Favorite Books of 2021

Previously: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

This year I only read 101 books, 39 fewer than last year. I blame this drop on my growing podcast addiction, as well as the fact that I read some extremely long and dry books these past few months. You can view my 2021 book list on Goodreads. Each year, I blog about my favorite books, an idea I got from the incomparable Aaron Swartz.

This year my favorite books were, once again, overwhelmingly non-fiction (mostly business, economics, and history). So, without further ado, here are my...

Top 10 Favorite Books Read in 2021

1) Who is Michael Ovitz? by Michael Ovitz. This an absolutely riveting book, by a master strategist, details CAA’s rise to power and dominance from the 1970s – 1990s. CAA deliberately built the perception that if any studio didn't do exactly what it wanted, there would be terrible consequences - CAA would withhold their talent and their best packages. Ovitz taught his agents to reach for the club several times a day but to never use it, because "power is only power until you exert it."

Ovitz openly talks about learning how to charge packaging fees when he worked at the William Morris Agency in the 70’s. When he jumped ship to start CAA, he offered six percent commissions to undercut WMA because he knew that the back-end he would earn on packaging fees was worth far more than anything he could earn charging 10 percent from a client. WMA threatened to sue Ovitz out of existence for undercutting him so Ovitz threatened to sic the justice department onto WMA with an anti-trust investigation on packaging fees. This part of the book was especially delicious to read in light of the recent WGA Agency Campaign, when agencies claimed that packaging fees were both insubstantial and not an antitrust violation.

The ways in which Ovitz created the modern talent agency are almost too numerous to count. He created the idea of representing people in teams, as is now widespread in the industry. He streamlined the way agents are promoted (formerly, people didn't become full agents until well into their 40s). He had the novel idea to not have clients sign an annual contract because that would give a client a reason to think, "what have they done for me lately?" He created the current agency aesthetic of designing an impressive office and hanging expensive postmodern art collections in the lobbies. He even had the idea of giving elaborate holiday gifts – now standard industry practice.

At the apex of his power, Michael Ovitz had the ability to turn his martial arts instructor, Steven Seagal, into a movie star, and to turn his favorite local chef, Wolfgang Puck, into the biggest celebrity chef in the world. He obsessively studied Japanese culture in order to broker the sale of Columbia to Sony. He helped reinvent Coca Cola’s image in the 1990s by convincing the soft drink giant to ditch their traditional ad agency and go with CAA. 

All told, a remarkable book. Say what you will about Michael Ovitz, he was a brilliant strategist and innovator who utterly transformed the agency business.

2) How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley. I always enjoy his books – he is an iconoclast but with an utterly reasonable and fact-based approach. He presents wonderful illustrations of how anti-science political groups stifle innovation, how patent law stifles innovation, and how regulation stifles innovation while supporting incumbents. He also makes a convincing case for how parallel ideas seem to have appeared for just about every major invention of the past century, suggesting that innovative ideas may almost be the inevitable product of their times.

3) Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. I read this book after a trip to Cannery Row in Monterrey. As a lover of a well-crafted plot, I shouldn't love a book that is little more than a series of character sketches, yet I was completely engaged throughout. I love books that are so vividly descriptive that they give one the sensation of time-traveling. I did notice that Steinbeck used the phrase "barking monotonously" twice in the book, which is a point against his editor!

4) Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed. I never fully connected all of the dots between the disastrous actions of the world's central bankers after WWI, the 1929 crash, the depths of the great depression across the world, and the rise of the dictatorships that precipitated WWII. All of these events can be laid at the feet of central bankers and their adherence to the gold standard. For all those who believe that banking is somehow a dull profession, just remember that monetary policy pretty much runs the world and determines history.

5) Something Like an Autobiography by Akira Kurosawa. I tremendously enjoyed reading about the great director’s childhood - born into the samurai class - and his heart-rending description of war-torn Tokyo. Kurosawa claims that much of Japan was on the brink of committing mass suicide after the Japanese defeat in WWII, until the emperor got on the radio to call it off. I did not find this book to be at all useful toward screenwriting or directing, but I absolutely loved the vivid historical portrait of pre-industrial Tokyo.

6) Liftoff by Eric Berger. This book chronicles the unbelievably inspiring story of SpaceX, succeeding against all odds at reinventing the space industry. At the point in the book when SpaceX crashed its third rocket in 2008, and was facing bankruptcy, I was on the edge of my seat. When their fourth rocket finally worked, I had tears in my eyes. This book will make for an amazing movie.

7) Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. This book is staggeringly long but wonderfully comprehensive and full of common sense. Like all denizens of the Chicago school of economics, Sowell derives his conclusions from history and data, rather than hunting only for evidence that supports his preconceived notions.

I also read his book, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics this year, which is so well-researched and well-reasoned. He's just an absolute delight to read.

8) Flow by Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi. I spent the past five years reading and savoring this book. It presents a comprehensive philosophy of life. The thesis is that happiness does not equal pleasure; it equals enjoyment. Enjoyment is being engrossed in challenging, purpose-driven activities that create a flow-state. Namely, autotelic activities that become increasingly challenging as we improve: music, sports, arts, vocations, or even ever-evolving relationships. This book was extremely well-reasoned and one of few books of philosophy that I have found to be genuinely useful and applicable to everyday life.

9) Civilization by Niall Ferguson. Ferguson picks up where Jared Diamond left off with Guns, Germs, and Steel, by offering a theory of why modern civilization arose in Western Europe rather than elsewhere on the Eurasian continent or elsewhere on earth. He offers six explanations: British property rights, the scientific enlightenment in the UK, modern medicine, British consumerism, the Protestant Work Ethic, and competition between European states. This year, I also read Ferguson’s books Empire and Doom, which are similarly thoughtful and chock full of ideas.

10) Human Kind by Rutger Bregman. Bregman convincingly presents the thesis that humankind is far nicer than we have been led to believe. The Stanford Prison Experiment that we all learned about in college has been proven to be a fraud. Philip Zimbardo, who built a wildly successful career off of the famous experiment, rigged the entire thing. Similarly, the famous Milgrim Experiment, where participants were asked to electrocute a stranger, has also been largely debunked because fully 55% of the participants knew the experiment was not real. The Kitty Genovese story we were all taught in Psych 101 was completely misreported and misrepresented at the time. In fact, it was Kitty’s concerned neighbors who eventually caught her killer. In short, this book presents myriad examples of how evolution has designed humans to be cooperative and kind. A very uplifting message, indeed.