Reading

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
One of my favorite reading memories from when I was younger was sitting on the couch in my parents’ house and cracking open a new David Sedaris book. Ones like Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Naked. That’s why I’m so excited that his newest book, The Land and Its People came out this week! My wife and I went to see him earlier this month at the Orpheum Theater and we cracked up the whole time. He’s just so damn funny. It made me want to reread an old favorite, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I’ve yet to read another author who so accurately—and so side-splittingly—captures the absurdity of daily life.

Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences by Neal Allen and Anne Lamott
I found this book while browsing the shelves of Changing Hands, and when I saw it was co-written by Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird, I bought it on the spot. There are so many gems of writing advice here. One favorite: “Spend less time defending what you’ve written and more time revealing the truth.” Lamott writes that when she edits her own work she removes anything “that put me in a more sympathetic/desperate light so the reader will feel sorry for me or anxious on my behalf, and like me more,” and that there is nothing more stunning than the truth presented carefully and unvarnished. I just love that. On a similar note, a huge piece of writing—and life—advice I’ve been thinking about is Ryan Holiday’s positive contribution every day rule. Seriously, read this article. And if you like to write, read this book.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe
Oh my goodness, I LOVED this book. It’s one of the best I’ve read this year. Keefe is a master of narrative tension. The slow-but-propulsive unfolding of the story made it almost impossible to put down—I needed to know the motives of the people at the center of it all. In that way, it reminded me of—dare I say—the true crime classic In Cold Blood. You find yourself needing to know how the cast of characters came together, what stories they told themselves and others, and how the chain of choices led them where they ended up. It’s seriously so good. (Also, on a semi-related note, crime writer Patricia Cornwell published her memoir this month, and it looks really good.)

Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein
I wasn’t sure if this book would be gimmicky, but I gave it a shot because I loved his book Range. This one is just as good, maybe better. We tend to think unlimited time, money, and freedom would solve our creative and business problems. It turns out what we often need are constraints: rigid limits, real or self-imposed, that force us to think more clearly and creatively. From some of the biggest companies to the most influential artists, from Steve Jobs to Johann Sebastian Bach, Epstein argues that constraints were not just the catalyst but the key ingredient in their success. It’s fascinating, and on top of that, it’s well-written and easy to read. It reminded me of the ideas in one of my favorite books on creativity, Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist. (Btw, Kleon’s newest book Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again comes out next month!)

Misc: I also read and loved Christina Applegate’s memoir You With the Sad Eyes, which is where the Anchorman story above came from.

As mentioned, I’ve been trying to be more discerning—yet less structured—in my reading, and spend more time putting ideas into actions. I didn’t read as many books this month as I typically do, but I ended up enjoying the experience a lot more. I dipped in and out of some old favorites, like David Sedaris’s Happy Go Lucky andWhen You Are Engulfed in Flames. I also read Lukas Gage’s memoirI Wrote This for Attention, which was a random choice for me but I LOVED it. I read How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr which was eye-opening. I’ve also been making my way throughThe Wisdom of Marcus Aurelius by Robin Waterfield, as well as—for the ninth time—A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy. I credit Tolstoy’s wisdom and teachings—Christian teachings, mind you—for turning me into such a flaming leftist. Oh, and if you haven’t heard, Anne Lamott and her husband, Neal Allen, released a new book in March:Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences. I’m only a few chapters in and it is fantastic.

One of the best books I read this month was1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How it Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Oh my goodness, it’s SO good. A 400+ page book about the Wall Street crash sounds like a remedy for insomnia, but it’s the opposite. I actually had a hard time going to sleep because I wanted to stay up and keep reading. The book follows the main players—the financiers, bankers, and government figures who helped fuel the speculation and then had to deal with the fallout—all from a fly-on-the-wall perspective. One especially fascinating thread is Carter Glass, who seems to have had a personal vendetta against National City Bank president Charles Mitchell. It’s all riveting. And Sorkin is such a fantastic writer that you often forget he’s the one doing the writing at all.

