Nilichosoma
What I've been reading
“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.” — Anne Lamott
I like books. And as you know, for the last couple of months, I've been adding a 'my week in books' bit to my emails. This forces me to read, and it allows me to reflect on what I've read. However, looking back, my take on each book is rushed. I summarised Camus' The Fall as follows: 'A philosophical novel that is as good as it is hard to summarise: very!' Skimpy.
So, let's take this in a different direction. Half inspired by Cowen's 'what I've been reading', half inspired by Holliday's 'Reading List' emails, and the third half (wait..) inspired by Danco's 'Ten Books'. Here are some books from the last few weeks. I'll do this monthly-ish and scrap my bylines at the bottom of the Sunday letters.
To Shake the Sleeping Self
I plan to cycle around the world. I don't know when, how, which way, or even whether I'll go for disk breaks or classic calliper brakes. I need to do some planning. Stories of long tours exacerbate my penchant for peddling…
Last month I was given To Shake The Sleeping Self. In it, Jed Jenkins rolls from Oregon to Patagonia. Ostensibly, this is a story about cycling. Really, this is a story about growing up a committed Christian and coming out in a deeply religious environment. Jed finds a new (higher) relationship with God. I wept for the last two chapters (n.b. I rarely cry): It's great.
"Traveling alone, you get to be whoever you want. I don't mean lie. I mean you get to be a blank slate. You can't leave behind your skin color, or your height, or the handsomeness or homeliness of your face. But you can leave your story behind. If you've broken hearts, the new place doesn't know. If you've lost trust in people and yourself, the new place doesn't know. If everyone thinks you love Jesus, but you never really have figured out what you believe, the new place doesn't care. It may assume you have it all tied nicely in a bow. All your thoughts and histories. Just feeling like your past isn't a vice to hold you in place can be very freeing. Feeling like your family and the expectations and the traditions and the judgments are absent... it can fill your veins with possibility and fire."
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
In a similar vein, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years tells the story of another (deeply religious) man finding meaning through cycling. Donald Miller is hilarious; he has Anne Lamott's dry humour. Don meets a film crew who want to document his life, and it turns out his *real* life is not interesting enough for a film. So he edits it live. It's inspiring: "…once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time." Don goes on: "A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important." Finally: "Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be." — I highly recommend it for even those who couldn't give a damn about bicycles.
Yes to Life in Spite of Everything
I'm looking for meaning in life. Who isn't? Victor Frankl found meaning amid Auschwitz. I am yet to read Man's Search for Meaning, his best selling book. However, a mere nine months after three years in a concentration camp (where his pregnant wife was murdered), Frankl gave a series of lectures. He turned them into a book, Yes to Life in Spite of Everything, which offers immense insight into the post-war feeling (how could the world do that to itself), and an insight into the camps themselves. He says, sardonically, 'we are not in this world for fun'.
On meaning, Frankl says: "We give life meaning through our actions, but also through loving and, finally, through suffering." And, most compellingly: "the human psyche seems to behave in some ways like a vaulted arch: an arch that has become dilapidated can be supported by placing extra load on it. The human psyche also appears to be strengthened by experiencing a burden (at least to a particular degree and within certain limits)."
Has the world changed much since? I wonder: "We have become pessimistic. We no longer believe in progress in itself, in the higher evolution of humanity as something that could succeed automatically." Perhaps not.
Biography of Elon Musk
If Elon Musk only tweeted, he'd be freaking cool. He’s a meme king. But he doesn't; Elon does lots of other business things too. People might well look back on our time and remember it as the age of Elon (in the same way that my family home is Georgian, presumable after King George).
I saw that Walter Isaacson is working on a biography of Elon, so I picked up 'Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future'. The guy is an absolute Titan, and so inspiring. Today, social networks and SaaS are the pinnacles of innovation. Elon's companies are applying tech to industries that have not advanced since the '60s (space, cars, power, road). Jeff Hammerbacher says at the start: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." Elon ruthlessly prioritises The real gem of the book (that resonated) is in Appendix 2. Elon notes: "The objective should be—what delivers fundamental value. I think it's important to look at things from a standpoint of what is actually the best thing for the economy." Elon's ventures are successful because they deliver economic value.
The Foundation Trilogy, Book 1
Musk was inspired by the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. It's fun, and while I never read sci-fi, I plan to read more now. Book 1, which I read, sets the scene.Hari Seldon, a mathematician, predicts the future probabilistically through a science called 'psychohistory'. He determines the fall of the intergalactic Empire in a millennium. It echoes the fall of the Roman (and perhaps the American) empire. "The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity – a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop." There are life lessons here, too: "'Violence,' came the retort, 'is the last refuge of the incompetent."
Let me know what's on your list, please. I want to read what you have loved.
Live well,
H
P.S. Where I’m reading this month: On an old sofa in my new house in Kitisuru, Nairobi.
Really enjoyed the longer book summaries