Five Books to Feed Your Mind

"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." -Frederick Douglass

Author

Matt Karamazov
September 07, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 36 minutes

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đź“šHey, good evening!

First off, let's welcome all the new people who joined us since last time!

There are 2,348 of us in total now.

Thank you (yes, you!) for trusting me to bring you the absolute best book recommendations I can each and every week!

As always, these are long emails full of great books and tons of cool surprises.

But I never expect that everyone will be interested in every single thing I publish.

So, feel free to jump around and dive into whatever does interest you!

Today we've got...

  • An introduction to today's "Five Books"

  • The book quote of the week

  • My personal news, and the best of what I'm reading and sharing right now

  • Two online creator friends of mine you need to know about

  • Three of my favorite newsletters that I always open

  • A new book alert: featuring a book by the world’s most-followed productivity expert

  • The latest book breakdown from the Stairway to Wisdom

  • “Boredom moats” and how to stay several steps ahead of your competition

  • My Monthly Reading Recap where I share the 13 books I read last month

  • Why “achieving” failure is the key to success

  • How developing a “Lamborghini Mindset” skyrocketed the profits in my business

  • My top 5 book recommendations this week

  • A special gift for reading all the way to the end

In one sentence…

The Road to Character is a book about the personal qualities that are actually worth acquiring - and worth the effort to keep - and how we can develop them, in a world that often takes the easy way out.

What Makes Sammy Run? is a novel about power, greed, and paranoia in Hollywood as movie producer Sammie Glick maneuvers his way to the top, and it’s one of Ryan Holiday’s favorite books.

The Forever War is an absolutely incredible science fiction novel that uses the idea of time dilation (time speeding up the faster you travel to the speed of light) to get at how Vietnam veterans felt as they came home after the war and discovered that the rest of the country had moved on.

White Noise is one of Don DeLillo’s best novels, about a small town professor, death anxiety, the “cheapness” of modern life, and an imminent, incoming “toxic airborne event.”

This is Water is a commencement address by David Foster Wallace in book form, about how to resist self-centeredness and feelings of alienation in the “adult” world.

Here in this email are summaries of each book, along with a sample of my best notes, and if you want my complete set of notes on these books, you can find them on my  Patreon .

Pro Learning Tip:

 Getting a membership to Medium is one of the best investments I've ever made in my continuing education. The quality of the writing on Medium is superb, and some of the smartest, most interesting thinkers publish there regularly.

“I am talking to the individual because only the individual can change, not the mass; only you can transform yourself, and so the individual matters infinitely."

-Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Truth

1) Not much to report this week! I literally have only left my house about three times since coming back from my hernia operation. Been working on something big :)

I'm also listening to  Living Untethered, by Michael A. Singer on Audible. It’s read by him, which is usually what I look for in an audiobook! I don’t know, it just adds a little something to have the author narrate his own book.

Nowadays, I listen to about 3-4 audiobooks a month, and I always listen to them on Audible. No other audiobook service even compares. You can also get a 30-day free trial  right here .

You know I love to support new and old friends of mine who are doing awesome things (or simply amazing people I've stumbled upon around the internet), and so here are a few great people you should know about:

1) First up is my friend Vincent Kao, one of the up-and-comers on Twitter I believe in the most, which is actually what he helps other people do:

Establish rock-solid, immovable, unshakeable self-belief and confidence. And he’s damn good at it too. I love reading his posts.

But then I got on a call with the guy and that’s when I was REALLY impressed. This may seem like a small thing, but it’s absolutely not: He asked me genuine questions about me and what I was doing/interested in, and then, wait for it…

He actually listened to the answers! Without spending the whole time I was talking trying to think of what he was going to say next. People like that stand out in conversation - and in life - and he’s definitely a person worth following if you find yourself on Twitter. 

2) Next up is a new friend of mine, Imed Djabi, another creator I got on a call with recently and really enjoyed connecting with. Here’s another guy who’s doing this “being a human” thing RIGHT.

