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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
I had a few great books arrive recently, and before I tell you about one of them, I should mention that there’s zero politics in the book whatsoever.
My early copy of The Book of Elon just arrived, and instead of wasting time talking about his family life or who he voted for, it’s a collection of his most useful ideas about purpose, success, and building an astonishingly epic human future in space.
Because that’s honestly all I care about. It’s not even that hard to get along with people. In fact, we need each other to make the future as awesome as it could be.
We need builders, and visionaries, and dreamers, and that’s the kind of person this book is for. I’m already 40 pages in and it’s amazing. The foreword written by Naval Ravikant is excellent too!
I also just ordered The Rubicon Leader, by Vahab Hasiri, a book that instantly hooked me with its references to Caesar, Cleopatra, Confucius, and Lincoln - visionaries in their own right! I’ll have lots more to say about this book soon.
And lastly, I published the first YouTube video I’ve had time for in the last few weeks, about a 1,300-year-old book that is…staggeringly good.
Now, tonight, I’m also 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
🎥 This 1,300-Year-Old Book is STAGGERINGLY Good
✍ 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!
I’ve been reading about 20 pages a day, so I’ll likely be reading this one for a while (it’s 730 pages long, in my edition), but exactly like the main character, I just want to keep stretching it out! Highly recommend this one if you love old books and want to get to the root of some of our greatest literary traditions.
The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch: This is my personal “Book of the Month” for March, which means that I’m spending the whole month on it, diving deep into it, testing it, arguing with it, exploring it, and making sure that I really understand it, instead of resting on the surface of the book. I think it deserves such a close reading.
The book is about explanations that transform the world, and the basic argument, as I understand it right now, is that progress is potentially infinite.
Human beings keep running into problems, but then we also keep generating novel solutions to those problems, each one of them leading to more interesting, complex problems that keep moving humanity forward.
Sooo many of my smartest friends kept pushing this book into my hands, so I just had to push it higher on my reading list!
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 1,474 books, including 20 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
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“The ‘English dictionary,’ in the sense that we commonly use the phrase today – as an alphabetically arranged list of English words, together with an explanation of their meanings – is a relatively new invention.
Four hundred years ago there was no such convenience available on any English bookshelf. There was none available, for instance, when William Shakespeare was writing his plays.
Whenever he came to use an unusual word, or to set a word in what seemed an unusual context – and his plays are extraordinarily rich with examples – he had almost no way of checking the propriety of what he was about to do.
He was not able to reach into his bookshelves and select any one volume to help: He would not be able to find any book that might tell him if the word he had chosen was properly spelled, whether he had selected it correctly, or had used it in the right way in the proper place.
Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly ordinary a function as reading itself.
He could not, as the saying goes, ‘look something up.’”
This 1,300-Year-Old Book is STAGGERINGLY Good: I don’t think this AI thumbnail really looks like me at all, but it is what it is. Anyway…
You can probably guess from reading this newsletter that I’m talking about The Arabian Nights, and in this video I give my current thoughts and perspective after reading the first 100 pages or so. I also drop a short reading update at the end with several more great book recommendations you may want to check out! [Watch Time: 7:00]
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.
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
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. 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
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 moment someone begins to open up, your attention must sharpen. What you observe in that moment - facial expressions, shifts in posture, hesitation in their voice - can reveal more than their words ever will.”
This is a great book about relationship-building, communication, and uncovering deception, by someone with heaps of credibility on the subject: retired Secret Service Agent Brad Beeler.
Far too many books on subjects like these are written by people who are just summarizing what they learned from blog posts or ChatGPT; or, at best, a couple of years spent in the workplace. But Brad has decades of experience in the field, and he lays it all out here.
It's also extremely “practical and tactical,” meaning that you can use a lot of this stuff right away. Personally, I don't have any interrogations coming up or anything, but literally the very next conversation I have (or anyone has) is an opportunity to practice a lot of what he teaches in the book.
Beeler has 25 years of Secret Service experience, and as one of the agency’s most experienced and decorated polygraph examiners, he teaches you how to master body language, tone, and the full spectrum of senses used whenever you’re engaged in deep conversation.
He shows you how to spot lies and falsehoods, and how to respond effectively to get the information you want and need. And he also explains the best ways to help people become comfortable enough to tell you everything.
“With a scarcity in our culture of mature men, it goes without saying that ritual elders are in desperately short supply. Thus, pseudo-initiations remain skewed toward the reinforcement of Boy psychology rather than allowing for movement toward Man psychology, even if some sort of ritual process exists, and even if a kind of sacred space has been set up on the city streets or on the cell block.”
This book is a guide to the four essential male archetypes, according to Jungian psychoanalytical thought.
Its core thesis is that we’ve become disconnected from the kinds of cultural rituals that help boys become men, and the authors argue that today, there are far too many 30-year-old little boys running around, and too few real men.
One of the many things that the authors get right is that real masculinity, in its true and ultimate manifestation, is not “toxic” in any sense.
