The Five Books Cal Newport Read In April 2023

00:00:00.000 | All right, let's do a final segment here.

00:00:03.180 | I wanna talk about the books I read in April.

00:00:04.660 | All right, Jesse, here's the bad news.

00:00:05.860 | I lost my list.

00:00:07.040 | I don't know what happened to it.

00:00:09.380 | - You were talking about this before the show

00:00:11.140 | and I think you should explain

00:00:14.100 | how you finished the book so early.

00:00:16.020 | - Yeah, so you might be thinking, well, wait a second,

00:00:17.780 | can't you just remember all the books you read in April?

00:00:20.220 | That was just last month.

00:00:21.220 | But here's the thing, I count books by the month

00:00:23.580 | I finished them and I'm on a weird rotation.

00:00:27.460 | I'm sort of out of sync.

00:00:29.580 | So I tend to finish the books for a month.

00:00:31.860 | I start them before the month begins

00:00:33.860 | and tend to finish them about halfway through the month.

00:00:37.980 | So I'm already, for example, a book and a half

00:00:39.780 | into my June books, even though it's May, whatever.

00:00:43.460 | So when I'm trying to remember my April books,

00:00:45.540 | a lot of these are books I started reading

00:00:47.760 | or maybe started reading, what, back in March.

00:00:50.380 | So this is just the weirdness

00:00:52.060 | of how I've sort of shifted off schedule.

00:00:54.820 | So I just walked around my library today

00:00:57.380 | and looked at books and, okay,

00:00:59.500 | that one I remember, that one I remember.

00:01:01.220 | So I was able, Jesse, to reconstruct

00:01:03.900 | four out of the five books I read in April.

00:01:05.860 | I can't remember the fifth.

00:01:07.660 | - You had a remarkable notebook.

00:01:10.060 | - Right now, I would just be hitting the buttons, right?

00:01:13.260 | The sun would come in through the window.

00:01:15.220 | I'd be fashionably dressed with a macchiato

00:01:17.700 | and I would see the books.

00:01:20.200 | And then they're always, always in these videos,

00:01:22.720 | they always have like a business chart that they're labeling.

00:01:27.220 | In fact, here, switch over to the screen for a second.

00:01:30.780 | Here's the Kindle Scribe ad.

00:01:32.700 | Look at what's in the picture.

00:01:34.220 | Am I right?

00:01:35.060 | It's a chart that they're labeling.

00:01:38.480 | That's what always happens in these ads.

00:01:40.720 | They're always like, what?

00:01:42.020 | And they put like an exclamation point

00:01:43.420 | and they're drawing on a chart.

00:01:44.840 | That's what business people do, is they label charts.

00:01:48.020 | But anyway, yes, my remarkable Scribe

00:01:49.420 | would be able to find this.

00:01:50.240 | All right, but I did remember four of them.

00:01:53.100 | See, it helped because I went on a vacation

00:01:55.480 | during that period.

00:01:56.500 | So it was easy for me to remember

00:01:57.860 | what books I brought on the vacation.

00:01:59.320 | So that helped me here.

00:02:00.520 | All right, so I read the book,

00:02:02.940 | "The Real Work" by Adam Gopnik.

00:02:06.220 | Gopnik is a long time staff writer for "The New Yorker."

00:02:11.220 | He's known for art criticism.

00:02:15.600 | So this was his first,

00:02:17.060 | the book takes a tentative step

00:02:19.460 | towards the pragmatic nonfiction world.

00:02:22.540 | So this book is about what really goes into mastery.

00:02:26.280 | Gopnik's a great writer.

00:02:27.540 | You'll see that as you read the book.

00:02:29.700 | And basically he builds reflections about mastery

00:02:33.940 | around different, I guess you could think of him as masters

00:02:38.540 | he spends time with or different activities he pursues.

00:02:42.220 | I was reading this actually in Las Vegas

00:02:44.540 | and I went to see David Copperfield.

00:02:46.900 | And so I appreciated that there's a whole section

00:02:50.180 | in this book where he's working with professional magicians.

00:02:53.520 | And this is where "The Real Work," that term comes from,

00:02:55.740 | is the world of professional magicians.

00:02:57.060 | So anyways, he's a great writer.

00:02:59.740 | This is not a Gladwell book.

00:03:01.060 | So it's not gonna, let's break down mastery

00:03:03.980 | into the contrarian understanding

00:03:06.340 | that you can then apply to your life.

00:03:07.580 | It's more reflective and philosophical than that,

00:03:10.080 | but it's very well-written, I enjoyed it.

00:03:13.660 | Also read John McPhee's "Levels of the Game."

00:03:16.680 | It's his book about tennis, Arthur Ashe versus Grabener.

