📚 The Reading Journal #012

👋 Hey Everyone

Good Monday Morning! We are excited to welcome the 203 of you that joined the Reading Journal last week.

In today's newsletter:

📚 Staff Pick of the Week

📈 Rising Quickly - Week of September 12, 2022

🪄 Most Talked About Fiction - Week of September 12, 2022

✍️ Most Talked About Non-Fiction - Week of September 12, 2022

🆕 New and Noteworthy

In Iraq, booksellers leave books outside at night because “the reader does not steal and the thief does not read.”

The Mutanabbi Street in the center of Baghdad, near the old quarter at Al Rasheed Street, is home to a stunning book market, often referred to as ‘the heart and soul of Baghdad’s literacy and intellectual community.’ At night, it is completely unattended.

📷 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

Loonshots by Safi Bahcall

I was trying to find the words to describe this book, but I’ll have to borrow Daniel Kahneman’s praise of Loonshots:

Safi Bahcall has written a non-fiction epic that connects the science of emergence to industry, organizations and governments. Bahcall carefully analyzes major events and transformations throughout history and sheds light on the loonshot projects that changed the world. He shows that some of the most important inventions from radar, and jet planes all the way to the scientific method itself were originally dismissed as “crazy” or “impossible” by much of the population. But a few brave and gritty individuals persevered through sometimes years of rejection and development to see their ideas come to life.

For those interested in learning how some organizations nurtured crazy ideas while others dismissed them, this is a book for you. It is a riveting tale of history, recounting events from a different perspective, that ultimately shaped our current world. It is a brilliant piece of work that will help guide the leaders of tomorrow.

Loonshots is ranked number 47 on our top 100 most recommended book list. It has been recommended by the likes of Keith Rabois, Arianna Huffington, Malcolm Gladwell and 10 others.

🎥 Reading Talk's

📈 Rising Quickly - Week of September 12, 2022

The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher

We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social network preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies’ founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone.

Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales, to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear.

His narrative is about more than the villains, however. Fisher also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it’s too late.

🪄 Most Talked About Fiction - Week of September 12, 2022

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything―if you bury yourself alive.

These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike.

📚 Most Talked About Non-Fiction - Week of September 12, 2022

A Visible Man: A Memoir by Edward Enninful

When Edward Enninful became the first Black editor-in-chief of British Vogue, few in the world of fashion wanted to confront how it failed to represent the world we live in. But Edward, a champion of inclusion throughout his life, rapidly changed that.

Now, whether it’s putting first responders, octogenarians or civil rights activists on the cover of Vogue, or championing designers and photographers of colour, Edward Enninful has cemented his status as one of his world’s most important changemakers.

A Visible Man traces an astonishing journey into one of the world’s most exclusive industries. Edward candidly shares how as a Black, gay, working-class refugee, he found in fashion not only a home, but the freedom to share with people the world as he saw it. Written with style, grace, and heart, A Visible Man shines a spotlight on the career of one of the greatest creative minds of our times. It is the story of a visionary who changed not only an industry, but how we understand beauty.

🆕 New and Noteworthy

Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir by Jann S. Wenner

Jann Wenner has been called by his peers “the greatest editor of his generation.”

His deeply personal memoir vividly describes and brings you inside the music, the politics, and the lifestyle of a generation, an epoch of cultural change that swept America and beyond. The age of rock and roll in an era of consequence, what will be considered one of the great watersheds in modern history. Wenner writes with the clarity of a journalist and an essayist. He takes us into the life and work of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bono, and Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. He was instrumental in the careers of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Annie Leibovitz. His journey took him to the Oval Office with his legendary interviews with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, leaders to whom Rolling Stone gave its historic, full-throated backing. From Jerry Garcia to the Dalai Lama, Aretha Franklin to Greta Thunberg, the people Wenner chose to be seen and heard in the pages of Rolling Stone tried to change American culture, values, and morality.

Like a Rolling Stone is a beautifully written portrait of one man’s life, and the life of his generation.

👀 In Case You Missed It

✍️ Quote of the Week