Happy Thursday everyone 👋
Before jumping into this week’s post, I wanted to share a few quick updates.
Next week, I’ll be doing my first ever Think Week. I booked a cabin in Hudson Valley and will be heading up there with my computer, a small stack of books, and some hiking gear. I wish I could tell you that I have concrete goals for the week, but I don’t. I suppose my goals are simply to read, reflect, and recharge. If you have any favorite books, articles, podcast episodes or documentaries that really inspired you, taught you something interesting, or shifted your perspective on life/work, please send them my way!
I’ve teamed up with my good friends Harris Brown and Shivani Shah to create a writer’s collective called Wayfinder, and we just launched this week! The goal of Wayfinder is to build community and cultivate honest conversation around life’s big questions. For more information, check out our launch post. More details to come soon!
Onto this week’s post.
My Year in Books: 2020
I believe the books we read can be a reflection of who we are and who we hope to become. They reveal our interests beyond the narrow constraints of job titles and weekend hobbies. They provide a window into our inner worlds and the topics we care most deeply about. Most importantly, they provide surface area for us to connect on shared interests and trade further recommendations.
These are the books that guided me through 2020. I left a few hot takes at the bottom :)
Top 5 Favorites
The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
This book comes in at #1 because it introduced me to a radically new way of understanding human psychology. The book focuses on the theories of psychologist Alfred Adler, a less well-known contemporary of Freud and Jung. His theories are described through a conversation between a student and a philosopher, which makes them approachable and engaging. The work is too ripe with lessons to articulate them all here, but I found this article to be useful in summarizing the key takeaways.
Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts
I love biographies and this one is among my all-time favorites. I think the ultimate test of a biography is whether the reader feels like they know the subject personally by the end of the book, and here I think Andrew Roberts succeeds. The book is compelling from beginning to end, largely because of the sheer magnitude and productivity of Churchill’s life. For instance, by the time Churchill was 26, he had published five books, fought in four wars on three continents, and escaped a prisoner-of-war camp. I can’t recommend this book more highly; it’s motivating, awe-inspiring, and humility-inducing in the way that only a great biography can be.
The Bhagavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran
Based on a friend’s recommendation, I enrolled in a sixteen-week course on The Bhagavad Gita, which is a key text of Hinduism. Similar to The Courage to Be Disliked, the text is almost entirely a dialogue between two people: a prince named Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna (who is the embodied version of a primary deity in Hinduism). During their conversation, Krishna offers an ethical framework and practical advice for living a good life. Though I personally don’t subscribe to some of the core tenets of Hinduism (like reincarnation), there is a spiritual core of secular lessons that can be easily exported from the text and remain profoundly relevant today. I’m working on another article that summarizes my key takeaways, so look out for a future post dedicated entirely to this text.
Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang
I rarely read science fiction, and I worry that this book has set an unrealistically high bar for the genre as a whole. The book is a collection of nine separate stories, and each one is more unique, mind-bending, and thought-provoking than the last. The stories are engaging and entertaining, but also force the reader to wrestle with some of life’s trickiest concepts, like free will, the nature of time, the certainty of death, the power of language, and the human need for meaning and purpose.
During the beginning of the lockdowns, I got into the habit of starting my day by leafing through this book and choosing a story to read. Chekhov avoids the cliches and tightly knit narratives that we are used to, and is a master of picking up universal subtleties that are shared across people and cultures. It often feels like his stories begin or end halfway through a story. His stories can be equal parts heart-wrenching, hilarious, and deeply moving. In one of his more memorable short stories (warning: spoiler), a wife anxiously awaits news of her husband, who was lost at sea during a storm. Upon his eventual arrival, the husband notices the disappointment on his wife’s face at finding him alive, so he promptly paddles back out to sea and drowns himself. The storm in the story mirrors the emotional storm that Chekhov provokes in the reader - one of absurdity, surprise, heartbreak, and humor all at once.
Recommended
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
After reading Exhalation: Stories, I immediately ordered his other book Stories of your Life and Others. At risk of overpromising Ted Chiang’s stories (I’m not sure that’s possible), this anthology is every bit as masterful as the other. I felt like I resonated slightly more with Exhalation, but it was effectively a toss-up. In summary, retweet to everything I said about his other book.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
I’m fairly certain this was required reading for all high school students, except for me. I was feeling nostalgic and angsty on a particularly rainy weekend in the middle of quarantine, and Brave New World seemed like a perfect fit for the general mood of things. Though published almost a century ago, the lessons and insights in the book have never been as relevant and urgent as they are today. We now inhabit a world that eerily mirrors Huxley’s imagined world, where dopamine is available on demand, and depth and meaning are superseded by conformity and comfort.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
I have a general rule not to reread fiction (there are just too many great novels out there), but I’m certain A Gentleman in Moscow will be an exception. In a lineup of predominantly nonfiction, this book offered a much-needed dose of feeling instead of thinking, and showing instead of telling. The story and characters are charming, wonderful, and heart-breaking. A Gentleman in Moscow is fiction at its finest.