The Zorg by Siddharth Kara
Wow. I’d never even heard of the Zorg before, let alone understood its role in sparking the abolitionist movement in England and the United States. In 1781, the crew crammed the ship with 442 enslaved people on a voyage to Jamaica. After a series of events—bad weather, navigational errors—the ship veered off course, and supplies began to dwindle. What happened next is almost impossible to comprehend. In an effort to “save lives,” they began throwing people overboard, starting with women and children. Shackled together, often in pairs, people were dragged to the edge of the ship, screaming and begging for their lives, and thrown into the ocean to drown. It was the systematic murder of 133 people. Why? Mostly money. The slaves had been so malnourished and mistreated that they would likely sell for far less than expected. And because they were insured “property,” they’d be worth more dead than alive. When news of the massacre spread, it forced people to confront the true brutality of slavery. True to form, pro-slavery activists used the Bible to defend it. Reverend Raymond Harris “asserted that, ‘the slave-trade . . . appears in perfect harmony with the principles and decisions of the word of God,’ and that Jesus ‘never once condemned, reproved, or even hinted the least disapprobation of the practices of slavery . . . not even in his divine Sermon on the Mount.’” Another slavery supporter, William Gregson, argued that financial catastrophe would occur if slavery was abolished. To which I wrote in the margins: then you be a slave. It’s a hard book to stomach. But the storytelling and historical detail make it readable and unforgettable.

Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In by Louis Zamperini
My good friend recommended this, and I’m so glad she did. Most people know Louis Zamperini’s story on the surface: Olympic runner, World War II bombardier, prisoner of war. What he endured is almost incomprehensible. What I loved about this book—a collection of advice written near the end of his life—is how he remained cheerful through it all. He laments how you can’t watch sports today without seeing someone lose ungraciously. He talks about hatred and, like Etty Hillesum, believed hatred was a ruse. “You hate and hate and hate, and think you’re getting even by hating.” But you’re really just destroying yourself. That’s the trap. After everything he went through, maybe the hardest part wasn’t surviving. Maybe it was deciding what to do with it all: Carry it? Or put it down and free yourself? And maybe that’s what “not giving up” really means—not just surviving what happens to you, but like Etty—refusing to let it turn you into someone you don’t want to be. Refusing to let jerks turn you into a jerk. Really, really great book.

Football by Chuck Klosterman
Oh my goodness, this book was so much fun. This guy is one of the weirdest, most interesting thinkers I’ve read. He overthinks everything in the most entertaining way. He takes football and uses it as a launching pad into bigger questions about time, culture, and what we choose to value. This isn’t really a book about football. It’s a book about how we think about football. And from there, how we think about everything else. This guy has thought about football in pretty much every context you can imagine. He even argues—convincingly—that Jim Thorpe was a greater football player than Tom Brady. And there’s not even video footage of Thorpe playing football!He said NFL football will continue to grow in the U.S. over the next 15–20 years, but eventually it will become too big. And when that happens, it will break. As obsessed as Americans are with football now, he suggests that in 50 years, it will probably be irrelevant. This sounds ridiculous at first, but he has valid points. And this got me thinking. If something as massive as football can eventually fade into irrelevance…what does that say about everything else we chase? Fame. Legacy. Being “the greatest” at the expense of our happiness. Not only will you not be able to enjoy your legend status because you’ll be, you know, dead, but the people who think of you as a legend will in turn be dead themselves. The next generations probably won’t even know your name, let alone what the thing was that you were great at. This is all to say: nobody cares what you do. So do things that are meaningful to you. Spend time with your parents. Take the vacation. Explore. People talk about hustling 24/7 like it’s a good thing. They hustle just to do more hustling! (Usually it’s because they don’t know what else to do with themselves.) It reminds me of something Marcus Aurelius wrote: “You’re afraid of death because you won’t be able to do this anymore?” In other words, what you do matters, but not nearly as much as how you live.

What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes
This war memoir is epic. I couldn’t put it down. It’s so well-written that I had to order another book of his, Matterhorn. Marlantes warns about what war does to a person internally. He argues that we do a great job physically preparing soldiers for war, but a terrible job giving them the tools to survive mentally and spiritually. He talks about the guilt and anger and confusion of trying to reconcile being a “good person” with the atrocities the war enables one to commit. I just love how brutally honest he is. And while I didn’t agree with everything he said, I still think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s raw, insightful, full of action, and reflective. I think you’ll love it too.