The Five Books I Read In August 2022 | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right, so it is the first episode in September to come out.

00:00:07.400 | So as is my tradition, speaking of segments that aren't directly related to help you live

00:00:12.540 | your life deeper, as is my tradition, these traditions are going to live on, Jesse.

00:00:17.400 | I talked about the books I read the month before.

00:00:19.620 | So I want to briefly mention the five books I read in August of 2022.

00:00:27.120 | Now I have to say this list is a summer list.

00:00:31.280 | So a warning.

00:00:33.280 | It's very much influenced by the fact I was on vacation.

00:00:35.280 | So you're going to see the beginning of the list is vacation books and then the other

00:00:42.200 | part of the list as I got back from vacation.

00:00:43.600 | All right, so let me start with GoldenEye.

00:00:47.040 | I mentioned this on the show before.

00:00:49.040 | 2016 book by Matthew Parker.

00:00:53.500 | This is a book about Ian Fleming, the novelist who created James Bond, about the house he

00:00:59.800 | built in Jamaica and its influence, his time in Jamaica and its influence on the James

00:01:07.600 | Bond series.

00:01:08.600 | It's a British book, very deeply researched.

00:01:11.720 | I learned quite a bit about late stage colonial England, what happened in Jamaica, how that

00:01:19.680 | country was transformed.

00:01:20.960 | You get a lot of interesting context and a lot of tidbits about how Fleming and his life.

00:01:25.840 | It's basically a biography of Fleming.

00:01:27.160 | It's basically a biography of late stage colonialism in the British empire, all mixed up into this

00:01:33.980 | package.

00:01:34.980 | So very ambitious book.

00:01:35.980 | Yeah, it's interesting.

00:01:37.200 | Also a lot of good cabin, what you might call, there's a book called Cabin Porn, where it's

00:01:44.760 | just pictures of beautiful cabins.

00:01:46.400 | This is sort of like deep work writing porn, right?

00:01:48.720 | It's on a bluff writing over a cove that you snorkel in every day.

00:01:53.440 | So you get a lot of that too.

00:01:55.640 | One interesting point to say about that book, when Ian Fleming, this is a reveal in the

00:02:00.360 | book, when Ian Fleming left the service after the war, so World War II, he was obviously

00:02:05.680 | like in the military and that's where he was stationed in Jamaica briefly.

00:02:08.840 | That's how he found out about it and that's why he built his house there.

00:02:12.460 | He got a job after the war with a newspaper group that owned the Sunday Times and he was

00:02:16.560 | the manager, coordinator of foreign correspondents.

00:02:19.480 | His contract he negotiated included three months vacation a year.

00:02:24.680 | That's how he could go to Jamaica every winter.

00:02:26.440 | It's just his contract.

00:02:27.440 | He was like, I just am gone in the winter.

00:02:29.960 | So I mean, of course, this is British class privilege at its finest.

00:02:37.460 | You could just imagine his boss being like, good show old chop.

00:02:40.400 | Yes, you'd go away in the winter.

00:02:42.800 | You can't work then.

00:02:45.080 | By the way, spot on English accent.

00:02:47.840 | Very good.

00:02:48.840 | I was just in Scotland.

00:02:49.840 | Sounds identical.

00:02:50.840 | Exactly.

00:02:51.840 | I would pass as a native in Scotland.

00:02:54.360 | But I mentioned this earlier in the show.

00:02:56.080 | Yeah, right now you have to be like a pseudo aristocrat in 19, late 1940s Britain to get

00:03:01.640 | a contract like that.

00:03:02.920 | But why is that not more common?

00:03:04.760 | Like, why is if you're Facebook, are you not trying to attract engineers by saying, Hey,

00:03:10.720 | if you're willing to do nine twelfths of the salary, you can take three months off a year.

00:03:15.200 | You would get more people.

00:03:16.200 | We need more variety like this.

00:03:17.680 | That should not be so rare.

00:03:19.680 | So there we go.

00:03:20.680 | All right.

00:03:21.680 | Book number two.

00:03:22.680 | So I read Goldeneye.

00:03:23.680 | I said, well, I better read a James Bond book.

00:03:24.680 | And I'm reading about his house.

00:03:26.760 | I know so much about Fleming.

00:03:27.760 | I was on vacation at the time.

00:03:28.920 | It's like, I should probably read a James Bond book.

00:03:31.200 | Interesting observation.

00:03:32.820 | They're temporarily not available on Kindle.

00:03:36.320 | I don't really know what's going on here.

