The Five Books Cal Newport Read In December 2022

00:00:00.000 | All right, Jesse, it's late, but better late than never.

00:00:03.000 | In this final segment, I want to mention the books I read in December 2022.

00:00:09.000 | As you might recall, December for me is Thriller December.

00:00:15.000 | It is the month in which I like to read adventure or thriller novels.

00:00:20.000 | That's the genre that I really like.

00:00:23.000 | There's a lot of holidays in December, so it's a tradition of mine to read more thrillers than normal in December.

00:00:28.000 | So I read three thrillers in December, Jesse, and I will go through them all right now.

00:00:33.000 | All right, the first one I read, The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield.

00:00:39.000 | This is a action thriller that takes place in an alternative timeline.

00:00:45.000 | So it's in the 70s, and it's positing an alternative timeline where we did a few more Apollo programs.

00:00:52.000 | And I don't want to give too many details away other than there's gun battles happening in space with the Soviets.

00:01:00.000 | What was cool about this book, what attracted me to it is that Chris Hadfield, the author, is an astronaut.

00:01:06.000 | So this actually has realistic, realistic details of how all the 1970s era Apollo space program technology actually worked.

00:01:17.000 | He actually understands space and what this world is like.

00:01:20.000 | So I like that idea that it was written by an astronaut.

00:01:22.000 | A book about astronaut murders is pretty good.

00:01:25.000 | The next one I read was Recursion by Blake Crouch.

00:01:29.000 | I want to flag this book for a second because I read a lot of thrillers.

00:01:35.000 | Recursion is about as platonic of an example I have found of perfection in pacing.

00:01:44.000 | It's like a master class in thriller structure and pacing.

00:01:50.000 | Really, this piece of it is brilliantly done.

00:01:54.000 | It's datelined chapters, and you're moving back and forth between two timelines, and those timelines kind of catch up.

00:02:01.000 | And the way it moves back and forth, back and forth, and ratchets up is just a precision plot construction.

00:02:08.000 | It's a book that's really hard to put down once you pick it up.

00:02:12.000 | I was really impressed by it.

00:02:14.000 | Actually, I was so impressed by it that I was a little bit disappointed when I went back to read a prior book of Blake's, which was good.

00:02:20.000 | But man, with Recursion, he has the pacing just locked in.

00:02:25.000 | It's the best thriller pacing I've read, one of the best thriller pacings I've probably ever read.

00:02:30.000 | When was it written?

00:02:31.000 | This book would have been, I don't know, the last 10 years or something like that.

00:02:34.000 | It's like a time, I won't give away everything that happens, but the way it opens is it's playing with time.

00:02:43.000 | So he's a techno-thriller writer.

00:02:45.000 | He's like our age.

00:02:46.000 | He's not like, I used to say relatively young.

00:02:48.000 | I guess we're not that young anymore.

00:02:50.000 | But there's this virus sort of happening where people are having memories of different lives suddenly appear.

00:02:59.000 | And it seems to be contagious, like people nearby have the same thing happen.

00:03:04.000 | And there's a detective that's trying to unwind what's going on.

00:03:08.000 | And then it starts to unravel.

00:03:12.000 | And then you get a plot line from back in time and it catches up.

00:03:15.000 | And then it gets crazy at the end.

00:03:16.000 | Anyways, perfection in structure and pacing.

00:03:20.000 | The last thriller I read in December was The Last Juror by John Grisham.

00:03:24.000 | I just had it from a little free library here in Tacoma Park.

00:03:28.000 | And here's the thing about being a writer like John Grisham.

00:03:32.000 | If you have that one or two huge successes early on, you can just keep writing books that don't have to be blockbusters.

00:03:40.000 | Like if The Last Juror was written by someone else, you know, like us.

00:03:46.000 | Nice.

00:03:47.000 | Yeah.

00:03:48.000 | But because he wrote The Firm, because he wrote The Pelican Brief and The Client, and he became such a superstar,

00:03:54.000 | you could just write these books where they don't have to be bangers.

