The Reading List

Finding the right book in the right moment and this month's books.

Feb 15, 2023

When starting a new year, I think about books that have meant a lot to me in the past but the message has been lost in the caverns of everyday life. Rereading is not something we put a lot of thought into because it feels like a waste of time. But I think it’s the opposite. Great books are hard to come by and present different takeaways. There are far more bad books and in most of those circumstances, especially non-fiction, the entire usefulness of the book is in the introduction or first 20 pages. That’s why it’s important to not waste time on bad books. Put them down and pick up something else. When we find a great book, it’s almost impossible to pull out all of the messaging that’s offered on the first reading. I think a lot of this has to do with the various life stages we are in and where our current focus lies. Books have the power to transform because of how we change as people. I find rereading to be an intentional and well-thought-out use of time. So if you get the sudden itch to reread a past book, there is usually a reason for this. Take it upon yourself to explore that itch. As part of starting this year sober, I chose to revisit a couple books where I needed a refresh.

How to Die by Seneca, translation by James Romm

“Those who have learned how to die have unlearned how to be slaves.”

It’s safe to say, we do pretty much anything we can to avoid death. Even the conversation of it. It scares us. But it is the only guarantee we have in life and even then we have a hard time accepting it. No matter how much wealth or fame or stuff we accumulate, no matter how many of us are “lucky” enough to get our name on a building, there isn’t an escape. We spend so much time worrying about other people’s opinions of our house, car, what school we send our kids to, the amount of money we make, whether we have a nicer lawn than them. What in the fuck is the point of this?

Seneca wrote a lot about death throughout his life, but his advice predominately lingers on one point: fear of death is to fear living and life lived in fear is in itself a form of death. Our lives are riddled with trivialities. We bind ourselves to the meaningless and choose not to pursue the meaningful. We are mortals, after all, and our fear of death is so palpable. Yes, death sucks, but it also doesn’t. Death serves a purpose and it gives life more meaning.

I think a lot about the author, Robert Greene's advice on alive time vs. dead time. Especially how much "dead time" I've wasted with alcohol. The past is something we can learn from, but that time is also dead to us. Death has taken it away. All we are left with is the day we are living and the choices we can make now. Planning for the future matters, but there is something far more important: quit putting off what you want to do for some later date. Enough time goes by, you will get to the end and death doesn't grant wishes.

How to Be a Friend by Cicero is another one of my favorites from this Princeton University series. I recommend pairing How to Die with On the Shortness of Life, which is my favorite of Seneca’s essays. For more writings from the Stoics, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (this translation from Gregory Hays in particular) and The Art of Living by Epictetus are both exceptional.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a poem titled Mori’s Dance as a Memento mori - a meditation on my own mortality. Symbols like this have a remarkable way of letting us see that the life we are living right now is a gift and not to waste it on trivialities that can easily take over our day-to-day lives.

A Better Man by Michael Ian Black

"The relentless American marketing campaign of the Real Man has fucked a lot of us up."

As a father of two boys, it's easy to look through the lens of what my experience was as a kid and what I want to improve upon as a dad. Some of those things are apparent to me. And two of them are value and acceptance.

Boys are raised in a world where feelings and vulnerability are pushed out of us. You've probably heard of toxic masculinity, which is expecting a male to behave by certain stereotypical behaviors because he is a man. Meaning always brave, strong, and independent. Fear and vulnerability are something to avoid and if you cry, just forget about even leaving your house for the next hundred years. Not all boys are raised this way, but if you're anything like me, it's a real pain in the ass to open pandora's box of emotions without cracking. And when you do let even just a little out, what you tend to find is emotions come out sharper because they have been vacuum sealed shut for so long.

This is why I find value and acceptance to be so important. Value is about seeing my kids’ opinions and choices as worthy. Not making them feel like I have THE answer or any answer for that matter. They are their own people. And they have their own identity. I don’t want them to feel like that has been bossed into them. That's where acceptance is important. Accepting who they are and who they want to be. I can't make those choices for them. I can only hope to raise them well enough for them to feel that it’s ok to be vulnerable and give themselves the chance to do what has meaning to them. Otherwise we live in a prison of doubt and shame. There is no freedom in this sort of living.

Michael Ian Black wrote this book for his son that was going off to college at the time. It has certainly given me a lot to think about with my own life and also the future of my kids’ lives. No person makes it through life without pain and it's time to end this idea that guys have to work through pain (or should I say not work through it) in a certain way because they are men. The Real Man is one who embraces feelings and vulnerability and more importantly allows his kids to do so. Because we are all human.

Every guy should read this book. Whether you have kids or not. This narrative needs to change for the better.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson

“No matter where you go, there’s a five-hundred-pound load of shit waiting for you. And that’s perfectly fine. The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.”

The first time I read this, it was a much needed knock in the mouth. We all try to care about too many things until we learn that it is destroying us. Manson does a great job of boiling it down to the essential: we only have so many fucks to give so stop trying to give a fuck about so many things and only give a fuck about the very few things that have meaning to you. But how do we choose what has meaning to us?

