350. Best books of 2022 🤓
My five favorite books + all the books I read this year
Hi there 👋
Thank you to all the many people who helped amplify the jobs board I shared last week. And thank you to everyone who applied to join the jobs collective. It’s not too late to apply, if you missed it. And it’s never too late to share the board with anyone in your network who is looking for a new job. Lots of great opportunities are out there right now!
Here’s a link to the jobs board itself (new job from Watershed just got added today). And here’s a link on how to apply for the collective.
Wishing you a great week,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Best books of 2022
One of my favorite perks while working at Buffer was the unlimited books policy: You could request as many Kindle books as you’d like, no questions asked. Before Buffer, I didn’t really read much at all. Since Buffer, I’ve averaged about one book per week and have even crossed the 100-book mark a couple of years.
This year, I read 54 books.
(A couple of them were children’s books, which seems like cheating, but I still have a couple weeks left in December to make up for it.)
I try to read a wide variety of genres, authors, and perspectives. This year, I read cookbooks, graphic novels, zines, Pulitzer Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, novellas, and more. I aimed for a 50:50 ratio of books written by women and by men, and I attempted to better round out my reading list with non-American authors. I even did a book challenge or two (unsuccessfully — I got very stuck on Read a Nordic Noir.)
Here is a list of my very favorite books from the past year as well as the complete list of everything I’ve read.
What were your favorite reads of 2022?
I’d love to hear about them. Please do reply or shoot me an email at hello@kevanlee.com.
Best business-ish book
The Sea We Swim In by Frank Rose
This is a story all about storytelling (how meta), and though it was not intended to be a business book, I found it to be full of incredibly relevant anecdotes and frameworks for startup marketers who are building big brands. The author, Frank Rose, has been a contributor at Wired and Fortune and is now a professor at Columbia University. He has studied some of the best storytelling in the culture and the market, which gives the book a solid foundation in practical marketing. Here are two of my favorite anecdotes:
The marketing agency conducted a survey for a beer brand to better understand how to reach a younger audience. This is one of the comments back:
Focus on making an excellent product. If you do so, then all of your marketing will be true, and most of the marketing will be done by us.
And then regarding the power of customer research and the disconnects it can expose, Frank told this story about a group of BBC executives who took part in customer research:
We were given a “gamer” for our group – a nice enough guy in his early 20s who very politely answered the questions of the dozen or so media execs on my table. Yes, he did play games for a couple of hours a day. No, they weren’t all about kiling things. No, he didn’t play alone – his friends would come round for the night. Yes, he did find time to watch a bit of television as well. Yes, he did prefer gaming to television. No, he didn’t think that was weird
The reaction in my group was almost as if an alien had landed
Book that made me feel the most feelings
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
This book was beautifully written and incredibly honest about the inner life of a main character who is experiencing change, loss, health, ennui — so many different things and feelings and yet all so relatable.
Putting him to bed once, I asked him why he liked having something in his hand. At the time he was holding the strip of flannel he slept with. He said, “I don’t like it.” I asked him why he did it then. “So I don’t sink.” He looked at me nervously, as if I might laugh at him. “My mum wouldn’t be able to find me.” I told him I knew what that felt like, not wanting to sink. He held up the piece of flannel and asked me if I needed it; he would give it to me. “I know you would but it’s okay. Thank you. It’s your lovely thing.”
Book that explained my childhood
The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman
Having grown up in the 90s, I was oblivious to the greater sociological trends happening all around me — like, why is cable TV a big deal? or what is the macro impact of a Nirvana song? — so this retrospective from Chuck Klosterman was extremely fascinating. I knew all the things he was talking about, but I also didn’t know anything about the things he was talking about.
Historical non-fiction like this also helps give me a much better perspective on the realities of today. Take this quote about smartphones vs. landlines, for instance:
Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it.
Mini MBA in personal finance
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
This book makes a great companion read for one of my faves from last year, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. The Psychology of Money is much more broad strokes than the tactics of I Will Teach You … but I found it to be indispensable nonetheless. It made me recommit to my views on money with even greater conviction.
The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”
Best series finale
The Fall of Koli by M.R. Carey
The three-part Koli series is one of my favorite science fiction series ever because — yes, there’s cool dystopian stuff but also — there is just so much love and affection between all the characters and a purity to the story. Highly recommended if you like sci-fi.
The people of the before-times had been so rich they could use their tech not just for weighty things but to give them pleasure in an idle moment. I wondered: did they know they lived in Edenguard, or did they dream of a higher Heaven still?
—
And here’s the list of all 54 books that I read this year, broken out into genres. If you’d ever like to see the latest things I read, I track everything on this website and update it in real-time throughout the year.
Non-fiction
Business-y books
The Sea We Swim In
Trust Me I’m Lying
This is Not a T-Shirt
Memoir
Ducks
Foreverland
Little Weirds
Seek You
My David Sedaris rabbit hole
Happy-Go-Lucky
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Naked
History & Biography
Everything Now
Come Fly the World
Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres
Sellout: The Major Label Feeding Frenzy that Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore
The Cult of We
The Forgotten First
The Anthropocene
The Pioneers
Call Me God
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America
Madhouse at the End of the Earth
Cultish
Fuzz
Misc.
How We Live is How We Die
The Longevity Code
Psychology of Money
Fox & I
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Cook This Book
Fiction
The Cartographers
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
When Women Were Dragons
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
Puppy in My Head
Too Loud a Solitude
People We Meet on Vacation
Either / Or
Less
Sorrow and Bliss
Something New Under the Sun
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Matrix
Science-Fiction
Cult Classic
Upgrade
The Fall of Koli
Salamander
A Psalm for the Wild-built
The Atmospherians
Essays
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
Her Body and Other Parties
Misc.
Airbnb’s vision to build a 21st-century company. Do you like it?
52 Things I Learned in 2022 — an annual list by Tom Whitwell
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster. I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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