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Dear Friends and Readers: 2020 is right in front of us. I'm excited and nervous. Because 2019 challenged me. I wasn't expecting it to be the most difficult year of my life. Health and wellness, relationships, career development, hobbies, interests—all the plans we make, people in our lives, and things we rely upon aren't certain. I am grateful in some ways for those reminders, because they present with painful clarity a host of learning opportunities—to be grateful for what and who I do have. This was my 16th year reading a book a week and the Reading List's 6th birthday. In truth, I almost quit. What kept me going was the beauty and truth and practical value found and cherished within the pages below and the wonderful human connections I continue to make by sharing them. Whether you're a new or casual or devoted subscriber, thank you for your support, recommendations, emails of encouragement, and friendships. Especially you, Samir, Sue, and Sydney. Following tradition, I've rounded up the 10 best books I read in 2019. By best, I mean best for me. Tyler Cowen writes about "quake books," which I've certainly had my fair share of (from gentle tremors to Magnitude 8+). This year was no different. Whether you try all or one, now or later, for the first or fiftieth time, I hope you get as much out of them as I have. If you go your own way, be sure to let me know where you land. Happy New Year and happy reading. Jon P.S. If you or someone you know is looking for more book recommendations, you can subscribe to the Reading List. Each month, I'll email you 3-6 books that I absolutely couldn't put down—usually a mix of fiction and nonfiction. I try to steer clear of bestseller (read: fake) lists, and instead explore authors who challenge my worldview, enchant me through language, and model how to act more effectively and even nobly. At the end of the day though, maybe it's best to not take my advice and Joseph Campbell's instead: simply "follow your bliss." If you're looking for more starting points, here are my 10 best books from 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.  I first met Hawthorne 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 became my favorite assigned reading book ever. I literally couldn't stop. Now, twelve years later, I'm bound back up 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. If I had to choose just one short story: The Great Carbuncle. In it, 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. Read the full post here.  This classic coming-of-age tale holds the tension of a loaded revolver in a steely hand. When a mysterious gunman emerges from "the glowing west" and rides into a peaceful Wyoming valley, a farm boy's life is forever changed. I love Jack Shaefer's brevity, lyrical passages, visual descriptions, and celebration of heroes and the boys who idolize them. I can't wait to read Shaefer's twenty five other novels. Read the full post here.  The American Civil War was the first photographed war and Frederick Douglass—not Lincoln or Lee or Grant—the most photographed American of the 19th century. He never smiled by design, aiming to blast the meme of the happy, content-in-his-bondage black man from public discourse. His life's story is a powerful and painful-to-read indictment that peels back the dishonestly romanticized Old South's way of life—a false meme which continues to this day. Apparently, there are many slave narratives (yes, that's what the genre is called) and I plan to read many more. Douglass' tale is unique historically and psychologically though, as I understand it. Here was a man born into slavery, whose desire for freedom was awakened by his vision of an alternative life. In large degree, this was nurtured by him learning to read in secret. Read the full post here and another on his speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?  7. SETTING THE TABLE: THE TRANSFORMING POWER OF HOSPITALITY IN BUSINESS Danny Meyer Paperback | Kindle | Audio 336 pages | 5 hours Danny Meyer is the CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group. His restaurants and their chefs have earned twenty-one James Beard Awards, and are perennially ranked among NYC's favorite food spots in the Zagat survey. From his early twenties spent studying the dining rooms, kitchens, and markets of Europe to his insatiable appetite for discovering and improving on local specialities, Meyer's lifelong journey to realize his vision for perennial dining experiences is packed with inspiration for any business venture. I found his later chapters on navigating press and customer reviews as well as building teams through discerning hiring practices especially illuminating. Read the full post here.  "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." 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. What Blixen explores the most it seems 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. Read the full post here.  