00:03:57.000 | It's just interesting.

00:03:58.000 | It's just, it's a guy starting up a newspaper in the small Mississippi town that he likes to write about.

00:04:03.000 | And there's a trial and 20 years later, like some of the jurors start dying out, like being killed.

00:04:10.000 | Right.

00:04:11.000 | And then they kind of figure out what's going on.

00:04:14.000 | That's the book.

00:04:15.000 | But I enjoyed it.

00:04:16.000 | I enjoyed it.

00:04:17.000 | But if, if, if this was the book you ran instead of The Firm, you wouldn't know the name John Grisham.

00:04:21.000 | So it's a good gig if you can get it.

00:04:23.000 | There's another thriller I didn't quite finish in December.

00:04:26.000 | So I'll get to that in the January.

00:04:27.000 | So I really read four in December, but the fifth one I didn't finish until into January.

00:04:32.000 | So we'll get it with the next list.

00:04:34.000 | All right.

00:04:35.000 | I read two other books as well.

00:04:36.000 | Non-thrillers.

00:04:37.000 | One was called Living with Frankenstein by Stephen Schoen.

00:04:43.000 | This is I'm working on some things with artificial intelligence.

00:04:46.000 | So this is like a small philosophical tract about machine sentience.

00:04:51.000 | And this is like a gentleman scholar has this thesis about, you know, what does it really mean for technology to be conscious?

00:05:00.000 | And he has a much lower bar for that.

00:05:01.000 | And things were already there.

00:05:03.000 | I needed it for something I was doing.

00:05:06.000 | What I enjoyed more was John Meacham's And There Was Light.

00:05:09.000 | It was John Meacham's new Lincoln biography.

00:05:12.000 | It was very good.

00:05:13.000 | Very good.

00:05:14.000 | So Meacham is taking a he's looking at Lincoln through the lens of in part ethics and in part religion.

00:05:23.000 | So the virtue ethics worldview of Lincoln and then also the impact of religions on Lincoln.

00:05:29.000 | I think the early part of Lincoln's life, I really enjoyed the way this Meacham treated it because what he does good in this book, and I've read a lot of Lincoln books.

00:05:36.000 | What he does good in this book is set context.

00:05:39.000 | So there's a lot of primary sources that he pulls from to set the context.

00:05:43.000 | So it's one of the better, for example, depictions of Southern culture and, uh, during the pre-war period, because he, he pulls from sermons and newspapers and headlines to try to really understand the reactionary culture that was emerging in the South in defense of slavery.

00:06:03.000 | And like understanding that really helps make sense of some of the big historical things that happen.

00:06:08.000 | He goes to primary sources to get there.

00:06:10.000 | Uh, another thing I learned from Meacham, which was really interesting was I didn't know this, and I read a lot of Lincoln that, you know, Lincoln's family, when he was a young kid was attending a church at one of these rural churches.

00:06:23.000 | That was, um, it's very antislavery.

00:06:26.000 | So he was, he was exposed to antislavery thinking in part because of this was the early exposure he had to it was in church, which I hadn't heard.

00:06:35.000 | I had heard about the, there's a labor argument, you know, his dad, um, was a working poor working class white and Illinois were worried about the economic ramifications of slave labor coming into their state.

00:06:48.000 | So I had heard that piece of it.

00:06:50.000 | So he grew up in an antislavery household, but he was inculcated with a religious antislavery message and Meacham went back and like found, here's the preacher and here's the type of things they talked about.

00:07:00.000 | So I thought that was all good.

00:07:02.000 | Once they get to the war and the presidency, it's like real fast.

00:07:07.000 | He just covers it and you know, 70 pages.

00:07:09.000 | It just, it moves by really fast, but enjoyed it.

00:07:12.000 | All right, Jesse, those are my five books from December.

00:07:16.000 | Next month we will talk about the five books I read in January.

00:07:19.000 | [Music]

The Five Books Cal Newport Read In December 2022

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