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- Five Great Books: Stronger Than Yesterday, Buy Back Your Time, Infinite Jest, and More!
Five Great Books: Stronger Than Yesterday, Buy Back Your Time, Infinite Jest, and More!
Matt Karamazov
May 04, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 30 minutes
Please accept my apologies in advance for the 2-page book summary of Infinite Jest below, but when I’m recommending one of my top five favorite books of all time (out of more than 1,300 books read since 2014), I tend to go a little overboard.
But since this newsletter is a bit longer than my other ones (and because it’s 1:02AM right now and I’m just finishing it), let me just run through some quick items of interest and then we’ll get into tonight’s main book recommendations:
📚 I bought Dan Koe’s 2nd book (without even looking at the description), and I give a brief review in my latest YouTube video.
📚 I bought 8 books after Amazon exploited my ONE weakness (that I’m weak haha).
📚 My friend Jay Yang - one of the most impressive people I know, not to mention impressive teenagers - published his first book and it’s an absolute banger.
📚 There’s another book I’ve been really looking forward to reading, this one by Nick Huber, and it’ll be on my doorstep pretty soon.
📚 Thank you to my friend Tak for recommending my newsletter in his newsletter! It’s called The Automated, and it’s one of the newsletters that I always open.
📚 All of my book notes + summaries of tonight’s book recommendations are going to be available soon on my Patreon, along with a bunch more, once I get out from under this tidal wave of work I’m under right now.
📚 The next book breakdown I’ll be releasing this week is called Food for the Heart, by Ajahn Chah, Thailand’s best-known meditation teacher (it’s a reissued breakdown, because I first published it years ago, and that version, well…sucked).
With that said, below are my complete notes and summaries from the following books…
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
📕 Books I’ve Finished This Month
📜 The Book Quote of the Day
🎥 Is Dan Koe’s 2nd Book BETTER Than The Art of Focus?
✍ 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!
Book and Dagger, by Elyse Graham: The true story of how various scholars, librarians, etc. were recruited to be spies during WWII. Literature professors turning over double agents, gathering intelligence to help defeat Germany - it’s great so far!
Dying to Do Letterman, by Steve Mazan: Another true story, about a standup comedian who received a shocking cancer diagnosis and decided to go all-in on his dream of performing comedy on The Late Show with David Letterman.
Napoleon’s Library, by Louis N. Sarkozy: This one’s about Napoleon Bonaparte and the books he read that influenced him. Not just him though, but really the entire content - even the entire world. It’s also written by the son of the former president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy - so that’s pretty cool!
Tales of Power, by Carlos Castaneda: Book four in the series of Castaneda’s unreliable yet incredible accounts of his search for knowledge among the Yaqui of central Mexico. More fiction than fact, and Castaneda eventually became something of a cult leader, but I stand by my absolute love of his books.
Time Anxiety, by Chris Guillebeau: One of Chris’s earliest books, The Happiness of Pursuit, inspired me to reading 1,000 books before I turned 30. This one’s his latest, about how to overcome overwhelm and get back to living your life.
None Yet (It’s Been, Like, Two Days, Give Me a Break!)
“There is no end point to this process. There’s no mountaintop. You’ll never ‘arrive.’ Life promises you an adventure and nothing more.”
Is Dan Koe’s 2nd Book Even BETTER Than The Art of Focus?: I just finished reading Dan Koe's 2nd book, and I had high expectations going into it, based on how much I loved The Art of Focus.
In my latest YouTube video, I give a brief review of Purpose & Profit, as well as drop a few other book recommendations, including an incredible book on self-discipline, and a highly-anticipated book by Morgan Housel. [Watch Time: 8:19]
If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
This Harvard Professor’s Mind-Obliterating Drug Trip Ruined His Life (But Saved a Generation): The wild, true story of two drug-addled professors and a countercultural revolution.
18 Ways Winners Manage Their Time Each and Every Day: World-class time management advice from the legendary Brian Tracy.
8 Ways to Develop a High-Performing Mind (Backed by Science): What Olympic athletes and ultra-high-performers do and know that the rest of us don’t.
