I Read 71 Books in 2020

By Brad Robertson

In 1980, at Irvington school in northeast Portland, Mr. McDowell‘s 5th grade class had a reading challenge. If you read a book, you wrote the book title and your name and put it on a segment of a giant earthworm that went around the walls of the classroom.

My dim recollection is that a bunch of those worm-parts were mine. I guess it was practice for Covid. 

I read 71 books in 2020.

What else are you gonna do when you can’t go to your kids basketball games, take early flights out of PDX, spend time commuting on Highway 26, and in general  joining the hustle and bustle of the commuting, working world?

And also, not incidentally, when all of your work temporarily disappears overnight because you spend your days delivering live training events and going to conferences.

Bad news right? In The Coddling of the American Mind (read in February, 2020), I learned that in fact adversity can be good for us because it can make us more anti-fragile.  

Good news!  

Ok, let’s not waste a crisis then.

According to Atomic Habits (April) if you organize your life so that things are easier, you will do them. It’s not about will power, it's about making your environment organized to get you to make better choices. 

So rule number one:  have a book nearby and a place you like to sit.  

One way to do that?  On the last day the library is open in March 2020, check out 45 books.

Time to get busy reading…

Here are a few things I learned.

2020 was challenging, but so were other years

Some people have had their entire town burned to the ground, like in Fire in Paradise (June), or their city swept away in a tsunami, like in Ghosts of the Tsunami (August).

But pandemics do last longer than those things...

When I was wondering when this would be over, The Splendid and the Vile (August), made me realize that other eras and countries have had it far worse, and endured challenges for far longer. In Winston Churchill’s London, when bombs fell on the club you were currently attending, you would just go to the one down the street and continue the party.

By the way, what’s going on with the people doing the bombing? Apparently, according to Blitzed (September), Hitler, as well as most of the Nazi leadership and tons of soldiers were on serious drugs. How is it that I’ve never heard of this?  

We live in a remarkable and dynamic world, but we mostly live in our own minds.

Annika Harris‘s Conscious (June) made me wonder in a new way about time and made me realize that much of how I was feeling about 2020 was a part of my own mental reality.  

I also learned that memory and truth can be slippery, that fiction can be more true than reality, and that you can use humor to explore even the most challenging and controversial ideas.

I also realized again that there are a lot of books to read, and they are not all from this year.

Why was I doing all this reading, anway? According to Sam Harris’s Free Will (July), it wasn’t really me making those choices. Maybe my grandpa’s non-stop reading of geology books in his chair in Boulder Creek, California in 1975 made me do it?

What comes next?  

Maybe keep reading. According to Apollo’s Arrow (October), we will be fully “back to normal” in 2024.

Want to stay out of The Institute (February)? Grab a book and join me on the page in 2021.

I also watched a lot of television.

Thanks to the authors who dedicated so much of their intelligence and energy to create these works, and also thanks to the Manzanita library.