14 Books We Love

By Christian Madsbjerg

1. 2666
   By Roberto Bolaño
   This tome by the Chilean poet and novelist is both lyrical and mind-numbingly brutal. It brings you calmly through a slog of cruelties, but rewards the reader with dreamy landscapes, captivatingly flawed characters, and stunning, solitary moments. The characters’ perverse adventures ramble on but pull together in a way that leaves you confused, and changed.

2. Buddenbrooks
   By Thomas Mann
   Mann creates a history of the unification of Germany, using regional dialects as well as French to comment on class, culture, and empire-building. His story of four generations of a merchant family is a sociological commentary on the middle class that seems to critique Weber’s “Protestant ethic” with equal parts comedy and pessimism (the subtitle of the novel is “Decline of a Family”). It’s also a deeply personal portrait of a family that explores childhood, nostalgia, and sexuality, as well as philosophical questions inspired by Mann’s own interest in Schopenhauer.

3. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
   By Joseph A. Schumpeter
   In Schumpeter’s landmark 1942 book he predicts that capitalism will collapse from within, because its success will undermine the values of the intellectuals who believe in it. In it he coined the term “creative destruction,” an economic concept based on the idea that new ideas and products destroy old ones—a helpful framework for understanding how innovation works.

4. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
   By David Foster Wallace
   Wallace’s witty and often-hilarious essays probe the nuances of everything from porn to a lobster festival in Maine. He immerses himself in the facts and details of everyday interactions, examining our hypocrisies and failings, our oddball needs and rapacious pursuit of entertainment — even the subtleties of diction. (“At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale…It is humility with a comb-over.”)

5. The Craftsman
   By Richard Sennett
   In a world that has become obsessed with quantifying skills and measuring people by their contribution to the bottom line it is both liberating and thought provoking to read Sennett’s book on what constitutes good work. Sennett gives a detailed account of what craftsmanship is and why it matters. He then deconstructs the work of great cooks, architects, doctors, violin builders, and even urban planners, in order to distill the essence of what good craftsmanship is. Good work, Sennett argues, is not about the money or personal gain. It is about the work itself. Doing your job well, he underscores, is probably the most significant factor in maintaining high ethical standards, a sense of beauty, and a good quality of life. Read this book and then get back to work.

6. Fear and Trembling
   By Søren Kierkegaard
   For Kierkegaard true faith is deeply irrational and painful — the “fear and trembling” of the title. A leap of faith, according to the Danish philosopher, is revealed in the way a person under 70,000 fathoms of water still believes he can reach land, and does, despite the impossibility of that belief. He uses the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 to probe the relationship between ethics and religion, questioning what it means to have your faith tested, as well as the nature of our belief in and commitment to God.

7. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
   By Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
   Ernesto Laclau has had a major influence on the way we think. His version of Lacanian and Foucauldian discourse analysis is by far the most pragmatic for us to use in our project work. The book is really an exposition of the authors’ ideas on how we construct meaning and how language is used in power struggles. The third chapter of the book is where this claim is most fully developed and it is the section most worth reading—if you’re able to get through that chapter in less than three hours we will serve you champagne.

8. Invisible Cities
   By Italo Calvino
   Calvino’s moody tales are framed as a conversation between the emperor Kublai Khan and the explorer Marco Polo. As Polo recounts his travels through Khan’s territories, he breaks down the geography and physical limits of 55 cities, leaving the reader with a rare sense of new dimensions.

9. The Life of The Mind
   By Hannah Arendt
   The Life of the Mind is Arendt’s best book. She explores how the human mind works and what role thinking plays in our lives—especially in the sphere of politics. She develops three main categories (Behavior, Action, and Thinking) of how the mind works. Thinking, an activity that few people ever engage in, often happens outside of history and is a way of trying to fundamentally understand what is going on in the world outside of daily life. The book is not easy to read and is slightly Germanic in tone, but nonetheless it provides some of the best hours anyone can spend with a book.

10. The Hidden Persuaders
    By Vance Packard
    Packard takes us on a comprehensive and entertaining jaunt through the incipient stages of advertising culture and its scandalous repercussions. He shows how advertising prevailed. He demystifies consumer trends—compact cars, cigarettes, healthy foods—and explains how motivational research and other psychological manipulations are used to get us to follow them.

11. On Photography
    By Susan Sontag
    Sontag’s 1977 collection of essays explores the history of photography in America. She probes ideas on photography as self-realization and which challenges the way we view the world around us. In analyzing the medium as an art form Sontag addresses how we receive images and translate them in our lives.

12. Pattern Recognition
    By William Gibson
    This thriller by the science-fiction writer William Gibson explores our compulsion to find or create patterns in data. It tracks the adventures of a consultant who has developed an aversion to symbols and who goes undercover to find the person who has been distributing the cryptic and artsy film clips that have been gaining a cult following online. (Corporate hacks are interested in the wildly successful distribution process and intrigued by the commercial aspect of art.) What interests us is how the story closely resembles the lives we as consultants lead: global, intense, messy. Like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Pattern Recognition describes how far the sciences of human activity have come and their ethical implications. It’s also a really great story that you can read in one go.

13. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
    By Erving Goffman
    Goffman’s sociological piece from 1959 analyzes why we humans are constantly trying to calculate our behaviors and our presentation of “self.” With his razor-sharp observations of everyday life, Goffman shows how social role-play shapes and constrains the way we act in the social arena. It is a compelling and insightful read that decodes how we manage the impressions we give off.

14. The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History
    By Don Oberdorfer
    The book, which chronicles the divided paths of the two Koreas twenty years after the Korean War, offers a keen analysis of the struggle for South Koreans to move from military dictatorship to a liberalized democracy. The Two Koreas chronicles the race between two sibling nations to prevail over one another and sheds light on the psychology of urgency that drove progress and development in South Korea after the war and continues to shape its culture today.

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