Every Book I've Recommended Since The Beginning
In one convenient post
Last week, someone told me that they were having trouble keeping up with all the books I recommend. Fair enough!
I'm not trying to assign homework or add to anyone’s busy life. There’s no expectation here. I’m just showing what I read to the people in this little community that I’ve created, hoping that you might see one or two of them and go “huh! that looks interesting!”
It’s been three months to the day since I sent out my first Substack post, so I wanted to do something a little different today. I’ve decided to consolidate all of the books that I’ve thus far recommended into one place so that you can browse through, and hopefully find something interesting to read! They’ve all been books I’ve enjoyed and have added something to my life (I don’t recommend or review books that I dislike).
Happy browsing! And happy three month anniversary of The Well-Lived Life :)
Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday.
This wonderful book by Ryan Holiday is an in-depth look at what makes something a masterpiece, and a guide to creatives who are trying to create something that lasts.
“People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don't, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds. They want to make something timeless, but they focus instead on immediate payoffs and instant gratification.”
There are so many things competing for our attention in the modern world that don’t matter.
Timeless books and movies are about timeless themes, like the human struggle. What is in the news ultimately fades away, but what is important lives on.
What is important to you? What do you see as timeless? Hold on to those things, and let the rest disappear.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
I have a very intimate connection with this book, because, in a weird way, it chose me. When I was traveling in Southeast Asia in 2019, I went to a used bookstore in Ho Chi Minh City, and this was the only English book they had. I was looking for Moby Dick (which I still haven’t read).
This book follows three generations of two California families, and
East of Eden absolutely captured me. Not before or since have I written so many quotes down from a book. I’ll share three of my favorites:
“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”
“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of Good and Evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal.”
In his journal, Steinbeck called this his “first book.” He believed this to be his masterwork, and he left it all on the table. Every time I return to it I find something new. My copy is dog-eared and underlined like very few other books on my shelf.
If you do buy it, promise me that you'll give it 50 pages. It's a slow start, but no novel I've ever read has been more worth my time!
On Writing Well by William Zinsser.
This book is one of those perennial sellers that writers have been buying and using for almost 50 years, passing it along through word of mouth. However, this is not just a book for writers. If you are looking for ways to communicate better in your own life, this book is for you! He takes you through how to find and use the right words, how not to drone on, and how to write and speak so that people want to listen.
“Americans are unwilling to go out on a limb. A generation ago our leaders told us where they stood and what they believed. Today they perform strenuous verbal feats to escape that fate. Watch them wriggle through TV interviews without committing themselves. I remember President Ford assuring a group of visiting businessmen that his policies would work. He said ‘We see nothing but increasingly brighter clouds every month’... Later administrations brought no relief. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, assessing a Polish crisis in 1984, said ‘There's continuing ground for serious concern and the situation remains serious. The longer it remains serious, the more ground there is for serious concern’... But my all-time champ is Elliot Richardson, who held four major cabinet positions in the 1970s. (When asked for) his analysis of how to ease boredom among assembly line workers: ‘And so, at last, I come to the firm conviction that I mentioned at the beginning, it is that the subject is too new for final judgments.’”
This book has captivated me. My copy is highlighted, dog-eared, and loved. His chapter on rooting out clutter is alone worth the purchase price of the book.
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck
I'm so excited to talk about this. When I finished re-reading East of Eden, I found out that John Steinbeck had rewritten and published a collection of Arthurian legends.
I am loving it. Steinbeck modernized the language, but the tone of the stories remain the same. My favorite quote so far is:
“As Sir Pellinore tried to move his mount from between them, sir Ontelake drove his sword into the horse’s side and killed it and shouted, “Now you will be afoot as we are.”
Sir Pellinore stepped lightly from his fallen beast and drew his sword, and he said bitterly, “That was a cowardly thing to do. Guard your health, my friend, for I have something here for a man who stabs a horse,” and with that Pellinore loosed a swinging sword cut that sliced through Ontelake’s helm and split his head down to the chin and he fell dead.”
I'd never read the original Arthurian stories before, and I am blown away by how weird (and often funny) they are. Merlin is such a strange character, always popping in and out of stories and talking about cryptic prophecies. Arthur is much more of a complicated figure than the white knight he’s been made into in modern movies and shows (at one point he puts a bunch of month-old babies in a boat and pushes them out to sea because of a prophecy that one of them will overthrow him).
This book is a look into a different time, without having to slog through the language of that time. Highly recommended.
The Obstacle is The Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday
“There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.”
This bestseller had been on my list for a while, and it did NOT disappoint. It only takes a few hours to read, and it’s jam-packed with stories of great people from history who illustrate the truth of this Marcus Aurelius quote:
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
If you’d like to know how Amelia Earhart, Ulysses S. Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt used their obstacles as advantages, this is the book for you.
Ali: A Life by Jonathan Eig
Anyone who knows me well has, at some point, heard me ramble on about my love of Muhammad Ali. He was so inspiring! Larger than life, funny, fast-talkin’ (until Parkinson’s set in), and a true warrior for civil rights.
