The Books I Read in March 2022 | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | But we're also now in April, which means we can do our tradition of reporting on the books I read the month before.

00:00:12.000 | So I want to report on the books I read in March 2022.

00:00:19.000 | As long-time listeners know, generally my goal is to aim for five books per month, and that's what I read in March of 2022.

00:00:30.000 | I mix genres, I mix difficulties. I want a variety of different books.

00:00:35.000 | So let's go through it. Here are the five books I read in March of 2022 in order of completion.

00:00:41.000 | The first was Travels with George. This was written by the popular historian Nathaniel Philbrook.

00:00:51.000 | So Travels with George is an allusion to Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie.

00:00:56.000 | So if you're a Steinbeck person, you know, Travels with Charlie, Steinbeck is traveling with his dog, Charlie.

00:01:03.000 | Well, in Travels with George, Nathaniel Philbrook, who's written a series of books about the Revolutionary Era in America, went on a travel with his dog.

00:01:13.000 | And in particular, the dog was not named George. In this case, George is George Washington.

00:01:19.000 | And Philbrook and his wife and his dog trace the post-inauguration tour of the newly formed country of America that George Washington went on.

00:01:30.000 | So he did a tour all the way through New England, and then he later did a tour all the way through the South.

00:01:36.000 | And Philbrook retraced the steps of that tour in modern times and then went to these went to the spots and then mixed it in like with Steinbeck-esque anecdotes about the journeys and his dog being a pain, etc.

00:01:50.000 | So, I mean, here's the thing. The book was fine. I think the contemporaneous pieces about the dog, I didn't care.

00:01:59.000 | I mean, it's like two upper middle-aged people with a dog and the dog gets dirty and it's hard to find hotels for them to stay.

00:02:09.000 | It wasn't that interesting, but the history is great. I'm a big fan of Philbrook's history.

00:02:13.000 | I mean, I would have been fine if this book really was just about George Washington's post-inaugurational tours and just honed in right on that.

00:02:20.000 | I kind of read pretty quickly in the in-betweens. I'm a big Philbrook fan.

00:02:24.000 | Here's what I like about Philbrook. I love writers who live in cool places and write full time.

00:02:31.000 | And Philbrook, who came to writing late. When I mean late, I'm talking about like Jesse's current decade of life.

00:02:38.000 | I'm talking about someone in their 40s. Right. Jesse is all of one day being 40.

00:02:44.000 | So we're talking people who largely, we would rightly say, have very little productive life left.

00:02:50.000 | But somehow at that point, and it's hard for someone like me in my 30s, again, to really understand what that's like.

00:02:56.000 | But somehow at that point, he began writing in his 40s.

00:03:00.000 | And his first book was Heart of the Sea about the ship Essex.

00:03:05.000 | So this was the ship that was the model for Moby Dick.

00:03:08.000 | So it was a fishing, a whaling boat that was rammed and sunk by a whale.

00:03:13.000 | And what a great book. And some people survived in a life raft, like a boat, a whaling boat.

00:03:19.000 | And they were at sea forever. And they ended up on an island. It's all a true story.

00:03:22.000 | That's how he like burst onto the scene of doing historical fiction writing.

00:03:26.000 | But he lives in Nantucket. And that's what I think is cool.

00:03:29.000 | He lives in Nantucket where he's just a writer on this windswept, you know, island.

00:03:35.000 | And I always found that very romantic. But he was a great writer because he's a good he's a good archive guy.

00:03:40.000 | And you get a little bit of insight in this book about his methods, because in the contemporaneous parts,

00:03:45.000 | he's often hanging out with librarians, historical society curators,

00:03:50.000 | and you get a sense into what life is like writing that. It's all about finding primary sources,

00:03:55.000 | going to historical archives, going to libraries,

00:03:59.000 | pulling out these books that no one has seen in 75 years to try to piece together the context in which history happened.

00:04:04.000 | So I thought that was cool. So there you go. Good book. Guy lives on Nantucket.

00:04:09.000 | If you're going to read any Philbrook, start with Heart of the Sea.

00:04:12.000 | I also thought Mayflower was very good. Valiant Ambition is very good as well.

00:04:17.000 | So there are some recommendations for you. All right. Now we get a little bit weird.

00:04:20.000 | Not weird, but fantasy. And so we got to be careful here, Jesse, that I get all the names right.

00:04:28.000 | So I don't know exactly what path led me to this.

00:04:31.000 | I think because I had heard this book was appropriate for younger audiences,

00:04:35.000 | I might have been testing this out for my oldest son.

00:04:39.000 | But I have never read Ursula K. Le Guin, and I read her first Earthsea book, A Wizard of Earthsea.

00:04:49.000 | So it's a fantasy book written in the 60s. It has a lot of prescience towards Harry Potter, right?

00:04:56.000 | I mean, there's a young boy who goes to a school for wizards,

00:05:01.000 | but it's much more it's much more psychologically astute and sophisticated.