Plus, the guy writes about fascinating topics like the intersection of entrepreneurship and personal development, psychology, personal branding, and more. Dude’s like a Canadian Dan Koe.

Imed is a creator, designer, writer, business owner - he’s a lot of things, but you can’t help but come away from any interaction with him (or one of his posts) without feeling inspired and grateful that there are people like him out there doing great work that lead us all forward.

You can follow him on Twitter here, and his personal website is right here. 

Do you know someone I should know?

I’m always looking to connect with accomplished, inspirational, and good-hearted people who share the same interests that I do…especially books!

So if you have a favorite author, influencer, creator, etc. that you think I might love to meet (and maybe feature here), let me know! You can just hit reply to this email anytime and tell me about them. Thanks!

đź“š Alex and Books Newsletter: Become smarter, happier, and wiser with 5-minute book summaries. Plus advice on how to develop a reading habit, become a better reader, & more.

📚 Sahil Bloom’s Curiosity Chronicle: Join 400,000+ others who receive the 2x weekly newsletter, where Sahil provides actionable ideas to help you build a high-performing, healthy, wealthy life.

📚 The Imperfectionist: Oliver Burkeman’s twice-monthly email on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.

đź“š Start Your Own Newsletter with Beehiiv: This is the email platform I use personally to support my publications, The Reading Life, and The Competitive Advantage. I recently switched to Beehiiv and I will never, ever go back!

Ali Abdaal’s book is finally out! I’ve been waiting on this one for a looong time.

For those of you just hearing about him for the first time, Ali’s a former doctor and current YouTuber with more than 4,000,000 subscribers. He makes excellent videos about books, study habits, time management, and…

Productivity! That’s (unsurprisingly) what his first book is about and it’s available for pre-order now!

Here’s what Amazon has to say about it:

The secret to productivity isn’t discipline. It’s joy.

We think that productivity is all about hard work. That the road to success is lined with endless frustration and toil. But what if there’s another way?

Dr Ali Abdaal – the world's most-followed productivity expert – has uncovered an easier and happier path to success. Drawing on decades of psychological research, he has found that the secret to productivity and success isn't grind – it's feeling good. If you can make your work feel good, then productivity takes care of itself.

In this revolutionary book, Ali reveals how the science of feel-good productivity can transform your life. He introduces the three hidden 'energisers' that underpin enjoyable productivity, the three 'blockers' we must overcome to beat procrastination, and the three 'sustainers' that prevent burnout and help us achieve lasting fulfillment. He recounts the inspiring stories of founders, Olympians, and Nobel-winning scientists who embody the principles of Feel-Good Productivity. And he introduces the simple, actionable changes that you can use to achieve more and live better, starting today.

Armed with Ali’s insights, you won’t just accomplish more. You’ll feel happier and more fulfilled along the way.

“To see what no human has seen before, to know what no human has known before, to create as no human has created before, it may be necessary to see as if through eyes that have never seen, know through a mind that has never thought, create with hands that have never been trained."

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

Legendary music producer Rick Rubin has probably guided more of your favorite songs into existence than you realize, no matter whether you listen to country, rock, rap, metal, or anything in between.

Ever since co-founding Def Jam Recordings from his college dormitory in the 1980s, he's produced albums for Slayer, Adele, Jay-Z, Neil Young, Johnnie Cash, and a huge number of other artists that have very little in common other than the fact that they all record songs.

As Rubin says in the book, "However you frame yourself as an artist, the frame is too small,” which idea he definitely exemplifies in his own life and creative work. Even The Creative Act itself expanded beyond its frame, because, as he said about his own writing process:

“I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be.”

The above statement is a big key to understanding the book, to Rubin's creative process in general, and to the nature of life and art itself, because he reveals that living and being are inseparable from the work you end up creating. There is no "work-life balance" for the true artist, and everyone is an artist if only they would learn to see.

