Holiday Special: Review of the Year 2022

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Beatrice Di Caro: From the World Economic Forum. I'm Beatrice Di Caro, and this is the Book Club Podcast. As a year, 2022 draws to a close, we're starting this episode with Kate Whiting and myself looking back on what our favorite books were from this year. We'll also listen to key quotes and moments from the Book Club Podcast episodes from 2022, and we'll also hear from World Economic Forum colleagues on what their best reads of 2022 were. Kate, welcome back, it's always a pleasure to have you during the World Economic Forum Book Club Podcast. I'm really excited for this episode, starting with us having a chat about our own personal reads from the year. You know, I've been on BookTok all of 2022 and it has recommended me some incredible reads. And I thought we could start off the last episode of the year looking at what we've read, what we've enjoyed, and and take you from there. OK, I know this is a hard question, but what was your favorite book of this year and why? What is it about? Tell us.

Kate Whiting: Thanks, Bea. So good to be back on the podcast with you. My first pick for books I've read this year, I think this is probably the top one really is called Can't We Just Print More Money? Economics in 10 Simple Questions and it's by two economists at the Bank of England Rupal Patel and Jack Meaning. So since 2017, the Bank of England has been on a bit of a mission to promote economic literacy around the UK. And this primer on economics, which was published this year, is actually part of that. And it answers questions such as why shouldn't I hoard all my money under the mattress and whether economics can solve climate change? But it grounds the sort of in an analogy of why England economists always take too many chips or fries at the staff canteen. This is something called Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, where individuals always overconsume resources. And in relation to the climate emergency, there's also short-termism which former governor of Bank of England, Mark Carney, termed the Tragedy of the Horizons. So it looks at inflation and interest rates and all these kind of questions that have come out of this year, really. So if you know absolutely nothing about economics and you want to start somewhere, this is somewhere I recommend that you start. It's a really, really good book.

Beatrice Di Caro: Great pick. What a strong start to the episode. That sounds really good, I want to add to my list. If I were to give my first suggestion, I would go with Annie Ernaux Getting Lost. I was raised in the French system, so I had heard of Annie Ernaux, her work, but I never read Getting Lost and her winning the Nobel Prize this year reminded me of her work, and I dove back in by reading Getting Lost the diaries from more or less the year 1989 to 1990. And it tells the story of her affair with a Russian diplomat in Paris. And it is incredibly honest and raw. And the book is basically the pursuit of this affair with this man. And she's constantly trying to recreate their first night together. And she talks about things that, you know, at the time were quite taboo and talking about female desire, death, abortion. And she does all of this without any shame and just tells the story as it is. And we get to know her and get to feel like we're talking to her in a cafe. And I really adored getting back into her work, and I'm looking forward to reading more of her books. So that would be my number one pick this year. And what about you, Kate? What's the second one on your list?

Kate Whiting: Yeah, so I think similarly to you, I ended up reading I know we talked about this before, quite a lot of nonfiction this year just with one thing or another. But there was one book that stood out for me this year that was a fiction book that I read. And it's not it's not recent. I think it was in the nineties. It's called How to Make an American Quilt by Whitney Otto. And there's actually a film of this book. And I came to the film first and I don't know if you feel the same about this, but you often read a before you see a film, and then you are sure that the other one's not going to match up. And actually this time the book was excellent. And it more than, you know, did the film justice because I'd seen the film first, but it stars the film stars Maya Angelou and Winona Ryder. I managed to find a second-hand copy of this book and there's something really lovely about. So it was an excellent book and just holding a book that I knew loads of other people had some through. And yeah, that just hopefully also enjoyed it as much as I had. It tells the stories of a diverse group of women in California who come together in a quilting group, as the name suggests. And it's about this sort of gritty reality of love, war and racial injustice. And so it's just these brilliant sort of stories of these women, and they've all sort of knitted together like they're working on this quilt. And there were threads that run through all of them. So it's just very heartwarming.