Champion Mindset, by Patrick Mouratoglou: I had never heard of this guy, but apparently he was Serena Williams’ tennis coach for more than a decade, on top of his work with other icons of the sport. This book contains his “ten commandments” for success, applicable not just to sports but everywhere in life. I don’t even watch tennis, but I expect to learn a ton from this book. Expected: May 13th, 2025
Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business, by Ed Latimore: My friend Ed is a former heavyweight boxer too (his record is better than mine though), and his long-awaited new book is about how boxing gave him the tools to overcome childhood trauma and alcoholism. Really looking forward to this one! Expected: August 5th, 2025
Moral Ambition, by Rutger Bregman: I’ve read (and loved) Rutger’s first book, Utopia for Realists, and plan to read his follow up book, Human Kind - now I have to add this one to my list too! The subtitle is “How to stop wasting your talent and start making a difference,” and it’s a book about using your career for good, and to make the world a better place. Expected: May 6th, 2025
Protocols, by Andrew Huberman: Andrew’s a neuroscientist and tenured professor at Stanford, not to mention hosting one of the most popular health podcasts in the world. This book is a collection of simple, evidence-based solutions to a whole host of challenges, and a distillation of his very best advice from the podcast. Expected: September 9th, 2025
The Art of Spending Money, by Morgan Housel: This is Morgan Housel’s third book, after the 6-million-copy bestseller, The Psychology of Money, and the (in my opinion) shamefully underrated Same as Ever. I cannot WAIT for this one! Expected: October 7th, 2025
“You aren’t stuck with the body you have. You can make it better, even if you’ve mishandled it, and it’s far simpler than many people believe. Even better, once you start changing your body, you’ll realize that you also have the power to change your life.”
Personal trainers inspire even less trust these days than personal injury lawyers, and people on social media are rightly suspicious of fitness “experts” slinging supplements with less muscle-building power than soy sauce. Which is why when people like Michael Matthews come along, we appreciate them even more. He’s the real deal.
Stronger Than Yesterday is a super-practical daily reader, containing 169 insights for transforming your body, mind, and motivation, and Matthews stands out as someone who actually wants you to succeed and knows exactly how to help you do that.
He has that perfect combination of unconditional support and encouragement, balanced with the recognition that no one goes through life at 100% every single day, and perfection is the dream of people who never got started in the first place.
The book contains simple, evidence-based techniques and tactics for improving your physique, reducing your risk of disease and dysfunction, slowing aging, and more. Matthews realizes that 100% compliance is probably never going to happen, but he doesn’t let you get away with anything, least of all getting away with doing less than your best.
What you’ll realize is that when you start taking control of what happens inside the gym, you’ll start gaining more control over what happens in your life outside the gym too. You don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to try. You will likely never reach perfection, but on any given day, you can be stronger than yesterday.
“Athletes win because there is an actionable, clear target - a scoreboard. People finish marathons because there is a finish line. The problem with many of our dreams is that we wouldn’t even know if we achieved them.”
Your time is for sale, and you can buy it back at bargain basement prices if you have Dan Martell’s playbook. This book contains the exact systems and processes he used to build a $100M holding company, and it helped me read a lot more books, so they can work for a wide variety of people!
One of the most useful calculations in the book concerns your “Buy Back Rate,” meaning the dollar value you assign to your time. Briefly, if there’s a task that someone else can do pretty much as well as you can, for less than your hourly rate, you offload it to someone else.
That’s a fairly simple one, and lots of time management books cover it, but there’s a lot more in here too, like the DRIP Matrix, the 1:3:1 Rule, and others.
Bottom line, though, Buy Back Your Time is about finding creative and profitable ways to use a readily-available renewable resource (money) to reclaim the most valuable non-renewable resource in the entire freaking universe: your time.
Business owners and professionals are likely to derive the most value from this book, as that’s where the majority of Dan’s experience comes from.
I mean he’s got three software company exits to his name, an AI incubator he’s started, a massive social media following - the dude’s busy, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And this is the system he uses personally and professionally to manage it all without sacrificing the moments that matter most.
