In 2021 I finished 32 books (if you are counting, 2 are not in Goodreads). This year, 15 of the books I finished were audiobooks. I ended last year realizing I had read very little in languages I am learning, and this year I made a nice correction and read 6 complete books in Italian. Another book I read in French.

Never before have I juggled so many unfinished books. I don’t even know how many I can say I am ‘reading’ at the moment. Twenty, maybe.

This year will not stand out as a great reading year in my life, although I lucked out on 4 books. I dedicated a lot of this year to studying for the Brazilian equivalent of a CFA, plus a lot of cycling. I am happy with my priorities, as I got my certification to be a professional investor and had many adventures on the bike. I suppose I was not very diligent about choosing books to read, it was a lot of trial and error. All in all, I’m satisfied with the priorities I set. Let me say a word or two about the books I liked.

I finished Robert Caro’s ‘Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing’ just a few hours ago. Caro is considered one of the best biographers of the last many decades. He started out with a classic called ‘The Power Broker,’ about Robert Moses’ long-lasting influence over New York State. Afterwards he embarked on a multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. ‘Working’ is the first book by Caro I have read. In it he remembers how he started out as a newspaper journalist, his difficult transition to writer of books, then biographer of a US president. This short book served as a great introduction, since his subjects were relevant before my time and I’m not a big politics reader. No matter: Caro’s prose is phenomenal, as is his reading on the audiobook. His trajectory, how he finds out and is shocked to learn he’s happiest reading files and archives, his own ambivalence towards his compulsion to know everything, see things firsthand and consequently live in places his subjects lived or affected, his approach to research, extracting information from interviewees and his writing habits sure can serve as inspiration and maybe consolation to others who like to dive deep.

‘Atlas of Poetic Botany,’ by Francis Hallé is a short book on curious, yes, poetic plants around our planet. They are illustrated by the author in a plain and beautiful style. Each chapter is no more than 4 pages, describing a particular species of plant, always very unique. You’ll find plants that “walk”, plants with just one gigantic leaf, the famous corpse flower and many others. This was the absolute only book I finished this year that was not in digital form, and the way it’s put together more than justifies the…plants that gave their lives for the paper to print it.

Another book I really liked was ‘50 Sábados’ (50 Saturdays), by Fernando Zogaib. It is the memoir of Zogaib’s bicyle crossing of Brazil, north to south. He ended up doing it in 50 days, which he refers to as a string of Saturdays. What struck me most about this book, beyond even the athletic and mental feat, is Zogaib’s candor. He does not hold a feeling, a memory to himself. Having read many books about great athletes, crossings and long distance adventures, this one holds up against the best in terms of emotional openness.

As a final mention, I learned interesting things from ‘Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities,’ by Alain Bertaud. The author’s main goal seems to be to describe the interactions between urban planning and urban change brought about by the forces of populations, day by day. The chapter about urban mobility struck me the most: Bertaud writes an interesting critique on things held true by many of us regarding public transportation, use of cars and balancing different modes in a city.

I went through a few months without finding a book I was excited about, and just a few days ago I again found luck with ‘Working’ and another one I haven’t finished quite yet. What a good feeling. Next year will be the one to start listening to audiobooks in Italian — sono pronto!

My reading year was as strange as this year was.

In 2020 I finished 38 books. For the first time the majority of the books I consumed was in audio form: 22 audiobooks. None of them was in languages I have been studying, like Italian, German or Russian.

The most meaningful books of the year for me were books I have not finished yet. I have been reading Goethe’s Italian Journey in German since 2017, at a snail’s pace. That’s because all the German I know I am learning in this very book. For a few months, in the first half so far of the pandemic, I read a good few dozen pages of the book. Goethe’s still in Venice in my reading, which means that at this rate it’s a coin toss whether I will finish the book or die first. But it’s been a wonderful read, and coming into contact with a new language is magical, we see hidden structures of humanness reveal themselves in very touching ways.

In early March I went to Portugal once again after some 15 years. The country felt a lot happier now. I bought a copy of Os Lusíadas by Luís de Camões with the original text from 1572. Os Lusíadas is probably the most famous book in the Portuguese language of all time, and its title plays off the Iliad. As the pandemic shut the world down just about a week after this trip to Portugal, I slowly read about a third of Os Lusíadas. The book is as dense with references as can be, each verse carries one or more allusions to mythology and Portuguese history. There are books that help navigate Os Lusíadas, and I followed one of those. It helped a lot. This effort felt worthwhile — it’s so beautiful to witness our native language at a different state, and at the highest level. I feel no big hurry to finish this book.

Another important book I read some of, at no hurry, and haven’t yet finished, is Lacan’s Seminar number 3: The Psychoses. I have no special interest in psychoses, I just tried to follow the numbering of the books as I’ve already read the first two. It is a challenging read for me in the original manuscript, in French. But when it hits you it hits you hard.