00:05:07.000 | It's not the tale of a boy who's meant to be a hero and has to discover it.

00:05:13.000 | It's actually the whole metaphor of the book is that through his pride,

00:05:20.000 | he unleashes essentially like a demon force in the world that is hunting him.

00:05:24.000 | And in the end, he has to hunt it down. So it's much more literary,

00:05:26.000 | much more using language and scene to try to convey a deeper reality.

00:05:30.000 | Not so plot focused or expository as like a JK Rowling or like a George R.R. Martin.

00:05:38.000 | So actually like a really well crafted book in the fantasy genre.

00:05:44.000 | And I thought it was quite good. You know, I saw echoes of it.

00:05:46.000 | You certainly see echoes of it. To me, it wasn't Harry Potter.

00:05:49.000 | I was thinking more of Love Grossman and the Magicians,

00:05:53.000 | which has a similar sort of literary metaphorical darkness where they sort of

00:05:58.000 | unleash this creature from the magical, I don't know,

00:06:03.000 | I forgot dimension or something that literally like kills one of the kids at the break

00:06:08.000 | beaks at the at the school for wizards. And so clearly Grossman must have been channeling

00:06:14.000 | Ursula K. Le Guin. But it was I liked it. I'm not going to let my son read it.

00:06:18.000 | I think it's a little more too sophisticated and dark for him.

00:06:21.000 | He's reading Harry Potter instead. But, you know, it was a good change of pace.

00:06:25.000 | I did. I did. And did enjoy it. Lots of good old fashioned wizard names.

00:06:30.000 | It's all like these weird, crazy Dungeons and Dragons names.

00:06:35.000 | All right. Copy refill. All right. Book number three.

00:06:38.000 | Let's dig in a different direction. Every Good Endeavor by Timothy Keller.

00:06:46.000 | So Timothy Keller is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan.

00:06:51.000 | And he's a public communicator, effective public communicator.

00:06:57.000 | He's written a bunch of books that have done pretty well.

00:07:00.000 | At some point, someone sent me a bunch of his books.

00:07:06.000 | So I have like a stack of his books. I pulled this off of the stack.

00:07:09.000 | The reason why I read it is every good endeavor is come from a Christian perspective,

00:07:13.000 | but it is a biblical perspective on work, the point of work, finding work that's significant to you.

00:07:22.000 | And I thought this would be something I should probably know.

00:07:26.000 | Like I should probably have this club in my bag, understanding biblical perspectives on work and passion and vocation.

00:07:33.000 | Because obviously I've written about this in the past. I'm doing this work now on the deep life.

00:07:37.000 | And so I was like, let me get the Christian biblical perspective on work.

00:07:42.000 | And so that's why I dived in that book. And there's some good things in there.

00:07:45.000 | I mean, it was the pick and choose, but I mean, I think there are some interesting threads of thought that I hadn't come across before.

00:07:53.000 | I mean, here's the most interesting. Here's the headline, like a headline idea that comes out of that book,

00:08:00.000 | which probably puts it at odds with a lot of sort of elite discourse around work right now,

00:08:04.000 | is Keller finds like a really strong biblical justification for work as an intrinsic good.

00:08:15.000 | This is quite different than I think a lot of the anti-ambition, anti-productivity type philosophy that's going on now,

00:08:24.000 | which sees work as mainly like an exploitative activity to be tolerated at best and in a utopian society to be minimized.

00:08:33.000 | Keller comes at it basically saying God worked in Genesis, and that's an argument for work as important.

00:08:42.000 | He also has a reading of Genesis that says the seventh day of rest.

00:08:47.000 | So God worked and then he rest is basically a biblical mythological recipe for human satisfaction in which you have the seasonality.

00:08:55.000 | You need to work, but then you need to not let work be all consuming.

00:08:59.000 | You need to step back and rest and it's in that dance. And that's what God did during the first seven days.

00:09:03.000 | And that's supposed to be an instruction manual for life. And you see what Adam and Eve and like basically Genesis is like a whole manual for work.

00:09:10.000 | I mean, I think, you know, Karl Marx's head would explode if he read this because it's, you know, it's, it seems really different than a lot of sort of economic materialistic analyses from today.

00:09:23.000 | But wait, cool. It's cool to see. I love people taking big, like big swing thoughts on things that are drawing from interesting sources.

00:09:30.000 | So that was an interesting one. Then I read the Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. It's arguable. This is a book.

00:09:44.000 | I thought it was a book I got on Kindle. It's really a collection of three lectures delivered during the World War II.

00:09:49.000 | So it's pretty short, but let's call it a book. And I forgot how I came across this. I came across it somewhere.

00:09:56.000 | I was like, I should just read it. I just bought it and read it. You know, it took me two days just sort of reading it.

00:10:00.000 | It's not a long thing. And it's interesting. So supposedly this is this book quotation marks collection of speeches is was very influential in the 20th century.

