Tag: books

As promised and previously updated here and here, I read 50 (51 actually) books in 2021.

One of the last books I read this year, and easily one of my favorites, was Ridgeline by Michael Punke, who also wrote The Revenant. It describes the fight between Capt. William Fetterman and the Sioux chief Crazy Horse at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming.

Punke switches between the perspective of the settlers, soldiers, and the Sioux to great effect. I can’t stop thinking about what it’d be like on one hand, to live in a small fort surrounded by people who want to kill you, or on the other, to have your entire way of life threatened by that same group of heavily armed people in the small fort.

Other excellent historical fiction this year were Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and The Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield.

Towards the end of the year I switched to reading about oppressive states and bad leaders. That included:

The Party by Richard McGregor, a look inside the Chinese Communist Party’s inner workings.

The Fear by Peter Godwin. The most harrowing of the lot, this book is about the Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and his descent from liberator to murderous dictator.

The Man Without a Face by Massha Gessen is an excellent look at Putin’s rise to power and what makes him who he is.

Erdogan Rising by Hannah Lucinda Smith is about the rapid decline of democracy in Turkey under the populist Erdogan.

The Wires of War by Jacob Helberg. This was less about any individual leader and more about threats to America’s technological sovereignty in the face of foreign disinformation campaigns, and intellectual property theft as well as internal complacency and mismanagement of our technological future.

I recommend all of them.

A dump of my notes on the book Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

Key takeaways:

Focus less on the perennial problems and more on the day to day:

• Especially focus on flow in both vocational and avocational contexts.
• Less multitasking. It interferes with flow.
• Also focus on microflow. Create and enjoy rituals. Find small activities with intrinsic rewards and do them frequently.
• Optimize for having less low-key continual stress, but more short bursts of intense stress doing things like exercise.
• Don’t ask “what’s the purpose of my life?” Ask “what’s the purpose of my life right now?”

Be with people. Smile and be friendly and people will want to be with you.

Eat a large variety of food and only to 80% full. Caloric restriction can help.

Other notes:

Some of these notes are direct concepts from the book, some of them are just what I wrote down as I read.

Ikigai – The center of a Venn diagram between what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.

Forget the idea of retirement. It’s escape and if you’re escaping, maybe think about how to think differently about what you do or change what you do.

Active mind, youthful body. Stress shortens longevity. Frequent low doses of cortisol constantly flowing through the body cause adrenal fatigue and chronic fatigue. This opposed to our ancestors who had occasional high doses of cortisol and adrenalin in moments of actual danger which kept the body healthy.

Don’t sit all day. Find small reasons to remain active. Sleep 7-9 hours a day. Melatonin strengthens our immune system, protects against cancer promotes insulin production, slows Alzheimers, helps prevent osteoporosis and fights heart disease. Slows production after 30 years old. Balanced diet with calcium, moderate sun, sleep, avoiding stress, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine (which make it harder to sleep) can help.

Logotherapy – Viktor Frankl – “Well, in logotherapy the patient sits up straight and has to listen to things that are, on occasion, hard to hear.” (vs. in psychoanalysis: “the patient lies down on a couch and tells you things that are, on occasion, hard to say.”

The search for purpose / meaning as described by logotherapy in 5 steps:

1. A person feels empty, frustrated, or anxious.
2. The therapist shows him that what he is feeling is the desire to have a meaningful life.
3. The patient discovers his life’s purpose ( at that particular point in time).
4. Of his own free will, the patient decides to accept or reject that destiny.
5. This new found passion for life helps him overcome obstacles and sorrows.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Victor Frankl

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

There’s a natural tension between what we’ve accomplished and what we’d like to achieve in the future. “What we need then is not a peaceful existence, but a challenge we can strive to meet by applying all the skills at our disposal.”

Existential crisis – trying to fill the gap between what’s expected of us and what we want for ourselves with economic power or physical pleasure, or by numbing the senses. 

