📚 The Reading Journal #003

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👋 Hey Everyone

Good morning! Today we cover a new staff pick, Alvin Irby, Where The Crawdads Sing, a new book list, The Network State and new recommendations from Laura Deming.

Hope everyone enjoys their day and please reply to this email if you have any suggestions or to let us know what you are reading!

📚 Staff Pick of the Week

Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

The first thing that you will take notice of in Greenlights is the layout. Rather than a conventional memoir or self-help book, it’s a series of short stories and life lessons punctuated by journal excerpts, photographs and poetry. It’s lively. It’s engaging.

I’ve always been a person who finds great difficulty in sitting down for long periods of time. Reading as a young boy was a great joy of mine and an exception to that rule. Percy Jackson and Warriors on a car ride or under the covers at night. It was about stories, I loved it. As I moved into my teen years I lost that. It became an exercise in patience rather than a source of entertainment. I was preoccupied with other things and I read to absorb and learn, not to enjoy and laugh. Greenlights has been nostalgic and almost euphoric for me. I tried to do other things—to put down the book, but I was enjoying it. McConaughey’s writing hooked me—and here’s why.

Greenlights, as the name suggests, is about those traffic lights that populate our lives. You’ll hit red lights and yellow lights as you go. Then it’s green and you’re on your way. In the course of life there are experiences we have, lessons we learn and people we meet who can be greenlights for us. That’s affirmation and encouragement; it’s the things that keep us going and that animate our lives into a story worth reading.

🎥 Reading Talk's

📚 Best Seller - Week of July 11, 2022

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

It makes sense that Where the Crawdads Sing would be back on the top charts with the new movie released last week. As with any movie created after the book, before you watch it reading the book is an absolute must!

For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life–until the unthinkable happens.

📝 New Book List

🆕 New and Noteworthy

The Network State: How To Start a New Country by Balaji S. Srinivasan

We battle for the old when the fresh new is unimaginable. That is where we are now in terms of governments, politics, and most of the physical world. But maybe we can alter it.

This book offers the notion of the network state: a country that can be started from a computer, a state that recruits like a startup, a nation developed from the internet rather than disturbed by it.

You can read the Network State for free here.

👀 In Case You Missed It

🤩 New Recommendations

Laura Deming

Laura has worked in the Kenyon, Guarente, Weiss and Firestein labs on a number of topics, including aging and synthetic biology. In 2011, she started Longevity Fund, the first VC firm dedicated to funding high-potential longevity companies. So far, Longevity Fund has raised $26M and have backed Unity Biotechnology, Precision Biosciences, Metacrine, Navitor, and Alexo Therapeutics.

📖 Reading Journal Book Club

July's Book is Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell.

In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.

Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?

✍️ Quote of the Week