Being an artist isn't so much about what kind of art you make, or some particular volume of output, but rather it's about your relationship to the world and how much of it you can pick up through your senses. And how much of what you see you're able to pass on to your audience to help us see it too.

The Creative Act contains 78 philosophical "musings" on the nature of art and the laws of creativity, although most of those "laws" are more or less made to be broken. Really, the only law that Rubin says is "less breakable" than the others is the need for patience.

Tactically, inside you'll find a wealth of insights about finding - and being receptive to - ideas, settling on sustainable rituals that will help you achieve longevity in your career, advice about setting limits, advice about exceeding limits, how to discover your own unique voice, and even what it means to express oneself creatively.

In the Key Ideas section, we'll be discussing what it might be like to pay attention as though you were landing a plane, how to expand the universe, how to anger the audience and incite strong reactions to your work, and more.

Rick Rubin will help us understand why we must become finishers, how we can take our work to its extreme conclusion, and why expressing ourselves is the best - and perhaps only - way to discover who we really are.

The fundamental idea behind much of his advice is that we are all artists, and each of us has something meaningful to contribute to the world, whether we're actively working to make it real or not. That's part of the magic that he often brought to the studio, and that's part of the magic he put into this book.

It's hard to compete with someone who's having more fun than you at something that's supposed to feel like work.

A boredom moat is essentially your competitive advantage when it comes to doing great work and being recognized for it.

If you can find something that you love but that most people find boring, you're going to be able to do it better, faster, for longer than anyone else, and eventually you're going to separate yourself from any and all competition.

Your moat will be so wide that, for someone to be able to compete with you, they'd have to love the work as much as you do.

For me, my boredom moat is reading!

I've carved out a nice little career for myself writing and speaking about something that many people would find boring. Or, at least they wouldn't find it as fascinating as I do!

I could literally talk about books all day and all night for decades, and that's why I'm not too worried about competition.

My boredom moat is just too wide. Any potential competitors would never be able to stick with it for as long as I would be able to, because I just love it more than they ever will.

The best boredom moat for you will be something that aligns perfectly with your personal, unique interests. Find something that you could talk about all day and all night for decades, and you'll wind up with a pretty solid competitive advantage!

Further Reading: The Stairway to Wisdom

Note: This is a sample from my other newsletter, Stairway to Wisdom. Along with the book breakdowns, you get a premium weekly newsletter packed with insights and ideas like this one. Get your 14-day free trial right here .

Here is my Monthly Reading Recap, where I talk about the 13 books I read in August of 2023, including an INSTANT favorite by one of my most beloved fiction writers.

I don't usually finish books I hate, but there's also one of those in there. I don't REGRET reading it, but I do kinda wish it had never been written.

You'll understand why when you watch the video.

That being said, there are some GREAT books in here - new favorites - and so August was a FANTASTIC reading month. I toss in a few bonus book recommendations in there along the way too.

Have you read any of these books before? Let me know! I read every comment.

Even though I had just achieved muscular failure performing the squat (that’s when you physically, LITERALLY CANNOT perform another rep, not when “you” want to stop), I still had to do the same thing with the linear leg press, leg extensions, leg curls, and seated calf raises, before moving on to decline sit-ups and a final half-hour of walking cardio.

Yea, Wednesdays suck.

But I’m standing there with my legs on fire and I’m thinking:

“No one else is doing this.

Not only is there no one else here (I mean, it WAS midnight after all), but virtually no one else in the entire world is willing to put in THIS MUCH EFFORT to win; they’re not willing to go through THIS MUCH PAIN; and they’re not willing to do this for as many DECADES as I’M willing to do this for.

This is f***ing NORMAL for me, and that’s why I win.”

This mindset wasn’t an accident, and I’m also not just referring to what it does for me in the gym.

This is my daily, 16-hours-a-day attitude, and it’s a major reason why I’ve moved so far ahead in life and why most people will never catch up to me.