Ryan Holiday is a bestselling author of ten books on marketing, entrepreneurship, ancient Stoic philosophy, American culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into twenty languages and appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Fast Company, The New York Observer, and others. I'm also a huge fan of three other books by him: Trust Me, I'm Lying, The Obstacle is the Way, about which I had the privilege of interviewing him in 2016, and Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, & Advertising.I first encountered Ryan by way of the Chase Jarvis Live show in 2012, and since have discovered an incredible amount of books from other authors and creatives, including bestselling author Robert Greene, CEO of Breather Julian Smith, human guinea pig Tim Ferriss, and others. Read the full post here.  "Work or crematorium—the choice is yours," said the German SS Officer to a freshly shaved and tattooed group inside the gates of Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, a fifteen year old Hungarian Jew, was among them. "We were withered trees in the heart of the desert." But he would survive another 500 days or so in four different concentration camps, until American forces liberated Buchenwald in Weimar, Germany. Until then, "the stomach alone was measuring time," and his endless days were filled with night. Night is Wiesel's memoir of his experience in the Holocaust and the author of 56 other books. He died in 2016 at the age of 87 and survived by his wife and translator Marion Wiesel and son Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, named after his father. Read the full post here. Richard Louis Proenneke (Pren-uh-key) lived alone for thirty years in Twin Lakes, Alaska. This is his journal recording the first 18 months of the odyssey—from cutting beams and notching logs to meeting many woodland friends and foes as well as testing mouth-watering recipes. "For supper, I cut the trout into small chunks, dipped them into beaten egg, and rolled them in cornmeal. They browned nicely in the bacon fat, and my tender crusted sourdough did justice to the first fish fry of the season." The only help Proenneke accepted were food and mail deliveries twice a month from a float place piloted by his friend Babe. That and some tar paper and polyethylene for the cabin roof so it wouldn't leak. Tumbling further down the outdoors lifestyle has been a treasure trove of inspiring individuals and stories, especially Shawn James' YouTube channel My Self Reliance. Read the full post here.  Oscar Wilde's only novel is a masterpiece; one just as accessible and relevant in 2019. In it, young Dorian Gray, a handsome bachelor in his prime, falls in love with his own good looks. He is so enamored that he swears before a just-finished portrait and its painter that he would gladly sell his soul to keep his youth and beauty. From there, Gray is ushered into the decadence of high society. His own words and deeds begin to mimic the insincerity and immorality of various high society members—culminating in a very real slippery slope of dishonesty, materialism, and self-corruption. All the while, something strange isn't happening. Dorian isn't aging. He looks just as young and handsome as the portrait used to look. The painting—with each act of sin—changes; ages. His actions are destroying the soul of the face, the beauty that once rightfully belonged to it. Written with impressive brevity and a gorgeous lyricism (some favorite quotes and passages on the full post), The Picture of Dorian Gray is a cautionary tale of morality and its essential role for our survival. Read the full post here.  The War of Art is one of the most impactful books I've ever read and it doesn't read like most books. It's a battlecry and battle plan against that ever-present, invisible obstacle that creative types face daily. Pressfield gives it a name: Resistance. And a face. "Resistance is self-sabotage...Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within" and "...experienced as fear." Pressfield's exploration of the creative process cuts through and captures the essence of artistic blocks with brevity and pace. The audiobook is 6 hours, 4 if you crank the playback speed to 1.25. It's the perfect hiking companion. I revisit The War of Art often. But don't just take my word for it. Tim Ferriss, John Mayer, Ryan Holiday, Marie Forlio, Aubrey Marcus, Joe Rogan, and many other top performers cite Pressfield's body of work regularly. Read the full post here. YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
"Most of us would be seized with fear if our bodies went numb, and would do everything possible to avoid it, yet me take no interest at all in the numbing of our souls." — Epictetus, quoted in Stillness is the Key Seven years ago, I found myself in a job I hated and a mediocre relationship I was acclimating into. I was anxious and in serious questioning mode. I was twenty-three-years young, but felt old and tired. There I was in SoCal, three thousand miles away from my hometown and best friends and family, less than a year out of college and suffering from a full-scale quarter-life crisis. I even had the red Mustang convertible to prove it. But I shouldn't have been feeling that way. I was working in video production. I was only making $31,000 a year, but I loved the work—work I was eager to learn and take on larger, higher-paying projects. I lived just eight miles from Laguna Beach. I was renting a room from a family so I could bike to work. That way I could save for said Mustang and tutor their son for even more. What was causing much of my pain was the insane, House of Cards-style office politics—the nasty, vindictive, almost daily warfare waged between