Table of Contents (Under Construction)

This book shifted something inside of me when I first read it, and I’ve never looked back. Here was a guy, a successful blogger-turned-entrepreneur who refused to submit to society’s plan for his life, and decided to follow his own instead. It sounds wild to say, but I never fully understood that you could do that before reading this book. Life-changing. Full stop.

“It's lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for 'realistic' goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming.”

A chilling dystopian novel about an authoritarian government that will stop at nothing to control the thoughts, opinions, and behaviors of its citizens…and one man who starts to think for himself.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”

This is a book I almost didn’t finish, about a dystopian society where everyone is happy all the time (because of the drugs they take) and no one experiences any hardship. Or really feels anything at all. Until one day...I don’t want to spoil the ending, but the last half of the book made it unforgettable.

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

One of the absolute greatest novels ever written, this is a family drama about a cruel patriarch whose decisions rips apart the lives of his three sons (the brothers), ultimately leading to his murder. This was Dostoyevsky’s final, greatest novel. It made a massive impression on me when I first read it, and has never really left me alone since.

"Do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over.”

Cat's Cradle is really, really funny, but also horrifying and thought-provoking, which you don’t usually find all in one book. Anyway, it’s about the search for the last remaining samples of "Ice-Nine," which, once it comes into contact with water, binds to it, ALL of it, basically wiping out life on Earth. That last sentence may not have made much sense, but please read this novel!

“In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness. And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely. "Everything must have a purpose?" asked God. "Certainly," said man. "Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God. And He went away.”

This is one of the most famous existentialist novels ever written, and it explores the theme of the "absurd" character of existence. 

Things happen for reasons we can't figure out or get a hold on, our lives drift on, mostly without our ever being able to draw a convincing narrative arc, and then we come to the moment of our inevitable death, not really having understood anything that has happened to us. 

Bleak, sure. But Camus is definitely NOT a pessimist, this story is brilliant (in a sentence, it's about a man who has just lost his mother, who murders an Arab man for no reason on the beach in Algeria), and it's well worth reading.

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”

Published in 1903, As a Man Thinketh is one of the most popular self-help books of all time, and it's one that I try to re-read every single year. In the book, James Allen poetically likens our minds to a garden, where the thoughts that grow are exactly like the ones that we plant there, intentionally or not.

“The dreamers are the saviors of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which it shall one day see and know.”

Meditations was originally kept as a private journal by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who never intended to publish it. He was the last of the “Five Good Emperors,” and he’s also considered (rightly) to be one of the most important Stoic philosophers, right up there with Seneca and Epictetus.

Meditations is even more astonishing when you think of the time period Marcus lived through, which was characterized by constant wars, invasions, plagues, revolts, struggles…just on and on, and Marcus’s book is his impeccably honest attempt to understand himself and make sense of the universe with all this going on around him. 

I honestly can’t recommend this book highly enough, and I can’t even imagine a world without it. To think that it was almost lost to the endless abyss of time is unfathomable to me, and I’m just extraordinarily grateful every time I think about it that it wasn’t.

“At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.”

This is a fantastic nonfiction book about memory and how to improve it, and it follows an attempt by the author to improve his memory by undergoing “elite memory training” and afterwards entering the world memory championships. 

This might sound dumb, or like I'm exaggerating or something, but I was literally pumping my fist as he tells the story of his final showdown in the memory championships at the end of the book. It’s far more exciting than it sounds.

It’s not only an incredible book, it's also extraordinarily helpful, and it taught me that, in the end, all we really have at the end of our lives is our memories. So, we may as well go out and make them as memorable as possible!

“Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by not paying attention?”

How can I summarize one of my absolute favorite books of all time? This is THE book that got me hooked on learning about space, and Carl Sagan has been my go-to every time I want a triple-shot of wonder, beauty, and awe. Cosmos is an absolutely thrilling book about space exploration, the composition of other planets, our efforts to find out more about the universe we live in, and the possibilities for future space-missions to unlock even more wonder and beauty and awe. Such an incredible book!

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

There’s a well-known passage in the beginning (see below) that is simply one of the most stirring descriptions of our Earth that I've ever heard. 

The book is about space exploration, of course, but the implicit (and explicit) warning throughout is that if we don't take better care of the planet we have now, we might have to go looking for another one. That's easier said than done, so we'd better get our act together!

“It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.”