The Reading Stack for August 2024 📚
a hot take, a modern master, a stoic re-read, a polarizing billionaire, norwegian self loathing pt 2
Well it’s almost September, the ninth month of the year. I’m only at 30 books which means I’ll have to pickup speed to hit 52 this year. No more skipping books because they’re too long. It’s sheepish and petty and antithetical to wtf I’m trying to do with the: write-a-novel-that-people-read-a-hundred-years-from-now thing.
Anyway.
I recently received a few excellent, bookish questions:
What books are you reading (or have you read) which have shaped:
A) Your life & worldview?
B) Your approach to leadership, business, and organizational design?
Are you a father? If so, what has raising kids taught you about building a team?
It’s interesting to see how cultural tides can change over the years. I haven’t followed Harari as much of late, but current events seem to have harmed his public perception. I was being honest with this answer: I read Sapiens at a particularly formative time, and still believe his insights like “collective fictions” and “imagined realities” to be useful frameworks for viewing the world.
As far as the second question goes, next time.
📖 Ok books inbound.
The Books 📚
Book #25 of 2024 - Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
Hot take #1
I read Fourth Wing and actually enjoyed it…
I don’t know how I feel about the merging of smut + fantasy writ large: I’m glad that it’s gotten people reading again, but it’s not usually for me. What I will say, however, is that Fourth Wing is “romantasy” in name only, and I’m happy my partner convinced me to listen to it on our road trip. What I enjoyed most was the originality: the magic system in Yarros world is not like one I’ve read before, nor is the book layered with tropes and archetypes that we’ve seen over and again.1 Usually man controls dragon, and wreaks havoc on the world but, in Fourth Wing, the dragons are in control.
The story follows the frail, bookish, tiny 22 year old Violet Sorrengail, daughter of the country’s commanding general, as she fights to survive her time at Basgaith War College. Something like 50% of students die during their first year, and Sorrengail has a target on her back, but she also has gifts that are, frankly, pretty badass. On the whole, the book has a good mix of political maneuvering, action, and relational spice. For my thoughts on the smut, click this footnote.2
I wouldn’t have read this without some serious urging, but I’m glad I did, and would recommend it if you can endure a bit of cringe.
Book #26 - Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
Hot take #2
Unlike most people, I don’t hate Elon Musk. He’s an immature man-child with little regard for individuals, but the man cares about the world. No one has done more for climate change (electric vehicles), space expansion (SpaceX), guardianship of free speech (Twitter), neural repatriation (Neuralink), and humankind writ large.
That said, my praise for this book is more authorial than subjective. Walter Isaacson is the greatest biographer of all time.3 Granted he’s written about some of the most interesting humans in history—Steve Jobs, Da Vinci, Ben Franklin—but his are always the most captivating, less empathetic, less holistic pieces of literature. Isaacson is a master at capturing iconoclasts both in the gestalt and in the minutiae.
If you want the most indicative paragraph of the book hit this footnote: 4
Walter Isaacson === rich cake 🤌
Book #27 - Telephone by Percival Everett
Now for the man of the hour, Percival Everett.
Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure, was the basis for last year’s smash hit film American Fiction, and his book sales have gone a-roaring ever since. Neither Dan nor I had read any of his work, so we chose to read Telephone (2020) on our novel-journey from 2000-2024. Man, was this book good. And it’s one of those books that since it has finished I’ve thought about more and more, with increasing fondness and excitement to read more books by him. The first half reads like John William’s Stoner, a cult classic about a stodgy college professor who dates a student, while the second half is closer to a Cormac McCarthy southwestern adventure. If you’ve listened to the pod, you know we dig both of those authors so this was a treat to say the least. Also, Everett has balls. I didn’t know it until finishing, but the novel actually has three different endings—the conclusion to the e-book (which I read) made me laugh out loud.5
Telephone was one of the better books I’ve read this year. Worth a look.
Book #28 - Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Here’s a book that I’ve heard a lot about but never got fully into. Unlike Telephone I’ve barely given it a second thought over the past weeks. It’s a stellar work of short fiction written by a clearly talented Irish author about a terrible moment in history. It has all the trappings of pulling in a reader. But it never hooked me. We can’t love every book.
