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10 Books That Revealed to Me the TRUE Power of Reading
Matt Karamazov
October 02, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 40 minutes
This is a long one (featuring 10 spectacular books), so I’m going to get right into it!
Just let me mention a few quick things first…
Every month, I donate $1 to First Book Canada (a literacy charity) for every Premium Member of The Reading Life newsletter, and this month’s donation of $40 brings our total up to $634 so far! It’s not millions or anything (yet), but it’s a start!
I also just accepted an advisory position with BookGenius, a very cool new iPad/iPhone app featuring book quizzes (to help you remember more of what you read), book clubs you can join (I’m starting one soon), and much more.
BookGenius is an official sponsor of The Reading Life, and I earn a commission for new signups, but now I can also offer you guys 56% off the annual plan. Check out the app.
And in case you missed it, here are 90 great psychology books to read, selected from the 1,400+ books I’ve read so far.
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
“If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious.”
“The great news is that you can take this approach for almost every product or service that it’s possible to provide. The formula is simple: solve the hardships, remove the stumbling blocks, answer the questions or hire professionals to do so, and you’ll soon have a product so great - so ‘push-button’ - that it is a no-brainer of a purchase to make.”
Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This month’s book is How To: $10M, by William Brown, a great business book that contains everything you need to know about scaling a coaching and/or e-learning business to more than $10,000,000 in revenue. Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!
(None Yet, But October JUST Started!)
After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,418 books, including 66 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“For a couple of pages now you have been reading on, and this would be the time to tell you clearly whether this station where I have got off is a station of the past or a station of today; instead the sentences continue to move in vagueness, grayness, in a kind of no man's land of experience reduced to the lowest common denominator.
Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it - a trap.
Or perhaps the author still has not made up his mind, just as you, reader, for that matter, are not sure what you would most like to read: whether it is the arrival at an old station, which would give you a sense of going back, a renewed concern with lost times and places, or else a flashing of lights and sounds, which would give you the sense of being alive today, in the world where people today believe it is a pleasure to be alive."
You are about to begin reading my summary of the book, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino. It’s a postmodern masterpiece, but it can be confusing if you’re reading this while distracted. So go and close the door and pull the blinds. Turn off your notifications and tell your coworkers that for the next ten minutes, you’re not to be disturbed for any reason…
Alright, so the previous paragraph will make a lot more sense if you’ve read the first page of this book already. But If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is yet another example of why postmodern fiction is infinitely better than postmodern philosophy. It was my first introduction to the work of Italo Calvino, and it completely altered what I thought I knew about what books could do.
From the opening paragraph, Calvino pulls you right into the story, speaking directly to you, convincing you to ignore all distractions, give him your undivided attention, and immerse yourself in the story. At the end, he pulls off even more magic tricks (this summary contains spoilers, by the way), and just leaves you in awe. I loved it.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler contains ten interconnected stories, the titles of which (it’s revealed) combine at the end to form a complete sentence. That’s one of the pleasant surprises in store for first-time readers of this “book about books.”
The meta-narrative features two readers who are gradually, inexorably brought together by stories, during which time the first reader attempts to solve a literary mystery involving missing chapters. He buys a new book at a bookstore, but is distressed to discover that the second chapter is missing - the pages are all blank.
Thus begins his search, which leads him to start and stop ten additional novels, each a part of a literary labyrinth that culminates in an ending that comes out of nowhere and drops like a hammer blow. Or maybe a “subtle” hammer blow, if such a thing exists.
All ten novels that the first reader starts and stops are nothing like each other - different plots, styles, ambience, author - and each of them ends with a cliffhanger. Calvino constantly surprises the Reader (and you, the meta-reader), catching you off-guard with abrupt twists and turns that lead you, carefully, imperceptibly, onward to an even deeper mystery. I didn’t even know words could do that, until Italo Calvino showed me how.
Even though the book has a beginning and an end, it’s infinite - timeless, inexhaustible. I can’t imagine that it would hit with the same force on a second reading, and I’ll have to admit that not everyone will “get” Calvino’s style at all. But I thought it was brilliant, and you can now return to work, seeing as you’re almost finished reading my summary of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino.
