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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
By this point, I’ve read nearly 1,500 books(!), and it’s getting damn-near impossible to pick ten favorites, much less one favorite.
But for tonight, I did my best to pick out ten books that made a deep, lasting impression on me, and also ones that I haven’t recommended a bunch of times before.
If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll likely remember me raving about books like The Revolution from Within, The Outsider, Meditations, Fahrenheit 451, Cloud Atlas, and Siddhartha, and while those are phenomenal books, I wanted to recommend a few that you may not have seen as often.
There’s a wide range of genres represented here, from psychology and philosophy, to literary fiction and military science-fiction (trust me) - there’s even an ancient religious text in here (and not from a religion I personally adhere to).
All of these books are incredible. They all changed my life. And now I’m recommending them to you.
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
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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 1,474 books, including 20 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“I picture the most demanding challenge; I visualize what I would need to know how to do to meet it; then I practice until I reach a level of competence where I’m comfortable that I’ll be able to perform.
It’s what I’ve always done, ever since I decided I wanted to be an astronaut in 1969, and that conscious, methodical approach to preparation is the main reason I got to Houston. I never stopped getting ready. Just in case.”
This is an incredible book by the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, and it was one of the very first books I read after I started counting, way back in 2014.
You don’t have to count the number of books you’ve read, by the way, it literally means nothing. But Hadfield’s book inspired me to read compulsively, to raid the library over and over again, because I realized there were more books like his out there. I just had to find them.
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth is about dreaming big, and being ready for anything. It’s about getting yourself ready to achieve big dreams, to start taking moonshots, and to start believing that you have what it takes. Literal moonshots, in his case!
It’s entirely possible that I’m building this book up in my memory so much that it might not be as good as I remember…but I honestly don’t think so. I know it’s common for people to say this, but it’s true: this book changed my life.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why You Might Love It Too: If you love space and you’re excited about the possibility of a bright, expansive human future among the stars, you’ll almost definitely love this one.
But even if you’re more of an Earth-bound type, it’ll inspire you to think bigger, start believing in yourself, and get out there and make it happen.
“The existentialists remind us that human existence is difficult, and that people often behave appallingly, yet they also show how great our possibilities are.”
Existentialism was one of absolutely favorite courses in university, and I’ve never forgotten how alive it made me feel. This book helped me recapture even more of that aliveness, and I’ve never forgotten how it made me feel either.
The philosophy of existentialism itself is a strong, unshakeable inner conviction that life is worth living; it’s yours; and that you bear ultimate responsibility for living it.
Characterized by radical freedom, authentic being, and personal responsibility, it’s the definition of high-agency. There may be certain “facticities” of your existence - limits that shape the possibilities of your life - but you have unlimited freedom within those limits to make your life exactly what you want it to be.
With that in mind, this is a book about the key figures of that philosophical movement, the major events of their lives, the weird troubles they often found themselves in, and how they inspired countless others to recognize their own true freedom as well.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why You Might Love It Too: If you’re into philosophy already, you’ll find this book quite easy to read, and if you’re into being alive at all, you’ll love it. It’ll get you thinking, it’ll get you moving, it’ll get you living.
“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: HARD
Why You Might Love It Too: Infinite Jest gave me a book hangover that lasted for months. I literally couldn’t stop thinking about it. I realize it’s not going to be everyone’s thing, and it’s one of “those” books that people tend to have all these weird associations with, but man. It’s incredible.
“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
This is Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, and it’s easily one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.
Briefly, it’s about a fully-automated, futuristic society run entirely by super-intelligent machines, but it was written in 1952, so you can just imagine what that’s like! Reading it in 2025 like I did was a trip.
Vonnegut is always hilarious, sure, but he always brought a ton of heart and humanity to his books, his characters, and his writing, and just like with Chris Hadfield above, he was one of the very first people to get me really fired up about reading. This newsletter wouldn’t even exist without those two.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why You Might Love It Too: The jokes alone are reason enough, but it’s also a fascinating look at what people in the 50’s thought the future would be like. The crazy thing is how relevant it still is, even though the details are a little off. Amazing book all around, and one that might get you hooked on Kurt Vonnegut!
