2022 Roundup

Since 2010, I’ve done yearly personal updates, which I have always found to be both enjoyable and illuminating. So I thought I’d do one for To Summarise as well, to see how this site changes and grows over time.

I also highlight below a few of the best and worst books I’ve read this year, and indicate which books I started but didn’t finish for one reason or another.

The website

2022 was certainly a big year for To Summarise, as it marked the birth of this website – 5 March 2022 was its exact birth day. In the course of this year, I’ve posted:

• 26 book summaries;
• 17 blogs;
• 4 podcast summaries; and
• 1 course summary.

Around halfway through the year, I accidentally deleted my entire site. Oops! Thankfully, I had saved a backup and managed to recover it without losing much at all.

I’ve learned a lot in the process and it’s been interesting to revisit some of my old summaries and compare them to my newer ones.

Visitor numbers

This site is still very small and doesn’t get a ton of visitors. But I’m more interested in the direction things are trending, and less about absolute numbers. Overall visitor numbers are growing, which is encouraging.

From March to July of this year, my monthly unique visits were around 30-50 (and I think a lot of those were my own visits, before I figured out how to block them). They’ve since increased to 300-600 unique visits each month in October to December, mostly thanks to Reddit. Page views are roughly double the unique visits.

Google tells me that around a third of my traffic comes from “organic search”. It sends a message every now and then congratulating me on reaching a certain number of clicks within 28 days.

As the screenshot above shows, my number of clicks tripled in less than 3 months between 27 September and 16 December. So even though it’s starting from a (very) low base, the trend’s been increasing – and I’m happy with that.

Ultimately, this is a passion project and visitor numbers are not the be-all end-all for me. But I can’t deny that it’s very satisfying to get visitors – so thank you to all of you!

Books

I read more than 40 books this year, and am pretty dang pleased with that! Granted, a couple of these – like Show Your Work and Steal Like an Artist – are very short and arguably don’t really “count”. And I truly believe that quality is more important than quantity. I didn’t have a target number in mind this year, and I don’t plan to next year, either.

Best 3 books I read in 2022

In my opinion, the best books I read this year were, in no particular order:

• Noise by Kahneman, Siboney and Sunstein. It’s a quality book, with assertions backed up with extensive references. As I say in my summary, it changed the way I thought about noise and error, and I appreciated the practical advice about how to reduce noise.
• Calling Bullshit by Bergstrom and West. I highly recommend this book to anyone who cares about the truth. The problem is, there’s a lot of bullshit out there and it’s hard for anyone to figure out what’s true. We humans tend to believe what we hear. Yet it’s so important to be able to spot bullshit and call it out – and this skill is only going to become more valuable when more and more AI-generated content proliferates on the web. This is one of the few books from this year I could see myself re-reading.
• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. I know there are problems with this book, especially in Chapter 3, and I’ve even written a post summarising some of the most common criticisms of it. I hesitated to put this book in my top 3, given how controversial it is. But I can’t deny that the book had an impact on me, or that I enjoyed it a lot. History is a subject I’ve long wanted to better understand, yet I find the topic to be intimidating and often really boring. I find it hard to care about specific details of how particular events went down. I much prefer getting a sense of the broader, overarching forces and patterns that have arguably shaped history. Diamond’s theory is a just theory, and you should certainly read the book with a healthy degree of scepticism – like you should approach most books, really. But, at the very least, it’s made me interested in reading more about “big history” and seeking out competing views in this area, which can only be a good thing.

I’m only counting non-fiction books here, as it doesn’t seem fair to compare non-fiction and fiction at all.

One reason I’ve picked the above as my top 3 is because I feel like I learned something valuable from each of them. There were some other excellent books, such as A Mind for Numbers, and Doing Good Better, which could have made this list. The reason they didn’t was through no fault of their own – I simply learned less from them, because I had already heard the underlying ideas elsewhere.

There are plenty of other books that I enjoyed, which altered how I think about certain things. Examples include The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Four Thousand Weeks, and The 48 Laws of Power. These weren’t bad books by any means but, overall, their arguments were more simplistic, less balanced, and supported by minimal (or no) evidence compared to my 3 “best” books above. They’re almost like philosophy books – they can serve as useful prompts, but to get the most out of them you have to do most of the thinking (and you will probably end up disagreeing with the author to different degrees). Maybe I’m just lazy, but I prefer books where the author puts in a strong effort to refine and shore up their own arguments. Even better when they fairly deal with counterarguments.

Worst 3 books I read in 2022

The 3 worst books I read this year were:

• The Practice by Seth Godin. My summary for this book was pretty half-assed, because the book itself felt pretty half-assed. Like I said in my original summary, The Practice is not a book; it’s a collection of haphazardly-arranged blog posts.
• Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is a compelling writer who knows how to tell a good story. Unfortunately, he’s also full of crap. My opinion of Gladwell has dropped with each book I’ve read (now 3). I don’t know why I keep reading his books. I guess there’s a masochistic part of me that wants to be entertained and annoyed.
• Tribe by Sebastian Junger. Tribe didn’t piss me off nearly as much as the two books above, so I’ll place it as a distant third. It was just overly repetitive and Junger’s writing style was not to my taste. But it’s been a while since I read it and there are probably a number of other books I could have subbed in for this one.

