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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
At this very moment, I’m sitting next to a pile of unread books (several piles, actually), having just clicked the “Place Your Order” button on my next Amazon purchase…
For someone who reads a lot, I really haven’t learned my lesson, have I?
Anyway, I did finally update my Patreon Book Notes, so I’ve got that going for me! Members received 20 of my updated book notes + summaries a few minutes ago, with lots more on the way.
When I first started taking notes on every book I read (almost 1,500 books ago now!) I never intended for anyone else to see them, so now I’m going back and updating them all. Yes, that’s right, all 1,488 book notes!
It’s something of a process, but it’s also been great getting back into some of the most formative, awesome books I’ve read since 2014.
Taking notes (and reviewing them periodically, testing myself on them, etc.) has been fantastic for remembering more of what I read too. Highly recommend taking notes yourself! Even if no one else ever sees them. Here are mine.
With all the craziness last month - my dad had a stroke, my business exploded (in a good way), and more - I also forgot to make my monthly donation to First Book Canada!
I’ve been donating $1 to First Book for every Premium Member of The Reading Life, and we’ve now raised $861 since I started doing that! Pretty damn cool! I missed last month’s $37 donation, so I donated $74 just a few minutes ago.
Donating money to help kids access books and learn to love reading feels great, by the way! Try it for yourself!
And/or become a Premium Member for all sorts of additional book-related rewards.
There’s more I’d love to pass along, but let’s just get to tonight’s book recommendations, shall we?
Tonight I’ll be 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 to Take the Wheel of Your Own Life
✍ 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!
Choose Hard, Live Easy, by MJ DeMarco: This is the latest book by the author of one of my favorite business books of all time, The Millionaire Fastlane. It’s about how taking the easy path in life (cheap dopamine, junk food, gambling, etc.) leads to experiencing hard consequences later, and how making hard choices now (getting down to work!) leads to an “easy” life later.
Reality Transurfing, by Vadim Zeland: If you hear me talking about “the alternatives space,” “destructive pendulums,” and “balancing forces,” it’s from this book! It’s a little bit “out there” compared to what most people are comfortable with, but it’s one of the most impactful books I’ve read in a long time.
The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt: One of the best-selling business books of all time, The Goal is where the author introduced the Theory of Constraints, which teaches business owners to address the main bottleneck of their company, or the one thing that’s preventing breakout growth.
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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 1,489 books, including 35 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“Freedom is the highest form of success.”
7 Books to Take the Wheel of Your Own Life: It’s a bit cringe to say that “nobody is coming to save you,” but besides being true, it’s also true that nobody’s coming to stop you, either. You can just do things. You can take the wheel of your own life, and build one that works for you. These 7 books can show you the way. [Watch Time: 10:14]
If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
Homeless to Billionaire: Andres Pira’s 8 Principles of Wealth Attraction: No home, no money, no excuses.
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
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
The Arcadian, by Steven Pressfield: I’ve read virtually all of Pressfield’s nonfiction work (it’s amazing, by the way), but I’ve never read any of his novels. I’m thinking I should get on that! Expected: May 26th, 2026
The Greater Game, by Dan Sullivan and John Bowen: Dan Sullivan’s the business mastermind behind some of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of this generation, and his next book is about creating 100X exponential growth, a strong legacy, and greater freedom than ever before. Expected: May 26th, 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 best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
This is a tragically underrated book by an award-winning journalist who volunteered with 12 different charities, one a month, for an entire year.
I realize that not everybody loves books that follow this “Year of XYZ” structure, but I’d make an exception for this one! It’s excellent.
The charities that Lawrence volunteers with during his Year of Living Generously include organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, Canadian Crossroads, the soup kitchen at St. Vincent de Paul, and several others.
Everywhere he goes, he meets the desperately needy, and the human-shaped angels meeting those needs, testing and verifying various ideas and theories about volunteering, philanthropy, service, and compassion.
Everywhere he went, he inspired me to help more, to give more, and to understand more.
I would never have even heard of this book had a bartender I used to work with not handed it to me after she had finished reading it. Which makes me wonder exactly how many other phenomenal books are out there, somewhere, just waiting for the right person to hand it off to someone else.
“The secret to productivity isn’t discipline. It’s joy.”
The definition of productivity has gone through a reimagining in recent years, and so have the best methods and mindsets necessary to achieve it.
Nowadays, productivity doesn't mean crossing off as many tasks as possible, regardless of their actual importance or meaning, all while desperately wishing you were somewhere else.
Today, I think of productivity as doing exactly what you intend to do, when you intend to do it, and as long as you're doing that, you're perfectly productive. Even if it's your intention to recharge by taking the night off.
In this book, Ali Abdaal, a former medical doctor and the world's most-followed productivity expert, takes issue with the idea that productivity has to be about discipline and drudgery at all. It can be about joy.
Feel-Good Productivity is based on the idea that we'll get more done by making work feel good, instead of dragging ourselves through it, regardless of how we feel.