She’s a better novelist than me. I am the one defending Fourth Wing while she gets 180,000 positive reviews on Goodreads. So don’t take my word for it. We’ll be chatting about what we did and did not like on Good Scribes soon.
Book #29 - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
There are some books I read and reread. Meditations is one of them.
There’s a meditation to be had here about books having a time and place for the reader. I’ve read this one three or four times in my twenties, and this was the first time it felt like effort to read. There were some days that I connected but most of the time it was plodding along hoping the magic would come back.
Why does a book strike you at one point and not at another? Am I hungry for novelty right now? Have I moved on to other philosophers? Other philosophies? Or are the teachings more solidly in me now, time for other stoics? Could it be my relationships? Could it be my relationship with myself?
It’s not the first time my thoughts on a book have changed. There are authors I used to love and don’t bond with so much anymore. There are books I found boring that surprised me on a second read.
Re-reading books and examining how we feel about them is a worthy vessel for self study.
It is a phenomenal book. I agree with Ryan Holiday when he says it’s one of the best ever written. I’ll come back to it again.
Book #30 - My Struggle Pt 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard
In January, I called the My Struggle series a 3,600 page Proustian masterpiece. Love, death, art, fear. Fatherhood, meaning, addiction, change. Knausgaard takes it all on. Part two of the semi-autobiographical novel follows Karl Ove Knausgaard as he falls in love and starts a family. Thought it’s not a heartwarming tale. It’s heavy and intense and slow at times but always redemptive.
Either I would begin writing about my life the way it was now, like a diary and open to the future, with everything that had happened over recent years as a dark undercurrent - or I would continue the story I started three days ago.
Then I met Linda and the sun rose.
I can’t find a better way to express it. At first, as dawn breaking n the horizon, almost as if to say, this is where you have to look. Then came the first rays of sunshine, everything became clearer, lighter, more alive, and I became happier and happier, and then it hung in the sky of my life and shone and shone and shone.
A dazzling excerpt to say the least. Knausgaard is exceptional like that. There’s a podcast episode if you want to hear two people hem and haw about him. But I have to add that Part 2 was significantly less stimulating to me than Part 1. Maybe it was the novelty wearing off, maybe I read the too close together. Or maybe it just hit too close to home.
It’s an undertaking, but My Struggle is rewarding and stimulating in similar ways to Infinite Jest6. Unquestionably worth reading.
📚 Years ago,
I committed to a life of books, and that choice led me to view reading and writing as a privilege and a practice. It occurred to me that no matter how much time I dedicate to reading, I won’t come close to getting through all the great writing out there. The realization freed me up to explore books of all kinds, not just the greats. Now, even as reading time grows more scarce, I pickup whatever sounds compelling, and am writing even when I’m not at my desk.7
Books are magic. Learning is magic. And my biggest wish is that you treat your mind with the books it deserves.
Cheers,
—J
I love a good wizard or dwarf or elf as much as the next guy, but it can be overbearing at times. Balance is key with archetypes.
There were only two points where the author goes into the hyper descriptive clitoral depths of smut that readers of the genre long for, and I skipped over those. Because they were sex scenes I didn’t miss anything important by skipping over them. An interesting aside that I want to look over again is the depth of George RR Martin’s sex scenes. The show has sex and nudity everywhere you look, but I dont remember this when reading them—granted I read them in high school and college. Anyway, the two sex scenes weren’t too long and I just viewed them the same way someone might view a sword fight between two warriors or superheroes throwing down. Eye/ear/mind candy. To each his/her own.
The GBOAT! 🐐👑✍️
“One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth. As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex. Even the best people are molded out of faults.”
The ebook version is a literary fuck off to reader, which I found hilarious and ballsy. The other two versions—here’s a spreadsheet of the differences—have much more fulfilling endings but I wasn’t turned off by the ebook version which ends with loose threads dangling.
They are very different, but the challenge level is similar.
It’s like that sometimes