📚 The Reading Journal #011

👋 Hey Everyone

Good Monday Morning! We are excited to welcome the 211 of you that joined the Reading Journal last week.

In today's newsletter:

📚 Staff Pick of the Week

📈 Rising Quickly - Week of September 5, 2022

🪄 Most Talked About Fiction - Week of September 5, 2022

✍️ Most Talked About Non-Fiction - Week of September 5, 2022

🆕 New and Noteworthy

The Japanese language has a word to denote letting reading materials pile up in one’s home and never read them – tsundoku.

The term originated in the Meiji era as Japanese slang and is a combination of two words – tsunde-oku (to pile things up ready for later) and dokusho (reading books).

There’s also an English word that can be used to describe loving the smell of old books – bibliosma, and one to express fear of running out of reading material – abibliophobia.

📷 Bookshelf Humble Brag

📝 Note

• Want to show off your library? Send us a picture to be featured in the Reading Journal.

• Looking to read some of our previous Journals? You can find them here.

📚 Staff Pick of the Week

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder into an inspiring tale of self-discovery, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations.

Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different—and far more satisfying—than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.

It is number 13 on our top 100 most recommended book list. It has been recommended by the likes of Aaron Rodgers, Brendon Burchard, Sadia Badiei, Tim Ferriss and 19 others.

🎥 Reading Talk's

📈 Rising Quickly - Week of September 5, 2022

Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most by Cassie Holmes

Our most precious resource isn’t money. It’s time. We are allotted just twenty-four hours a day, and we live in a culture that keeps us feeling “time poor” —like we never have enough. Since we can’t add more hours to the day, how can we experience our lives as richer? Is it possible to spend our days so they aren’t just full, but are fulfilling?

Enlivened by Holmes’s upbeat narrative and groundbreaking research, Happier Hour teaches you how small changes can have an enormous impact, helping you feel less overwhelmed, more present, and more satisfied with your life overall. It all starts by transforming just one hour into a happier hour.

🪄 Most Talked About Fiction - Week of September 5, 2022

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”

📚 Most Talked About Non-Fiction - Week of September 5, 2022

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works.

🆕 New and Noteworthy

Solito: A Memoir by Javier Zamora

Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago—“one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.”

Javier Zamora’s adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote” hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks.

At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents’ arms, snuggling in bed between them, and living under the same roof again. He cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside fellow migrants who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family.

A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito provides an immediate and intimate account not only of a treacherous and near-impossible journey, but also of the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments. Solito is Javier Zamora’s story, but it’s also the story of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home.

👀 In Case You Missed It

✍️ Quote of the Week