you like the type of mind-bendy science fiction of the show Black Mirror, then you should read this book
Did you read something during quarantine or have a favorite book that I missed? I’m always down for recommendations, so please do share! Feel free to add/message me via LinkedIn.
Disclaimer: This blog represents solely the opinions of myself, not my employer.