There came a point in the pandemic when all these serious reads felt like too much. It became clear I needed to exercise more after several months stuck inside. I took to my bycicle and, when riding in the mountains, listening to audiobooks took over completely. Almost all of these were forgettable, entertainment material, many were about cycling feats which yielded only-passable literature.

Of the books I finished in 2020, I mention Psychoanalytic Listening — Methods, Limits and Innovations by Salman Akhtar as the most memorable. The topic of high-level listening interests me a lot these days. Salman Akhtar does a great job of breaking down and explaining the most fundamental act of a psychoanalyst. I feel this book is applicable outside psychoanalysis and, if you undergo phychoanalysis, even more so.

These were the books I read this year. Please friend me on Goodreads if you’d like.

Any year in which you read Grande Sertão: Veredas is automatically excellent.

This year I read 32 books. I may have broken my record of rereads at 4. I continued reading in Italian, 2 books this year. Or should I start saying “consumed” books? Thirteen out of the 32 were audiobooks.

It may be hard for a non-Brazilian to understand what about Grande Sertão: Veredas makes it the best book of all time. It is probably as difficult as can be to translate. It is very hard to understand at first, even for solid, native readers. Suffice it to say that it is on par with the Iliad, the best Goethe or Shakespeare. Ranking works of art is nonsense. Still, Grande Sertão is number one for me.

If not for Grande Sertão, 2019 would have left a lot to be desired in terms of my reading. I am happy to put in a good word for Crucial Conversations, a book I listened to and immediately repeated. I seem to have reached that age when any meaningful personal growth is to do with interpersonal skills.

Crucial Conversations was one of several books I read around communication and management, the one big topic for me in 2019. It always feels like most of these books could have been fine as shorter blog posts, but you never know which ones should truly be books and I end up reading them whole. Also, a single good idea may easily be worth the dozen hours we spend on a given book, and that makes me think of The Culture Code, a serious candidate for a future reread as it may contain 2 or 3 really good ideas.

But then there is Grande Sertão: a book where every line, every phrase and word explodes with meaning, with angles on life, a love story to make Romeo and Juliet robotic and numb by comparison.

Maybe I’m ripe for some fiction after a long hiatus.

I log my reading, done or intended, on Goodreads. Please friend me there if you’d like and let’s find the next amazing book.

In 2018 I read 28 books. The number means little but this is probably the lowest for me in many years.

I’ve noticed a trend this year of enthusiastic book readers becoming less so, and praising blogs and other media instead. That was not really the case for me: this year my family and I spent another two months in Italy, and again, why read books if you’re living inside one. More importantly, my wife had twins.

This year I continued to read in Italian, and I was able to read much more advanced texts like Diario Minimo by Umberto Eco, Mark Twain’s Following the Equator and Elisabeth Roudinesco’s biography of Jacques Lacan. Out of the 28 books, 5 were in Italian.

Last year I mentioned I had taken up audiobooks, and this year I continued to listen to them, 11 in total. I think I have gotten better as a listener of books, and the main thing I’ve been doing more often is re-listening to sections of books. This seems to compensate for the lower rate of absorption I seem to be capable of in audio form.

The book I liked reading the most this year was “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes”, by Daniel Everett. In it, Everett recounts his experiences living with the Piraha tribe in the Amazon jungle. His initial mission was to translate the Bible to their language as a Christian missionary. What he comes across, however, changes his own life. It’s a profound encounter of two cultures that could not be more different from one another, in the midst of another culture, that of Northern Brazil. On top of it all, Everett, also a linguist, discovers a language unlike any other in the world, and picks a fight with Noam Chomsky about what even constitutes human language. It’s all so amazing you wonder how much of it is really true. Incidentally, this one was in audio book format and it was great to hear the author reading it, warts, emotion and all.

This year I doubled down on a practice I had started, but not mentioned, last year: that of translating/transcribing books. In 2017 I went to Berlin while living in Italy and really loved it. It was my first time in Germany, and it made me want to learn some German. While in Rome I had learned of Goethe’s experience living there, and of a book recounting his life in Italy. So I started translating “Italienische Reise” from German to Portuguese, and that has been my introduction to German. One year and a half later, I’m still in page 20 of the book. I may go entire weeks without doing it, but I have fun when I translate a paragraph or two. And the links between the German language and the others I know are always deeply touching. Languages are among my favorite things in the world.

So by doubling down I meant I started doing something similar with another book. This time I am not translating but transcribing Security Analysis, by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. It’s one of the most important books about investing of all time, I had read it before but it’s such a dense book that I thought I should do this to slow it down and spend more time with each paragraph. Almost every weekday I dedicate 10 minutes to it. At the current pace I will need several more years to complete the book. I have no idea if I want to do the whole thing, but I can say it’s been a great experience so far.

If you’d like to see all the books I’ve read in 2018, please take a look at my Goodreads year list and do friend me there if you wish.