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Five Great Books: Nietzsche, Time Management, Mental Mastery, and More!
Matt Karamazov
February 02, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 26 minutes
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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
As someone who literally gets paid to read books all day (learn how), it’s with great shame and embarrassment that I admit to you…
That I failed my Reading Challenge!!
I was attempting to read 200 pages a day until I reached 200,000 followers on Instagram, and today just…wasn’t my day.
I’ll spare you the details, but with publishing my latest YouTube video, getting this newsletter out, meeting with potential sponsors, and just generally running my “book business,” I simply came up short. I think I read 115 pages or something.
About 30 of those pages were read during today’s livestream though, which I’ll definitely be doing more often! Hang out and read with me here.
Anyway…I’ll be back at it again tomorrow, starting over from Day 1, because it’s been a wonderful experiment so far in a multitude of different ways.
That’s a story for another time though.
Here in this newsletter, I’m sharing my complete notes and summaries of each of the following Five Great Books:
Headway is a book summary app with thousands of titles available, but that’s only the beginning. With personal growth plans, daily micro-learning sessions, curated collections, and more, you can make 2026 your best year ever. And when you sign up through my link, you can get 60% OFF! Check Out Headway 👈
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
🎥 How I Get Paid to Read Books All Day
✍ 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!
The Library, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen: My main takeaway from this book so far? Books can be burned, libraries can be destroyed, knowledge can be lost, and wisdom can be forgotten......but reading ALWAYS comes back!
The Library is a history of, well…libraries…and it’s fantastic so far. It traces their history from the earliest collections of printed material, up through the first, most rudimentary book collections, right up through the present day. Highly recommend!
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 1,464 books, including 10 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
Headway is a book summary app with thousands of titles available, but that’s only the beginning. With personal growth plans, daily micro-learning sessions, curated collections, and more, you can make 2026 your best year ever. And when you sign up through my link, you can get 60% OFF! Check Out Headway 👈
“Perhaps the fact that I was exceedingly fond of reading made me endurable. With a large library to browse in, I spent many hours not bothering anyone, after I once learned to read.”
How I Get Paid to Read Books All Day (And How You Can Too): Yes, I get paid to read books all day. No, it's not an impossible pipe dream.
Yes, I actually make great money now. No, it's not going to happen for you in 6 weeks.
Yes, now is one of the best times to make it happen. No, it's not going to be as easy as you think it will.
Yes, it’s still absolutely worth it, and you should watch this video all the way to the end to learn how I did it and about the mistakes you should avoid! [Watch Time: 6:19]
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.
The 12 Best Business Books I Read in 2025: Including how I’m applying each one to scale my business faster than ever.
REAL Confidence, by Simone Knego: I received an advance copy of this book a short time ago, and it’s wonderful! Highly recommend for anyone who wants to break free from self-sabotage and be able to trust themselves again, and everyone who wants to lead their life with courage, clarity, and self-respect. Expected: February 17th, 2026
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
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. Essentially, adding constraints can make us better, and free us to do great work. 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
“The dreamers are the saviors of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which it shall one day see and know.”
Published in 1903, As a Man Thinketh is one of the most popular self-help books of all time, and it's one that I try to re-read every single year. The benefits that it’s added to my calmness, peace, positivity, self-assurance, and boldness are all worth it!
In the book, James Allen poetically likens our minds to a garden, where the thoughts that grow are exactly like the ones that are planted. But it's so much more than just "positive thinking" or "wish-fulfillment." Simply put, our life is what our thoughts make it, and when we think uplifting thoughts, we lift ourselves up at the same time.
Allen was writing before Neville Goddard, but As a Man Thinketh is also about how we’re constantly “out-picturing” the images that are most dominant in our minds, which shapes our external circumstances over time. In much the same way that we tend to see what we’re looking for, so long as we entertain thoughts of integrity, justice, hope, positivity, wealth, and abundance in all its forms, that’s what we’re most likely to see “growing” in our lives.
As you can see from my book notes here, the writing is just beautiful too - stunning, even. And it’s like that from start to finish! The whole book is less than 50 pages, so it’s another one that you can easily read in a single day but keep returning to for a lifetime.
“Look at this gateway! It hath two faces. Two roads come together here: these hath no one yet gone to the end of. This long lane backwards: it continueth for an eternity. And that long lane forward - that is another eternity.
They are antithetical to each other, these roads; they directly abut one another: and it is here, at this gateway, that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘This Moment.’”
People have been misunderstanding Nietzsche and misquoting him ever since he died (and way before that), and this is perhaps his most misinterpreted book.
