End of the Year Favourites (2020)

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Oh 2020, what a year, what a year… In this article, I collected the stories that marked me this year.

Non-fiction books, in random order:

  • The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War – an exhilarating story about Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian double-spy whose secret work for MI6 led to his extraction from Moscow. The final part of the book, his fleeing across the Finnish border, is a masterpiece of suspense and thriller.
  • Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup – The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers. Another unputdownable book, with some details, shared that seem absolutely insane. Possible investors would get invited by Holmes to get their blood tested using a Theranos machine. Instead of showing errors, the machines were programmed to show a progress bar. If the results didn’t come back, Holmes would tell the investors she will send their results back home. If the results didn’t come back, Holmes would tell the investors she will send their results back home. A commercial blood analyzer analyzed the blood samples. The “Fake it till you make it” slogan is not cut to work for a health company.
  • A Room of One’s Own – so many great insights packed in such a tiny book. Especially in quarantine, when parents, and especially mothers, can’t find a room of their own to work, this book was more relevant than before.
  • Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators – how Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lauer were exposed as sexual predators. Incredible brave investigative journalism.
  • War’s Unwomanly Face – Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, writes a riveting war memoir about the Soviet women that participated in the Second World War. Snipers, cooks, radio operators, women blew up bridges, bandaged the wounded, killed and were killed. She recorded more than 200 women interviews because “I’ll explain it to you: it’s terrible to remember, but it’s far more terrible not to remember.” “I believe that in each of us, there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together we write the book of time. We each call out our own truth. The nightmare of nuances.”
  • The Science of Storytelling – a fascinating point of view about storytelling: why we need stories and how to craft them. I felt like taking a world-class seminary. Examples of quotes from books to illustrate the power of storytelling are found in every chapter. I was hooked right from the beginning – “We know how this ends. You’re going to die and so will everyone you love… Human life, in all its noise and hubris, will be rendered meaningless for eternity… The cure for the horror is story… It gives our existence the illusion of meaning and turns our gaze from the dread. There’s simply no way to understand the human world without stories”.
  • Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems – the latest book of the husband-and-wife team of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, winners of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (there is no such thing as the Nobel prize for Economics), along with their colleague Michael Kremer. A book that focuses on policy debates that get attention in wealthy countries (Poor Economics, their first book, focused on poor countries). These issues are immigration, inequality, trade. Such difficult topics are discussed with much-needed humility and empathy. “Democracy can live with dissent as long as there is respect on both sides. But respect demands some understanding.”

Fiction

  • The Beekeeper of Aleppo – the heartbreaking story of a Syrian family, struggling to get safe passage to a country that would provide asylum.
  • Zuleikha – the fate of a young Tatar woman sent to Gulag, in the years of Stalin’s Great Purge. Zuleikha transformed from a shy, obedient wife into a perfectly capable woman to survive in the harsh roughness of the Siberian taiga.
  • Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead –  I was mesmerized by this novel from Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish writer and 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature winner. A literary crime story about an eccentric elderly woman living alone in a rural area of Poland that tries to protect Life.

Articles

Videos

Podcasts

I would like to conclude with a quote from Good Economics for Hard Times: “Defining people by their problems is turning circumstance into essence. It denies hope.”

And maybe hope can rise like seeds from the ashes of this year.