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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
I’ve got a ton of fantastic books to share with you tonight, and you might also like the 7 books in my latest YouTube video:
I finished editing and posting it from beside my dad’s hospital bed, and even though he’s doing a lot better (thank you to the many people who sent along their kind words), it hasn’t been easy helping out with his stroke recovery!
The reason I mention it is because my publishing schedule has been a bit erratic lately, and that’s why. Thanks for your understanding though! I’ll be publishing more on Instagram, YouTube, Medium, and everywhere else very soon.
At least I’ve been getting a ton of reading done in the hospital (silver linings and such), including this awesome book about the books that influenced Napoleon. The last few books I’ve finished are mentioned below as well.
Now, tonight, I’m also sharing my complete notes and summaries of each of the following Five Great Books:
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Also Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
📕 Books I’ve Finished This Month
📜 The Book Quote of the Day
🎥 7 Books That Made Me IMPOSSIBLE to Control
✍ My Latest Medium Articles
✅ 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 Arabian Nights, translated by Richard Burton: Thousands of years later, The Arabian Nights still has a hold on our collective imaginations. Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin, and so many other stories you’d likely recognize in here. It’s just a spectacular read, and the Richard Burton translation is one of the best!
I’ve been reading about 20 pages a day, so I’ll likely be reading this one for a while (it’s 730 pages long, in my edition), but exactly like the main character, I just want to keep stretching it out! Highly recommend this one if you love old books and want to get to the root of some of our greatest literary traditions.
The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch: This one is about explanations that transform the world, and the basic argument, as I understand it right now (I basically just started reading it), is that progress is potentially infinite.
Human beings keep running into problems, but then we also keep generating novel solutions to those problems, each one of them leading to more interesting, complex problems that keep moving humanity forward.
Sooo many of my smartest friends kept pushing this book into my hands, so I just had to push it higher on my reading list!
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 1,486 books, including 32 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
"The incredible thing many people don't get? Technology is just getting started. We're only at the base of the exponential."
7 Books That Made Me IMPOSSIBLE to Control: I used to be relatively unfree, then I read 1,000 books before I turned 30, used what they taught me to build a business (and a life) around what excites me, and now I have total freedom over my time and my life.
None of it was an accident, and I definitely didn’t achieve it on my own. I had help from the authors of these 7 brilliant books. Read them and claim your freedom too. [Watch Time: 11:29]
If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: This lost self-help book from 1908 holds the key to owning every hour of your day.
Michael Jordan’s Personal Trainer Wrote This Book to Help You Become RELENTLESS: Read it if you want to leave “average” behind forever.
Do the Hard Things First: Plus 11 Other Procrastination-Killers to 11X Your Productivity
How to Try Again, by Steve Kamb: This a guide to help readers transform their lives by giving up more often, failing faster, and mastering the art of starting over. I read Steve’s first book, Level Up Your Life (about how to turn your life into a video game) years ago and loved it. Expected: June 16th, 2026
Incorruptible, by Eric Ries: This is a book about why good companies go bad, and great companies stay great, by the author of The Lean Startup. Expected: May 26th, 2026
Inside the Box, by David Epstein: This is David’s follow-up to his previous book, Range (which I really liked), and it’s about how limits are the key to stimulating creativity, innovation, and collaboration. Expected: May 5th, 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
Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, by Adam Grant: Adam Grant’s newest book goes into the science of these strong connections, and how you can stay sane in crazy (and lonely) times. Expected: October 13th, 2026
“The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself.”
Reading this book was a revelation. Very few people have influenced the direction of my life as much as David Goggins has, and if you’re put off at all by his intensity, or different aspects of his personality, I’d urge you to give this book a chance!
It’s easy to misunderstand him, or to write him off as that crazy guy online who just yells a lot about pull-ups and pain, but please don’t. His overall message is nothing short of life-changing. At least it was for me.
The beginning of the book is actually rather painful to read. The nightmare of Goggins’ childhood and adolescence - the physical, mental, and emotional abuse, the racism, the indignities of poverty - none of it is “light reading.”
But once you get through that part of the book, you get it. It made him.
And his own transformation? Unbelievable. Astounding. Here’s this guy, extremely overweight, depressed, with limited opportunities or support - he had every reason for you never to have heard of him. He was so close to becoming a number, and had it not been for the tremendous reserves of inner strength and fight that he found within himself, that’s exactly what he would have become.
Even just turning himself around to get to the point where he could successfully apply to become a Navy SEAL would have been impressive. But everything that came after that? Straight up legendary.
I learned so much from this book that I can’t stop thinking about, things that have helped me overcome challenges and obstacles of my own ever since reading it.
“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
As far as moral essays go, this one from the ancient Roman statesman Seneca is one of my favorites. Written in 49CE, it’s addressed to his father-in-law Paulinus, whom he advises about how to expand time, prevent it from being squandered on nonsense, and use it in the best way we can.
I read this book in 2015, and since then, I’ve probably taken about 5 full years of my life back due to taking Seneca’s advice and rejecting everything that diminishes the value of my time, and placing my focus squarely on where I’m able to experience true fulfillment and purpose.