Beatrice Di Caro: Great. Thanks for sharing. One more to add to my list for sure. My second book of the year would have to go to Ben Macintyre's Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison. I love reading about history and especially about the Second World War. So it's no surprise that Ben Macintyre has become one of my favorite authors. I've read everything from The Spy and the Traitor to Operation Mincemeat. I really have become one of his biggest fans and it's no difference with Colditz. The book presents a story about this prison where the German army used to hold the most defiant allied prisoners. And it tells a story about their numerous escape attempts. It tells a story about, you know, some of the most popular prisoners to the least popular to class conflicts, alliances, and really shows day to day lives of these men in this prison. And there were fascinating stories about characters like an Indian doctor, the only Indian prisoner at Colditz who went on a hunger strike. And there are so many fascinating aspects to life at Colditz. And the book goes right up to its liberation. And it's just an incredible book from from Ben Macintyre, which I highly, highly recommend for any history geeks out there like me. So, Kate, back to you. What was your third pick of 22?

Kate Whiting: Okay. So the last one I guess I picked from the year and just to show the variety of different things may be going on in my life. This is called The Book You Wish Your Parents Would Read and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did. I don't often find myself in the self-help section of bookshops, but this one they nowadays turn books around facing out that are on the big show. And this was one of those books, and it's written by a psychotherapist called Philippa Perry, who is the wife of the artist Grayson. It was updated in 2020. I am the mother of two children. So it was interesting from that perspective, but also as a daughter. So it works both ways round, obviously. And it was is quite tough going actually, because you sort of feel like a lot of the things you're doing wrong. But it's part of this movement, called gentle parenting. And so it's sort of looking at how we are parenting children. And the core takeaway for me and hopefully all parents is this idea of rupture and repair, that actually repairing is more important than the rupture. So you just take time to make up and say sorry to children. If you go across with them and explain what's going on in your life and the stresses that you're under and why you maybe, you know, got as angry as you did. And I guess it's just not treating children like they don't really understand what's going on. It's kind of giving them the benefit of the doubt and, you know, validating their feelings and allowing them to feel and kind of recognize the feelings they're having as well. So yeah, there were a lot of sort of good learnings for me in that as a mum, but also just a really interesting book about psychology.

Beatrice Di Caro: Good. Yeah. Another one to add to my list. This is proving to be quite a useful chat. But if I had to look at my last book of the year, I am going to cheat and I'm going to mention two because there are too many. One, which was a book that I read at the beginning of 2022 and it's Girl Woman Other by Bernardine Evaristo, the winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 and the first black woman to win the award. I bought it when she won and then added it to the pile of books next to my bed that I tried to get through and just didn't get to it. And I must say, I really loved it. The book looks at a group of black British women and looks at how their lives are intertwined and looks at class, race, friendship, relationships, what it means to be a woman. It's a fascinating book that gives us insight into these women's lives and the way she writes and the way you jump from one character to the other was something I just adored and her book has to go on on my top list for 2022, so late to the party but incredible read. Another one again just add a bit there, I'm on BookTok and I spend hours just seeing what pops up. A lot of my book recommendations come from there. Some have been great and some not so much, but one that I loved and I saw everywhere was Jennette McCurdy's autobiography, I'm Glad My Mum Died. Quite a strong title and it's just an incredible story. I was born in 93, so I really grew up with the Nickelodeon sort of family of stars. And I remember watching her on her show iCarly and had no idea of what was going on behind the scenes. And the story looks at how she began her acting career way too young and how she ended it officially in 2017. And the abuse she faced coming from her mother. And the book touches on a lot of, you know, difficult subjects eating disorders, abuse, mental and physical. And it isn't an easy read, but she tells the story with grace. And again, it's a very open, raw book. And as you can see from my suggestions, a lot of what I read is historical or autobiographical. And yeah, I just had to add this one to to the list thanks to BookTok. So thank you to Kate for joining and for looking through some of her favorite reads from the year. And now I think we're going to take a quick look at some of the best moments from our book club episodes and hear from some of our favorite authors that have appeared on the show. To begin, let's hear from our first ever guest on the World Economic Forum Book Club Podcast. Organizational psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant talking to us about his book, Think Again.

Adam Grant: I think that one of the dangers of living in a rapidly changing world is that we end up carrying around mental fossils in our heads, old opinions and assumptions that might have made sense in a previous version of the world, but are no longer true. And I think in a in a dynamic world, we need to be as quick to think again as we were to think in the first place.

Beatrice Di Caro: And in terms of thinking again, maybe I need to think again about some of the books I'm reading because all I'm reading is non-fiction. But moving on to another one of our amazing guests, Elif Shafak, who I spoke to to speak about her latest novel, The Island of Missing Trees. And she made a very passionate case for why we should all have a very diverse reading list, in particular fiction.

