First published Dec 2018

I met my challenge of reading 52 books, or one a week, this year — because books are a balm, a shaft of light, an anchor in a turbulent world. Fiction is unashamedly my first love, although I didn't read as much of it as I would have liked. Donna Tartt, however, was a real find. I inhaled two of her novels, which balanced powerful plots, unvarnished emotion, and finessed writing: a lesser writer could not captivate for 600+ pages.

I didn't travel adventurously, but explored vast realms as a voyeur of another — Barry Lopez transported me to the Arctic, and I flew with Antoine de Saint Exupery as he piloted us across seas, sands, and the mysteries of the human heart. I ventured with the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger across the desolate and alluring sands of the Empty Quarter, with his bedu companions, in the night, in the heat, in the savagery and colour that dulls a softer life.

I also returned to my roots in philosophy, politics and economics, enjoying heavyweights such as Henry Kissinger and Thomas Piketty, and discovered Ta-Nehisi Coates' muscular vehemence -- a scathing analysis of race and history in America. On the topics of social justice and travel, I find my moods evocative, thoughts fecund, and on a few of these standouts I elaborate below.

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Matthew Desmond's “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” was assured and masterful. It read like a novel, but is entirely non-fictional, based on years of fieldwork with eight families living in the poorest neighbourhoods of Milkwaukee. I didn’t expect it to be this powerful, throwing into relief how complex people are and how our judgments are often flawed. It is gritty, evocative, human — the best that social science aims to be.

Political philosophy will always have a special place in my heart. But a word of caution: F.A. Hayek’s classic, “The Road to Serfdom", may be a little left-field for today's liberal sensitivities. (Note: ‘liberal’ begs to be defined.) I’d often heard of Hayek, but had not read him for myself. He writes with prophetic impulse from an arresting place in history (1944), observing fascism unfolding in Germany out of socialism, and makes such observations grounded in lived reality, that those of us partial to Marx’s ideas would do well not to ignore:

“For experience has made them wiser and sadder men: they have learned that neither good intentions nor efficiency of organisation can preserve decency in a system in which personal freedom and individual responsibility are destroyed.”

I had often thought that the solution to poverty was for wealth and resources to be better distributed. And I believed that if you had enough knowledge, money, will-power, and opportunity, you couldn't go very wrong. Nina Munk's portrait of Jeffrey Sachs and his Millennium Villages Project in “The Idealist” is a must-read that turns this notion on its head. Imagine if you were very smart — a full professor of economics with tenure at Harvard by the age of 28. If you had money — you raised US$120 million almost single-handedly. And you had a plan — to "reboot" African villages out of poverty though a massive infusion of assistance, and by creating a market-based system to provide jobs and income. What happens? This is more than a story of a single person, for Jeffrey Sachs remains a gifted individual who has tried to do much more than most of us ever will in our combined lifetimes. It leads me to reflect on the persistence of culture and politics against the ideals we aspire to, the enduring divergence between our noblest intentions and its skulking shadow, and the earth-bound reality that is the paradox of Man.

Travel is the Helen of genres that launches a thousand ships (or planes, or desires). Barry Lopez was a revelation in "Arctic Dreams": “In these Arctic narratives, then, are the threads of dreams that serve us all.” In lyrical and haunting prose, I learned variously about Eskimo natives, ship-strewn 18th century explorers who sought fortune and freedom, animals (narwhals, collared lemmings, polar bears), and the harsh, implacable, beauty of icebergs, glaciers, and valleys. Listen to this winter and feel yourself there, with the wind howl and wave cry and mewling of the ice:

“Not the cold but the oppression. The darkness that came down. The winter wind that picked up a boat and pitch-poled it across the frozen beach, as if darkly mad… In the feeble light between the drawn-in houses of a winter village, you can hear the breathing of something with ice for its heart.”

This is writing at its finest — a soaring that speaks not only to the author's gift but of years of hard work and dedication, to turn each image into words, each word into polished stone. Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities” was also a stand-out. Marco Polo, the famous explorer, describes to Kublai Khan all the places he has visited. The cities sound fantastical and awesome, but they were perhaps only the re-created images of his beloved Venice. So in travelling, home is never far away, and what we consider foreign are composed of the ordinary. Calvino's writing defies categorisation, is a conceit almost, and describes what a place must seem to those who know it best: everything that has been said is nothing that it is, yet anything that can be said is everything it must be. I read these words and think of Singapore — where our desires will lead us and whether we will be able to give form to them: “It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it." The best travel writers filter the light with which we see our world. In their light, we perceive another awakening — our deepest emotions trawled from the depths, slipping their shadowed cloaks, taking shape, given expression. For the explorer, then, a journey that speaks to the heart is one that has no map or itinerary; none, at least, that is visible. Something in the lostness and greatness evokes eternity, a never-ceasing search for wonder, and an understanding of ourselves.

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I greatly enjoyed and highly recommend those marked with **

Philosophy / Politics / Economics

• “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City”, Matthew Desmond**

• “The Road to Serfdom”, F.A. Hayek**

• “The Economics of Inequality”, Thomas Piketty**

• “The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty”, Nina Munk**

• “World Order”, Henry Kissinger**

• “The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity”, Esther Perel**

• "We Were Eight Years in Power", Ta-Nehisi Coates**

• "The Fire Next Time", James Baldwin**

• “Between The World And Me”, Ta-Nehisi Coates

• “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, Wittgenstein

• “Fear and Trembling”, Kierkegaard

• “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity”, Katherine Boo

• “The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality”, Branko Milanovic

• “More than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty”, Dean Karlan

• “This is What Inequality Looks Like”, Teo You Yenn

• “Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore”, Chua Beng Huat

• “Can Singapore Fall”, Lim Siong Guan

• "The Leader, The Teacher, and You", Lim Siong Guan

• “The Christian World: A Global History”, Martin E. Marty

• “Jesus: A Very Short Introduction”, Richard Bauckham

Fiction

• “The GoldFinch”, Donna Tartt**

• “The Secret History”, Donna Tartt**

• “A Fire Upon the Deep”, Vernor Vinge**

• “The Ocean At the End of the Lane”, Neil Gaiman**

• “Ready Player One”, Ernest Cline

• "The Dry", Jane Harper

• “The Doll Maker”, Mary Burton

• “State of Emergency”, Jeremy Tiang

• “Ministry of Moral Panic”, Amanda Lee Koe

• Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus series

Travel / Meditations / Memoir

• “Arctic Dreams”, Barry Lopez**

• “Invisible Cities”, Italo Calvino**

• “Upstream”, Mary Oliver**

• “Wind, Sand, and Stars”, Antoine de Saint-Exupery**

• “Arabian Sands”, Wilfred Thesiger

• “The Glass Castle”, Jeanette Walls

• “The Rules Do Not Apply”, Ariel Levy

• “Let Me Be A Woman”, Elisabeth Elliot

Skills / Tech

• “Draft No. 4”, John McPhee**

• “The Business Blockchain”, William Mougayar**

• “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ”, Daniel Goleman

• “Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions”, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

• “Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness”, Patrick Lambe