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Five Great Books: Of Mice and Men, The Creative Act, An Iron Will, and More!
Matt Karamazov
October 18, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 24 minutes
I’m back with five more great books to recommend tonight.
Actually, here are eighteen more of my best book recommendations (nonfiction edition), although I will say: it bugs me that Instagram chose the post with the obvious design flaw to send out to 1,000,000+ people. But hey, I’ll take it!
Here in this newsletter though, I’m sharing my complete notes and summaries of each of the following Five 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
🎥 I Read 10 GREAT Books Last Month
✍ 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!
11/22/63, by Stephen King: This is a giant horror novel about the assassination of JFK, and a man who discovers a way to go back in time to try and prevent it from happening. I’m about 400 pages in, and I am ripping through it - Stephen King can just write, man.
Plagued by Fire, by Paul Hendrickson: I stopped reading this amazingly well-done biography of Frank Lloyd Wright about halfway through, but not because I wasn’t enjoying it. It’s actually fascinating (Wright was Ayn Rand’s inspiration for Howard Roark in The Fountainhead), but I wanted to finish up a few of the other books I was reading. Now that I’ve done that, I can give this one my full attention!
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 1,423 books, including 69 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“The higher up the monetary food chain we go in our compensation and the nature of the people from whom we get it, the more we are paid for WHO we are and WHO we are perceived to be by them, than we are paid for WHAT we do. But nobody wants to accept that - and even if they do, it’s like pulling teeth to have them embrace it to the degree that they actually start using it as a strategy to raise their level of income.”
I Read 10 GREAT Books Last Month (Yearly Total: 66): September was a great reading month, where I was able to finish a ton of great books - including a few that I had been looking forward to for quite some time.
For instance, Brian Tracy's latest book, The Laws of Power! Not to be confused with the Robert Greene book, The 48 Laws of Power, which is also amazing!
I've already launched into my October reading list, but these 10 books are ones that I'll be thinking about and returning to for quite some time. Hope you find some great new books in here! [Watch Time: 14:09]
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.
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
Wisdom Takes Work, by Ryan Holiday: I’ll basically read anything that Ryan Holiday publishes, and so I’m really looking forward to this one. It will complete his Stoic Virtues series, and in this book he makes the case that wisdom is the virtue on which all other virtues depend. Expected: October 21st, 2025
“That ranch we’re goin’ to is right down there about a quarter mile. We’re gonna go in an’ see the boss. Now, look - I’ll give him the work tickets, but you ain’t gonna say a word. You jus’ stand there and don’t say nothing. If he finds out what a crazy bastard you are, we won’t get no job, but if he sees ya work before he hears ya talk, we’re set. Ya got that?”
John Steinbeck can deliver more emotional force in 100 pages than anyone has in the last 100 years. Of Mice and Men is “controversial” (to semi-literate simpletons), but man is it incredible. You can read it in a day and think about it for a decade.
Actually, the first time I read it was in high school, where we watched the movie version as well, and now I can’t not see Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie.
The movie is fairly faithful to the book, and it follows two friends as they try to make their way in America during the Great Depression.
George and Lennie are both itinerant day laborers, and the novella picks up after they were unceremoniously expelled from their last temporary stop after an unfortunate “incident.” See, Lennie is a mostly-friendly giant who doesn’t know his own strength.
Simple-minded but good-natured, he can never keep a pet because he keeps petting them to death. After accidentally killing a person instead of a pet, the pair are on the run, looking for a new place to settle down, and that’s where we pick up their story.
I don’t want to drop any spoilers, but I can tell you here that George and Lennie have a plan. They’re going to own an acre of land and a shack that they can call their own, and they’re saving up their money to buy a specific plot of land they’d seen earlier.
Things seem to be going well, until they meet the boss’s son, a man named Curley, and his wife, who unintentionally threatens to disrupt the best-laid plans of mice and men.
“Awareness needs constant refreshing. If it becomes a habit, even a good habit, it will need to be reinvented again and again. Until one day, you notice that you are always in the practice of awareness, at all times, in all places, living your life in a state of constant openness to receiving."
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.
But 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.
How much of an artist you are is directly dependent on how much awareness you can bring to your direct experience of life. The more aware you are, the more of an artist you are, and everyone can learn how to deepen their perception of their internal and external worlds. We can all be artists.
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.
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.