00:03:23.600 | Brilliant example, it's sort of studied

00:03:26.680 | in nonfiction courses, just a brilliant example

00:03:29.040 | of what McPhee is known for,

00:03:30.640 | which is using sophisticated structure

00:03:33.920 | to try to generate insight.

00:03:35.560 | And so the structure of "Levels of the Game,"

00:03:38.480 | this book is from the '60s.

00:03:39.720 | This has been replicated a lot now,

00:03:41.200 | but I think McPhee was at the cornerstone of this,

00:03:43.240 | is it's built around a single US Open tennis match

00:03:46.120 | between Arthur Ashe and David Grabener.

00:03:49.760 | And it moves seamlessly without even section breaks

00:03:54.000 | between they'll be playing this point

00:03:56.560 | and then it's a backstory, and then back to the point.

00:04:00.080 | And so it goes back and forth

00:04:01.360 | between these two tennis players' backstories

00:04:03.960 | and the game that's going on

00:04:05.480 | in a sort of complicated structure

00:04:07.200 | where he won't even break, it'll be a return.

00:04:12.120 | And then next paragraph is Arthur Ashe,

00:04:15.920 | 15 years earlier.

00:04:18.400 | And he goes back and forth, back and forth.

00:04:20.040 | And the idea is as you learn more and more

00:04:23.200 | about the backstory of these players,

00:04:26.160 | the nuances of their play,

00:04:27.940 | which you're also learning more and more about

00:04:29.800 | as you hear about the match, become more clear

00:04:32.840 | that he's drawing this connection

00:04:34.120 | between their style of play

00:04:35.440 | and all these different things that went into their history

00:04:37.680 | and who they are as a person

00:04:38.800 | and what's going on in the culture around them.

00:04:40.480 | It's just a masterwork in narrative nonfiction.

00:04:43.560 | And one of the things that caught my attention,

00:04:46.080 | 'cause I read that and I read Gottlieb's book

00:04:47.580 | at the same time, two New Yorker writers,

00:04:49.040 | obviously different generations, is that McPhee,

00:04:53.200 | I don't know who's doing this right now,

00:04:56.000 | but I'm inspired by this.

00:04:57.560 | McPhee uses simple language, complicated structure

00:05:02.240 | to get the truth.

00:05:04.020 | And I would say that's probably,

00:05:06.880 | not a lot of people are doing that now.

00:05:09.000 | I would say the tone of the New Yorker right now,

00:05:10.380 | including my writing for better, for worse,

00:05:12.960 | also relies on lyricism to try to get at truth

00:05:17.160 | more evocative sentences that have some sort of poetry

00:05:22.160 | in the writing, that the writing and the rhythms,

00:05:25.760 | there's a lot of rhythm of writing work,

00:05:27.320 | I think is going on a lot now at the New Yorker,

00:05:29.140 | that it's almost lyrical nonfiction prose

00:05:32.740 | that can extract insights and understanding.

00:05:35.880 | And Gopnik's great at that,

00:05:36.880 | he's a very philosophical, self-reflective writer.

00:05:39.080 | McPhee was so different.

00:05:40.560 | I mean, his sentences are simple.

00:05:42.760 | (imitates music)

00:05:45.760 | They read like they come out of one of those

00:05:50.760 | mid-century grammar guides, strunken whatever.

00:05:56.680 | - Or they might read like you speak,

00:05:59.280 | like people speak probably, right?

00:06:00.680 | - Well, what I meant by the grammar guides,

00:06:02.400 | and I'm forgetting the classic strunken--

00:06:07.400 | - Strunken white.

00:06:08.720 | - Is it strunken white?

00:06:09.540 | Yeah, so in the sense of sometimes it's very formal grammar,

00:06:12.640 | it's like, oh, this is just perfectly constructed grammar,

00:06:15.080 | is what I mean by it.

00:06:16.240 | Yeah, it's like this comma, this semicolon, this,

00:06:19.600 | but it's using grammar like you would see

00:06:22.480 | in strunken white, like, oh,

00:06:24.040 | this is a well-constructed sentence,

00:06:25.540 | not like in maybe in like something I might write

00:06:28.080 | or a modern New Yorker piece,

00:06:29.440 | you use grammar to help support something

00:06:32.880 | that's more poetic or lyrical or whatever.

00:06:34.400 | The sentences are just boom, boom, boom, boom,

00:06:36.960 | subordinate clause, boom, just very straightforward.

00:06:40.520 | And yet when combined with complicated structure

00:06:43.340 | is incredibly deep.

00:06:44.880 | So I don't know, not a lot of people are doing that now.

00:06:46.480 | Maybe a lot of, not a lot of people

00:06:47.640 | are doing that back then either,

00:06:48.680 | but I just as a writing masterclass exercise,

00:06:53.040 | reading 60s era McPhee, it just got me thinking a lot

00:06:57.160 | about how I write, about how he wrote, about his effect,

00:07:01.040 | made me think about my own writing a little bit.

