Favorite Books of 2020

While normally my reading interests gravitate towards magazines, newspapers, graphic novels, and book reviews, this year I have gotten back into reading novels end to end. Below, you can find a list of my 7 favorite books that I read this year along with a brief description. Would love to hear back on some suggested reading for 2021!

PS: The order of the Books doesn’t reflect anything as I enjoyed all of them equally.

1. Scramble: How agile strategy can build epic brands in record time

The powerful tools at the center of the story are the five Qs of strategy and the five Ps of design thinking. These make up the basic principles of agile strategy — a faster, more collaborative approach to building a brand.

Whether you’re a CEO, strategist, marketer, manager, designer, writer, researcher, or consultant, you’ll find familiar challenges and recognizable faces here. You’ll also discover the ability to see business in a new light — not as a static set of requirements, but as a living entity that responds to passion, purpose, and creative collaboration. Scramble is that rare book that everyone on your team will eagerly read, discuss, and put into action.

2. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles — counterintuitive tactics and strategies — you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.

Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car, negotiating a salary, buying a home, renegotiating rent, deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.

3. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

“There’s a really important book that came out… called The Color of Law. It explains how a lot of the racial segregation taking place in our neighborhoods that we maybe treat today as de facto actually happened as the result of very specific and very racist policy choices, going back at least to the F.D.R. Administration. You would think it would make sense if resources went into creating that racial inequity that resources would go into reversing it.”
- Pete Buttigieg, author of Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future

4. Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

Mears spent eighteen months in this world of “models and bottles” to write this captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking narrative. She describes how clubs and restaurants pay promoters to recruit beautiful young women to their venues in order to attract men and get them to spend huge sums in the ritual of bottle service. These “girls” enhance the status of the men and enrich club owners, exchanging their bodily capital for as little as free drinks and a chance to party with men who are rich or aspire to be. Though they are priceless assets in the party circuit, these women are regarded as worthless as long-term relationship prospects, and their bodies are constantly assessed against men’s money.

A story of extreme gender inequality in a seductive world, Very Important People unveils troubling realities behind moneyed leisure in an age of record economic disparity.

5. The City We Became

Worldbuilding is the bedrock of any good novel, especially in fantasy and science fiction. It’s also incredibly hard to do well. Fortunately for us, we have multiple time Hugo-award winner N.K. Jemisin, who is very probably the best worldbuilder alive.The City We Became is about a spiritual war for New York, with each borough battling a nefarious extradimensional enemy through human avatars, among them a homeless man, a rapper turned lawyer, and some lady from Staten Island. Beneath the fantasy plot, there are searing insights by the pound about the ways racism and gentrification impact all aspects of urban life. As always, Jemisin’s writing is visionary and immersive. This book is the perfect world to escape into while you’re holed up at home.

6. Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close

Aminatou and Ann define Big Friendship as a strong, significant bond that transcends life phases, geographical locations, and emotional shifts. And they should know: the two have had moments of charmed bliss and deep frustration, of profound connection and gut-wrenching alienation. They have weathered life-threatening health scares, getting fired from their dream jobs, and one unfortunate Thanksgiving dinner eaten in a car in a parking lot in Rancho Cucamonga. Through interviews with friends and experts, they have come to understand that their struggles are not unique. And that the most important part of a Big Friendship is making the decision to invest in one another again and again.

An inspiring and entertaining testament to the power of society’s most underappreciated relationship, Big Friendship will invite you to think about how your own bonds are formed, challenged, and preserved. It is a call to value your friendships in all of their complexity. Actively choose them. And, sometimes, fight for them.

7. East of West

Ya ok this is a Comic Book series, but truly if you are a fan of fantasy & science fiction, then this is a must read series regardless of the medium.

Three creepy children come up out of the earth and decide to kill Death and then destroy the world. We learn the world deviated from the present as we know it during the Civil War, seven nations were born and The Message reveals the story of the world’s end. The end times are imminent and we all hate each other too much to come together and solve our problems. Our final destination is imminent, and it is the Apocalypse. And then, in the face of all that despair and gloom, somehow there is still hope