Adopting it will set YOU apart as well if that’s something you want for yourself.

I’m about to make a bold move here, and some people will be turned off by it. Most people won’t care, a few will be envious, but the people I’m talking to — and hopefully, I’m talking to YOU — will be inspired by it.

You see, I’ve never earned more than $100k in a single year, but in just 8 short months from now I am going to be selling my Porsche Boxster and buying a Lamborghini Aventador. Now, why should you care at all?

Well in this article I’m going to (briefly) explain how I got to where I am, what set me up to be able to buy the Lambo, and how you can replicate my results.

Let’s start in the middle, right in the center of the action, where I was at my lowest point all year. I didn’t stay there for long…[Read Time: 5 Mins ]

Many of us are starting to make the switch from teaching students what to think, to teaching them how to think, and this is a good thing. And of course, the work is far from complete. Critical thinking skills are still in dangerously short supply.

But the next logical step, I believe, is guiding students toward what to think about, and this is what makes David Brook’s book so marvelous.

Very early on, he points out the disconnect between what kinds of things we normally spend a lot of time thinking about – career success and popularity – and the things that we tend to ignore to our profound disadvantage, which would include questions about what exemplifies a moral life and whether or not we’re really living up to it.

“Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.”

***

“Character is not innate or automatic. You have to build it with effort and artistry.”

***

“What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?”

***

“We sometimes think of saints, or of people who are living like saints, as being ethereal, living in a higher spiritual realm. But often enough they live in an even less ethereal way than the rest of us. They are more fully of this earth, more fully engaged in the dirty, practical problems of the people around them.”

Published in 1941, this is a classic cautionary tale about ambition, power, and greed, set in Hollywood and featuring the ruthless, conniving Sammy Glick.

Glick starts off as a copyboy at a New York newspaper and eventually steps on enough people to become the most powerful movie producer in Hollywood.

The story is told by Al Manheim, who starts off the novel with Glick at the paper in New York and essentially becomes his only friend, as Glick dives deeper into his own narcissism and paranoia.

I should say too that Schulberg’s sentences are what make this book even more memorable. Sharp and surprising and funny at times, he can also string a sentence together that’s a little bit longer but then carries you exactly to where he wants you to go.

I loved this book, and it’s a relatively fast read, so if you have a few hours you should definitely check it out.

“Even though Sammy knew I could read him like the top line of an optometrist’s chart, he also knew that he could relax with me because I wasn’t willing or didn’t know how to use him for a ladder the way he used me.”

***

“Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.”

***

“Well, the first day Sammy came into my office to save California from annexing itself to Russia, I felt like tearing him limb from limb and at the same time I had this crazy desire to know what it felt like to have all that driving ambition and frenzy and violence inside me.”

***

“Hollywood may be full of phonies, mediocrities, dictators and good men who have lost their way, but there is something that draws you there that you should not be ashamed of.”

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, that’s all there is to it.

Haldeman is a Vietnam War veteran, and he uses time dilation (time speeding up or slowing down the closer you are traveling to the speed of light, which is a real thing) to talk about the alienation and dejection he and thousands of other Vietnam veterans experienced returning to the U.S. after the war and finding their old country a foreign land.

Plot-wise, it’s about a draftee named William Mandella who is conscripted to fight an interstellar war against the Taurans, an alien civilization many lightyears away, for reasons that are muddled, confusing, and not entirely understood.

I don’t want to give any more away, because I really, really want you (yes, you) to go out and read this book!

“Twenty-five years later, most young readers don’t even see the parallels between The Forever War and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that’s OK. It’s about Vietnam because that’s the war the author was in. But it’s mainly about war, about soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.”

***

“We got our first look at the planet we were going to attack. Invaders from outer space, yes sir.”

***

“I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back.”

***

“No matter. It took all of my money, and all the money of five other old-timers, but we bought a cruiser from UNEF. And we’re using it as a time machine. So I’m on a relativistic shuttle, waiting for you.