Rather, it’s the prevalence in our society of Boy psychology that interferes with true masculine potential, and causes the immature, abusive, overly aggressive and harmful behavior typically denounced today.
I believe that Jungian psychology tends to overexplain many of the things it attempts to fit into its tightly balanced worldview.
But there’s also some excellent observations in here about how calling upon these masculine archetypes - the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover - can help prevent young men and even older adults from feeling lost, threatened, or unable to express themselves and make their way in society.
“My mother imbued me with a love of libraries. The reason why I finally embraced this book project - wanted, and then needed, to write it - was my realization that I was losing her.
I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened?
My mother was the one person besides me who knew what those gauzy afternoons had been like. I knew I was writing this because I was trying hard to preserve those afternoons.”
I was sitting at an airport bar in Toronto, about to dive into The Library Book, by Susan Orlean, which I had just picked up in the airport bookstore about twenty minutes before.
I knew I’d like it - I mean, it’s about books - but I had no idea that I wouldn’t want it to end, that I would angrily confront anyone who tried to get me to put it down.
In fact, I would end up pushing it into the hands of dozens of people after I read it, from close family members to strangers who mentioned in passing that, “Yeah, I kinda like books too.” Do you? Then read this! It’s excellent! It’s about libraries! And fires! And books! And librarians! And literature! And life!
Specifically, The Library Book details the events of April 29th, 1986, when a massive fire devastated the Los Angeles Public Library, at one point reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (more than five times the temperature at which paper burns) and lasting for more than 7 hours.
When all was said and done, 400,000 books were completely destroyed, 700,000 books were partially damaged, and the police had exactly zero suspects.
Enter: Harry Peak, underemployed actor, and master storyteller, said by many (but not all) to be at the library that morning, and who subsequently became the focus of the criminal investigation, and later, Susan Orlean’s book.
You can almost think of Orlean’s account as In Cold Blood...except with books!
Before reading it, I honestly never really gave librarians enough credit for all they do and all that they’re capable of. You should see what they have to deal with, the kinds of crazy questions and requests people bring to their desks.
In fact, this one woman I met told me that she was studying Library Sciences, and I think I said something like, “How long does it take to learn the Dewey Decimal System?” That was my previous level of ignorance here, and…I don’t think I ever got a second date with her.
Anyway...I really can’t recommend The Library Book highly enough. It’s simply excellent. It’s almost worth reading just for the Fahrenheit 451 references alone, plus the story of the author trying to burn a book herself. For research, of course. “Research.”
“The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.”
Out of nowhere, there came this finance book from an obscure author I had never heard of that completely changed how I think about money. The Psychology of Money absolutely blew up when it first came out, and it’s no surprise why.
As you can guess from the title, it deals with the personal, emotional side of money and the role it plays in our individual lives. It turns out that the “soft” skills of money are just as important as the “hard” skills of knowing how to apply the “4% rule” or choosing an investment broker.
Money is completely neutral; it will change aspect and feel depending on whoever it is that’s thinking about it, worrying about it, or pursuing it. Money doesn’t care about anything we’re feeling, it just responds to how we feel about it.
That sounds more woo-woo than I meant for it to sound, but there’s none of that stuff in here. It’s actually similar in some ways to Tim Ferriss’s instant classic, The Four-Hour Workweek, especially the discussion of how critical it is to spend money to buy time; and how everyone’s financial strategy makes sense to them, regardless of how crazy it may look to people on the outside.
No one is crazy. We just bring our whole psychology and library of past emotions and experiences to the subject of money and how we use it, and the result is a real circus!
“A lot of games that are glamorized by society aren’t actually worth winning at all.”
The reason I’m so philosophically aligned with Nick Huber here is that his approach to business and lifestyle design has led to a great deal of success in my own life as well.
This is a business book, primarily about pursuing unglamorous opportunities for wealth creation in unfashionable industries, but it’s also about consciously choosing your own path forward in life, and not just falling in line with what the people around you are chasing. It’s about saying no, resisting cultural gravity, and carving your own path.
What Huber calls “boring businesses” are things like landscaping services, storage units, and a variety of other things that will never have much “viral” potential.
No one dreams about one day opening a business helping college students store their stuff, but it’s that exact business that made Huber something like $30,000,000 in personal wealth. So maybe it’s not the worst business idea in the world?
There’s also so much untapped opportunity in businesses and sectors like these because of that very reason. Everyone else is getting excited about going into venture capital, or building the next Instagram, which, although it might be cooler than mowing lawns for a living, comes with horrifically low odds of success - financial or otherwise.
To be wildly successful, you don’t even need to have some revolutionary new idea, or be at the head of some miraculous innovation. Nick never “revolutionized” the self-storage business, he just examined his competitors honestly, saw where they were weak, and outcompeted them on his way to a multimillion-dollar net worth.
A great idea with horrible execution can only lead to disaster.
But a boring idea with powerful, precise, and professional execution can lead to the accumulation of obscene wealth over time.
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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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