A Promised Land by Barack Obama
Obama’s new book is a masterclass in writing, storytelling, and memoir. The opening pages alone reminded me why Obama was already a New York Times bestselling author long before his presidency. The book carries the reader from Obama’s formative years and early political involvements all the way through to Operation Neptune Spear — the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. During this journey, Obama describes the day-to-day life of the President, conveys an insider’s perspective on the politics of Washington, and offers a balanced and honest reflection on his own shortcomings, doubts, and decision-making processes. Like the best memoirs, Obama removes the facade of the presidency, and makes it feel as if he’s sitting across from you at the table, telling you his story.
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
Written about twenty years after Brave New World, The Doors of Perception describes Aldous Huxley’s experience taking the psychedelic drug mescaline for the first time. Referred to as “the book that launched a thousand trips”, The Doors of Perception offers a livestream of his mind during his trip, as he finds himself in rapture and awe of seemingly mundane experiences. Huxley dedicates several pages to describing his observations of the folds in his pants, and how the experience rivaled the most beautiful and profound moments of his life thus far. This book offers a convincing argument that psychedelics can help people transcend their everyday experience and see life in a fundamentally different way. (If this sounds interesting to you, I’d also highly recommend Michael Pollan’s book on psychedelics.)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
This novel tells the story of a brother and sister living in Kerala, India, and shifts back-and-forth between their childhood in 1969 and their reunion 25 years later. Of all the books on this list, I think The God of Small Things is the best piece of writing. Roy’s prose is so beautiful and powerful that I found myself frequently pulled away from the plot just to admire the writing itself. Every chapter you’ll run into a quote like this one:
“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Written as a letter to his young son, Coates takes us through his life - from the dangers of his youth growing up in Baltimore, through his intellectual renaissance at Howard University, and into his adulthood in the great melting pot of New York City. As he recounts his story, Coates’ writing is sharp, clear, and poetic. He charts his own journey of understanding race in America, explores America’s current problems by examining its history, and describes how ultimately those problems manifest as a visceral and physical experience of racism for black people - from slavery and segregation to today’s gun violence and mass incarceration.
The Wisdom of Life by Arthur Schopenhauer
Published just 9 years before Schopenhauer’s death in 1860, The Wisdom of Life is an essay from his final work Appendices and Omissions. The essay itself is among the most approachable and concise works of philosophy that I’ve ever read. It’s dense with insight and meaning without being obscure, and manages to offer relevant and practical advice despite being written over 150 years ago. There are also strong ties to Buddhism and Stoicism that really resonated with me. More to come on this essay in a separate post.
Other Recommendations: The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy, Inspired by Marty Cagan, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger, The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson, The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Hot Takes
My two most disappointing reads of the year were Walden by Henry David Thoreau and “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” by Richard Feynman.
I started both of these books with sky high expectations. Both are frequent mentions in articles, lists and Twitter threads about people’s all-time favorite books, but both of them missed my expectations.
In Walden, I was anticipating a work of philosophy that critiques society and offers a well-reasoned alternative. However, the bulk of the work seemed more descriptive than philosophical, like a how-to manual on the simple life. It mostly focuses on the day-to-day work involved in maintaining a plot of land and describing the benefits of this lifestyle.
In “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, I expected an autobiography of Feynman, who I greatly admire as a teacher and physicist. However, the text focuses largely on pranks that Feynman pulled on people during specific events throughout his life, rather than telling the story of his life as a whole. In short, it was entertaining but not exactly life-changing.
That’s all for this week’s post! If you want to chat about Think Week, Wayfinder, or any of these books, please feel free to reach out to me directly. And if you enjoyed this post, you can look forward to another one at the start of 2022. I promise that one won’t be six months late :)
Thanks for reading,
Mark
I literally had goosebumps reading your newsletter, and I am afraid a dozen of new books are on my to-read list for the next month. You are such a great book-teller! I found an old second-hand edition of the god of small things when I was in Kerala and I never took the time to read it, it was more like a fragment of my trip, and you just put me in an urge to re-open it.
If it can be interesting for your Think Week, the series The me you can't see about mental health has been pretty eye-opening for me. Sure it's an Oprah tv show so it's well produced but they succeed to tell authentically stories and emotion (including Prince Harry social anxiety).
Anyway - your words are inspiring! I love it.
I literally had goosebumps reading your newsletter, and I am afraid a dozen of new books are on my to-read list for the next month. You are such a great book-teller! I found an old second-hand edition of the god of small things when I was in Kerala and I never took the time to read it, it was more like a fragment of my trip, and you just put me in an urge to re-open it.
If it can be interesting for your Think Week, the series The me you can't see about mental health has been pretty eye-opening for me. Sure it's an Oprah tv show so it's well produced but they succeed to tell authentically stories and emotion (including Prince Harry social anxiety).
Anyway - your words are inspiring! I love it.