Books (Including Snippets)

Parts of Books that I Love

There are certain parts that have gotten lodged in my head forever. These are some of my favorites that I was able to post.

• In High Fidelity, there’s a great quote about how where you are in life depends a lot on chance.
• In Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good, there’s a great treatise that ends with “Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t really claim that shooting presidents wasn’t like him at all. Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.”
• Dave Eggers’s The Captain and the Glory is a pointed and fun satire of the Trump administration. Here are some of my favorite parts.
• Cary Grant used to greet guests Magic Castle in Los Angeles acting as a faux doorman. Everyone thought it was a doppelganger or impersonator because they couldn’t imagine that Cary Grant would be greeting guests anonymously.
• Anthony Bourdain has some great quotes about how great meals are about more than the food and how workers (like Millenials) need to focus on working hard and getting the job done well.
• In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes about the books 1984 and Brave New World. He writes that in Brave New World, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
• The Story of Art is the book that opened my ideas about art. It talks about how art is for everyone and that teens deserve to appreciate art as much as the most art educated snobs. It also talks about finding pleasure in art wherever you can. There’s no bad reason for liking art; however, there are bad reasons for disliking art.
• Everything is Obvious. *Once You Know the Answer. Is a great book about how confident we are about things we couldn’t possibly know. My favorite part of the book is this study on whether rural or urban soldiers fared better in World War II. The results will surprise you.
• How to Make a Journal of Your Life is a short (128 page) book which changed the way I journal. In terms of materials, I really like Moleskin notebooks. They have a lot of special edition notebooks which make me feel like I’m holding something meaningful in my hands. They come in large (which is actually kind of small) and small (which is tiny). Moleskin has lined and not lined versions. I like it without lines as I feel more free to add art and photos.
• One of my favorite books is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s such a great satire of modern life. My favorite version of the guide is the original Radio Drama before it became a book. Wikipedia has a good list of phrases from the book.
• I just listened to The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. I first read the book about 20 years ago when I graduated from college. Re-reading it, it’s still one of my favorite books, and I couldn’t help seeing how many of the ideas in the book have stayed with me all these years like the idea of single combat warriors. Wolfe opens the book with the question, “What kind of person would put themself on top of a rocket that might blow up?” He answers it in Chapter 1 and then tackles the moving target of who has the right stuff and how it changes over time, like Chuck Yaeger⁽¹⁾Chuck Yaeger is the pilot who had more of The Right Stuff than anyone else. Wolfe writes in the book that the low key Appelechean accent that most commercial pilots use when talking to passengers is all an imitation of Yaeger. If you want to hear what Yaeger sounds like, you can listen to this interview of Yaeger that starts with a Wolfe anecdote about the accent.. The audiobook is perfectly read by Dennis Quaid who played Gordon Cooper in the movie.⁽²⁾If you’re looking for similar books, Leo Janos co-wrote two autobiographies. Yaeger dives deeper into the life of Chuck Yaeger. Skunkworks is the memoir of Ben Rich, the second leader of Lockheed’s super-secret military aircraft division.(4/26/20)
• In his book, Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how difficult it can be to communicate with others and how it can have disastrous results. Here’s his story of how Cortés completely misunderstood Montezuma.

From 2016

• Overall Pick: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Amazon, Audible). This is a bit of a fanboy review but this book is awesome. In the article Ernest Cline is the Luckiest Geek Alive, Cline describes the book as, “What if Willy Wonka was a video game designer and held a contest inside his greatest video game?” Ready Player One is set in a dystopian future where nearly everyone lives in a virtual world called “The Oasis” and the only way to save the world is through an encyclopedia knowledge of 80’s trivia. The book presents such a compelling version of the VR future that all employees of the VR firm Oculus are asked to read the book before they start. The Audiobook is read fantastically by Wil Wheaton (who is mentioned very briefly in the book). Oh, and Steven Spielberg is making it into a movie.
• Guilty Pleasure: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson (Amazon, Audible). A pruriently intellectual book on gossip, twitter and social media shaming. What happens when Lindsey Stone posts a picture mocking a sign at Arlington National Cemetery and it follows her for the rest of her life or when Justine Sacco tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” and it ruined her life. Ronson does a great job of going deep into the specific stories but also making some general points about what social media shaming is doing to society.
• Business: Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull (CEO of Pixar) (Amazon, Audible). Creativity Inc is a great book that combines the history of Pixar with the lessons that they’ve learned as a business. The lessons in the book are pretty run of the mill but the real spark is how Pixar implements them. When Catmull says “Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others,” it sounds like any other book on iterative development. But he shows how Pixar implements this, how movies like Toy Story 2 and Up were completely remade from the initial draft. As a bonus, Catmull talks a lot about his decades long relationship with Steve Jobs and how Jobs impacted Pixar.
• Economics: Misbehaving – The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler (Amazon, Audible). Thaler is the founder of Behavioral Economics, inspired by Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky. In the book Thaler talks about how he got started in economics and started noticing how humans don’t act in the ways that economists expect them to. For example, in his first experience as a professor he got enormous pushback from students when he presented them with a hard test, with an average score of 72. Though the class was graded on a curve, this shouldn’t make a difference to anyone — but it did to the students. How did he learn to placate them? By changing the total available points to 137. Poof! The human students became much happier.
• Memoir: Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (Amazon, Audible). I was expecting a teenage story similar to all the other comedy celebrity stories out there — like Mindy Kaling’s “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?” But this book is so much more — chronicling Noah’s life through the collapse of Apartheid and seeing the culture through the eyes of a half black / half white man who doesn’t really belong to either culture.
• Technology: The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait but Why by Tim Urban (Amazon e-book, Original web series). Tim Urban writes a great blog called Wait But Why?  Elon Musk liked it so much he asked Tim to write about his companies. After months of work, many interviews with Elon and staff and 90,000 words Tim put together a very complete picture of the problems that Tesla (global warming) and SpaceX (global annihilation) are looking to solve and how they are looking to solve them.