00:03:37.760 | Just a standard James Bond book.

00:03:39.640 | American translations are not available on Kindle.

00:03:42.320 | I think there was a, there's been a transfer of rights.

00:03:45.000 | I think something about Amazon buying Paramount and maybe Paramount owns the rights.

00:03:50.080 | And there's some, I saw something I should look into this deeper.

00:03:53.640 | I saw something about their, maybe the reformatting and going to republish these, but it was very

00:03:57.520 | hard to find.

00:03:58.520 | So I basically got a pirated copy.

00:03:59.520 | The only one I could find on my Kindle, because I was on vacation.

00:04:01.720 | So I didn't want to, I couldn't just Amazon a book.

00:04:05.400 | The only one I could find is basically a pirated e-copy of Moonraker.

00:04:10.280 | It's one of the early, it's a 1960s James Bond novel.

00:04:15.160 | Interesting point, two interesting points about it.

00:04:18.160 | One, it has the first third of the book is James Bond playing bridge at a fancy club

00:04:26.880 | in London.

00:04:28.460 | Only two thirds of the book, he is at a high-tech missile installation trying to stop a villain

00:04:37.120 | from dropping a nuclear bomb on London.

00:04:39.180 | So it seems a little incongruous.

00:04:40.420 | I looked into it.

00:04:41.840 | Turns out Moonraker was based off a teleplay that Fleming wrote about the missile and this

00:04:45.700 | or that.

00:04:46.700 | It wasn't long enough.

00:04:47.700 | Was it long enough when he translated to a book like this is not, we can't, it's not

00:04:50.540 | long enough to sell us a novel.

00:04:51.540 | So he's like, well, I'll just add a, a scene, extended scene where he plays bridge with

00:04:56.780 | the villain.

00:04:57.780 | And you know what?

00:04:58.780 | It's a great scene.

00:04:59.780 | Like the whole premise of the scene is the villains cheating and M as Bond come figure

00:05:03.220 | out how he's cheating.

00:05:04.220 | And again, to all, this is so Fleming, all of the details of this very fancy upper crust

00:05:08.500 | club and the food and how they, and the specific drinks that they're drinking and sort of classic

00:05:13.980 | Fleming point number two, it's a surprisingly modern techno thriller.

00:05:19.140 | I think we give credit to Crichton.

00:05:21.340 | We give credit to Clancy is sort of inventing the genre of high, high pace adventure type

00:05:26.500 | thrilling thriller writing that has a lot of technology.

00:05:29.140 | Moonraker feels like it could have been from that same genre.

00:05:33.940 | I mean, it's a lot of the technology of the missiles and how it's going to work.

00:05:38.420 | There's these details involved of it reads like a modern techno thriller.

00:05:42.100 | I don't think Fleming gets enough credit for techno thriller writing.

00:05:45.780 | I had, I guess I had assumed that James Bond books were going to be a little bit more like

00:05:49.020 | British and ornate and, or maybe like a little bit more a little bit more sort of classic

00:05:55.900 | spy type writing.

00:05:57.620 | We're going to have the sort of spy who came out of the cold Alistair McClain style writing.

00:06:01.140 | No, it reads like Crichton, this missile and whatever.

00:06:05.300 | Interesting point number three, this was before the space programs got started.

00:06:11.660 | So Fleming's take on space technology, though specific is very wrong.

00:06:20.060 | So it's clearly he, he was just guessing, you know, this was the early sixties.

00:06:23.660 | He was just guessing what would be involved in sending rockets in his world.

00:06:29.260 | His guest was like, obviously like you can't send a rocket very far without the fire melting

00:06:33.780 | it.

00:06:34.780 | So like the whole plot was around how this villain had cornered the market on this special

00:06:38.420 | material that could hold up to the flames of a rocket.

00:06:41.140 | And that that was going to be the key.

00:06:42.220 | It's not even a ballistic missile.

00:06:44.540 | It's just a missile that can go a thousand miles.

00:06:47.780 | Sub ballistic required special material and just huge thing.

00:06:50.860 | And it was interesting.

00:06:53.780 | All right.

00:06:55.540 | Then this was speaking of techno thriller.

00:06:58.180 | So also on vacation, this was at the house.

00:07:00.140 | I always try to find a thriller just like where I am.

00:07:02.620 | They had a Michael Crichton techno thriller that I had not read 2004's state of fear.

00:07:11.300 | My memory was I didn't read this.

00:07:12.660 | I used to read all the Crichton.