Contrary to Sartre, we don’t create meaning for our lives, we discover it. This meaning can be transformed many times over the years.

Just as worry often brings about precisely the thing that was feared, excessive attention to a desire (or “hyper-intention”) can keep that desire from being fulfilled.

Seven conditions for achieving flow – Owen Schaffer

1. Knowing what to do
2. Knowing how to do it
3. Knowing how well you’re doing it
4. Knowing where to go (where navigation is involved)
5. Perceiving significant challenges
6. Perceiving significant skills
7. Being free from distractions

According to Csikszentmihalyi to focus we need:

1. to be in a distraction-free environment
2. to have control over what we’re doing at every moment

Some studies indicate that working on several things at once lowers our productivity by 60% and our IQ by 10 points.

“All that I have produced before the age of 70 is not worth being counted. It is at the age of 73 that I have somewhat begun to understand the structure of true nature, of animals and grasses, and trees and birds, and fishes and insects; consequently at 80 years of age I shall have made still more progress; at 90 I hope to have penetrated into the mystery of things; at 100 years of age I should have reached decidedly a marvelous degree, and when I shall be 110, all that I do, every point and eery line, shall be instinct with life.”

Hokusai – artist of One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji

This is raw outline of Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay’s fantastic book on how to have tough conversations that potentially change minds.

Focus first on instilling doubt rather than changing beliefs.

Basics

1. Goals – why are you having the conversation?
2. Partnerships – be a partner, not an adversary
3. Rapport – build the relationship
4. Listen – talk less, listen more.
5. Delivering messages does not work. Conversations are exchanges, not debates. Deliver a message only on explicit request.
6. Intentions – Socrates Meno dialog. People don’t knowingly desire bad things.
7. Walk Away. If your primary emotion is frustration, it’s time to quit. Breathe.

I slowed down a bit from my earlier breakneck pace and also got… shall we say distracted by lots of shiny objects–the in-progress books below the list of finished books. Despite those intermissions, I’m still relatively on track for 50 this year. I’ll likely revisit this post and add mini-reviews or link each title to a longer reviews at some point in the near future.

Finished

1. Cultural Amnesia – Clive James
2. The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
3. The Hamlet – William Faulkner
4. The Dog Stars – Peter Heller
5. Jayber Crow – Wendell Berry
6. Tortilla Flat – John Steinbeck 
7. The Sunset Limited – Cormac McCarthy 
8. Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens 
9. Conscious- Annaka Harris 
10. The Red and the Black – Stendhal
11. Extraterrestrial – Avi Loeb
12. The Evolution of Desire – Cynthia L. Haven
13. Never Enough – Judith Grisel
14. Unmasked – Andy Ngo
15. La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert – Joel Dicker (the first and only book I’ve read entirely in French)
16. The Revolt of the Public – Martin Guri
17. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
18. Gun, With Occasional Music – Jonathan Lethem 
19. Klara and the Sun – Ishiguro Kazuo
20. Live Not By Lies – Robert Dreher
21. The Virtues of War -Steven Pressfield
22. All About Love – bell hooks 
23. The Ghost Writer – Philip Roth
24. The Price of Tomorrow – Jeff Booth
25. A Thousand Brains – Jeff Hawkins
26. The Comfort Crisis – Michael Easter

In-progress

• An Elegant Puzzle – Will Larson
• Postjournalism – Andrey Mir
• Battling to the End – René Girard
• Human Diversity – Charles Murray
• L’Élégance du hérisson – Muriel Barbery
• The Sovereign Individual – James Dale Davidson
• Baltasar and Blimunda – José Saramago
• The Courage to Be – Paul Tillich
• Novels, Tales, Journeys – Pushkin
• Falcoln Freeway – Christian Hagenlocher
• War and Peace and War – Peter Turchin
• Lila – Robert Pirsig
• The Language of Creation – Matthieu Pageau
• Hollow Kingdom – Kira Jane Buxton
• A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters – Julian Barnes
• Ducks, Newburyport – Lucy Ellman