My Books of 2020
The year 2020 has been quite a different year: from a global pandemic and lockdowns which in turn caused a global recession to protests against police brutality from Nigeria to the United States to Brazil. It felt like everything was just turning on its own.
For me, it is also the first year in a very long while that I would not be complaining of having read too few books. Of course, I wish I read more books than I did — especially certain books I have been craving for — but I outdid my previous records in terms of not just the number of books I read, but their themes and content.
So here goes:
Books About Nigeria
After a long wait, it was only fitting I started the year with Max Siollun’s third book on Nigeria’s contemporary politics, focused on the five-year rule of maximum ruler Sani Abacha, the transition to the Fourth Republic, and a bit on former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s tenure. Like other Siollun books, it was very interesting to read, even though unlike the others, I was old enough to recall the intrigues in the book when they played out.
Ebenezer Obadare’s Pentecostal Republic, on the other hand, did not captivate me as much as it should have. Maybe it was because I read it right after Soldiers of Fortune, but I think the style of writing was rather too academic for my liking. Nonetheless, it is an excellent piece of work in describing how the ascendancy of Pentecostal Christianity has shaped the socio-political life of Nigeria.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s memoir of her second stint in office as Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy laid out a lot of the thinking and drama behind major policy moves she was involved in, including highly-publicized ones such as the attempt to withdraw fuel subsidies and the kidnapping of her aged mother. However, I wish that she did not withhold the names of many of the actors who played negative roles in many dramas, especially the one who made her access to the Presidential Villa difficult when former IMF Chair, Christine Lagarde visited.
Shehu Shagari’s autobiography was a very detailed account of his life from birth through his time in public office: from being a minister in the Tafawa Balewa and Gowon administrations, his return home as a councilor, and his eventual successful run for the presidency. There was a lot I learned in his book for the first time (e.g. that in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Federal Government did make efforts at reconstruction and rehabilitation in the South-East) and his barely-disguised dislike for Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Colonel Muammar Gaddhafi and (of course) Muhammadu Buhari was obvious. I still do not agree with how he downplayed the level of corruption in his administration or with many of the economic policies he undertook.
The World Beyond Nigeria
Ronen Bergman’s celebrated Rise and Kill First traces the history of Israel using targeted assassinations right from their founding in 1948 when Jewish survivors of the Second World War tracked and killed those behind the rounding up of Jews that died in the Holocaust, to high-ranking Nazi officials and all the way to present-day Israel under the Mossad. Matter of fact, just weeks ago, an Iranian scientist was assassinated with all the clues pointing straight back to Tel Aviv. The morality of their actions is definitely questionable but I couldn’t help but admire the ingenuity with which they carried them out.
I read Chris Whipple’s The Gatekeepers in 2018, an amazing book which covered the time in office of all past Chiefs of Staff to the US President, and he did an excellent job as well with The Spymasters which looked at all directors of the Central Intelligence Agency: the politics behind their appointments, how they carried out their roles, and how they shaped the course of American and world politics. Quite interesting to note how the post of CIA Director is often occupied not by intelligence experts but by politicians.
Madeleine Albright’s Madam Secretary was my last book of 2020, and I enjoyed it way more than I expected. I was initially tempted to skip all those first chapters about her life and plunge straight into her time as Secretary of State, but I am glad I did not. There are so many gems in the book that it is hard to pick one to highlight, but it felt like being on the front row of major geopolitical battles (from an American perspective, of course) and picking all the lessons.
Business and Economics
This was a category in which I read a whole lot of books this year, more than I even expected to.
Netflix. Twitter. Instagram. Three apps/services that I almost cannot live without now. But beyond what they are now, it was very interesting delving into the stories of how they were founded and the numerous decisions their founders took to get to this point.
Of the three books, only one was written by one of the founders, which meant the outside-in perspective of the other two meant, in my view, a more candid account of the formation and growth of the businesses.