In fact, my favorite Nietzsche translator, Walter Kaufmann, helped rescue his reputation somewhat from the clutches of Nazi “philosophers” who manipulated Nietzsche’s ideas of the “Superman” and the “Will to Power” for their own nefarious and evil ends.
They’d seriously rip whole passages out of context and claim that his philosophy supported their cruelty and racism. Nietzsche has never truly recovered.
But this book in particular is Nietzsche’s telling of the Persian prophet Zarathustra descending from his solitude in the mountains and proclaiming that “God is dead” (and we have killed him).
What this means, of course, is that human values must come from human beings, rather than being handed down to us by the gods on high. A “revaluation of values” is what he calls for, and the surpassing (in intelligence, energy, and passion) of every human being who has ever lived before now.
This is not only one of my favorites of Nietzsche’s books, but probably one of my favorite books of all time, even though I had an extraordinary amount of difficulty deciphering it the first time I tried to read it.
It’s a tough read, and Nietzsche’s not known for making himself clear! You have to work at this one, but I believe it’s worth it. No two people have to love the same books, of course.
But if you hated this one the first time you read it, make sure you didn’t in fact read the 1939 translation, if you know what I mean!
“I think what makes it hard for us to enjoy happiness in the moment is our tendency to hold on too tightly to happiness from the past.
When we idealize the past and subconsciously crave a return to that safer, more certain time, we are taking energy and focus away from being in the present, which is ultimately where we spend our lives.”
This is a tragically underrated (but hopefully not for long) book by the screenwriter-turned-therapist of the Ashton Kutcher movie, Dude, Where’s My Car?, and it’s a “friendly and engaging guide to talk therapy.”
But there’s so much more here, and even if you’ve never been to therapy or had plans of going, you could still absolutely stand to benefit from reading the book.
For one thing, I found Phil’s use of metaphor wonderfully insightful, as he’ll describe depression like being caught in quicksand, addiction as being controlled by a planet’s gravity…just on and on.
A completely different way of looking at things that helps you instantly understand, and even if you’ve never struggled with those afflictions yourself, it’ll help you better relate to people in your life who have.
In 50 chapters, he deals with all these things people end up in therapy to help them deal with, like grief, anger, relationship issues, worry - basically everything.
By the end of it you almost can’t help but feel that if you ever were to end up in therapy, you’d want to have a therapist like Phil.
“Good time management and personal productivity begins by valuing your life, and every minute of that life.”
This is a short, easily-digestible addition to Brian Tracy’s “Success Library” of books, and the title pretty much tells you everything you need to know!
While I don’t necessarily think it covers everything one needs to know about time management, it’s very well worth reading, it’s fairly broad in its scope, and it includes discussions about how consequences can help you define what’s truly important, and what kind of commitment to time management it takes to become a top performer - but also an extremely valuable detour into what you’re managing your time for.
Read this book if you want to get ahead in your work and/or career as quickly as possible, while staying organized and moving your important projects forward, sure, but as Brian Tracy says, the main point of time management is to help you improve the overall quality of your life.
Time management skills are just a huge waste of time if you’re only going to use them to build a life you don’t want to live.
“There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at least reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless to advance.”
Henry James has been a favorite of mine ever since being completely captivated by his other book, The Ambassadors.
The Turn of the Screw is a classic ghost story that’s been retold and recast in many different forms in the century since it was first published - we’re talking movie adaptations, TV shows, Netflix series, plays…everything.
It’s slightly more difficult to read than even some of the other books of that time period (late 19th century), mostly due to Henry James’s “F-you, just try and read this” writing style and lack of punctuation. And it’s not even a lack of punctuation, really, but that there’s so much of it! A typical sentence of his can be strung out for half a page or more.
The Turn of the Screw is told within a framing narrative, where a group of people are huddled together on Christmas Eve telling ghost stories. One guest tries to one-up everyone else with his scary story, basically asking, “You think that’s scary? Listen to this!”
The story he tells, the main, nested narrative, centers around a governess who’s hired to look after two young children who have just lost both of their parents.
In the course of time, it becomes clear that the children have some sort of supernatural connection with the dead, former governess and her lover - or is it actually a story about the living governess’s struggle with mental illness and her descent into madness?
That’s the ambiguity, deftly handled and brilliantly imagined that makes The Turn of the Screw such a classic. And the ending! We have to talk about the ending!
I won’t spoil it (obviously), but I’m telling you: the very last word, on the very last page, after such a long, typically Jamesian setup, complete with run-on sentences - not to mention asides like this one, that add to the syntactic complexity of the whole - and digressions every which way, concludes the tale with a terrific hammer-blow that you will not see coming.
The story itself may not be terribly scary by today’s standards, but the ending is one reason I’ve been haunted by this novella ever since.
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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 180,000+ 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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