- The Reading Life
- Posts
- Five Great Books: Crime and Punishment, Play a Bigger Game, Tiny Experiments, and More!
Five Great Books: Crime and Punishment, Play a Bigger Game, Tiny Experiments, and More!
Matt Karamazov
November 22, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 26 minutes
YOUTUBE đź“š CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY đź“š PATREON
Hey, I’m back with five more great books to recommend tonight.
Except, as usual, I can never restrict myself to only five. In fact, I just counted and there are actually 25 books that I mention in this newsletter alone.
Oh! And I’ve also been re-organizing the bookshelves in my YouTube studio, and it turns out that I’ve been assembling quite the “anti-library” of books I haven’t read yet:
I’m not sure how many books are there in total (a few hundred?), but I counted at least 100+ books that I haven’t even started.
That’s what Nassim Taleb calls an “anti-library,” which is an exercise in intellectual humility. It reminds you that, even though you may have read 1,400+ books, compared to what there is to know, you’re still basically on Page One.
Here in this newsletter though, I’m sharing my complete notes and summaries of each of the following Five Books that I have read:
đź“š Indistractable, by Nir Eyal
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Also Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
📕 Books I’ve Finished This Month
đź“ś The Book Quote of the Day
🎥 This Book Literally Shows You How to Build a $10M Business
✍ My Latest Medium Articles
âś… New Book Releases Coming Soon
📚 Tonight’s Five Main Book Recommendations
🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter
Let’s not wait for our coffees to get cold…let’s hit the books!
The Library: A Fragile History, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen: The title’s pretty self-explanatory here: it’s a history of libraries, from the earliest discovery of the written word, right up until today.
One of the most striking things about this one is just how endangered reading and writing have been at various times in human history, and how libraries and the written word have always survived. Books have always made a comeback!
The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait, by Frederic Morton: This is a multi-generational history of the Rothschild banking family, how the original patriarch of the family started off in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt and how his descendants basically took over the entire financial world (and are now, literally, shadowy trillionaires).
It’s endlessly fascinating so far, and also quite funny! I wasn’t expecting that! It came out a long time ago though, and I’d definitely be interested in following up my reading with some more contemporary sources.
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 1,431 books, including 79 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“Having a definite chief aim will serve you whether you want to make money, express yourself in the arts, become a leader in your field, or defeat injustice and evil. Some of us want all these things. But the door of greatness cracks open only to those who approach their dreams with one special, overarching focus - a Definite Chief Aim.”
This Book Literally Shows You How to Build a $10M Business: This book contains everything you need to know about scaling a coaching and/or e-learning business to more than $10,000,000 in revenue.
I know, I know, bold claim! But I know and (briefly) worked with William personally, and he’s the real deal. Ten million is what he sold his own company for, the book itself is phenomenal, and he literally holds nothing back. It’s all here. [Watch Time: 21:30]
If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
“Status Anxiety” is the Source of Your Paralyzing Fear of Never Having Enough: And this fantastic book is the antidote (14 key takeaways).
The Business Book That Helped Me Buy My First Porsche: Ignore the scammy title - this book took me from minimum wage to financial freedom in 5 years flat.
The Saddest AND Funniest Book I’ve Ever Read is Also One of the Most Challenging Books of All Time: 39 flashes of brilliance from Infinite Jest that’ll make you think, laugh, cry - and probably all three at once.
Beyond Belief, by Nir Eyal: I’ve read two of Nir’s books so far, and so I’m eagerly awaiting this one, which is about science-backed ways to stop limiting yourself and achieve breakthrough results. Naturally, I’ve read plenty of books on the subject already, but I know that I’m going to come away with tons more here that I can use immediately. Expected: March 10th, 2026
Protocols, by Dr. Andrew Huberman: Still a long way to go before this one comes out, but it’ll be an essential guide to improving brain function, enhancing mood and energy, optimizing your health in all kinds of ways, and rewiring your nervous system for high performance and a better life. Expected: September 15th, 2026
What’s Stopping You?, by Timothy Armoo: I was hoping Timo would come out with a book of his own, because not only does he have great book recommendations of his own, but he’s on his way to becoming a legendary entrepreneur. His first book offers 11 cheat codes to unlock the life you want. Expected: January 15th, 2026
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
Crime and Punishment is a major Russian novel about Rodion Raskolnikov, a young, impoverished student in St. Petersburg. It’s the story of how he comes to murder and rob an old woman in what he convinces himself is an altruistic act, and of his subsequent complete psychological disintegration.