Difficulty Rating: Moderate/Hard
Why You Might Like It: I had never read anything like it before, and very few authors can pull off that postmodern style and create anything worth reading. Calvino’s a genius, though, and this one made me want to go and read his other work too (The Baron in the Trees is also excellent).
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
Let me tell you a little bit about what makes Infinite Jest so intimidating, and then I’ll tell you why the epic challenge is so indescribably worth it.
For one thing, it’s over 1,100 pages long, including hundreds of endnotes, which you probably should read because some of them contain crucial plot points and several of the funniest jokes.
Wallace uses 20,584 unique words in the 577,608-word book(!), which ended up sending me to the dictionary on almost every single page. One guy actually calculated this, and he worked out that the first 35,000 words of the novel contain 4,923 unique words, “more than most rappers but still less than the Wu-Tang Clan.”
So it’s long and you won’t know what all the words mean. But what is it actually about?
That’s a big question, and my full summary is massive (too big to include here), so if you’re interested you can read the whole thing here.
Difficulty Rating: Extremely F****** Hard
Why You Might Like It: Infinite Jest gave me a book hangover that lasted for months. I literally couldn’t stop thinking about it. Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome, maybe it was just because it’s incredible…whatever it was, yeah: Infinite Jest, man. Highly recommend.
“If there is an effect in your life that you want more of, you merely need to trace it back to the causes and repeat the causes. If there is an effect in your life that you do not enjoy, you need to trace it back to the causes and get rid of them.”
This was the fifth book of Brian Tracy’s that I’ve read, and it cemented his place as a key influence on my professional life. Many of the things I’ve learned in this book have led directly to my current success, and I’ve never forgotten them.
It’s for that reason that I include it here in this list. This book showed me that my future could be sooo much bigger than my present.
Certain key ideas stand out, such as the fact that you can never outperform the self-image that you have of yourself, which is a key idea in another fantastic book I would read later, Psycho-Cybernetics, by Maxwell Maltz. He also makes the case for doing more than that for which you’re currently paid - that is, if you want to someday earn much more than you’re currently paid.
If you remember just one idea from this book, though, I’d say remember the Law of Substitution, which states that you can never hold more than one conscious thought in your head at any one time, positive or negative. So make it a good one!
A century earlier, in 1903, James Allen said the same thing in As a Man Thinketh, where he likened the mind to a garden and said that whatever you plant there will bring forth.
I’ve never forgotten that, and ever since reading this book I’ve made a conscious effort to pursue positivity wherever I could, and try to think about only the best, most life-affirming ideas. The ideas that would lead me to success, happiness, and maximum achievement.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why You Might Like It: All of Brian Tracy’s books are written in a clear, organized, and straightforward manner that make all the key concepts he’s explaining very easy to understand and apply. He’s a legend in the personal development space, and one of the greats.
“The mind is its own place, and in it Self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”
What I’ll never, ever forget about this masterpiece is that John Milton dictated the entire thing - more than 10,000 lines - after he became completely blind. It would be a breathtaking, astonishing, and awe-inspiring epic poem anyway, but knowing that makes it all the more incredible. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I read it.
Paradise Lost has been profoundly influential on Western culture for centuries, and it tells the story of the Fall of Man across three different worlds: Heaven, Hell, and Earth. It begins with the expulsion of Satan from Heaven, and what’s striking about Milton’s characterization is that Satan comes across as…sympathetic almost. And honestly? God’s kind of a jerk in this one! Very Old Testament for sure.
Right out of the gate, Satan and his band of rebellious, fallen angels are kicked out of Heaven and plunged forever into Hell, a place Milton describes as “darkness visible.” And again, you start seeing references to Paradise Lost everywhere, as William Styron’s memoir (he wrote Sophie’s Choice) about his deep depression is titled Darkness Visible. To my knowledge, no reference is made to Paradise Lost in Styron’s book, but it’s a direct reference and, what I imagine to be extremely accurate.
You might expect Milton to make Satan a completely vile, evil creature with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, but he shocked the literary world by making people empathize with his feelings of anger at being shunned by God and forced into exile. God himself is shown to be petty, envious, and wrathful, and Satan wonders why God would jealously guard his Knowledge of Life from Adam and Eve by forbidding them to eat the infamous apple.