I’m about halfway through this biography by Eig, and it’s been fabulous. He gives you the feeling that you’re ringside at Ali’s fights, hearing the roar of the crowd, the hiss of the punches.
Before I started reading this book, (and watched the documentary that I’ll recommend below) I had no idea that when Ali was trying to reclaim his title (after it was stolen from him by the U.S. government), he returned to nature, and trained, among other methods, by chopping down trees. Here’s a famous interview clip of Ali in the woods. I must have watched the last 30 seconds of this clip close to 20 times this weekend. I love that he just cuts the interview short and walks away, saying “now I’ll see ya I now I gotta go chop down some more trees out here somewhere.”
If you’re interested in learning more about this great man, this biography is a one-stop-shop.
Ego Is The Enemy By Ryan Holiday
This book is Ryan Holiday’s attempt to wrestle with his own ego as a successful author, and show us the ego-driven pitfalls that have crippled people throughout history.
We travel from ancient Greece to the 2000s, following examples from ancient generals and modern CEOs as we learn how to live with our own egos.
This book shook me. Ever since I was lucky enough to have an article I wrote go viral, I've been struggling with how best to retain a sincere and honest message. Reading Ego is The Enemy helped me on that journey. It reminded me that at the end of the day, I'm just a guy who reads books and scribbles things down in notebooks.
I recommend Ego Is The Enemy for anyone at any stage of a creative journey.
Journey of Awakening by Ram Dass
This book found me at just the right time, showing up in a free little library in a city I’m hardly ever in. Read in conjunction with the other book I read this week, it is *chef’s kiss* beautiful.
Meditation is one of those things that there never seems to be enough time for. In Journey of Awakening, Ram Dass lays out how the average person can build meditation into their daily life, rather than trying to shoehorn it into ten-minute intervals. He shows us that life itself can be meditation if we’re willing to build it in.
“What Einstein demonstrated in physics is equally true of all other aspects of the cosmos: all reality is relative. Each reality is true only within given limits. It is only one possible version of the way things are. There are always multiple versions of reality. To awaken from any single reality is to recognize its relative nature. Meditation is a device to do just that.”
One of the most wonderful things about this book is that Ram Dass doesn’t try to be a guru. He packs this book with quotes from spiritual teachers both ancient and modern (for 1978). If you are having trouble finding stillness in your life, read this book!
Stillness is The Key by Ryan Holiday
This is the third and final Ryan Holiday book from the boxed set that I bought (The Way, The Obstacle, and The Key) and by far my favorite. Ryan Holiday is at the top of his game here, as always pulling together lessons from the greats of history to show us why we need to cultivate stillness.
“How different would the world look if people spent as much time listening to their conscience as they did to chattering broadcasts? If they could respond to the calls of their convictions as quickly as we answer the dings and rings of technology in our pockets?”
From prime ministers to Zen masters, stillness has been a quality many great people have shared.
In the modern world, we are stressed, overworked, and often feel that we are on a treadmill of nonsense. We know that we need to calm down, but we’re not sure how. This book gives us insights and tools for how to live calmer lives in our quests to be more effective.
Thou Art That by Joseph Campbell
These are the most knowledge-packed hundred and ten pages I've ever read. This book will eventually be the subject of a whole long-form article for me. I'm a bit of a Campbell fanboy, but I’d passed this one up until I found it in a local bookstore. May I just say... Holy. Crap. This book, guys! I haven't shut up about it since Tuesday!
From the first page, I knew I was in for something special:
“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result, we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
Why are we so obsessed with duality? Why do I have to choose religion or atheism? Republican or Democrat? “Turd sandwich or giant douche,” to quote South Park?
I don't particularly want to hang out with the atheists or the very religious. Both are notoriously un-fun groups of people. This book gives great reasons to be neither.
Joseph Campbell lays out his experience with Western mythology and explains several things I'd never thought about before.
I'd already thought it was problematic that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity worship the same God, but can’t get along. What I never realized before reading this book is that those religions (two of which set up the psychology of the entire western colonialist world) create separation on almost every level. The separation between people and nature. The separation between people and God. The separation between people and the idea of the divine feminine (God is seen as male, with no female counterbalance).
They then tell us that the only way back to God from the separation we feel is through organizations and systems, like churches.
This book did something very powerful for me. It permitted me to recognize the divinity within myself, without hokey spirituality, crystals, or astrology. As I said, I can’t shut up about it!
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
This was my second time reading this classic, but the first time I’d really dug into Viktor Frankl’s “Logotherapy.”
“Logotherapy... Focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in a man. That is why I speak of a willto meaning in contrast to the Pleasure Principle (or, as we could also term it the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered”
For those of you who've never read it, Viktor Frankl’s classic is half memoir, half psychological text. As a victim of the Nazis, Frankl was forced to live in four different concentration camps over the course of WWII. It's from this experience that he deepened his psychiatric practice, focusing on the idea of helping his patients find meaning in life, rather than helping them reconcile to and align with a broken world.
He believed that we are responsible for our own experience of meaning:
“By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.”
Meaning is. We are. Present tense. In a world of endless noise that keeps us chasing satisfaction, we forget that. We've been taught that it's out there, that there are gatekeepers to meaning. No! We've got to reclaim it.