00:10:12.000 | It's an argument for values, basically having rooted values on which you build cultural social systems.

00:10:21.000 | It's an argument against subjectivism. This notion of all value is constructed.

00:10:27.000 | So it's basically like a preemptive rejection of what 30 years later would emerge in French postmodernism before that even existed.

00:10:36.000 | So I'm sure this book is not well appreciated by the modern academy, but I think that's what made it interesting to read.

00:10:45.000 | And it's it's it's jargon free and very approachable. But I mean, you can basically really crudely summarize the argument.

00:10:52.000 | I hate to summarize it crudely, but he's basically making an argument that we have to be careful of the heartless man.

00:11:01.000 | And by the heartless man, what he means is or no, the man, not the heartless man.

00:11:07.000 | That's not the right wording. No, the right wording was the man without chest. But what he means by that is heartless.

00:11:14.000 | He says without. A foundation of values, which the heart is, so in other words, like the values that you have, these moral intimations about these moral intuitions that this seems right.

00:11:25.000 | If you ignore that, you're just trying to use your brain to think through ethics and mediate like and control your gut, which is like, let's go.

00:11:34.000 | I'm mad. Let's go kill this person. I want that to have your animal instincts.

00:11:38.000 | And if you try to just tame that with just your brain, let's just come up with what makes sense from scratch.

00:11:45.000 | Let's do that. Let's be like Kant and just try to construct a moral system from scratch.

00:11:50.000 | He's arguing that's not going to work. You have to ground it all in what you feel in your heart, this sort of these underlying truth.

00:11:56.000 | Lewis is a real obviously a Christian apologist, but he writes this book outside of the context of Christianity.

00:12:01.000 | So he's trying to be religion agnostic. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, it's something for sure.

00:12:07.000 | I'm surprised we don't read it like it in a sort of standard, heavily postmodern influence academic culture.

00:12:12.000 | Be a nice thing to assign to people to is like in here is like a like a very straightforward standard critique.

00:12:17.000 | And this is the this is the tension between those two, the tension between those two things.

00:12:21.000 | Of course, the postmodern view would say there is no underlying value system that you're picking up through your metaphorical heart.

00:12:29.000 | It's all just constructed. It's all just systems that are constructed to support various supremacies and power relations.

00:12:36.000 | And C.S. Lewis, if he had been alive, would probably have an issue with that.

00:12:40.000 | So it's interesting to read, quick to read, no jargon, very approachable.

00:12:45.000 | All right. Final book. And I mentioned this last week in last week's episodes, I actually drew some insights from this book was John McPhee's The Fourth Draft.

00:12:55.000 | So I'll point you towards last week's episodes, I think maybe one eighty five.

00:13:00.000 | I got in I got into some details of some things I learned from the book. It's great. It's a John McPhee book about writing.

00:13:07.000 | A little bit of memoir, a lot of craft, very interesting.

00:13:12.000 | You'll be impressed by McPhee after you read it. You'll also be insanely jealous.

00:13:17.000 | Like, wait a second, you get to spend eight months just thinking about an article and and then, you know, maybe at some point write it when it all feels right.

00:13:26.000 | Like it feels like a very it feels like a very cool life. Like I can't be jealous. I can't complain.

00:13:30.000 | I write for The New Yorker. They're very generous and giving me flexibility and timing when I need it.

00:13:35.000 | And so I'm not I'm not complaining. I'm saying it's awesome. And John McPhee's awesome. It's a cool book.

00:13:41.000 | So if you're into nonfiction writing, you can get a look inside the mind of a master.

00:13:46.000 | All right. So, Jesse, those are my five books. People like to know what you read.

00:13:50.000 | Give us one book, Jesse. What's one book you've read recently we should know about?

00:13:54.000 | I'm almost done with 4000 weeks. Pulled it off your bookshelf, actually. Oh, yeah.

00:13:59.000 | All right. Well, what's your almost done with it? Review. I like it.

00:14:03.000 | I've been, you know, thinking about it. I think about time a lot anyway. But it's it's good.

00:14:09.000 | I mean, you hear it mentioned all the time. Yeah. Ferris talks about it. You talk about it. Other podcasts talk about it.

00:14:15.000 | Yeah. Now, Berkman's Berkman's great. Ferris always forgets his name. You know that he called it is always like 4000 weeks.

00:14:22.000 | And well, I messed up the book on Ferris's show. So I called it 4000, like 40000 days or something.

00:14:31.000 | So, Oliver, we're all sorry. I don't there's nothing particularly hard to remember about your name or that actually a book title.

00:14:37.000 | That's a number can be difficult once you're like in the four digits. That could be difficult.

00:14:41.000 | So I'm going to give myself a give myself a break. But yeah, that's a great book.

00:14:46.000 | Blurbed by me. So, you know, it's good. Yep. That's how you can tell.

00:14:49.000 | [MUSIC]

The Books I Read in March 2022 | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

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