Vincennes Review of Books 2022

Let’s start, per tradition, with a graph:

A solid 22% of these were business books. I got a new job last year, I felt like I had a lot to learn, and as usual my response was to read a lot and see if that would help me to figure it out:

This included reading every book Bob Sutton has written, a project I’m especially excited to tell you about this year. In 2008, I read Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer’s Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense, their book about evidence-based management. There is no book that has influenced my career more profoundly. However, 2008 was also the year in which I was too heartbroken to do a Vincennes Review of Books, so it’s only now that Bob Sutton is really getting his due here.

It’s always exciting to read the complete works of an author in a single year, because you get a proper overview of what their concerns are and what the project of their work is. In the case of Bob Sutton, his work circles around the question of; how annoying should work be? The answer is definitely not “never annoying,” but as the author of The No Asshole Rule his answer is not going to be “annoying to the point of pure rage and misery” either. From my reading of the complete Bob Sutton, here are the ways and the reasons why you should be annoyed at work:

1. Because you constantly need to upgrade your ideas and assumptions

2. Because you constantly need to change how you work to get the best from the people around you

3. Because you’re spending less time on the exciting task of talking about big plans and more time doing the small things that get you there

If you also are facing a big task at work, or a big job next year, here are my Bob Sutton recommendations. I’m going to assume that if you want to read The No Asshole Rule, you will, so that one is not on the list despite being excellent:

● Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense — it’s not the easiest read, but it’s a really great framework to help you think about the things around you at work that are presented as “facts.”

● Scaling Up Excellence — what I particularly appreciated about this book is how clear-eyed it is on… what you are trying to do is difficult! It’s okay if it feels difficult! It doesn’t ride this theme too hard, but doesn’t shy away from it either.

● Good Boss, Bad Boss — this was a huge book for me last year, and if you’re managing people or about to be there will be so much here for you. Let me know if you pick it up, I’d love to talk about it with you.

You might notice The Art of War on the right hand column of books. I can simply recommend no book more highly if you wish to wage a ground war in China in 500 BC. Look, it’s an easy read, and as you can see very short, but I found that I brought too much of myself and my own situation to it for it to be really useful. The Prince, though, is still psychologically extremely astute, and not even in the top three morally empty books in that photograph.

I gave up on most of the reading aims I set myself a year ago. At this point I can hear a voice in my head, and it’s your voice, and you’re saying “Alexandra… are you telling me that you sacked off reading John Milton because you were too busy reading business books??!” And the answer is pretty much yes, that is exactly why I sacked off reading Paradise Lost. I knew before we were halfway through the year that I was struggling to keep up with Pepys and the Bible and that, as I said to a colleague around that time “I have enough problems without inventing them for myself by reading John Milton.” About three conversational moves later, she quoted a bit of T. S. Eliot’s “Preludes” to me, kindly allowing me to feel that I was keeping my hand in with the great poets.

Obviously the Harlem Renaissance also fell by the wayside. I did read Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I enjoyed it a great deal, but no one I spoke to told me that I’d feel the same way about Jean Toomer’s Cane. In fact, the feeling on Jean Toomer was pretty universally “he’ll wait,” so I allowed him to do that.

I did engage with modernism though! The literary greats help us to see our lives in context:

I was also preparing my bit of my and Jennifer’s book, which entailed reading every short story F. Scott Fitzgerald published between 1921 and 1924 backwards. This was the only way I could proofread without being distracted by the beautiful sentences, and although it wasn’t the optimal way to read these stories or anything else, I did catch a load of things I wouldn’t have caught the normal way round.

You might notice that, after going big on Ulysses in 2021, I didn’t read any Joyce in 2022. Me and Jamesy are doing fine, thank you for asking. I listened to the RTÉ Ulysses, which is on Spotify and a lovely way to engage with the text. If podcasts are your thing, I also recommend Catherine Flynn’s Ulysses 1922 podcast. They have some amazing guests, in that they have normal people talking about what this book has meant to them throughout their lives. Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us is also about the everyday and Ulysses, and a delight.

Given that I met half of my aims from last year, I am not even sure I should do aims for this year. But since I do have aims (and also nothing bad happens if I don’t meet them?) it would only be cowardice that stops me from writing them down:

1. T. S. Eliot — I got two books about Eliot for Christmas, one biography of him and a biography of “The Waste Land.” So, at least those.

2. Pepys’ diary for 1667 — a bittersweet one as this is the last volume that I can read in a full year! 1668–9 are combined because he gave up his diary in 1669. Now that I write this I realize I still have a fair amount of Pepys to read.

3. The Bible — in 2022 I read a Bible plan with commentary, which was a really nice way in and which I recommend. Of course, if you want in on reading the Bible with me this year, as every year, just let me know.

Previous reviews: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006

Lists of books read: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004