Elif Shafak: Inside fiction, there is everything inside a novel. There is politics, technology, there's psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and there's so much more. But perhaps most importantly, there's emotional intelligence and there's empathy. And I don't know a single person in this world who doesn't need emotional intelligence.

Beatrice Di Caro: Very wise words from Elif Shafak. Some of our latest episodes have tackled the climate crisis, and the issues were center stage at COP27 in November in Egypt. And over the course of the year, we covered two books by two very different authors that both deal with the issue of climate migration. I spoke to one of the forum's young global leaders, Parag Khanna, about his book, Move: The Forces Uprooting Us.

Parag Khanna: So I advocate, you know, what I call the cosmopolitan utilitarianism, right? So, you know, fraternity with one and fellow man, but but also utilitarian meaning seeking to improve the conditions, the living conditions and the welfare for as many people as possible. And that will require enabling people to leave areas that, again, through our own deeds of the unlivable and helping to resettle them in places that are. And we will be glad that we did because the world population is plateauing at just about less than 9 million people potentially. So we have a self-interest in this because we need to actually preserve our numbers as a human species.

Beatrice Di Caro: And my colleague Kate spoke to journalist Gaia Vince about Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval.

Gaia Vince: We've just had this horrendous summer that has affected everywhere from India and Pakistan to the US to Europe to China everywhere. So we're now getting the conversation a little bit about adaptation, but still nobody is talking about the large places around the world and with huge populations that simply will not be able to adapt. As the conditions become more extreme over the coming decades. There is no plan in place to manage that and these people will have to move. Migration is already now inevitable. The degree is not inevitable. We can still change, you know, who has to migrate and in what numbers. But nevertheless, we need to start talking about this as an honest and realistic situation so that we can put in place some plans to manage it.

Beatrice Di Caro: We also had the privilege of speaking to the Booker Prize winner of 2022 Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, just days after he won the award. If you haven't read his book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida here, he sums it up.

Shehan Karunatilaka: Well, it's complicated. It's the short answer, but it's at its heart. It's a murder mystery about a dead war photographer trying to find out solving his own murder. But it's set during 1989, during a time where Sri Lanka was fighting three wars at the same time. Also a political thriller in that this war photographer has got photographs under his bed of the atrocities of the Sri Lankan tragedies and that yeah, this is going to he's going to expose this. So that's another motivation. But also it's an imagining of the afterlife. There's a love triangle at the center of it. There's a lot of ghosts and ghostly philosophizing and a few go. So many moving parts. But I think yeah. In a sentence it's it's about a dead war photographer trying to give them seven moons to make peace with with his life.

Beatrice Di Caro: Each year, the forum publishes the Global Gender Gap Report, which looks at how long it will take to reach gender parity in different countries and in different spheres, from health to politics. My colleague Kate spoke to two women authors about how we can reduce gender bias and reduce discrimination against working mothers. Journalist Jessica Nordell said the process of writing her book The End of Bias: How We Change Our Minds, had a huge impact on her own perception of bias.

Jessica Nordell: I started writing this book thinking that I was writing a pure science book and I was going to look at the research and I was going to use all of my powers of scientific thinking and analysis to look at what worked and bring it to as many people as possible and, you know, put a dent in this problem. I did not expect it to affect me as deeply as it did. And maybe that, you know, that could have just been my naivete, my, you know, miss-self-perception, which I think many of us have. I didn't see how deeply these biases. Affected me and how deeply I had internalized these biases, particularly sexism. Honestly, I mean, I'm a very vocal feminist. I have no problem speaking up. I feel very confident as a woman. And yet I found that the more deeply I investigated the origin of the patriarchal ideas, the idea of male supremacy, which I talk about a lot in the book. When I looked at the origin of these ideas, I could see the ways that they had affected how I thought about myself, how I thought about other women, how I interacted with other women, the kinds of assumptions I made about other women. And that was a very I almost want to say, a kind of spiritually devastating realization.

Beatrice Di Caro: And women's rights campaigner and founder of Pregnant Then Screwed, Joeli Brearley explained what The Motherhood Penalty, which is the title of her book, actually means.