The stated purpose of Paradise Lost is to justify the ways of God to man, defending divine justice, while explaining why God allows evil and suffering, and why He would allow Adam and Eve to make their own choices - “free to fall,” even though transgressing against the will of God. It also makes one wonder whether instead of creation being an act of divine favor, it’s more of a curse, due to the awareness of man’s mortality.
Another theme of the poem is the redemption of humanity via divine grace, Milton saying through the angel Raphael in Book VII (in one interpretation) how humans were created in order to fill the vacancy in Heaven after the expulsion of Satan’s co-conspirators. Ascension into Heaven isn’t guaranteed, but rather a cosmic reward for living according to the Will of God.
That’s to say very little about Adam and Eve in all this! Obviously, they’re major players in this universal drama as well. Eve is made out to be the main human villain in the story, fairly or unfairly, but really, she’s all of us. The first humans are subject to the temptations and attractions felt by all humans, and what helps make Paradise Lost so perfectly relevant is how relatable their actions are.
As Satan and his rebels plot their revenge against God, the loyalist angels attempt to defend the Garden of Eden and prevent the Fall, but even they can’t override human nature and free will. Between educating humans and battling rebels, the angels play a major role in the poem, though in the end, the fight for control of mankind’s destiny rages on.
In 1667, John Milton changed the future of humanity with Paradise Lost, and in 2016, my life was changed by reading it. The poem completely awed me with its power and force, and I have a feeling that I’ll keep noticing connections between it and other literary works long into the future.
Even the poem itself is an extension of other extremely influential and enduring ideas from the past. Just as Adam and Eve’s ultimate downfall is unyielding love, Dante discovered in 1320 that love is the power that moves the sun and the other stars.
Difficulty Rating: Hard
Why You Might Like It: This is an absolute classic that’s influenced a tremendous amount of Western thought since its publication. Some Books (parts) are more engaging than others, of course, but if you can make it through, you almost can’t help but be blown away by Milton’s erudition and eloquence.
“It just goes by so fast. Everyone overlooks enjoying it. They just put themselves into so many prisons.”
Ignore the horrifyingly bad Amazon description of this book. I was profoundly changed by Shakespeare Saved My Life, and I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. It’s spectacular, incredibly moving, and it confirmed what I’ve always suspected about reading: it improves lives, it changes lives, and it can even save lives.
Shakespeare Saved My Life is the nonfiction account of the work of Dr. Laura Bates, a professor and prison volunteer who went on to start a Shakespeare discussion group of sorts within a maximum-security prison in Indiana.
The other “main character” is an inmate by the name of Larry Newton, serving a life sentence for a murder he committed when he was a teenager. In other words, one of the last people you’d normally associate with a love of Shakespeare. And indeed, in the beginning, it’s a tough slog.
The prisoners (naturally) don’t completely trust Laura’s intentions, they doubt their own ability to grasp the meaning of Shakespeare’s plays, and they’re in prison, so many of them have a lot more on their minds than Mercutio or MacBeth.
But then they start to get it.
Not all of the prisoners love the Shakespeare group, sure, but more of them stay on than one might expect. And several of them prove themselves to be more than capable of contributing to an intelligent discussion about his work.
They shatter everyone’s expectations - including their own - and to read about their progress, and their growing love of books and literature was just…awesome.
I honestly can’t recommend this book highly enough, and not nearly enough people have heard of it. I read it back in 2015 and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. I’m not sure where Larry is now, or what Dr. Bates is doing now, for that matter. But I hope her work continues. It’s necessary, right, and good.
Because the purpose of imprisonment is not vengeance; it’s redemption, recovery, and rehabilitation. We put people in there because of what they’ve done, but in a functioning, compassionate society, we should help them make positive changes before they come out.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why You Might Like It: This book just made me so happy. It’s extremely sad, at times, but the overall message is such a hopeful one. It made me realize the true power of books and literature to change a person’s life, no matter what that life looks like now.
“Strether hadn’t had for years so rich a consciousness of time – a bag of gold into which he constantly dipped for a handful. It was present to him that when the little business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would still have shining hours to use absolutely as he liked.”
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. The famous line from this phenomenal, yet extremely challenging book!