“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.”
This is one of the main spiritual texts of Hinduism, which you might not expect me to have loved so much - or have even read! But yes, I read it years ago and haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. Seriously, it’s incredible.
The Gita is a philosophical dialogue between the God Krishna and a prince, Arjuna, wherein Krishna explains the fundamental truths of the universe, how humans can come to know God, and how to live in accordance with what I guess you could call the “divine will.”
I’m trying to summarize something that could never fit inside a simple newsletter, but the idea is that the universe has always been perfect, is perfect now, and will always be perfect, that it goes on forever and ever, but we still have to play out our individual parts.
Taking place right before an important battle, Arjuna questions why he has to fight at all, since the universe is perfect anyway, and Krishna basically tells him that it’s his part to play, that it’s perfect, and that, at the same time, his actions are supremely important.
I’m glossing over a huge part of it, and obviously I could dedicate pages and pages to what I learned from the Gita, but I absolutely loved it!
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why You Might Love It Too: You can probably guess that I’m not a Hindu, but this book still changed my life. If you’re interested in different religions, curious about the larger universe and what it means, then I highly recommend it!
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
The Book goes together perfectly with the the Gita (above), and in fact, Alan Watts was known as the foremost interpreter of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences.
His lively lectures (that you can watch for free on YouTube!) were all about freeing people from the idea that life has to be this endless struggle.
He also helped me realize that I didn’t come into this world…I came out of it.
One of my favorite lines of his (and one I can write from memory) is that “You are something that the universe is ‘doing,’ in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.” Meaning, that there’s nothing to do or to achieve, nothing to acquire - because you already have it!
You are as much a part of this universe as the basic molecules that make up the water in the oceans, the stars in the skies, and there’s nothing “outside” of yourself that you can attain or grab or rush after that will make you any more or less worthy of human life and all the dignity that being human affords you. Yup, easily one of my favorite books.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why You Might Love It Too: Again, if you’re into that Eastern philosophy stuff (which I am!), you’ll find lots to love in here. Alan Watts never took himself too seriously, he loved being alive, and he gave audiences some of the clearest introductions to those life-enhancing philosophies that they had ever heard.
“All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope.”
This book has been absolutely blowing up online recently, and that makes me so happy.
I’m often hard-pressed to give a straight answer to “What’s your favorite book of all time?” but this might be it! It’s absolutely, astonishingly, amazingly awesome. Damn.
Briefly, the main character Edmond Dantes is thrown into a deep, dark dungeon for a crime he didn’t commit, where he meets another condemned man who tells him of buried treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo.
This is nothing you won’t read on the back flap, but * spoiler alert * he escapes, finds the treasure, reinvents himself, and spends the rest of the novel taking revenge on the people who put him away.
It’s especially relevant to me because I started reading it while I was sitting in the Halifax police station, waiting to get booked and charged for a crime that I didn’t commit either.
The whole story is too long to get into now, but back when I was a nightclub bouncer, some drunken loser claimed that he had been assaulted, and when the investigating officer, Constable Cadieux, asked me to give the rest of my statement at his house after work(!), he charged me with the crime after I said no. Go figure.
Everything was eventually dropped because being innocent meant that there was no evidence(!), but the whole thing was so dumb. All that is to say that this novel spoke to me. It’d be incredible even if I hadn’t gone through that, but oh man. The Count of Monte Cristo was my whole personality for about two full years.
Difficulty Rating: Easy (But Very Long)
Why You Might Love It Too: If you’ve ever been wrongfully accused of anything, and had your life destroyed (or almost destroyed) because of it, you'll probably love this book. Even if you haven’t…I literally can’t think of a single person I recommended this to who has said “Yeah it was alright.” No, they all loved it.
“Man not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an eternity from now.”
This book about the subconscious fear of death and how it motivates much of human behavior won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, but the man behind the book was just as interesting as its subject matter. I never met the guy, but he might just be one of my favorite university professors.