Joeli Brearley: The Motherhood Penalty is actually a term that's coined by sociologists, and it's about the systematic disadvantage that women encounter in the workplace when they become mothers in terms of pay, perceived competence and benefits compared to other workers. So essentially the motherhood penalty is for me is the gender pay gap. Motherhood penalty makes up. Some studies have shown 80% of the gender pay gap, and it really is about all of these barriers that women had. But when they try to have children and a career that fathers just don't experience.

Beatrice Di Caro: One of our latest episodes, an interview with Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo, who spoke to my colleague Julie Masiga, looked at her motivation for writing her latest book, How Boards Work and How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World.

Dambisa Moyo: Very important for us, and it continues to be very important for us to understand that if we really are serious about addressing the problems that the world faces, climate inequality, growth declines, geopolitics, etc. we need everybody at the table. We cannot start saying, Well, we don't want corporations there or we don't want government there. We don't want NGOs, everybody. This is so serious. Everything is so serious now. We need all hands on deck. But many of these organizations have constraints. But I think it's really important for people to understand what these businesses are coming with, boards are coming with, in terms of their contributions and how that was going to play a big role for society. So that's why motivated to write the book.

Beatrice Di Caro: It's been an honor talking to these incredible authors with my colleague Kate. We haven't featured all of the best moments from the year in today's episode, so if you're taking some time off over the holidays, go search for the Book Club Podcast on any podcast platform and take a listen to all of the wonderful interviews we've had. To end the episode, we asked some friends and colleagues around the World Economic Forum to tell us what their favorite read of 2022 was.

Kulé Galma: Hi, my name is Kulé and this year my favorite read was Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. It is a thought provoking and moving novel that centers on the story of Gifty, a young Ghanaian-American woman who struggles to understand and overcome the traumas of her past. I found the writing to be beautiful, yet evocative, and the themes were personal and universal. So if you're looking for a book that will stir up those emotions, then this one is the one for you.

Eoin O Cathasaigh: My name's Eoin, and this year, one of my favorite non-fiction books was Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War. It's this wonderfully written book by a historian called Deborah Cohen, and she charts the lives of this gang of five American foreign correspondents writing in Europe in the twenties. They kind of wrote the rule book on what it means to be a foreign correspondent. And in this wild period, they interview everyone from Gandhi to Mussolini and Hitler and many others. I really liked it because you get a great sense of what it felt like in Europe in those years. And also, it hammers home just how influential these folks were in shaping opinions on world affairs in an era before television so loved it. Highly recommend.

Pavitra Raja: Hi there, this is Pavitra Raja. A book that I enjoyed this year has to be Nutshell by Ian McEwan. Fantastic book. It's a retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, but from the perspective of an unborn child. It's brilliant. Trust me, it's great.

Hao Wang: Hi, I'm Hao. My favorite book this year is a collective literature called The Stars of the Workers, written by nine migrant workers from rural areas of China. They came to Beijing, living on the outskirts of the city and working as nannies, doormen, cleaning staff, peddlers and construction workers. The book shows a unique perception of life and the perseverance of the migrant workers with full of emotions. This book is a must read if you read Chinese. I highly recommend it.

Bianca Bertaccini: Hi, my name is Bianca and my favorite book for 2022 was The Moustache by Emmanuel Carrère. The story develops around the fact the unnamed main character who has worn a mustache for over a decade one day decides to shave it off. And guess what? No one realizes it. This is because conscious observation is abandoned in favor of their assumed appearance. However, the apparently marginal act of shaving the moustache starts triggering a multitude of cause and effect. It occupies the remaining narrative. If you feel intrigued by a book that will leave you speechless, this one is for you.

Abdellah Hmamouche: Hello. My name is Abdellah and my book recommendation for 2022 is written by Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami. And it's called The Other Americans. The novel follows the story of an immigrant who is killed in a hit-and run in California. And the story is told in the perspective of nine different people who knew the victim. I hope you enjoy the read and have a great rest of the year.

Beatrice Di Caro: Great suggestions and echoing Abdellah's thoughts at the end there, we thank you so much for listening to the World Economic Forum Book Club podcast throughout the year. Hope you have a restful holiday period and don't forget to come back in 2023 where we'll be dropping even more exciting interviews with authors. Don't forget to send us any suggestions for authors you'd like us to feature. And as always, leave us a review. Search out our sister, podcasts, Radio Davos and Meet the Leader. Big thanks to Gareth Nolan, who produced this episode and many of the other book club episodes. Thank you to Robin Pomeroy, our podcast editor. Thank you all for listening and goodbye.