In our typical, adult, everyday lives we tend to focus more on our avoidance of struggle and pain. This is pretty evident with the amount we complain about shit that really shouldn’t bother us. Struggle and pain are pesky little things that make life difficult and we don’t like that. But this avoidance tends to create more problems and struggles are also necessary for growth. Maybe the better answer is to focus on choosing our struggles. The kinds of struggle we are able to choose - things in our life that we control. The limited fucks we have to give shouldn’t just revolve around what we enjoy. But what we are willing to put up with day in and day out. Think of struggle as the process. Focusing on results doesn’t work because that is out of our control. But process-focused has purpose and value. There’s that word again. It’s about valuing our life, our time, and our growth. If you can’t do that for yourself, how can you expect someone else to value those things for you? And if we don’t value ourselves and our growth, how can we expect to be there for others or really value others?

Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp

“There’s a sense of deep need, and the response is a grabbiness, a compulsion to latch on to something outside yourself in order to assuage some deep discomfort.”

This compulsive desire to grab on to something is a need to fill the emptiness that exists within.

I have battled alcoholism for the better part of two decades. Sobriety teaches you a lot of things, but one of the first things you recognize, alcohol is the single most important relationship in the active alcoholic’s life and it very much acts as a love relationship. You become married to hiding who you are, numbing everything inside because the fear of letting your real self out is enough to tip you over. Alcoholics drink to transform themselves into someone they are not because they don’t know who they actually are. It’s lack of honesty to self. It’s fear. It’s not taking responsibility for our own lives. It’s the desire to avoid anything difficult. But it’s also a disease of isolation.

All of us have reasons to act this way. Whether it’s childhood trauma or an abusive relationship or PTSD or something else, there are reasons. But by not taking responsibility of our lives and addressing our problems, control of our life is given over to those who profit off our decisions. Alcohol is a pervasive thing in this world. There is no way to escape the sexiness of it. It’s just going to look appealing. And it’s going to be even more appealing to drown out the pain if that’s what you’re used to doing. As Brené Brown wrote, “we cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”

One of the few things I know is I am a better person sober. It’s much easier to make better decisions without alcohol steering my life. And it’s just fucking worth staying sober. Alcohol sucks the life out of me and I don’t want to live or die like that.

What I like about Caroline’s book is how she works through the various stages and characteristics of alcoholism and tells the tale through stories of her own life. Even if you don’t personally struggle with alcohol, most of us know at least one person who does. If you want to understand what an alcoholic goes through, this is one of the better books to read. If you want the more psychological approach to addiction, Never Enough by Judy Grisel is fantastic. Andrew Huberman’s podcast on how alcohol affects our brains and bodies is also worth checking out. He mostly addresses moderate drinking here.

This Is Water by David Foster Wallace

“The capital-T Truth is about life before death.”

This Is Water is a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. I have this in book form linked above, but you can find the audio and transcript for free at Shane Parrish’s site, Farnam Street.

This is one of those speeches that I revisit 4 or 5 times a year. Mostly because I need the consistent reminder to exercise control over what I think rather than let the world dictate what it wants me to think. There is an endless amount of distraction and it can take us whichever way it wants. Just think about how hard it is to close out your social media windows whenever you log in. It’s a trap because all it succeeds in doing is riling us up.

We gain more with intentional focus on fewer things. We don’t need to have an opinion about everything. That’s just our drunken mind trying to have its say. But it doesn’t control us. We control it.

Miscellaneous

I have enjoyed looking through Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home. She wrote The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve read multiple times. I think a lot of people like to knock minimalism as being this sort of bad anti-attachment thing. But it’s really not about being anti-attachment or anti-clutter so much as it is understanding that outside clutter creates inner turmoil. A moderate lifestyle is incredibly important in all things. When shit fills your house, it’s hard for it not to consume your thoughts and choices. And we have a limited amount of this brain energy. Fewer choices, fewer things. Less distractions, more focus. Not everything can be important to us. We just don’t have the time or energy to care about that much shit.
I have experimented with a plant-based diet off and on and I enjoyed reading This is Vegan Propaganda by Ed Winters. I wish everyone would read a book like this if only to understand what it is we are putting in our bodies. I paired this with Earthlings, which is a great documentary and will probably destroy your enjoyment of meat forever if you watch it. It is free on YouTube and Vimeo, but, frankly, it is brutal, sad, and triggering. So be forewarned.

Children’s Books

I Need a New Butt has become one of the main jokes around the house. It’s exactly what it sounds like and we crack up every time (pun intended).
Bob Dylan is my favorite artist of any type and it’s always fun to teach kids about people, places, things we are interested in. They will likely never find Bob Dylan as appealing, but this has been a fun one to read to them. Vegara, the author, has written over 100 of these Little People, BIG DREAMS books and I like these types of books to teach kids about different people in history.
The Lights and Types of Ships at Night is a beautifully illustrated book about different types of ships. We’ve been reading this one a lot.
Secret Pizza Party continues to be a staple. Written by the same team that wrote Dragons Love Tacos, which we have also been reading a lot this month.
Shape Island was released on Apple TV+, which has been fun for the kids to see the Shape Trilogy books come to life. Everything by the Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen duo is worthy of reading.