The approach Ali lays out in the book is supported by a litany of scientific studies, empirical observation, and personal experimentation, and it's laid out in an extremely practical way, featuring 54 "productivity experiments" you can conduct on your own to put these insights into action.
The book also contains overwhelming psychological and neuroscientific evidence for why positive emotions fuel success, and how feeling good in your work can boost your energy, soothe your stress, and improve your life.
I'd never try to claim that discipline doesn't matter at all, or that it can't be extraordinarily valuable in a wide variety of situations, but what I love about Feel-Good Productivity is that Ali doesn't make it a matter of "discipline or nothing."
Success and fulfillment is possible without constant pain and suffering, and for the majority of the work that most of us do each day, it's probably more joy that would help us out the most.
Work isn't always going to feel good. Sometimes you do have to suffer (at least temporarily) for what you want in this life. But it's far from the only way there is to succeed, and Ali's book is the perfect counterbalance to that claim.
Discipline shouldn't be the default; it should be that extra gear that you drop into occasionally when you really need to dig deep.
“The chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next moment is waiting for you as if you’d never wasted a single moment of your life.”
This is an incredible, hidden classic from all the way back in 1908(!), and Bennet’s enthusiasm just completely took me over when I discovered this book for the first time.
I was already more than a little aware of the true value of time and why it was worth protecting, but I loved this hundred-year-old reminder.
Bennett was also a pretty heavy reader (one of us!), and he even mentions at one point that he was never caught traveling without his Marcus Aurelius.
But the style and tone of this book is almost like he had invited you into his home, you asked him for his best time management advice, and then patiently listened to his helpful, lively answers. When he says that “the supply of time is truly a daily miracle,” it’s raised to the level of a conviction.
Speaking for myself, time is one of the most fascinating subjects: everyone gets the same amount of it, even though we don’t necessarily control the same amount of our time, but we don’t even really understand what it is or where it comes from.
What’s more, certainly most of us live as though there’s an everlasting supply of it. We live as though we’re immortal, only briefly and occasionally looking up from our ordinary concerns to realize how astonishing it is that we’ve been given an additional 24 hours to spend virtually however we’d like. And this happens every day we’re alive!
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day is one of the earliest time management books, yet still among the very best. And while I’ve never once made it a full 24 hours without wasting at least 1 minute of it, I waste much less of it after having read this book. Perhaps most importantly, now I also know the true value of what exactly I’m throwing away.
“Renegade Millionaires approach every day, every challenge relying on a pre-developed system of organized effort that stays consistent with a set of guiding principles.
This is what says yes or no to the constant stream of questions, strategic decisions, problems, solutions, opportunities, everything that the entrepreneur must manage.”
This book is something of a wealth and business “manifesto” by the legendary marketer and entrepreneur Dan Kennedy.
He’s another person who’s made a massive, positive, profitable impact on my life and work, and ever since reading his other book, No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, I made the executive decision that I was going to read every book he’s ever written.
Dan has broken with basically every business convention imaginable - to the point of not even being reachable by phone or email. Literally the only way to get ahold of him is via fax machine, which speaks to just how successful in business he’s actually been.
Because the progression of wealth and business success pretty much goes like this: no meetings, then lots of meetings, then no meetings. He’s reached Stage Three, which definitely makes him the type of person you want to learn from.
One of the major lessons within Renegade Millionaire is simply that if you want to achieve astounding success and make a lot of money, just do the opposite of what most people do.
The majority of people in the world are not rich, so stop acting like them if you want to be rich. Adopt the mindsets, behaviors, and strategies of the people whose success you want to emulate, and that means living according to the seven principles laid out in this book.
“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.”
You can finish this book in just a few hours (it’s only about 90 pages long) and if you’re a writer, or you think you might want to be one, it will stay with you for a very long time. That was the case for me, as I kept coming back to my notes on this book for weeks after I finished it.
The Writing Life is one of the top “advice for writers” books, right alongside Bird by Bird, On Writing (Stephen King and Charles Bukowski - different books, same title), Draft No 4, and Consider This, among others.
Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize for another book of hers, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and she’s been writing up a storm for decades. Novels, narrative nonfiction, essays, etc. In this book, she shares her absolute best tips and tricks.
She’s been described as a “gregarious recluse,” as she’s far more comfortable out in her cabin on the West Coast of the US than in the city, but she welcomes you right in as a fellow writer, artist, and creative, and lets you in on everything she’s been thinking about when it comes to crafting the perfect sentence, connecting to readers, seeing as a writer, dealing with the monotony of the writing life, and everything else that comes with dedicating oneself to words.
I really don’t see how, if you want to be a writer, you can’t just devote, like, a couple of hours to reading one of the best books out there on how to be a better writer.
She’ll explain the real purpose of setting a schedule and sticking to it, the differences between and advantages of several competing writing styles, how to dig deeper in your writing and come up with insights and lessons that are unavailable to those unable to sit still and wait, and how to deal with the vicissitudes of the writing life.
Even if you’re not a writer, you should still read it, if for no other reason than to see how a master craftswoman does 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 2026, join us inside Wealth Creators 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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