📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
I’m actually really glad you’re here.
There’s been a lot of doom and gloom lately (much of it accurate, sorry to say) when it comes to the literacy crisis, how our phones are making us dumber, fewer people are reading books these days, nobody has an attention span anymore…
You’ve probably heard that kind of talk recently. About how non-readers are cooked.
But you’re not one of those people.
You know that books are absolutely incredible - handheld magic, really - and you know that even being able to read is one of the greatest gifts ever. You know this, and you appreciate this, and I appreciate you for it.
You’re not a member of the mindless masses who couldn’t even be bothered to…
Actually, you know what, enough of that. Like I said, I’m glad you’re here, and I’ve got some great books to share with you this evening!
I’d also like to congratulate my friend Simone Knego on having her book become a USA Today bestseller this week! Well-deserved!
In my work, I come across some really cool books that don’t get nearly the recognition they deserve, and I love using my platform to share them.
So besides Simone’s book, REAL Confidence, here are a few more authors I’ve worked with recently whose books you may have missed:
📚 Billion-Dollar Communication Skills, by John A. Brink (I’m actually featured in this book!)
Many of them have become good friends and mentors in the years since I’ve known them, and I highly recommend checking out their books!
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
🎥 You’ll NEVER Change Your Life - Until You Do This
✍ 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 1,469 books, including 15 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“The ideas that underpin our modern world – meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances and so on – were championed, consolidated, codified, and geographically extended by Napoleon.
To them he added rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.
At the same time, he dispensed with the absurd revolutionary calendar of ten-day weeks, the theology of the Cult of the Supreme Being, the corruption and cronyism of the Directory and the hyper-inflation that had characterized the dying days of the Republic.
‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil d’Etat, ‘we must now commence its history.’ For his reforms to work they needed one commodity that Europe’s monarchs were determined to deny him: time.”
You’ll NEVER Change Your Life - Until You Do This: Once you understand how the Compound Effect works, your life will never be the same.
But you have to do more than just understand it. You also have to let it work long enough for it to actually work its magic. And yes, it really is one of the closest things to magic that exists in this world. [Watch Time: 3:42]
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.
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
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. So I’m excited for this one too! Expected: June 16th, 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
Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, by Adam Grant: With the loneliness crisis showing no signs of slowing down, and with the world becoming increasingly divided along ideological lines, making time for friends and establishing strong, supportive communities has never been more important. Adam Grant’s newest book goes into the science of these strong connections, and how you can stay sane in crazy times. Expected: October 13th, 2026
“And then, just for a few minutes or hours, my words will sound again in the mind of someone as yet unborn. Maybe.
I suppose it’s more likely that the book will lie forgotten on the shelves in some massive library storage warehouse, or perhaps it will survive only in digital form.
But, even so, to publish a book is to imagine not only its circulation across space but also its endurance through time. Every act of writing and publishing is thus an attempt to ward off death, to save something of ourselves from oblivion.”
“Books about books” are some of my favorites, and in this one, professor Tom Mole goes beyond the words on the page, past books as merely “objects,” and into what we do with them, what they say about us and for us, how we relate to them, keep them, share them, display them…just on and on.
It’s very easy to make a book like this stuffy and inaccessible, but he does a fantastic job of, well, not doing that. In that sense it’s much more conversational, easy, and free than some academic discussion of “texts” and “discourses.”
The Secret Life of Books isn’t that at all.
If you’re the type of person who loves the feel of a physical book in your hand, who owns way more books than you could possibly count in one afternoon, and yet still feels compelled to buy more, this book was written for you.
"I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game."
The quality of Ray Dalio’s decision-making led to him growing his hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, to more than $124,000,000,000 in Assets Under Management (AUM), becoming a very wealthy man himself in the process. But that’s one of the least interesting things about him. How his mind works is incredible. And incredibly rare.
What I appreciate the most about Ray’s thought processes is that he just wants to be right - he doesn’t necessarily care if the right answer comes from him.
To that end, he seeks out the most believable people in particular subject areas, attempts to understand their viewpoint - and most importantly, what led them to their viewpoint - before engaging in what he calls productive disagreement with the people whose opinion he rejects, or at least doesn’t fully understand.
Principles is the first book in a series of incredibly in-depth, well-researched, and thoughtful books exploring global macroeconomic trends, historical cycles, and market volatility. He’s not right about everything, and he’s certainly not perfect, but if you want to become a more critical thinker, that’s kind of the whole point.
“And yet, all of a sudden, I knew what they were; I heard them in my head, they metamorphosed from black lines and white spaces into a solid, sonorous, meaningful reality. I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing ourselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could turn bare lines into living reality, I was all-powerful. I could read.”
You can absolutely judge this book by its cover, because it is exactly what it looks like: a history of reading. Not “the” history of reading, for reasons which Manguel will make clear in the end, but it’s easily one of the most fascinating and exciting books on the subject you’re ever likely to find.
Part of what makes this book so special is Manguel himself, and how he weaves personal stories of his own well-traveled life throughout, including how the famous writer Jorge Luis Borges came into the bookstore Manguel was working at as a teenager and asked Manguel to read to him; Borges had gone blind by this time.
There are chapters on “forbidden” reading, about the truly heinous attempts made by members of certain groups to stop members of other certain groups from reading; there are chapters on why and how human beings ever became able to read at all; there are chapters on libraries, reading at work, reading at school, reading in the unlikeliest of places.
Easily one of my favorite books, this one can be enjoyed by anyone who has ever had the entire course of their lives changed by a book. If you’re anything like me, you’ll finish the book gripped by this gratitude for the ability to read – and the easy access to books – and you’ll want the same ability and access for everybody the world over.
“Stress is not the enemy in our lives. Paradoxically, it is the key to growth.
In order to build strength in a muscle, we must systematically stress it, expending energy beyond normal levels. Doing so literally causes microscopic tears in the muscle fibers.
At the end of a training session, functional capacity is diminished. But give the muscle twenty-four to forty-eight hours to recover and it grows stronger and better able to handle the next stimulus.”
This is a classic book on energy management and personal renewal, and it’s been a favorite of top CEOs and professional athletes for decades.
By “full engagement” the author means full aliveness - involvement with life, and a certain joy in living. Today, that state of presence and vitality is probably in greater danger than when this book was written, which makes it all the more useful and necessary.
In the book, Loehr explains how to mobilize four key sources of energy and balance the stress and recovery required for sustained high performance. Basically, we need stress in order to grow and progress. But too much, for too long, and without proper recovery is deadly. Physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
Managing all four sources isn’t complicated, and neither is The Power of Full Engagement. It’s meant to be read by ambitious overachievers and stressed-out office workers whose work is literally killing them.
But when time management is no longer enough, you have to turn to energy management to restore what you’ve lost. This book is a practical, science-based manual for doing exactly that.
“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.”
This is the book that “scared me straight” when it came to my sleep, and I’d say it’s been one of the most practically useful books I’ve ever read. Ever. And I mean that.
One key aspect of learning is behavior change: if you haven’t changed your behavior in light of new information, you likely haven’t learned anything.
Well, after learning about the deleterious (and deadly) effects of sleep deprivation, and all the critical bodily functions that are directly impacted by sleep (or the lack thereof), I made immediate changes to my routine, my sleep environment, my schedule - everything.
And I’ve never looked back. It’s been nothing short of life-changing, and it’s probably added at least several years to my life 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 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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