Obviously, these are just my opinions and what makes a book good or bad is very subjective. So don’t be offended if I’ve listed a book you like as one of the “worst” books I read this year. If you disagree with my picks, that just tells you we’ve got different tastes, and you can now discount any opinions I give about writing style, etc accordingly. (Although if you like Talking to Strangers, I would urge you to read my summary of it, as I think a number of Gladwell’s assertions are very problematic.)

Books I read but did not summarise

In 2022, I read a further 17 books which I didn’t summarise. Of those, 12 were not books I wanted to summarise (7 were fiction, and the other 5 were not suitable for summarising, in my opinion).

The remaining 5 books were:

• The Brain by David Eagleman
• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Why We Fight by Chris Blattman
• The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
• Range by David Epstein

I definitely plan to summarise Why We Fight, The Prince and Range – I just haven’t done so yet. I’m not sure if I will ever do The Brain and Flow. It’s been so long since I read them that I’ll probably have to do significant re-reading for a summary, and I’m not sure that would be the best use of time. We’ll see.

Books I started but didn’t finish

When I start a book, I usually finish it. I don’t think this is great, and I suspect I should be abandoning books way more often. So here are the books I started in 2022 but didn’t finish – I hope to see this list grow in 2023:

• The Shortest History of Germany by James Hawes. For something that is pitched as the “Shortest History”, I didn’t find it a very accessible read at all. I really did try – I think I got more than halfway through, but gave up before reaching the WWII section. I wonder if its brevity makes it harder to read – without enough space to explain the broader context, it comes off more as a barrage of facts.
• Why the West Rules – For Now by Ian Morris. Something else distracted me after a quarter or a third of the way through. Personally, Morris’ writing style was not to my taste, and the book is quite long. However, I do plan to come back to it. I find the underlying topic interesting and Morris came off as a careful and credible writer.
• Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I’m not sure I even got through one chapter of this. I simply couldn’t stand Taleb’s writing style. I’m willing to give his earlier book – Black Swan – a go as I’ve heard it’s a better (more heavily-edited) read. But I doubt I’ll come back to Antifragile.
• Neuromancer by William Gibson. I got about a quarter of the way through, and it was a struggle. Gibson’s writing style was not to my taste at all, and I found it really difficult to understand. My impression is that this book may be more palatable if I were on drugs. (I’m not even joking.)
• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat. I sort of finished this one, but I skimmed heaps. Not sure this really counts, but it’s probably not meant to be read cover-to-cover anyway. I have it as an e-book, which was a mistake. The illustrations are a big part of the book and they don’t render well in an e-book. It’s definitely intended as a physical book.
• Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. I didn’t give this book a fair chance – I barely started it before deciding I didn’t want to read it at the time. The problem wasn’t with the book itself. Its vibe just felt too similar to books I had recently read, and I wanted something different at that point. I may well come back to this one.
• The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell. I started this one as an audiobook, which didn’t really work for me. After a few failed attempts, I think I need to accept that audiobooks are just not my thing. I might try it again as an e-book.
• The Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford. I barely started this book and am unlikely to try it again. I only chose it because it fit the theme of a monthly book club I attend, and I ended up going with another book that month.
• The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan. I really want to read this one, and I liked what I saw of it. Unfortunately, I had some technical problem where it wouldn’t load on my e-reader, so I could only read it on my phone or PC, and I don’t like reading entire books off those devices. I may try this again as I find Caplan’s underlying argument compelling.

Let me know if you’ve read any of the above books. Do you agree with my decision to abandon them or should I give them a second chance?

Looking ahead to 2023

Next year holds some big personal changes in store for me, and I’m not sure how things will shake out just yet. I expect to have less free time at the start of next year than I do currently; and more free time by the second half of the year.

My vague goals or plans for next year are to:

• Read better quality books, which will likely mean starting, but abandoning more books.
• Increase my publishing cadence, largely by increasing blog posts. This will involve splitting out my lengthier thoughts on books from the main summary. For example, my summary for Evicted contains a lot of commentary. Looking back, it seems distracting and would have been better off in a separate post. Putting my thoughts in a separate post also forces me to organise them better and reflect more deeply on what I read.
• Do more, but shorter, podcast summaries. I still believe these are worth doing, but I haven’t really gotten the hang of them yet. I think I need to condense them much more than I currently do.
• Possibly change the WordPress theme for this site. I picked this current theme rather quickly, and it’s less flexible than I would like. I’m thinking of switching to a simpler, but more customisable, theme, but this may take me a bit of time, and it’s not a high priority right now. But do let me know if you really hate the current theme.

I know people often advise you to set SMART (specific, measurable, etc) goals, but I’m using the word “goals” quite loosely here. I don’t care that much about achieving these goals – they are more like vague plans or ideas for what I’ll do next year. If these plans change, I’m fine with that.

Finally – Happy New Year everyone! Stay safe and sane. Thanks heaps for following this site in 2022, and I look forward to seeing you next year,