And it also plays a large part in the story of how I would eventually come to read more than 1,000 books before I turned 30.
This particular book is one of Dostoevsky's most significant works, and it’s a layered literary masterpiece that set the standard for psychological thrillers ever after.
The central moral question of the book, in my view, is whether a brutal act (in this case the murder of an old woman with an axe) can ever lead to good. You might not think that’s even a question!
Of course that’s terrible and wrong and could never be justified…read the book.
You can also make a connection between the character of Raskolnikov and a kind of underdeveloped “Overman,” as described by Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Raskolnikov believes that most people simply aren’t capable of taking drastic, courageous, aggressive action to change their lives or effect real change, and that only a relative few people throughout history have possessed the qualities necessary to radically alter their circumstances.
The book itself is an incredible read, just packed with suspense and populated with vividly realized characters you almost can’t believe wouldn’t be found in a real history book somewhere. None of these people existed, and yet, for the entire time you’re inhabiting Dostoyevsky’s creative world, nothing else exists.
Would I murder an evil old woman and redistribute her ill-gotten wealth to people who were more deserving? Would you? What’s stopping us?
Crime and Punishment was also the very first book I finished, ever since I decided to track the number of books I read, beginning in 2014 and continuing up to the present day.
It started me on a path to read more than 1,000 books before I turned 30. And after engaging with it, pondering it, pushing through it to the end, Dostoyevsky’s brilliant philosophical novel helped give me the confidence to imagine that I could read 1,000+ books: difficult ones, the greatest ones.
It also led me to believe and to know that if I could finish this masterpiece, there were also potentially thousands of others that I would eventually come to love too.
“Being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do. Indistractable people are as honest with themselves as they are with others. If you care about your work, your family, and your physical and mental well-being, you must learn how to become indistractable.”
It used to be said that “religion is the opium of the people,” but today the people have a new religion, and how they worship is by opening an app on their phones and devoting themselves to endless, mindless scrolling for hours and hours at a time.
Quick, cheap release from the boredom, anxiety, and discomfort of modern life is constantly available with an infinite scroll, and just as in the original meaning of the quote above, the tech companies profit enormously from your apathy and pacification.
Netflix doesn’t care about what time you have to get up in the morning - one of the founders is even quoted as saying that their number one competitor is sleep! Instagram doesn’t care whether or not you achieve your life goals, and TikTok couldn’t care less about where you derive true meaning and fulfillment in life; they just want your attention.
This book, Indistractable, is how you fight back. It’s an immediately applicable, practical, “scared straight” program for your scrolling addiction, and I was able to derive a ton of benefits from reading it back in 2020. It’s probably saved me at least a few hundred hours of my life since then, and so it’s a book I recommend quite strongly.
“Linear goals promise certainty - if we just stick to the plan and climb, we will arrive safely at the expected destination. But life rarely follows such rigid and predictable patterns.
Experiments are built for the in-betweens; they will propel you forward even without a fixed destination, in constant conversation with your inner self and the outer world.
By having the courage to leave the shore, we trade the illusion of control for the possibility of discovery.”
The goal of this book is to get you to reevaluate whether or not having goals is making your life better in the first place.
Or rather, it’s about experimenting with a new way of meeting the future: abandoning rigid goals, with strict deadlines accompanied by self-loathing in the event of failure, and replacing them with tiny experiments that allow you to feel good about trying something new.
A tiny experiment is essentially a pact you make with yourself to try something for a set period of time. It could be committing to publishing daily YouTube videos for 100 days, signing up for three months of yoga classes, or devoting a $500 budget toward testing out a new lead generation tactic for your business.
The idea, though, is that there are no failures, only results. Data that you can use to iterate on that first experiment, restate your hypothesis (or generate an entirely new one), and keep moving forward.
Whereas with goals, every day you haven’t achieved them yet means that you’re technically “unsuccessful,” with tiny experiments and systems you can be successful every day.