00:07:15.260 | I didn't read this one because I had heard it was sort of weirdly grumpily sort of like

00:07:20.900 | polemically anti-climate change.

00:07:24.300 | Like the whole book was just him being grumpy.

00:07:27.380 | This is kind of what I had heard about, about, uh, environmentalist and climate change scientists.

00:07:32.740 | Uh, reality that's true.

00:07:35.180 | It does read as like he's, he was a grumpy guy, but I mean, it was, it was grumpy.

00:07:39.060 | He has these long, let me just, he, he has citations throughout the book and he has this

00:07:44.860 | character, this MIT professor whose whole job is to have conversations with a good intention,

00:07:50.740 | but annoying environmentally minded people who are like, but everyone just knows that

00:07:54.620 | blah, blah, blah about climate change.

00:07:56.020 | And then the MIT professor speaking as a proxy for Crichton would be like, well, it's actually

00:07:59.780 | not true, blah, blah, blah.

00:08:01.420 | And then Crichton would put real citations under there.

00:08:03.780 | So I don't know.

00:08:05.500 | Someone got under his skin about this.

00:08:07.460 | Um, I think a green piece boat ran over his dog or something.

00:08:10.460 | I'm not sure.

00:08:11.460 | So that is true.

00:08:12.460 | Uh, also it's not his best unrelated to that because it starts too slow.

00:08:18.060 | It's a, it's, it's 150 pages before you're really rolling at what the actual plot is.

00:08:22.980 | Once it gets rolling though, actually very well paced thriller, really great set pieces.

00:08:29.020 | And we've got, there's one in Antarctica.

00:08:31.860 | That's pretty cool.

00:08:32.860 | The, and again, this speaks to his grumpiness.

00:08:36.460 | There's a, a actor who's clearly supposed to be Martin Sheen.

00:08:40.300 | It's an actor who played the president on TV.

00:08:43.700 | Actually yeah, that's right.

00:08:44.700 | The timing's right.

00:08:45.700 | He was like very environmentalist spoiler alert gets eaten by cannibals in the Solomon

00:08:52.300 | Islands.

00:08:53.300 | It's anyways.

00:08:54.300 | So here's what I'd say.

00:08:55.300 | If you can get through a hundred pages, it's a, it's a fine paced thriller.

00:08:57.180 | He's good at pacing thrillers.

00:08:58.900 | Um, and if you don't like climate change, you'll love it, but it's also otherwise kind

00:09:03.140 | of annoying.

00:09:04.140 | All right.

00:09:05.140 | Uh, quickly, two other books.

00:09:06.740 | Washington goes to war written by David Brinkley in the 1980s, David Brinkley, the former ABC

00:09:12.700 | news correspondent.

00:09:14.020 | It is a book about Washington DC and the transformation it made because of world war two.

00:09:20.180 | And the, the interesting thing about the book is that in the eighties, when Brinkley was

00:09:24.620 | writing this, the leaders, the people who were, you know, not 18 year olds, but were

00:09:29.900 | a little bit older during world war two, they were all dying.

00:09:33.400 | And so there was this sort of race against time where he went to gather all these oral

00:09:36.580 | histories.

00:09:37.580 | And if you live in Washington DC, it's a cool book.

00:09:39.180 | It talks about how 1940 Washington DC is a sleepy, very Southern town.

00:09:46.980 | And by 1945, it's completely different thing.

00:09:49.420 | So if you live in DC, very interesting.

00:09:51.340 | If you don't probably not well-written though, Brinkley's, it's a really good, really well-written

00:09:56.820 | nonfiction book.

00:09:57.900 | So hats off.

00:09:58.900 | And then finally, uh, Tolkien.

00:10:03.140 | The 2015 biography of Tolkien written by Raymond Edwards, caveat, M.

00:10:08.620 | Tur, it is an academic biography.

00:10:12.300 | So it really gets deep into the, the work academically that Tolkien was working on and

00:10:19.940 | its influence on the books he eventually wrote.

00:10:23.500 | So this is, it's written by a scholar who's in a similar field and it's the study of,

00:10:30.380 | it's the study of ancient linguistics, but, but from a standpoint of using the language

00:10:34.300 | to try to recreate stuff about the culture and it's a very precise field.

00:10:39.300 | And so it can be a little bit rough going two things I'll point out about this.

00:10:42.580 | Then we'll move on.

00:10:44.400 | Number one, uh, the reason why Lord of the Rings was so successful is that Tolkien just

00:10:50.180 | spent decades building a mythology for Anglo-Saxon England because there wasn't one.