All it does is go out five light years and come back to Middle Finger, very fast. Every ten years I age about a month. So if you’re on schedule and still alive, I’ll only be twenty-eight when you get here.

Hurry! I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else.

I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.”

DeLillo was awarded the U.S. National Book Award for this one, which is interesting because most people try to suppress the thought of death, and DeLillo confronts it on every page.

The main character, Jack Gladney, is a university professor in a small town who has 4 children with three different wives, with the first and last child being from the first wife, and – well it all gets very confusing. He and his current wife argue about who will be more devastated when the other one dies, and about who should outlive whom.

White Noise is extremely funny, even with all its talk about death. Most of the action centers around a toxic chemical cloud that descends on the town midway through the book – the “Airborne Toxic Event” - and comes to a head after Jack finds out where his wife is getting the medication she’s taking to suppress her paralyzing fear of death.

“Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.”

***

“Jack Gladney would not do, he said, and asked me what other names I might have at my disposal. We finally agreed that I should invent an extra initial and call myself J.A.K. Gladney, a tag I wore like a borrowed suit.”

***

“How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don’t want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn’t just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it’s just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn’t want to go there in the first place.”

***

“The next day I started carrying the Zumwalt automatic to school. It was in the flap pocket of my jacket when I lectured, it was in the top drawer of my desk when I received visitors in the office. The gun created a second reality for me to inhabit. The air was bright, swirling around my head. Nameless feelings pressed thrillingly on my chest. It was a reality I could control, secretly dominate. How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.”

This is the book version of the famous commencement speech that David Foster Wallace gave to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005. As such, it’s very short, and you can read it in under an hour. The speech can be found on YouTube as well.

He touches on the same themes found throughout his work, notably Infinite Jest, such as boredom, alienation, self-centredness, and true connection in a world that’s notoriously harsh and fast-paced. The YouTube video has 4 million views for a reason, as you’ll see!

“Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down.”

***

“And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.”

***

“This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted: You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.”

***

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

Today’s Five Books on Amazon:

You made it to the end! Congratulations!

You're now among the rarest of the rare.

I mean, that was a lot of books!

But I hope you found something here that looked interesting!

Personally, I’m obsessed with sharing the magic of books and reading, and so I love it when one or more of my book recommendations “hits.”

Also, if you know someone who might love this newsletter, you can just send them this link!

Or click here to share via Twitter. Thanks!

And if someone forwarded you this email, you can sign up on this page right here. 

I also want to thank you for reading this newsletter all the way through to the end and to thank you for real, I’m going to give you a 1-month free trial to the Stairway to Wisdom.

That’s twice the free trial period that most people get, because people who finish what they start - and have the patience to do a lot of reading - are usually the ones who love the Stairway to Wisdom the most.

Enjoy!

And remember, you can just hit "reply" to this email to ask me a question or offer a book recommendation of your own. I may take a while to respond, but I read every one!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you apply the wisdom found in the greatest books ever written to your life:

  1. I’m going to be leaving some casual spots open for personal coaching, alongside what I do for my monthly clients, and the first choice always goes to the people on my email list.

    Simply reply to this email or click here if this is something you're interested in working with me on, and I'll let you know more about it, answer all your questions, etc.

    Areas I can help you with include reading more books and remembering more of what you read, growing your business, getting into better shape, and building mental toughness and resilience.

    You’ll work 1-1 with me, and together we’ll be lining up big breakthroughs for you every single month.

  2. I've released 50 complete, in-depth book breakdowns on the Stairway to Wisdom that respects both your time AND your intelligence and will help you become the person you've always known you were capable of being. Read them for free here.
    ​

  3. Join my free Substack publication, The Competitive Advantage, where I teach high-level, high-impact self-discipline tactics and strategies to help you progress toward your goals.

    You'll also join a supportive community of other winners all moving forward together in the direction of where we want to be in life. Join here.

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