You’re successful as long as you’re running the experiment, because that’s what you set out to do in the first place! You don’t need to get your first 10,000 subscribers, or hit any random ROI target with that new business tactic. You just need to try.
The questions you ask yourself, the frameworks you apply, and the expectations you hold about how the world should work all come together to determine what you see and what you pay attention to.
By stepping outside that pre-selected, “perfect” path, you take much of the pressure off and you discover things about yourself that would have remained hidden, had you stuck to that linear, relatively confining goal.
Speaking for myself here, I still love setting goals. I have a lot of them! Big ones! Huge ones! They motivate me and inspire me to take massive action each and every day to achieve them.
They fire me up, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But not everyone is like me, and, just in case no one’s told you this before, there’s another way to live!
You can even take a hybrid approach like I do. I’ve still got my big goal of reading 10,000 books. With every single page I turn I’m getting closer and closer, and that feels amazing! But Tiny Experiments also got me thinking smaller and helped me enjoy myself a little bit more in other areas of my life.
A great companion book would also be The Pathless Path, by Paul Millerd. That’s another fantastic book about rejecting society’s default settings.
Whatever you decide, you don’t need to have everything figured out before you start, failure is never final, and if goal-setting doesn’t “work” for you, then tiny experiments could be just the thing that helps you drop that boulder you were carrying and find a different hill to climb instead.
“There is no 99% integrity.”
Play a Bigger Game teaches you seven universal principles - Integrity, Choice, Faith, Service, Gratitude, Discipline, and Consistency - that, were you to commit to putting them into action in your life, could change your life in as little as 24 hours.
Living according to these principles is an “infinite game,” so to speak, meaning that total mastery could take you an entire lifetime, but they represent the “80/20” of success principles. They’re the twenty percent of principles that will give you eighty percent of the results you’re looking for in your life. They’re that powerful.
Actually, Markus and I were speaking at the same event once in Boston, and one thing I can tell you is that he is exactly the same in person as he comes across in this book.
Which fits perfectly with the principle of Integrity, of course, because it’s obvious that Markus isn’t trying to be anyone else. He’s working on becoming more himself all the time, and out of everyone at the conference, virtually no one was having as much fun as he was.
He was one of the best, most captivating speakers at the event, with the highest congruence, and it’s probably safe to say that everyone who came in contact with him that day left feeling elevated and/or uplifted in some way.
Which is exactly how I felt after reading Play a Bigger Game. I was simply a better person when I finished it than I had been going in.
These seven universal principles are all things that have made a measurably positive impact on my own life, and they’ll help you to step up in all areas as well.
From your fitness and your mental health, to your financial success and the quality and depth of your relationships, most everything you need is right here.
Of course, you don’t “have to” go out and build a massive online following, become a millionaire, get down to 6% body fat, or do anything else! You can play as big or small of a game as you want.
But, what I’ve found is that most people are playing a smaller game than they want to play, and have the potential to play, and that’s where Play a Bigger Game comes in.
Just start applying the seven universal principles, and then never stop.
“Anyway, so what if he was crazy? What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”
This is an incredible work of science fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the best writers (science fiction or otherwise) ever to take up a pen and put it to paper.
The Lathe of Heaven is about a man, George Orr (possible reference to George Orwell?) who dreams “effective” dreams, meaning that his dreams have the power to change reality.
So, for example, he would dream up some alternate history of the world, and the “real” world would shift while he was asleep to reflect the reality of his dream.
He starts seeing a psychologist, Dr. Haber, who then tries to control George’s dreams for his own purposes. Things, as you can probably guess, quickly get out of hand.
Le Guin was a master of fiction, and so many passages in this book are just beautiful. In another book of hers, a nonfiction book on writing called Steering the Craft, she recommends reading your own work out loud as a way to eliminate words and phrases that sound “off,” or that strike the ear the wrong way.
Personally, I highly recommend reading the first part of the first chapter of this book out loud (you can find it in my notes below), because you can obviously tell that’s exactly what she did.
Forward this to a friend you think would love these books!
If you were sent this newsletter, click here to subscribe.
To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.
​Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).
OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 170,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
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
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are two more ways I can help you:
Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.
Join Creator Launch Academy, my mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.
Reply