00:10:58.480 | So there was a, a founding mythology for Norse culture.

00:11:01.560 | There's a founding mythology for Germanic cultures, uh, but it was lost.

00:11:05.600 | Whatever this was for Britain was lost.

00:11:08.920 | And so he was basically creating one from scratch and he was to spend decades.

00:11:12.200 | He called it his legit legendarium.

00:11:15.240 | And he, and at some point he, he kind of moved away from it being specifically about England

00:11:18.840 | and about a sort of fantastical realm.

00:11:21.200 | That is what he pulled from for the Hobbit a little bit and then deeply for Lord of the

00:11:24.800 | Rings.

00:11:25.800 | So he spent decades of work as someone who is, uh, it's called philology is what they

00:11:29.000 | called it back then an expert at ancient languages and its connection to culture and mythology.

00:11:35.200 | And he had all of that worked out.

00:11:37.420 | So that's why when you read Lord of the Rings, it feels like one of these lost culture books

00:11:42.160 | where they're just referencing this rich, deep world.

00:11:44.440 | It feels like it's real.

00:11:45.440 | It's because he, he, he not only created this world, but he created this world with academic

00:11:49.040 | soundness.

00:11:50.040 | I mean, this is a guy who for fun was organizing, uh, I I I Icelandic, uh, Icelandic mythology

00:11:59.080 | reading groups where they would read in the ancient Islandic languages, you know, saw

00:12:03.880 | Viking sagas.

00:12:05.680 | So that's why that was so good and why it's so hard.

00:12:09.120 | Nothing else really approaches the depth.

00:12:10.960 | You get more of the rings that, uh, that sense of reality.

00:12:14.480 | If there's a deep culture here that just takes place on it's because it was like the world's

00:12:17.920 | expert on doing that, who spent his whole life doing it.

00:12:20.920 | Number two, it's a painful book to read if you're a professor, because the whole thing

00:12:25.240 | is about his frustration with academic administrative load.

00:12:27.960 | I mean, his whole life was defined by being overwhelmed by academic load and, and, and

00:12:36.560 | non research type of work.

00:12:38.360 | And he was constantly short on money and constantly stressed out.

00:12:41.180 | And this was sort of post-war liberal England.

00:12:43.160 | So even after you couldn't just sort of leave and be like, I'm just going to write because

00:12:46.240 | even after Lord of the Rings became a huge hit, the taxation rates were such an England

00:12:51.120 | at the time that as Edwards talks about it, you know, it helped, but like, it didn't make

00:12:57.160 | him wealthy even at like a lower level.

00:13:01.800 | Because you could lose like 80 plus percent of your royalty income like that.

00:13:05.760 | The government was like, thank you.

00:13:07.000 | So he was not, so that's, so it's not like he could.

00:13:09.760 | So even at the, the very height of his success, like he couldn't, wasn't making them that

00:13:14.560 | that wealthy.

00:13:15.560 | Interesting.

00:13:16.560 | So it stressed me out, Jesse, though, all I was like, man, this is just like detailing.

00:13:19.920 | It makes modern academic life seem, um, free and flexible and great.

00:13:24.800 | I mean, Oxford in the early part of the 20th century just sounds like it was brutal.

00:13:29.720 | Just the work they would pour on you.

00:13:31.440 | And it was in the infighting and it's an interesting portrait of academia.

00:13:36.900 | Talk about slow productivity though, when he was coming up with that world, right?

00:13:40.600 | Decades.

00:13:41.600 | Yeah.

00:13:42.600 | Yeah.

00:13:43.600 | Like the Hobbit, uh, it's a 10 year window between when he was like starting to work

00:13:48.960 | out the story for his kids and when he sort of finally published it, like you just spend

00:13:53.560 | decades on things.

00:13:54.560 | Yeah.

00:13:55.560 | It's definitely slow productivity.

00:13:56.560 | Like you can't have Lord of the Rings without 20 years of, uh, philology.

00:14:01.960 | That's incredible.

00:14:02.960 | Yeah.

00:14:03.960 | So it was a cool book.

00:14:04.960 | Again, it's not super approachable.

00:14:06.780 | His son wrote a book.

00:14:08.720 | Christopher wrote a book that gets really into like his work habits and stuff like this

00:14:12.420 | and focuses more on the Lord of the Rings.

00:14:14.600 | Like that's probably the better book than this, unless you like your into linguistics.

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The Five Books I Read In August 2022 | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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