Henry James, brother of the famous psychologist William James, is the kind of writer who can take a reader like me to Paris – a city I’ve never been to – and make me feel like I can see and feel and hear everything that’s going on; then, he can drop me in the middle of characters like Lambert Strether and Chad Newsome and make me never want to leave! I just want to stay there with all of them and keep on living!
The brief plot overview is that an American, Lambert Strether is set to be married to the wealthy Mrs. Newsome, who then sends him off to Europe so that he can retrieve her son, Chad, from what she can only believe is an aimless, contemptible life in Paris.
We’re led to believe that the engagement might be off if Strether fails in this, but then again, he might be so transformed by his stay in Paris that it may not matter. We have to read and see!
This is one of Henry James’s three final novels, and it’s absolutely one of his most difficult ones. This is not easy reading. Just the complex sentence structure and confusing syntax makes me think of him as something like an early-19th -century David Foster Wallace.
Which, of course, isn’t a bad thing! Just don’t go think you’re going to take this one to the beach and read it in a single weekend.
And why would you even want to with a book like this! The Ambassadors is full of life and heart, and Strether’s moral transformation at the hands of the refined Chad and the beguiling city of Paris itself is simply wonderful to behold.
James is also very funny, though some of the jokes don’t land so hard when you’re trying so hard to figure out what the sentence actually means!
One reference to James from his secretary, Theodora Bosanquet that I want to leave you with:
“When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked around him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenseless children of light...
His novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperiled by reckless and barbarous stupidity.”
Perhaps a little overwrought (I rolled my eyes at “children of light”), but this is Henry James, and the difficulty of his prose is worth the effort to arrive at a world illuminated.
Difficulty Rating: Hard
Why You Might Like It: Once you untwist the sentences, most of them are quite beautiful, and the effort is worth it, in my opinion. Even the satisfaction of tackling an entire Henry James novel and understanding it is quite intense. But he was also one of the keenest observers of human nature (and folly), and so there’s extraordinary insight here as well.
“The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself."
There isn’t a single likeable character in this entire book, and yet I couldn’t stop reading. Most of them have no redeeming qualities whatsoever, their actions and attitudes are abhorrent, and their motivations almost wicked. And yet…
And yet it made me want to read every single other Jonathan Franzen novel as soon as I could. Freedom wasn’t quite as good, but The Corrections was amazing. Awful, but amazing. Frustrating and horrible, but awesome. And the cliffhangers!
I swear: there’s a character who falls off the deck of a cruise ship in the middle of the book, and the 100-page wait to find out what happened to them was nothing less than agonizing.
In terms of plot, The Corrections is about a family that’s long since gone its separate ways, but whose matriarch Enid Lambert wants to get together again for one last Christmas at home. Her husband, Alfred, is losing his mental faculties due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, and the rest of the family isn’t doing so hot either, which pushes the trainwreck of a story forward for more than 500 pages.
Which brings me to what struck me so powerfully about the book itself.
Franzen’s writing and storytelling just flows. I don’t typically use the word “spellbinding,” but that’s what other reviewers have called it, and I’d have to agree. Like I said, none of the characters are particularly good people - certainly no one I’d want to have at my house for Christmas - but page after page after page, I just had to know what happened.
Difficulty Rating: Moderate/Hard
Why You Might Like It: In fairness, you might very well hate it! Plenty of people don’t like Franzen at all, but this one just carries you along. He’s one of the greatest storytellers alive today, in my opinion, and so yeah, you may like this one.
“Education is the reason why we behave like human beings.”
I never tell anyone what to read (I don’t even like the word “should”), and every “best books” list is always going to tell you more about the list-maker than the books themselves.
That being said, I’ll make an exception for books recommended by Will Durant.
The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time is a fairly slim compendium of the greatest thoughts, minds, and books ever produced on this planet, introduced and summarized in an accessible manner, and arranged into sections such as The Ten Greatest Thinkers, The Ten Greatest Poets, The One Hundred Best Books for an Education, The Ten Peaks of Human Progress, and Twelve Vital Dates in World History.
One thing I liked is that even while defending his choices about which books and thinkers to include, he never claims to be the final authority on the value and worth of ideas, and he urges you to embark on your own education, your own library apprenticeship, and develop your own list of “best books and ideas.”
He’s wise enough to know that any list like that is going to be wildly different, depending on the individual.