00:07:04.840 | So it was cool.

00:07:06.600 | That's how you form my book group.

00:07:07.500 | I'm in a book group that just reads sports books.

00:07:09.440 | - Yeah.

00:07:10.280 | - Yeah, so that was my turn to pick.

00:07:14.000 | And so of course I was gonna pick like.

00:07:15.280 | - Was there a lot of tennis strategy in there?

00:07:17.040 | - Yeah, you should read it.

00:07:19.240 | I'll loan you my copy.

00:07:21.480 | - I should.

00:07:22.320 | - Yeah, because you play a lot of tennis these days.

00:07:24.560 | - I play at least three times a week.

00:07:25.880 | - Yeah.

00:07:26.760 | - It's a complicated game, it's like golf.

00:07:28.440 | - Oh my God.

00:07:29.280 | The sense I got, yeah, it's like golf.

00:07:30.940 | That's the sense I got is you gotta be playing

00:07:32.800 | since you were five.

00:07:34.080 | - Not necessarily, but you need to play a lot.

00:07:36.240 | - You have to play a lot of maintenance.

00:07:37.640 | Like if you wanna be any good,

00:07:39.280 | you gotta put a lot of time in it.

00:07:40.640 | - So one of the things maybe you would understand this

00:07:42.320 | is because you're playing tennis now,

00:07:43.720 | I didn't understand it as much.

00:07:44.800 | So one of the big parts of Ash's game

00:07:46.840 | is that when he was being trained coming up as a kid,

00:07:50.520 | they wanted him,

00:07:52.200 | they almost exclusively was training his backhand.

00:07:54.200 | They wanted the backhand to feel

00:07:56.160 | as comfortable to him as a forehand, right?

00:07:58.520 | So it was just like, I'm very, very comfortable with it.

00:08:00.480 | - Yeah, 'cause a lot of times people just expose

00:08:02.200 | your backhand if it's weak.

00:08:03.360 | - Yeah, so he's just very comfortable with his backhand.

00:08:05.400 | And then he was a very innovative, creative player, right?

00:08:09.160 | So he was very much risky, exciting shots,

00:08:13.680 | cross court drop shots, the winners, that type of thing.

00:08:16.200 | Whereas Grabener was much more of a mechanical,

00:08:18.920 | play the odds.

00:08:19.760 | There's a lot of statistics in it.

00:08:20.800 | It was very interesting.

00:08:21.840 | - Actually in air,

00:08:22.680 | there was a cool little commercial with Ash.

00:08:24.360 | Remember that in the beginning of the movie?

00:08:25.320 | - Yep, with the racket.

00:08:26.280 | Yep, the wooden racket.

00:08:27.120 | Yep, they get into that because Grabener used to,

00:08:29.240 | moved on to metal racket.

00:08:30.320 | So I think you would like it.

00:08:32.680 | The thing, the tennis players in my book group were saying,

00:08:34.800 | they were surprised by how fast Ash was serving.

00:08:38.320 | It really is not that far from today's era of monster serves

00:08:42.120 | and it was within, I mean, he was serving like 130

00:08:46.440 | or something like that.

00:08:47.640 | - Wow.

00:08:48.480 | - Or 125, or like he was close with a wooden racket.

00:08:50.920 | So, you know, it's like now it's supposed to be the age

00:08:55.200 | of the monster serve, but you read this match,

00:08:58.280 | like they would wanna get,

00:08:59.760 | if you could get four aces in a row,

00:09:01.800 | you're like, that's kind of what I'm looking for,

00:09:03.480 | is like in a lot of these sets,

00:09:04.960 | it's gonna be all aces for the serve side.

00:09:06.560 | It's all about making use of the few mistakes that happen.

00:09:09.560 | - Mm-hmm, it's interesting.

00:09:11.320 | - All right, other book I read,

00:09:12.320 | "The Transcendent Brain" by Alan Lightman.

00:09:15.520 | I like Alan Lightman a lot, former physicist at MIT

00:09:18.680 | that went on to start their science writing

00:09:20.320 | master degree program.

00:09:22.400 | I like him in part, as I've mentioned on the show,

00:09:24.240 | because their family has a cabin on this Island up in Maine

00:09:27.440 | and they go up there and spend the entire summer.

00:09:29.800 | I think it has electricity, maybe.

00:09:31.920 | There's no phone, there's no internet.

00:09:33.560 | And I always just, you know, I sort of knew,

00:09:35.520 | I didn't know him well.

00:09:36.360 | My wife had crossed paths with him a few times

00:09:38.800 | when we lived in Boston and he was at MIT, I was at MIT.

00:09:41.760 | And, you know, we had friends in common.

00:09:43.440 | I always loved that about him.