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
Let me tell you a little bit about what makes Infinite Jest so intimidating, and then I’ll tell you why the epic challenge is so indescribably worth it.
For one thing, it’s over 1,100 pages long, including hundreds of endnotes, which you probably should read because some of them contain crucial plot points and several of the funniest jokes.
Wallace uses 20,584 unique words in the 577,608-word book(!), which ended up sending me to the dictionary on almost every single page. One guy actually calculated this, and he worked out that the first 35,000 words of the novel contain 4,923 unique words, “more than most rappers but still less than the Wu-Tang Clan.”
So it’s long and you won’t know what all the words mean. But what is it actually about?
That’s a big question, but generally, it’s about entertainment, drugs, addiction, suicide, depression, recovery, and um...tennis I guess? Most of the book takes place at an elite junior tennis academy situated next to a halfway house in Boston, USA.
It’s difficult to summarize, but in the near future, all the years have been “sponsored” by corporations, so most of the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, and instead of 2007 or 2008 you’ve got the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar, etc.
Where the title Infinite Jest comes from (aside from it being a reference to Hamlet, more on that later) is that the previous director of the tennis academy, a film auteur by the name of James Incandenza has created a “video cartridge” that’s so irresistibly entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all motivation to do anything else other than watch it - Infinite Jest - over and over again until they eventually die.
So that’s one major theme - the addictive nature of entertainment - and the desire of human beings to give themselves away to something, even if that thing destroys them, either psychologically or physically, or both.
One of the great ironies that Wallace recognized is that although entertainment can serve as an escape from the anxiety of recognizing one's mortality, entertainment itself can be fatal, psychologically.
Oh yeah, and there’s this Canadian-Quebecois separatist group/terrorist cell that wants to steal the master copy of Infinite Jest so that they can deploy it as a weapon in a massive terrorist strike against the American people.
The group is made up entirely of guys in wheelchairs, and they’re called Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, or the “Wheelchair Assassins.” In the book, these guys are major badasses, and if, before suffering a brutally violent death, you “hear the squeak,” it’s already too late.
James Incandenza has killed himself before the novel begins (as David Foster Wallace would eventually do himself in 2008), but his wife Avril Incandenza now runs the tennis academy, where their son Hal is a senior.
For literature nerds, this is where you’ll begin to feel all warm and tingly: Hal is based on Hamlet, Avril represents Queen Gertrude, who is then courted by their Uncle Tavis, who in turn represents Uncle Claudius in the play. And of course, James Incandenza comes back as a ghost in the book, just like Hamlet’s father.
“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”
As if that weren’t enough, Hal is the middle child with two brothers, Orin (the oldest) and Mario (the youngest). Orin, Hal, and Mario each represent Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha Karamazov respectively in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
But even if you don’t think you’ll get all the references right away (I probably didn’t), don’t let it stop you from reading the book! Infinite Jest has so much heart. It’s just...it’s earnest.
It’s really about what it’s like to be a human being in this crazy world, where so much can be stacked against us, and where we have to find the internal resources to survive without destroying ourselves.
It’s simultaneously one of the saddest, funniest books that I’ve ever read in my entire life, and now it’s part of me forever.
If you’ve actually finished the book, that’s a big accomplishment, and you should be very, very proud! I’m not saying that “everyone needs to read this,” but here we have a book where the author put every last thing he had within himself to create the absolute greatest work of art that he possibly could, the apotheosis of what he was able to achieve at the time, and I was just - there’s no other word for it - completely blown away pretty much the entire time I was reading it.
One last surprise for the math nerds among us (not me, alas) is that, although it’s not a linear narrative (the story doesn’t go from beginning to end, but rather dodges around), the internal structure of Infinite Jest was meant to resemble a Sierpinski Gasket. I know, What’s that?
Well, it’s a fractal structure created when you recursively subdivide (I had to look up “recursively") an equilateral triangle into ever smaller equilateral triangles ad infinitum - so that three triangles fit into the main triangle with their vertices at the midpoints of its side, and in turn, they subdivide into three more triangles, and so on. Yea, I know. What the actual fuck.
