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Five Great Books: The Art of Impossible, Mastery, Pity the Reader, and More!
Matt Karamazov
January 16, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 28 minutes
📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
It’s not very often that Faust gets recommended alongside books like Make Money Easy in the very same newsletter, but here we are!
In this issue we’ve also got a deeper look into the creative life of Kurt Vonnegut, an incredible book about achieving mastery (one of my top favorite books of 2025), and a lot more.
Sometimes I wonder if these newsletters are too long, but it’s also not completely my fault when there are sooo many interesting new books coming out!
I recommended a few of them in the last issue, but here are some more (in case you weren’t completely overwhelmed yet):
Rather optimistically, I already placed 300 books on my Reading List for 2026 (aiming high, but knowing I’d never get through all of them), but now I have to go through my list all over again and see which other ones I have to push to next year!
Here in this newsletter though, I’m sharing my complete notes and summaries of each of the following Five 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
🎥 My Favorite Books of 2025 (Out of 102 Books)
✍ 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 Power of Concentration, by Theron Q. Dumont: Early 20th-century New Thought literature is some of my favorite, and this one’s an excellent book that came out in 1918 about how to improve and use your concentration. It’s wonderful so far, and even though (of course) literally nobody uses those old “scientific” terms anymore, I’m finding plenty in here that’s well worth reading!
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 1,459 books, including 5 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 👈
“Douglass stressed the ‘vast and wonderful change’ since the 1860s. He marveled that he could ‘live to see the day when I could with safety to my person, to my liberty, tread the soil of Florida, of South Carolina, of Georgia.’ For so long the very names of those states ‘sent a shudder through me.’ But now, Douglass declared via Isaiah, ‘We see…a new heaven and a new earth.’”
My Favorite Books of the Year (Out of 102 Books Total): The year 2025 is “in the books,” and it was a fantastic year for reading!
I went through the entire list of 102 books that I read last year, and could not for the LIFE of me narrow it down to just 10.
So in this video I kept myself to 20 favorites and went in-depth on five of what I consider to be among the "best of the best." [Watch Time: 13:49]
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.
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
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
“Enlivened once again, life’s pulses waken
To greet the kindly dawn’s ethereal vision;
You, earth, outlasted this night, too, unshaken,
And at my feet you breathe, renewed Elysian,
Surrounding me with pleasure-scented flowers,
And deep within you prompt a stern decision:
To strive for highest life with all my powers.”
This is a simply spectacular 18th-century German play in two parts about an old scholar, Heinrich Faust, who’s become disillusioned by the finitude of human knowledge and makes a deal with the demon Mephistopheles.
The bet they agree to, roughly speaking, is that if Mephisto can show Faust a moment that he will want to live eternally, then in that moment his soul shall be turned over to Mephisto forever.
It’s quite a long play, and much of it involves Faust’s relationship with a woman, Gretchen, who he believes might be able to help him find earthly happiness. After a series of tragic occurrences, Gretchen is sent to prison (I know, I’m skipping over a lot – you’ll just have to read it for yourself!) and Faust remains disillusioned about his prospects of ever finding happiness, an instant to which he can say eternally, ‘Abide, moment!’
In the end (spoiler alert), Faust loses the bet against the demon and owes Mephisto his soul, but is saved at the last moment by the angels of heaven, who intervene on his behalf, saying, “Saved is the spirit kingdom’s flower from evil and the grave: Who ever strives with all his power, we are allowed to save.”
This is a huge part of Goethe’s genius, and why I love him more than almost any other writer or playwright. Faust is saved because Goethe doesn’t believe in eternal damnation; no just or loving God would ever punish any of his children eternally.
Forgiveness and unconditional love are hallmarks of any God worth believing in, and Mephistopheles loses Faust’s soul because of it.
Humanity, justice, and love of life itself are what I think of whenever I think of Goethe or this play, and it truly is a masterpiece.
Like I said, it’s simply spectacular: wonderful to read out loud, and I really, really hope you read it for yourself. The version I read was translated into English by the famous philosopher Walter Kaufman, and that’s the translation I would recommend!
“When you learn how much you’re worth, you’ll stop giving people discounts.”
There’s some great stuff in here about how to develop a better relationship with money and get yourself on a firm financial footing, though it’s not exactly the first book I’d recommend for people who want to finally get on top of their money.
The underlying premise is solid. Aligning your financial goals with your Meaningful Mission and changing your mindset around money can be tremendously beneficial. I’d never call it my “Meaningful Mission” (I’d have to steal my own lunch money if I ever did), but that’s more or less how I earn my living now.
Building an entire business around books was (and is) incredibly meaningful for me, and ever since around 2025 it’s been wildly profitable for me too.
But in Make Money Easy, I feel as though there’s a lot of emphasis placed on building a business online with your personal brand, and precious little of any depth on exactly how to do that. Maybe for a beginner it would be more helpful, but for me I didn’t find a great deal that was new.