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson
Everything I read and watched this week has to do with Che Guevara because it's my spring break and I wanted to take a deep dive into the life of this complicated, wildly interesting man. Now, I don't want to give the impression that I think he was a saint. He was not.
What fascinates me about Che is that he walked the walk more than any historical figure I've ever read about. He fought in three revolutions that had nothing to do with his own country (he was Argentinian) because he believed in a United South America, free from banana republics and us-backed dictators (unfortunately, the CIA had other plans... Spoilers).
He lived simply and labored alongside the people when the Cuban Revolution was completed. His hatred of money was so powerful that when Fidel Castro appointed him Secretary of the Treasury after the Cuban Revolution, he signed all of the banknotes as “Che” (the equivalent of “dude” or “hey you”).
This fascinating biography covers his entire life (which is why I'm only halfway through its 750+ pages). The half that I've read so far, spanning Che’s childhood through the Cuban Revolution, paints a picture of an adventurous kid who grew up questioning, reading a ton, and developing a sense of fairness and revolutionary ideals from his time as a traveler. He then stuck by those ideals until he ended up dying for them. This book shows you the breadth of his fantastically full life and is worth a read as a one-stop shop for Guevara fans.
The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara
This book is a collection of Che’s private writings from his motorcycle trip with Alberto. Through it, we can feel Che wrestling with his identity as a middle-class med student, seeing how his comfort was built on the backs of a suppressed population of people thought of as “low-class.” It was on that motorcycle trip that Che discovered his love for the people and decided to fight for them, to end imperialism in South America. There's a beautiful bit at the end called quote notes in the margin, where Che writes out the needs of a revolution. I'll quote some of it here:
“The future belongs to the people, and gradually, or in one strike, they will take power, here and in every country. The terrible thing is the people need to be educated, and this they cannot do before taking power, only after. They can only learn at the cost of their own mistakes, which will be very serious and will cost many innocent lives. Or perhaps not, maybe those lives will not have been innocent because they will have committed the huge sin against nature; meaning, a lack of ability to adapt.”
This book is the only bit of travel writing I've ever read by one of the world's most influential revolutionaries. For that reason alone, it's worth the read.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
I discovered this book last year, watching the gorgeous Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold about Didion's life (and reading The Year of Magical Thinking, crying like a baby elephant).
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is hard to describe. Joan Didion is most often labeled a “culture writer,” but to call Didion a culture writer is like saying that Michael Jordan was “a dunker.” She could do everything.
This book is a collection of her essays from the 60s, covering subjects from the hippie movement/drug culture in San Francisco, to why it's important to keep a personal notebook.
Half of the book is just Didion's thoughts, minuscule details from her personal life, yet she manages to make these essays wildly engaging. Her prose is light as a feather. I couldn't put it down! The things she points out about American culture in the sixties ring true today.
It's one of those books where certain quotes just grab you and you're not entirely sure why, but you're grateful:
“That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.”
Why I Write by George Orwell
Orwell wrote this in 1940, one year after England entered WWII. It’s a critique of English Capitalism, a rallying cry for the people, and a guide to efficient writing, rolled into 110 pages (I highlighted every single one). I finished it yesterday, and it went straight to the back of my writing desk, where 10 books live that I keep there to remind me of the kind of writer I want to be.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from this tiny box of explosive awesomeness:
“Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again.”
“Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is actually the opposite of conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.”
“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from conservatives to anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Orwell talks in the beginning about how the times that his writing felt the most flat were the times in his life that he was writing without a political purpose.
I used to have the harmful idea that I didn’t want to “get political” in my writing. Unfortunately, because the modern world is so divided, telling people to block ads, think about how they consume, form deeper relationships in their communities, and stop searching for happiness is wildly political. I now keep my political purpose in mind as I write, encapsulated in the phrase “We are the answer. Power is the lie.”
Round Ireland With a Fridge by Tony Hawks
It’s exactly what it sounds like. Tony Hawks is an English comedian who, on a drunken 100-pound bet with a friend, tried to hitchhike the circumference of Ireland with a mini-fridge. It is the funniest book I've ever read! Hawks meets some very bizarre and hospitable people, proving that when you've decided to do something abnormal, heaven and earth conspire to help you.
A great quote from his time in a hostel (speaking of the need for silence):
“I'm against the death penalty. I believe that it is a mistake to show the killing people is wrong, by killing people. However, I'm not against the random killing of people who snore. Okay, I accept that it is Harsh, barbaric and against every decent human value, but the simple fact is that there is no other cure for snoring.”
This is one of those rare books that make you laugh out loud in public, making you feel as crazy as Hawks did standing by the side of the road in the rain, with a fridge, waiting for a ride.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
This is the most emotionally raw book I’ve ever read. Several times while reading this I felt like I should close the curtain and give the author privacy.
This book is a deeply intimate look at Joan Didion's unimaginable grief after her husband died quite suddenly while her daughter was hospitalized. We travel through memory after memory from her life while she grapples with big questions, trying desperately to make sense of it all.
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
To be read with a box of tissues.
This inspires me to plan a “reading vaca”. Thanks for this!