It was very interesting to see how features of these apps that we now take for granted were often heavily doubted by the founders to work, and always subjected to heavy debate — even when it now looks like a no-brainer.
2020 was also a year my partner and I decided to start taking our company MINDcapital in a new direction, and I needed to up my knowledgebase in that line as well.
So I sprinted through Jake Knapp’s Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, which lays out the blueprint of how to use speed and collaboration to ideate and prototype solutions to problems.
Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things draws on his experiences as a tech founder prior to becoming an accomplished VC and contains numerous lessons to shorten the learning curve for would-be founders.
I totally enjoyed Roger Martin’s The Design of Business on how design thinking can provide a big boost to businesses, whether small-scale ones or global multinationals, with numerous case studies of how different organizations have applied it.
My favorite couple in Economics (well, not like the category is a big one) dropped this very interesting treatise that explains the difficult issues in our world today from an economics perspective: migration, free trade, the rise of nationalism and white supremacist politics, etc. In other words, all the very things that played a large part in propelling Donald Trump to the White House and his ideologies; at very point, alternative approaches to the problem are made clear as well.
One of the biggest deaths this year was that of innovation guru and business professor Clayton Christensen, and his book, The Prosperity Paradox is a testament to his brilliance. I liked it extra because he had Efosa Ojomo co-author with him (Naija to the world!). But I also like the simplicity of the ideas laid out in the book for countries to adopt for their economic growth — if they had the political will.
Random Thought
The best way to describe the year 2020 is as a black swan event: an event that is unanticipated (perhaps because it seemed impossible or because no-one had considered it before), but which has very far-reaching consequences. Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s The Black Swan looks at such events and the tendency that we have as humans to find simplistic explanations for them. More importantly, he talks about how to build robustness to negative events and to maximize positive ones.
Frank Dikotter’s How To Be A Dictator looks at some of the most prominent dictators of the 20th century: Hitler, Mussolini, Mengistu, Castro, etc, and how they used not only fear and violence but also built personality cults to create illusions of popularity even without being elected. There are direct parallels between this group with an emerging group of dictators such as Putin and Xi Jinping.
Fiction Books
Just so if you were thinking, I did not read only ‘serious’ books this year. Two fiction books managed to get into my hands as well.
Chris Hauty’s Deep State was very interesting, even though I was skeptical of it in the beginning as I was trying to figure out if it was a pro-Trump conspiracy theory book masquerading as a novel. But before long, I had gotten so lost in the twists and turns that I didn’t care for whatever political objective it may (or may not) have had. Will definitely recommend it.
As the Black Lives Matter protests got bigger in the US after the killing of George Floyd, The Hate U Give started being mentioned as an excellent novel on race relations. Thankfully, I had a copy on my shelf and I began to read. It was quite mindblowing. There are not enough adjectives to describe how the book made me feel but it is quite immersive especially for a reader who has not had the lived experience of experiencing racism in the United States
What Was Different This Year?
For the first time in at least four years, I did not read any book about football, mostly due to not having any particular title on my list to obtain.
I also did not read any book about Boko Haram this year, despite books like Hilary Matfess’ Women and the War on Boko Haram: Wives, Weapons, and Witnesses being on my list. Once again, I also failed to get Alex Thurston’s Salafism in Nigeria: Islam, Preaching, and Politics — the $100 price tag is still my excuse but I shall overcome it in 2021.
For next year, I am definitely starting with Barack Obama’s A Promised Land — though I have a soft copy of it, I am holding back to read the print version. Feyi Fawehinmi (who inspired me to start these annual reviews of books I read) and Fola Fagbule’s Formation: The Making of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation is another strong contender to be my debut book of 2021.
If you want to encourage my reading addiction, you can send me an Amazon gift card: mark.amaza@gmail.com and I promise I shall spend it on books alone.
So tell me, what did you read in 2020 and what do you hope to read in the new year?