“Nevertheless we ought to mix up these two things, and to pass our lives alternately in solitude and among throngs of people; for the former will make us long for the society of mankind, the latter for that of ourselves, and the one will counteract the other: solitude will cure us when we are sick of crowds, and crowds will cure us when we are sick of solitude.”
Peace of Mind (De Tranquillitate Animi) is a dialogue written during the years 49 to 62 A.D. concerning the state of mind of Seneca's friend Serenus and how to cure him of his various mental afflictions - anxiety, fear, worry, pessimism, apathy, unhealthy desires, and despair.
Seneca is the ideal teacher because he has overcome all these incredible ordeals throughout his life and never allowed himself to be laid low permanently by pessimism or fear.
There's not a single person on earth who can be said to have had an "easy life" (we all encounter difficulties, suffer losses, get sick, and eventually have to face our own mortality), but Lucius Annaeus Seneca is uniquely qualified to teach us about how to claim tranquility of mind because he's been through it all.
Over the last two thousand years, he's been a close friend to millions, and by reading Peace of Mind and experimenting with his philosophy, he can be ours too.
“He who is silent is forgotten; he who does not advance falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceases to become greater, becomes smaller; he who leaves off gives up; the stationary is the beginning of the end - it precedes death; to live is to achieve, to will without ceasing."
Weakness of will is the only thing stopping you from achieving everything you've ever wanted to achieve in this life.
The opportunities for great achievement and relentless goal attainment are abundant today, but it's the will to achieve that's scarce, the will to keep going that's lacking, and the will to drive forward no matter what that's going to be the difference-maker between your outstanding success and dismal failure.
Luck exists, but volume and perseverance negate luck. We create a substantial portion of our own luck by being tenacious, relentless, and irrepressible. This book, An Iron Will, is a classic from all the way back in 1901(!) that will help you become exactly that: irrepressible.
Orison Swett Marden was the pre-eminent self-help authority in the earliest parts of the 20th century, and he was also the founder of SUCCESS Magazine, a publication that's still going strong today. If you think of people like Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Stephen R. Covey, Tony Robbins, and Zig Ziglar - Orison Swett Marden was the man who inspired their journeys of personal development.
In An Iron Will, Marden explores the importance of mental discipline, toughness, and perseverance to our happiness and success. The world tends to take us at our own valuation and believes in the person who believes in themselves, and regardless of what you intend to achieve, An Iron Will is how you'll arm yourself with the strength and power necessary to achieve it.
“Forgetting yesterday neither will I think of tomorrow. Why should I throw now after maybe? Can tomorrow’s sand flow through the glass before today’s?
Will the sun rise twice this morning? Can I perform tomorrow’s deeds while standing in today’s path? Can I place tomorrow’s gold in today’s purse?
Can tomorrow’s child be born today? Can tomorrow’s death cast its shadow backward and darken today’s joy?
Should I concern myself over events which I may never witness? Should I torment myself with problems that may never come to pass?
No! Tomorrow lies buried with yesterday, and I will think of it no more.”
Og Mandino. What a name, eh? But listen, this guy went from being a depressed, divorced alcoholic on the verge of suicide to selling more than 50,000,000 books, and this is one of my absolute favorite books of all time.
Seriously, I had no idea that it would have this kind of impact on me, and even if you’re not technically in sales, it’s really a book about life.
The Greatest Salesman in the World takes the form of a parable (which I found kind of dry in the beginning, to be honest), about a camel boy named Hafid who achieves a life of wealth and success after learning and applying what he learns written on these ten ancient scrolls that are given to him to read.
The framing parable puts some people off, but then it launches into all these fantastic chapters (the ten scrolls) about mastering your emotions, cultivating persistence, greeting each day with love and gratitude, and treating people the way you would if you wanted the absolute best for them. Themes of love and forgiveness, generosity, forbearance - in a sales book! The language itself is graceful, beautiful, and poetic as well. Yeah, I love this book.
The main message of the book is to “do it now.” Yesterday is past, tomorrow may never arrive, and if you waste today, you waste “the last page of your life.” “These hours are now my eternity,” Mandino says. Incredible. If Marcus Aurelius was an insurance salesman, he’d probably write something like this!
The Greatest Salesman in the World came out in 1968 - nearly two thousand years after Meditations - but both are just timeless. You can learn so much from both of them; about life, about kindness, about true success and abundance. It just so happens that Mandino’s book can help you make a hell of a lot of money too.
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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 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
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