All that being said, there’s no reason to be intimidated! You can tackle Infinite Jest! It could take you months, you might want to give up in the middle, and you might wanna throw the book out the window (or “defenestrate” it, as Wallace might say), but David Foster Wallace always recognized, and said repeatedly, that the writer’s primary obligation is to the reader. Wallace is adamantly anti-pretentiousness, anti-irony, anti-everything-that-insults-the-reader. As he said:
"It's a weird book. It doesn't move the way normal books do. It's got a whole bunch of characters. I think it makes at least an in-good-faith attempt to be fun and riveting enough on a page-by-page level so I don't feel like I'm hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, 'Hey, here's this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it.' I know books like that and they piss me off."
I don’t want this book summary to have to come with its own endnotes, so I’ll leave it there. But this is a very, very special book, and David Foster Wallace was a brilliant writer. I hope you enjoy Infinite Jest as much as I did.
“Can parents claim to love their children when, by educating them wrongly, they foster envy, enmity and ambition? Is it love that stimulates the national and racial antagonisms which lead to war, destruction and utter misery, that sets man against man in the name of religions and ideologies?”
I always describe Krishnamurti as like someone standing between Friedrich Nietzsche and Jesus. Uncompromising in his stance against ideology, conformity, and antagonism between human beings, he always refused to set himself up as a teacher.
While he was alive, he used to insist that no one should blindly follow what he said as though he were some sort of authority.
You’ll notice, in fact, that most of the time Krishnamurti just keeps asking questions. If you break down the transcripts of some of his public talks, it’s rare that he’ll make a concrete statement. He wants you to think for yourself.
He wants you to question what you’ve come to believe is self-evident. He wants you to question the dominant culture of acquisitiveness, envy, ambition, and groupthink.
In this collection, the focus is on education, of course, and he says that there is no “method” that one can follow to become “educated,” if there’s ever an end to education at all. Intelligence is not separate from love.
True education is a movement of the mind away from fixed structures and prepackaged beliefs. It is the approach toward the essential, away from the superficial. Not in the past or in the future, but grounded in the present.
“No matter what external conditions occur, you need a bastion of customers with both constant, uninterruptible ability and willingness to buy.
Such customers can only be found among people of affluence - not just in income, but in their net worth and emotional state. Organizing a business around any other population is, bluntly, self-sabotage.”
Dan Kennedy is the legendary marketing genius standing behind virtually every future marketing superstar you and I follow today. He’s the guy they all learned it from, and before everyone had a copy of $100M Offers or $100M Leads sitting behind them as their Zoom background, people displayed Dan Kennedy’s books behind them.
His “No B.S.” series contains more than a dozen volumes (18 at last count) and I’m rapidly working my way through all of them.
I’m inhaling them one after another, just ravenous for the principles, strategies, and tactics that are changing my financial future before my very eyes. It seems like I enter a new tax bracket every time I finish and apply a new Dan Kennedy book.
This book, unsurprisingly, is about how to get rich people to buy your stuff. There are, understandably, only a few books on this subject, partly because there are relatively few people who are qualified to write about it. Dan Kennedy is.
His demonstrated competence and multimillion-dollar track record speak for themselves, and have helped establish him firmly among the top business professionals thinking, writing, and speaking today.
The fact is that we are living and working and selling in the New Economy, a time where consumers demand more: demand what is specifically for them, demand competence, demand politeness and excellent service, and know that they are the ones with the most power.
“Low ticket” is becoming less and less sustainable as well, forcing the smart marketers and the people who like money to go where the money actually is. In other words, to market to the affluent.
This book covers the psychology and buying behaviors of the “Top 1%” of the consumer base, how to find them, sell to them, what they like and what they’re looking for.
All the strategies and tactics are right here, and in an economic environment where blending in with the masses means poverty and death, this book will help you stand out, command attention and respect, and both protect and expand your bottom line in any economic environment.
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
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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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