"May all of your creations have just the right flavor, and may the joy of discovery be your guide." — Preface of The 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss
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Tim Ferriss is some delightfully quirky mix between a digital Indiana Jones and "human guinea pig" (his words). And so his own cookbook, an eclectic 700 page tome, is the product of hundreds of experiments with a full team of scientists, chefs, hunters, farmers, Muy Thai boxers, professional athletes, world-record-holding memory champions, and other diverse figures.

4HC is organized into 5 full course meals of content (Meta-Learning, The Domestic, The Wild, The Scientist, The Pro), a sweet dessert Appendix (Yelp's 100 Best Restaurants, How to count cards in 43 seconds, building a fire with a bow drill), and seasoned with tons of sequential photos, lists, and further resources. I think I probably at this point have read 50% of it, but the value is unbelievable. As a bachelor, the book really helps to demystify the kitchen, basic food prep and cooking techniques, and lends step-by-step support for a host of 50+ delectable recipes (my two favorites pictured). I can't wait to taste the rest. [JG]

Lesson 1 of Part II: The Domestic is an Osso "Buko" recipe — a f*cking delicious baked lamb and vegetables dish. Hands-on time: 10 minutes. Bake Time: 1.3 hours. Notes from my experiences: lamb shanks over lamb cuts or minced. Try tomato sauce and whole canned tomato not just canned. Add a little basil to taste. 

In 2019, I found travelled close to 12 weeks. This short workout was an amazing go-to and totally doable from a hotel room. 30-50 reps of air squats, wall presses, and chest pulls. Note: Sharpie in margins not mine.

From the back cover: Tim Ferriss has been called “a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk” by The New York Times. He is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an early-stage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of four #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, and Tools of Titans. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded 200 million downloads and been selected for “Best of iTunes” three years running.
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"Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own." — Bruce Lee
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"Now in the afternoon sun, the trunks of the fir trees were burning red, and the landscape far away seemed cool, all blue and pale gold. Boris was able now to believe what the old gardener at the convent had told him when he was a child: that he had once seen, about this time of the year and day, a herd of unicorns come out of the woods to graze upon the sunny slopes, the white and dappled mares, rosy in the sun, treading daintily and looking around for their young, the old stallion, darker roan, sniffing and pawing the ground. The air here smelled of fir leaves and toadstools, and was so fresh that it made him yawn." — The Monkey, Isak Dinesen
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I studied the above passage in a fantastic creative writing course 7 years ago. It has haunted me ever since with its surreal flow that whips at my imagination. I particularly love the inclusion of the burning red fir trees at twilight, dappled mares rosy in the sun, the scent of toadstools, and Boris' desire to yawn. The writing transfigures radiantly, subtly, effortlessly what Boris sees before him and remembers from the old gardener's story. This passage and countless others are painted so vibrantly throughout Karen Blixen's Seven Gothic Tales. 

The Monkey, The Dreamers, and The Poet were my three favorites among the seven. What Blixen seems to explore most is our relationship to the past. Often characters seem to understand those gone from their lives through others or their own romanticized accounts of them. Identities, perhaps most explicitly in The Monkey, shift beneath moon-lit masks, shatter like a mansion's stained-glass window, and morph in dark forests on stormy nights. Exotic treasures, locations, and myths—snake-charming, hashish-smoking storytellers, brazen golden amulets and coral necklaces, double-rainbow landscapes— are called upon by Blixen to spellbind and suggest, to me, that life back then—but still now—is a little bit more beautiful and strange than meets the eye. [JG]
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Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of of Karen Blixen (1885-1962) a Danish writer whose works include Out of Africa, Seven Gothic Tales, The Angelic Avengers, Winter's Tales, and others. Before writing professionally, she and her husband moved to Kenya (then-British East Africa) and there ran a coffee plantation from 1914 to 1931. Upon returning, Blixen wrote (in English) Seven Gothic Tales and published it in the United States under a pseudonym and without an advance. It was an almost immediate bestseller. In 1937, she wrote Out of Africa, her best known work. When Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954, he famously expressed  Bernard Berenson, Carl Sandburg and Karen Blixen were all more deserving. 

Blixen made just one trip to the United States in 1959 when she was already in poor health, but during her time was able to meet Marilyn Monroe, pictured here, and share some of her drafts of her to-be-published work Ehrengard. She is buried on her family estate Rungstedlund located just outside Copenhagen. 
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"The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away...human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast..." — The Monkey, Isak Dinesen
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"Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe." — Wakefield, Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nathaniel Hawthorne is a treasure. I first encountered him in 9th grade English class by way of his haunting short story, The Birth-Mark. In it, a scientist tragically obsesses over the blemish on his beautiful bride's cheek. Two years later, The Scarlet Letter, was forced upon me in English class, except unlike so many assignment, this one I literally couldn't stop reading. The independent spirit of Hester Prynne, the tormented soul of Arthur Dimmesdale, and the satirically drawn, hypocritical Puritan town were clear, vibrant, dramatic, and haunting. And now, twelve years later, I'm bound by the New Englander's spell after plucking a gorgeously illustrated hardback off the shelf of a 197-year-old barn (yes, actually). Twice Told Tales, first told in various magazines and newspapers of the mid-1800s, is a curation of nearly 30 Hawthorne shorts, 9 dreamy illustrations by Lars Hokanson, and 2 praising Afterwords by Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 

Here are three of my favorite tales... 

The Great Carbuncle — A band of intrepid, yet distinctly motivated explorers search the White Mountains of New England for a fabled gemstone known as the Great Carbuncle. The finder(s) may surprise you. 

The Maypole of Merry Mount — A legend from Salem's earliest days in which a rival colony of forest-dwelling libertines dance beneath a maypole, celebrating the marriage of two youths. 

The Minister's Black Veil — Mr. Hooper returns to his congregation one day with his face hidden behind a black veil. The community speculates as to its meaning and what happened to their preacher. ​[JG]

"As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest. They returned to [the maypole] no more."

— The Maypole of Merry Mount, Nathaniel Hawthorne
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"My prescription for a modern house: first pick a good site. Pick that one at the most difficult site—pick a site no one wants—but pick one that has features making for character: trees, individuality, a fault of some kind in the realtor's mind."

— Frank Lloyd Wright, 1938
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Perhaps the most famous American home ever, Fallingwater was completed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939 for the Kauffman family as a summer home for three. He built it on land in a secluded glen near Bear Run, a river south of Pittsburgh, above a waterfall. This short photograph-rich book explores Wright's style and substance, what he called 'organic architecture' and gives a brief tour through the exterior and interior of the home and connected guest house. Fallingwater is now a UNESCO world heritage site and tourable year round. I grew up five hours away and attended university less than an hour away, yet haven't yet visited. I'm eager to change that now after getting a glimpse courtesy of Waggoner. [JG]
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​Fallingwater offered the Kauffman family what many of the architect's other works also do: 

• a shelter with a vista without and within; protection, but without "feeling cut off from nature"
• a sense of grounding; planes that fit with the site and give a sense of "repose" amidst undisturbed neighbors such as trees and rocks and waterways and other "revered ancestors"
• order through unity of man and nature
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"The corner-window is indicative of an idea conceived early in my work, that the box is a Fascist symbol, and the architecture of freedom and democracy needed something basically better than the box. So I started to destroy the box as a building. Well, the corner-window came in as all the comprehension that was ever given to that act of destruction of the box. The light now came in where it had never come before and vision went out. You had screens for walls instead of box walls—here the walls vanished as walls, the box vanished as a box." — FLW, 1953
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