00:09:44.400 | But anyways, he now just writes these

00:09:46.680 | short provocative books for Pantheon,

00:09:49.760 | which is cool, which I appreciate.

00:09:51.280 | And this one was trying to give a materialist explanation

00:09:54.280 | for spirituality, trying to say you can appreciate

00:09:57.720 | and even organize your life around spiritual experiences

00:10:01.520 | while still maintaining a scientific materialist view.

00:10:04.760 | So he sort of gives a Darwinian explanation

00:10:06.640 | for why maybe we feel these senses of connection

00:10:10.680 | or moments of transcendent awe

00:10:12.360 | and trying to explain that materialistically.

00:10:14.960 | Typical Alan Lightman book, it's short

00:10:17.400 | and it dives into these interesting angles,

00:10:20.080 | different history of religion and brain science over here

00:10:22.880 | and doesn't write more than he needs to write.

00:10:24.720 | So I always enjoy a good Alan Lightman book.

00:10:27.400 | The final book I remember reading in April

00:10:31.000 | is called "Finding the Mother Tree" by Suzanne Simard,

00:10:35.000 | who is a, I don't know what the field is, forestry maybe?

00:10:39.800 | Who studied, she did a lot of the innovative work

00:10:42.680 | that discovered trees are connected to each other

00:10:46.400 | underground through networks of fungus.

00:10:50.080 | They can not only communicate with each other

00:10:51.680 | with these underlying fungus networks,

00:10:52.920 | they can actually move resources on it.

00:10:55.960 | Sugars, for example, from one tree to another.

00:10:59.360 | And you even have in forest,

00:11:01.160 | you'll find what she called the mother tree,

00:11:02.640 | this very old tree that was connected

00:11:04.760 | to a lot of younger trees

00:11:05.800 | and it helps to redistribute resources to them, et cetera.

00:11:09.480 | Anyway, she did a lot of work on that.

00:11:11.040 | And so this book is about that.

00:11:13.000 | There's been a couple of books in the last 10 years

00:11:14.600 | about trees and communicating.

00:11:16.480 | This one is interesting because it's memoir.

00:11:18.680 | It's memoir/science.

00:11:21.240 | So she's actually a very good memoir writer.

00:11:23.760 | She had a very interesting upbringing in Canada.

00:11:25.680 | She comes from one generation removed

00:11:28.680 | from a Canadian lumbering family

00:11:30.960 | and worked actually in the timber industry

00:11:32.640 | before she moved over to academia.

00:11:34.760 | It's actually a pretty astutely drawn self-portrait

00:11:37.840 | that's intertwined with her scientific discovery.

00:11:40.920 | So you learn about her discoveries as they occur in her life

00:11:45.600 | as she tells a story of her life.

00:11:47.200 | And I thought it was a surprisingly well-written book.

00:11:51.720 | And the science is interesting too.

00:11:53.520 | Now, there's a bit of a grain of salt

00:11:56.360 | that has to be taken with it.

00:11:57.480 | I mean, there's a, I don't know,

00:12:00.600 | a sort of like philosophical or political resonance

00:12:05.480 | to this idea that clearly has to be involved

00:12:08.480 | in the popularity and the push of these ideas.

00:12:10.560 | It's like, no, trees don't compete.

00:12:12.240 | They share resources together.

00:12:14.080 | They help each other and cooperate.

00:12:16.320 | They mother each other.

00:12:17.280 | I mean, there's very much like embedded

00:12:19.840 | in these scientific studies,

00:12:21.000 | also reflections of critiques of aspects

00:12:24.720 | of capitalist culture.

00:12:25.680 | And so it's a complicated field,

00:12:27.280 | but she found some really cool things,

00:12:28.720 | but the book was really well-written

00:12:29.840 | and she has a really, had a really interesting life.

00:12:32.720 | So I grabbed it randomly.

00:12:35.280 | This was a politics and prose table, boom.

00:12:38.280 | Let me just grab it.

00:12:39.120 | It's not a new book.

00:12:40.360 | Sometimes when you're traveling,

00:12:41.400 | you have to just serendipitously grab something.

00:12:44.240 | And I'm glad I grabbed that one.

00:12:46.120 | All right, so that's four books.

00:12:47.080 | There was a fifth.

00:12:48.280 | I just can't remember what it is.

00:12:50.680 | I should just make one up, Jesse.

00:12:51.840 | What would be the most impressive thing I could have read?

00:12:54.160 | - All right, you guys.

00:12:55.840 | - I was reading "Gravity's Rainbow" or "War and Peace."

00:13:00.840 | Let's just make up what it is.

00:13:03.680 | I don't know.

00:13:05.000 | But there was a fifth in there,

00:13:05.840 | but those are the four I can remember.

00:13:09.680 | (upbeat music)

00:13:12.280 | (upbeat music)

The Five Books Cal Newport Read In April 2023

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