competing teams at the company I worked at. The war was started by certain executives, but I and the rest of the junior team found ourselves caught up in. Despite my best efforts to just focus on the work, I couldn't escape it. Even after switching teams to the other side of the office. After many of those personalities eventually spiraled downhill or were tossed out in the coming months. And, sadly, even after I left the office. Despite trying new diets and exercise routines I was in a funk in my personal life. I couldn't leave the bad at work and be a strong partner for my then-girlfriend. I'm grateful that we're still friends to this day though. During this quarter-life crisis, I sought guidance from friends, family, and coworkers. Some helped. I scoured my bookshelf. A couple dozen Barnes & Noble too. That led to a few more insights. But the real breakthrough came unexpectedly one day in my roomy corner office. It was a corner office I had wrangled from the executives after threatening to quit and a day I will never forget. I was researching how to organize the company's tens of terabytes of video files when I stumbled upon Chase Jarvis' YouTube channel. One video led to another. Eventually author Robert Greene (a favorite to this day) sat on CJ's couch for a thought-provoking interview. He was writing about power, war, and seduction from history, but I found it profoundly relevant to my daily experience. Then Ryan Holiday's episode queued up. He was Robert's long-time apprentice and research partner. Here was Ryan, a guy not much older than me, the former Director of American Apparel who was part-remorsefully, and part-tongue-in-cheekily(?) confessing a series of outrageous media stunts performed for his clients to the tune of millions of dollars. And yet, he was getting out of the rat race. In large part, because he'd been burned by the politics and also found solace in an ancient philosophy called stoicism. For all my book travels thus far in life, I hadn't heard of stoicism, as a formal school of thought, nor of its major figures: Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Cato, Zeno, Epictetus. But at Ryan's own encouragement via Twitter I soon devoured them. They helped me kick my social media addiction in no time. And when Ryan published The Obstacle is the Way a few months later, the first in what would become his stoicism trilogy, he helped give me the courage to quit my job, step out of the relationship, and go off to what was next:
Where Obstacle focuses on our interpretation of events and regulating our emotions, and Ego explores the trappings of arrogance people who have lost their heads and grip on reality, Stillness councils us on how and why to develop healthy mental and physical habits. Organized into three parts, Soul, Mind, and Body, the book is uniquely solution-oriented and perhaps the most tactile of the three. For instance, Ryan deep-dives into the importance of getting hobbies, going for walks, enjoying nature, building daily routines, addressing old wounds from childhood, maintaining longterm relationships, and much more. This may sound common sense, but it seems too often not to be uncommon practice—at least, for a lot of us during certain trials in our lives. I greatly appreciated three chapters especially: the cautionary tale of Tiger Woods and that of Michael Jordan, as well as the instructive one on Winston Churchill towards the book's conclusion. Those three great men are case studies in and of themselves, but Ryan extracts the essence of certain traits they embodied, at least during certain periods of their lives, with the goal of showing us what we can learn from them and about ourselves. He does this for Anne Frank, Fred Rogers, Seneca, Socrates, the astronaut Edgar Mitchel, baseball legend Shawn Green, Queen Victoria, the journalist and nun Dorothy Day, and a dozen other fascinating humans. I'm typing all this nearly seven years to the day after moving to California and first being introduced to Ryan's work and stoicism. Earlier today, I completed a six mile sunset hike to the Top of the World in Laguna Beach, ate a favorite-recipe: lamb chops with broccoli, finished reading Stillness to the sound of Christmas harp music, and will be sleeping for twelve hours on my memory foam mattress before some Sunday work projects. I am much more content, grateful, safe, loved, harder-working, humbler, wiser, and still than I used to be. [JG]  WHO IS RYAN HOLIDAY? Ryan Holiday is a bestselling author of nine books on marketing, entrepreneurship, stoic philosophy, American culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into twenty languages and appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Fast Company, The New York Observer, and others. I'm also a huge fan of three other books by him: Trust Me, I'm Lying, The Obstacle is the Way, about which I had the privilege of interviewing him in 2016, and Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, & Advertising. I first encountered Ryan by way of the Chase Jarvis Live show in 2012, and since have discovered an incredible amount of books from other authors and creatives, including bestselling author Robert Greene, CEO of Breather Julian Smith, human guinea pig Tim Ferriss, and others. YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
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