What Henry David Thoreau said many years after Seneca is true: the price of anything is the amount of life you’re required to exchange for it, and so you can think of On the Shortness of Life as a collection of Seneca’s best arguments against trading your life away for trivialities.
It’ll teach you the true value of time, how little we actually need to acquire and possess in order to experience peace of mind, and how you can defend yourself against the priorities of those who would steal your most important possession and give you back something infinitely less valuable in return.
“The water was disgusting. I didn't even want to touch it. And the people here were drinking it?”
I’m so fabulously rich, you wouldn’t even believe it…
For instance, in my kitchen right now, there’s this tap, see...and all I have to do is flip it up - really, just a tiiiny little flip of my hand in an effortless, upwards motion - and clean, fresh water just pours out of it, straight into my waiting glass.
The water is perfectly clean and safe and cool - and I can command this flow any time I want, right from the convenience of my home.
So I’m obviously rich, and I don’t feel guilty about that, but I also realize that there are currently more than a billion people who lack access to clean water, and an estimated 2.7 billion will experience water shortage at least one month a year.
I don’t need Scott Harrison’s help, but billions of people do. That’s why he founded charity: water in 2006 and built it into an organization that has raised more than $450 million to bring clean drinking water to more than 11 million people around the world.
Thirst is the story of the moral crisis that precipitated this decision and his unwavering commitment to seeing his story through to the end.
Today, charity: water is one of the most trusted and admired nonprofits in the world, and Scott started it after receiving an answer to a question he asked himself many times: “What would the opposite of my life be like?”
He was, by all accounts, a very successful nightclub promoter in NYC and after a long period of time began to feel morally bankrupt. He desperately wanted to change the direction of his life. He wanted it so desperately, in fact, that he actually did it.
His charity is an unqualified success, and the organization that he built from nothing has saved countless human lives that would have otherwise been lost. I think he’s a goddamn hero, and his book is excellent.
And perhaps it goes without saying, but 100% of Harrison's net proceeds from the sale of Thirst fund charity:water projects around the world.
“You must get rid of the thought of competition. You are to create, not to compete for what is already created. You do not have to take anything away from anyone.
You do not have to drive sharp bargains. You do not have to cheat, or to take advantage. You do not need to let any man work for you for less than he earns.
You do not have to covet the property of others, or to look at it with wishful eyes; no man has anything of which you cannot have the like, and that without taking what he has away from him.
You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has now.”
The Science of Getting Rich is a classic of New Thought literature, first published in 1910(!), and it’s the precursor to every scammy, pale imitation of its life-changing ideas that have cluttered bookstore shelves in the century since. Wattles, however, was the real deal.
Not much is known about Wattles’ life, but his daughter Florence recalled that “he lived every page” of his books. I think of him as like the Mister Rogers of New Thought, a genuinely decent man who spent a lifetime researching and discovering the laws of success hidden within the work of the world’s greatest philosophers, gathering them all in this book, and sharing it with the people in his community he hoped to uplift.
The basic idea of this book is that “There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made. A thought, in this Substance, produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.”
Creative visualization, in other words, a century before every Olympic athlete ever used it to win the gold medal, billionaires used it to build towering wealth, and bodybuilders used it to build staggeringly impressive physiques.
Can you “attract” anything you want in life merely by thinking about it?
No. Obviously not, and anyone telling you that you can just sees you as a dollar sign walking into a bookstore.
But is developing a clear, compelling vision of what you want to create and achieve an absolutely essential prerequisite for actualizing that vision in the real world? More than a century of gold medals, championships, and global wealth-creation says yes.
“Neglect your power for long enough and you’ll eventually come to believe that you don’t have any.”
Robin Sharma’s one of the “good guys” in the personal development space, and with over 20 million books sold, he’s one of the top leadership experts in the world.
Sure, not everything popular is good, but for the most part, his ideas are rock solid, and you really can’t go wrong with his books. And...we went to the same university! He was born like, a couple of hours away from my house!
Anyway, Sharma helped drive home to me the idea that you can get (almost) everything you want in life, as long as you help enough other people get what they want (which is an idea I first heard about through Zig Ziglar). This is an idea with massive implications.
It means that instead of looking for what you can get from other people, what you can extract from the marketplace, you should be thinking of what you can contribute.
The 5am Club itself is a story laced with lessons. Essentially, two strangers meet at a business event hosted by an eccentric tycoon who then takes them both under his wing and teaches them about how to crush it in life and in business.
A word of warning though: have some patience with the dialogue and the plot. Sharma’s hardly Dostoevsky, and the whole time I was like, “Oh come on! People don’t talk like that. What the hell, man!?” Or, “Oh come on! That’s the most cliche shit. Stop trying to be James Patterson.” But the book - and the advice - is really good!
If you absorb the lessons in this book, you will become a rockstar. I can’t emphasize that enough. So just try to forget that he makes Ayn Rand look like Henry James, and you’ll be fine.
Essentially, the book is about going through life at “world-class.” It’s about not settling. With respect to your contentment, your relationships, your income, your health, your everything - the message is to always demand the best for yourself and to prove to yourself that you’re worth it, that you deserve it.
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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 200,000+ 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
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