I just loaded my iPhone up with more books and realized what a rich year it’s been so far in reading.1
If you’re on the lookout for good reads (I always am!), here are some of the best books I’ve read recently:
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Carol Dweck) – Dweck’s TED Talks are great but the unabridged book well worth it. Read it if you care about living well.
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (Christopher McDougall) – this book changed my perspective on human physiology and convinced me that running in 100° Phnom Penh heat is actually pretty tame on the scale of human athletic achievements (and, believe it or not, can be quite enjoyable).
Wake, Sleeper (Bryan Parys) – a masterfully crafted memoir of growing up and grappling with faith. Equal parts tragic, hilarious, absurd, and profound, it was enjoyable and thought provoking to the end. This is one I read slowly, with my eyes, to savor the prose.
High Output Management (Andy Grove) – with such a yawn-inducing title I almost passed it over, but I’m glad I didn’t. It’s one of the highest-density books I’ve read in terms of value-per-page. I’m sure I will return to it year after year.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Robert B. Cialdini) – I’ll just copy from the book’s description: this is “the classic book on persuasion, [which] explains the psychology of why people say ‘yes’—and how to apply these understandings”. I had many ah-ha! moments learning to recognize why I behave in certain ways, often against my felt wishes.
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Robert F. Kennedy) – an inside account of the decision-making process that diffused likely nuclear war. Fascinating account of the human elements of negotiations. (I had previously read this in grad school; definitely worth the re-read.)
Finding George Orwell in Burma (Emma Larkin) – I’ve never paired travel writing with actual travel before but this provided an insightful introduction to Burma. Without it I could never have understood what a positive change has happened in the country in just ten years since it was published.
- This has been largely facilitated by the excellent Voice Dream Reader text-to-speech app, which lets me read equally well whether at a cafe, on a run, or on a bumpy bus ride. It might be worth a separate post, but for me the notion of “reading” has transformed in recent years from a discrete physical activity (moving your eyes across the author’s written words) into a cognitive activity (absorbing the author’s words with your mind). This has been completely liberating. Hat tip to Jared Goralnick, who got me started down this path with his evangelism of Audible.com. ↩