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- 📚 The Reading Journal #018
📚 The Reading Journal #018
The 4-Hour Workweek, John Fish, The Best Gifts for Bookworms
👋 Hey Everyone
Happy Halloween! 🎃
During a stormy night in the Swiss Alps, Lord Byron Percy, Mary Shelly and John Polidori had a spooky writing contest. Mary Shelly won it with Frankenstein, John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, which introduced vampires to the world.
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📚 Staff Pick of the Week
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
Many people aspire to retire millionaires so they will have the time and resources to travel, invest in fine homes and cars, or visit with their friends and families. To achieve all of these things, though, you don't have to be wealthy. Even retiring is not necessary.
In The 4-Hour Workweek, businessman, consultant, and life coach Tim Ferriss demonstrates how anyone can live the lifestyle of a retired millionaire by starting their own company, automating it, and then taking the profits while living their dreams.
For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way.
The 4-Hour Workweek is ranked number 8 on our top 100 most recommended book list. It has been recommended by the likes of Eric Weinstein, Sophie Bakalar, Graham Stephan and 25 others.
🎥 Reading Talk's
📈 Rising Quickly - Week of October 24, 2022
Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty by Andrew Meier
After coming to America from Germany in 1866, the Morgenthaus made history in international diplomacy, in domestic politics, and in America’s criminal justice system. With unprecedented, exclusive access to family archives, award-winning journalist and biographer Andrew Meier vividly chronicles how the Morgenthaus amassed a fortune in Manhattan real estate, advised presidents, advanced the New Deal, exposed the Armenian genocide, rescued victims of the Holocaust, waged war in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and, from a foundation of private wealth, built a dynasty of public service. In the words of former mayor Ed Koch, they were “the closest we’ve got to royalty in New York City.”
Lazarus Morgenthau arrived in America dreaming of rebuilding the fortune he had lost in his homeland. He ultimately died destitute, but the family would rise again with the ascendance of Henry, who became a wealthy and powerful real estate baron. From there, the Morgenthaus went on to influence the most consequential presidency of the twentieth century, as Henry’s son Henry Jr. became FDR’s longest-serving aide, his Treasury secretary during the war, and his confidant of thirty years. Finally, there was Robert Morgenthau, a decorated World War II hero who would become the longest-tenured district attorney in the history of New York City. Known as the “DA for life,” he oversaw the most consequential and controversial prosecutions in New York of the last fifty years, from the war on the Mafia to the infamous Central Park Jogger case.
The saga of the Morgenthaus has lain half hidden in the shadows for too long. At heart a family history, Morgenthau is also an American epic, as sprawling and surprising as the country itself.
🪄 Most Talked About Fiction - Week of October 24, 2022
Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet
Over twelve novels and two collections Lydia Millet has emerged as a major American novelist. Hailed as "a writer without limits" (Karen Russell) and "a stone-cold genius" (Jenny Offill), Millet makes fiction that vividly evokes the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction.
Her exquisite new novel is the story of a man named Gil who walks from New York to Arizona to recover from a failed love. After he arrives, new neighbors move into the glass-walled house next door and his life begins to mesh with theirs. In this warmly textured, drily funny, and philosophical account of Gil’s unexpected devotion to the family, Millet explores the uncanny territory where the self ends and community begins—what one person can do in a world beset by emergencies.
Dinosaurs is both sharp-edged and tender, an emotionally moving, intellectually resonant novel that asks: In the shadow of existential threat, where does hope live?
📚 Most Talked About Non-Fiction - Week of October 24, 2022
Nature's Wild Ideas: How the Natural World is Inspiring Scientific Innovation by Kristy Hamilton
When astronomers wanted a telescope that could capture X-rays from celestial bodies, they looked to the lobster. When doctors wanted a medication that could stabilize Type II diabetic patients, they found their muse in a lizard. When scientists wanted to drastically reduce emissions in cement manufacturing, they observed how corals construct their skeletons in the sea. This is biomimicry in action: taking inspiration from nature to tackle human challenges.
In Nature's Wild Ideas, Kristy Hamilton goes behind the scenes of some of our most unexpected innovations. She traverses frozen waterfalls, treks through cloudy forests, discovers nests in the Mojave desert, scours intertidal zones and takes us to the deepest oceans and near volcanoes to introduce us to the animals and plants that have inspired everything from cargo routing systems to non-toxic glues, and the men and women who followed that first spark of "I wonder?" all the way to its conclusion, sometimes against all odds.
While the joy of scientific discovery is front and center, Nature's Wild Ideas is also a love letter to nature—complete with a deep message of conservation: If we are to continue learning from the creatures around us, we must protect their untamed homelands.
🆕 New and Noteworthy
Spare by Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex
It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow—and horror. As Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest, billions wondered what the princes must be thinking and feeling—and how their lives would play out from that point on.
For Harry, this is that story at last.
With its raw, unflinching honesty, Spare is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.
👀 In Case You Missed It
✍️ Quote of the Week
Wisdom…. comes not from age, but from education and learning.
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