Nothing against Lewis, by the way! The reason I picked up this book in the first place was because I have tremendous respect for who he is and what he’s doing, and I did find some value here. I wouldn’t have finished reading it if I didn’t.
And so if you want to read more about breaking limiting beliefs around money and understanding the psychology of money, then it’s a decent read!
“How can any one option, any one goal, match up to the possibilities contained in all others? This troubling equation applies to everything from lifetime goals to what you’re going to do in the next ten minutes.”
For context, I have 11+ pages of notes from Mastery. From a 176-page book. If that tells you anything about how amazing I thought this book was.
Briefly, it’s about human potential, and the evolutionary destiny of human beings to learn - and keep on learning for as long as we live. But it’s about so much more than that.
It’s about how the modern world relentlessly socializes us, sapping us of our original creative energy and forcing us to conform to a world that stifles our most noble, most human impulses for generativity and greater life.
It’s about committing to a life of excellence, about all the fantastic rewards associated with traveling such a path, and how to really live while you’re alive.
On the surface, Leonard talks about martial arts, and his experience as a fighter pilot, to explain the 5 essential keys to mastery and how to achieve your athletic, creative, and intellectual potential. But on a deeper level than that, it’s about how not to waste a single moment of your one and only life.
So many of the things we do each day feel “in-between,” as though they’re not part of our “real” lives. We climb stairs to get somewhere else, never for the sake of climbing.
We drive, not for the thrill of commanding an unbelievably complex machine (the car) by using an even more unbelievably complex machine (our brain), but merely to arrive at some other distant point in time and space.
But in the same way that the point of dancing isn’t just to get to a particular spot on the floor, attempting to gain mastery in any worthwhile endeavor isn’t just about the end result.
It’s about the process, the plateaus, the pleasures of being here while you’re alive, and feeling every moment of your existence. Mastery is one of the greatest, purest distillations of this philosophy for living, and George Leonard gets it.
“Because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next - and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis - at any time of night or day.
Even more magically, perhaps, we readers can communicate with each other across space and time so cheaply. Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost.
No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that.
I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper - at a cost of less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.”
I’ve heard it said that talking about “American fiction” would be simply unimaginable without referencing Kurt Vonnegut, and I’d have to agree! Ever since reading books like Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five back in 2014, he’s been one of my favorites. In fact, I honestly don’t think I’d be as big of a reader as I am now, had I not discovered his work in my early twenties. I got hooked early.
Kurt never liked being called a science fiction writer - and truly, he’s one of the best satirists ever to pick up a pen and point it at an unhinged society - but that’s kind of how I think of him. His first novel, Player Piano, is an amazing book about a futuristic, fully-automated society run by intelligent supercomputers, and it’s easily one of my favorite novels of all time. What’s even crazier was that it was written in 1952!
So he definitely saw further ahead than most other writers did, and certainly he saw deeper as well. His work examines the absurdity and horror of (some parts of) human existence, and his work has so much heart, so much truth, and so much…earnestness, that you almost don’t realize that you’re reading a science fiction novel at all. And of course he wrote in other genres too!
This book, Pity the Reader, is about how writing and life always go together. It features rare stories from his time as a teacher, and a multitude of previously untold stories of him as a writer and a friend to other writers, readers, and students.
Reading the book is the closest thing most people will ever get to having Kurt Vonnegut as their creative writing teacher, and while you’re being carried along by his storytelling and wisdom, you almost don’t realize that he’s also teaching you how to live (and remain sane) in a fundamentally insane society.
“Stalking the impossible demands digging deep on a daily basis. Lao Tzu wasn’t wrong: the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. But it’s still a journey of a thousand miles. Uphill, in the dark, both ways.”
Nothing that’s ever been achieved by another human being has ever been supernatural - it just seems that way, and The Art of Impossible breaks down the psychology, neuroscience, and structure of how those people did it.
The “secret” of impossible performances, says Kotler, isn’t related to genetics, talent, luck, or any other mystical factor. It’s simply neuroscience plus structure. Brain chemicals, all lined up in a specific way that helps human beings achieve elite levels of performance, plus the disciplined pursuit of excellence for an extraordinary length of time.
The four core elements of elite performance that Kotler identifies include Motivation, Learning, Creativity, and Flow, and each of those elements can be trained.
When you create the conditions for them to occur, they show up naturally; it’s just that most people don’t seem to be interested in putting in the requisite amount of effort to appear supernatural.
Achieving the impossible is incredibly, insanely, ridiculously hard.
It takes a long time, it’s uncertain, you’ll doubt yourself, everyone else will doubt you, you’ll get lonely, you’ll reach stages of exhaustion you never knew existed…and yet, if you push through, if you persist, you’ll emerge into the kind of rarified air reserved for the best of the best at what they do.
You will have succeeded in pulling the stars down to earth, which is what The Art of Impossible will help you believe is possible.
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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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