Becker taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was so beloved by his students that they once got together and offered to pay his salary after learning that the university wasn’t going to renew his contract!
When he died at the age of 49 from colon cancer, the academic world lost someone very special, and I’d personally recommend several of his other books too, including The Birth and Death of Meaning, and Escape from Evil.
The main thrust of this book is that being alive - as fragile beings with no satisfying explanation for why we’re here - is so terrifying that in response to this realization, the majority of people retreat into a socially constructed self that basically forms a psychological defense against the reality of death.
Becker also believed that these psychological defenses prevent us from discovering who we really are, and not only that, are also responsible for much of the evil that’s present in the world.
With brilliantly reasoned arguments, he shows how this subconscious fear of death limits our lives, prevents accurate self-knowledge, and, if not surmounted through the pursuit of “genuine heroism,” casts a dark shadow across our full human potential.
Difficulty Rating: Intermediate
Why You Might Love It Too: Okay, so maybe not everyone will “love” a book about death, but it’s more about life than anything else. It’ll shock you into wakefulness, but in the very human, and deeply thoughtful way that Becker was known for.
“Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that ‘I was just following orders’ was an inadequate excuse for inhuman contact…but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?”
This book became an instant favorite of mine, even though I’m hardly what you would call an avid military science-fiction fan. There’s very little in my personal reading history to suggest that I might enjoy this book, and now it’s one that I damn-near beg people to read. It’s phenomenal, and that’s all there is to it.
Haldeman is a Vietnam War veteran, and he uses “time dilation” (how time slows down the closer you travel to the speed of light, which is a real thing) to talk about the disconnection and alienation he and thousands of other Vietnam veterans experienced returning to a country that no longer felt like home.
Plot-wise, it’s about a draftee named William Mandella who is conscripted to fight in an interstellar war against the Taurans, an alien civilization many lightyears away, for reasons which are muddled, confusing, and not entirely understood.
Because of the time dilation, centuries pass on Earth, while only months have gone by for Mandella, who returns home to a planet he no longer recognizes either.
I don’t want to give any more away, because I really, really want you (yes, you!) to go out and read this book! It’s so much more than “just” a sci-fi novel, or “just” a war novel. It might just turn you into an unlikely military science-fiction fan yourself.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why You Might Love It Too: The action scenes are awesome, the sad parts are devastating, the thought-provoking parts are fascinating, and it’s darkly funny in places that bring the absurdity and meaninglessness of Vietnam into clear view in a way that is just…timeless.
“At that subtle moment when man glances over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death.
Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well.
This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
This book has no business being as uplifting as it is, given that Camus’s stated aim was to deal with what he considered the most important question in all of philosophy: the question of suicide.
If you’re unfamiliar, in Greek mythology, Sisyphus is the dude who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity, which would then roll back down to the very bottom every time he finally reached the top.
Camus uses this myth to explore what he calls the “absurd,” or the contradiction between the deep human need for meaning and the unreasonable silence of the universe in response.
I know, I know, totally uplifting, right?
But Camus’s whole deal was that he believed human life should be a revolt against this absurdity, and that one should “live to the point of tears,” which is to say as intensely and passionately as conceivably possible - to give meaning to existence, where none may have existed before.
In the existentialist view, every human being is in the same position as Sisyphus, pointlessly pushing a rock up a hill for all eternity (or at least until we die), with the exception that we have a way out.
We don’t have to push the boulder anymore; we can just cease to exist. So, should we? Why or why not?
Exploring that question was Camus’s purpose here, and he comes up with a fundamentally positive, life-affirming answer, one that’s stayed with me ever since I read this beautiful book.
A book that, I will say, is a lot easier and more wonderful to read than pushing a boulder up a hill. And it won’t take forever, either.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why You Might Love It Too: This is yet another one of those great books that will just shock you into wakefulness - a recurring theme in a lot of my favorite books, if you hadn’t noticed! Like I said, it’s fundamentally positive and hopeful and life-affirming, and maybe you’d like to feel that way more often too.
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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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