At the very least, Durant will point you in the right direction, even though, for the majority of his life, some of the best books written by women didn’t exist yet. We had Mary Shelley, but no Martha Nussbaum; George Eliot, but no Ursula K. Le Guin. They didn’t make his list, but he would have absolutely loved them, and they can go on your list.
The best of what Will Durant has to offer in this book (and all his books) is a certain informed optimism about the future of humanity and its heroes.
As it stands right now, it’s virtually impossible to read every fantastic book that already exists. And when you think of the incredible talent - the brilliance - that’s popping up all over the world today, you can see that even if we were to read nothing but the very best, we could spend our entire lives drinking from the firehose of human wisdom, intelligence, and knowledge.
Difficulty Rating: Moderate
Why You Might Like It: If you want to cover a lot of intellectual ground in a hurry, this one’s for you. It’s a grand, sweeping overview of essentially the entire history of Western thought, and, like any good historian, he makes you curious enough to go even deeper and learn even more.
“If you decide to follow me, I will take you to where I believe our knowledge of time has reached: up to the brink of that vast nocturnal and star-studded ocean of all that we still don’t know.”
I’m more confused now about the nature and reality of time than when I started reading, but this is a beautiful book by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli about how our common experience of the universe doesn’t reflect its true objectivity, and how much of what we thought was true about time is actually false or misleading.
Rovelli has spent his career grappling with quantum gravity, and he’s among the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory. I can spell it, but don’t ask me to explain it! He’s also intensely interested in the history and philosophy of science, and he draws on the poetry of Horace – and specifically his Odes – to talk about how time is stranger than fiction.
For example, time moves faster not only depending on how fast you’re going (even I knew that), but also on whether you’re closer to the ground. Seriously, time literally moves slower for short people than it does for tall people.
In the same way that your feet are “younger” than your head, there is no “present moment” that is true for the universe at all times and in all places. Just like it wouldn’t make sense to ask, “Where is here in Beijing” when you’re in New York, the present moment in one part of the universe is totally separate from the present moment in other parts of the universe.
It’s almost like we create time, in the same way that as we travel to the end of the universe, we would create the boundary of the universe as we kept going. It’s difficult – notoriously so – to say what time “is,” but the closest approximation would be that it is a collection of events, a process. Time and the universe are flow, change, growth, entropy, decay – in short, movement and dance.
As Jorge Luis Borges put it, “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
Difficulty Rating: Moderate
Why You Might Like It: If you’re scientifically-inclined, or just wonder at the awesomeness and hugeness of the universe occasionally, you’re likely going to love this one. If you’re not scientifically-inclined (which I’m not), a second reading might be worth it, but a first reading definitely.
“You can't feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever - or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living.”
Hundreds of books have changed me, deeply, but this one will always be a favorite because of how many intense, varied emotions it made me cycle through while reading it. We Learn Nothing made me feel everything: it’s sincere, heartwarming, hilarious, wise, deeply thoughtful, and sooo much more. I just loved it.
We Learn Nothing is a collection of essays by satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider about his near-death experience being stabbed with a stiletto, the soul-crushing yet stultifying busyness of modern life, the inexorable passage of time, and a variety of other experiences that I’m glad I didn’t live though myself, but am glad I got to read about.
I mentioned this in the opening paragraph, but most of the essays are hilarious too. I can’t remember laughing out loud at more places than while reading this book. Laughing, as in the “holding my stomach, wiping-away-tears” variety. Years later it’s still funny.
The striking quality of (most of) these essays is that they’re not just funny, or not just thoughtful, or not just sad. They’re all of those things, sometimes in the same paragraph. Multiple times, when I had finished recovering from a bout of tearful laughter, I’d sit and think, and realize that Tim Kreider had just changed the way I thought about something. That’s hard enough to do in 300 pages, much less in essay format.
By the time I looked up after finishing the last essay (which only took me a couple of days in total), I noticed that my own life had become deeper and more vivid. I started noticing more things myself, became more aware of the strangeness, absurdity, and meaning of my daily existence. Maybe we do learn something after all.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why You Might Like It: If I haven’t convinced you already, I don’t even know what to say! Oh man, such a great book of essays. I rarely say “trust me,” but…trust me.
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.
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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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