All right, so it is the first episode in September to come out. So as is my tradition, speaking of segments that aren't directly related to help you live your life deeper, as is my tradition, these traditions are going to live on, Jesse. I talked about the books I read the month before.

So I want to briefly mention the five books I read in August of 2022. Now I have to say this list is a summer list. So a warning. It's very much influenced by the fact I was on vacation. So you're going to see the beginning of the list is vacation books and then the other part of the list as I got back from vacation.

All right, so let me start with GoldenEye. I mentioned this on the show before. 2016 book by Matthew Parker. This is a book about Ian Fleming, the novelist who created James Bond, about the house he built in Jamaica and its influence, his time in Jamaica and its influence on the James Bond series.

It's a British book, very deeply researched. I learned quite a bit about late stage colonial England, what happened in Jamaica, how that country was transformed. You get a lot of interesting context and a lot of tidbits about how Fleming and his life. It's basically a biography of Fleming. It's basically a biography of late stage colonialism in the British empire, all mixed up into this package.

So very ambitious book. Yeah, it's interesting. Also a lot of good cabin, what you might call, there's a book called Cabin Porn, where it's just pictures of beautiful cabins. This is sort of like deep work writing porn, right? It's on a bluff writing over a cove that you snorkel in every day.

So you get a lot of that too. One interesting point to say about that book, when Ian Fleming, this is a reveal in the book, when Ian Fleming left the service after the war, so World War II, he was obviously like in the military and that's where he was stationed in Jamaica briefly.

That's how he found out about it and that's why he built his house there. He got a job after the war with a newspaper group that owned the Sunday Times and he was the manager, coordinator of foreign correspondents. His contract he negotiated included three months vacation a year. That's how he could go to Jamaica every winter.

It's just his contract. He was like, I just am gone in the winter. So I mean, of course, this is British class privilege at its finest. You could just imagine his boss being like, good show old chop. Yes, you'd go away in the winter. You can't work then. By the way, spot on English accent.

Very good. I was just in Scotland. Sounds identical. Exactly. I would pass as a native in Scotland. But I mentioned this earlier in the show. Yeah, right now you have to be like a pseudo aristocrat in 19, late 1940s Britain to get a contract like that. But why is that not more common?

Like, why is if you're Facebook, are you not trying to attract engineers by saying, Hey, if you're willing to do nine twelfths of the salary, you can take three months off a year. You would get more people. We need more variety like this. That should not be so rare.

So there we go. All right. Book number two. So I read Goldeneye. I said, well, I better read a James Bond book. And I'm reading about his house. I know so much about Fleming. I was on vacation at the time. It's like, I should probably read a James Bond book.

Interesting observation. They're temporarily not available on Kindle. I don't really know what's going on here. Just a standard James Bond book. American translations are not available on Kindle. I think there was a, there's been a transfer of rights. I think something about Amazon buying Paramount and maybe Paramount owns the rights.

And there's some, I saw something I should look into this deeper. I saw something about their, maybe the reformatting and going to republish these, but it was very hard to find. So I basically got a pirated copy. The only one I could find on my Kindle, because I was on vacation.

So I didn't want to, I couldn't just Amazon a book. The only one I could find is basically a pirated e-copy of Moonraker. It's one of the early, it's a 1960s James Bond novel. Interesting point, two interesting points about it. One, it has the first third of the book is James Bond playing bridge at a fancy club in London.

Only two thirds of the book, he is at a high-tech missile installation trying to stop a villain from dropping a nuclear bomb on London. So it seems a little incongruous. I looked into it. Turns out Moonraker was based off a teleplay that Fleming wrote about the missile and this or that.

It wasn't long enough. Was it long enough when he translated to a book like this is not, we can't, it's not long enough to sell us a novel. So he's like, well, I'll just add a, a scene, extended scene where he plays bridge with the villain. And you know what?

It's a great scene. Like the whole premise of the scene is the villains cheating and M as Bond come figure out how he's cheating. And again, to all, this is so Fleming, all of the details of this very fancy upper crust club and the food and how they, and the specific drinks that they're drinking and sort of classic Fleming point number two, it's a surprisingly modern techno thriller.

I think we give credit to Crichton. We give credit to Clancy is sort of inventing the genre of high, high pace adventure type thrilling thriller writing that has a lot of technology. Moonraker feels like it could have been from that same genre. I mean, it's a lot of the technology of the missiles and how it's going to work.

There's these details involved of it reads like a modern techno thriller. I don't think Fleming gets enough credit for techno thriller writing. I had, I guess I had assumed that James Bond books were going to be a little bit more like British and ornate and, or maybe like a little bit more a little bit more sort of classic spy type writing.

We're going to have the sort of spy who came out of the cold Alistair McClain style writing. No, it reads like Crichton, this missile and whatever. Interesting point number three, this was before the space programs got started. So Fleming's take on space technology, though specific is very wrong. So it's clearly he, he was just guessing, you know, this was the early sixties.

He was just guessing what would be involved in sending rockets in his world. His guest was like, obviously like you can't send a rocket very far without the fire melting it. So like the whole plot was around how this villain had cornered the market on this special material that could hold up to the flames of a rocket.

And that that was going to be the key. It's not even a ballistic missile. It's just a missile that can go a thousand miles. Sub ballistic required special material and just huge thing. And it was interesting. All right. Then this was speaking of techno thriller. So also on vacation, this was at the house.

I always try to find a thriller just like where I am. They had a Michael Crichton techno thriller that I had not read 2004's state of fear. My memory was I didn't read this. I used to read all the Crichton. I didn't read this one because I had heard it was sort of weirdly grumpily sort of like polemically anti-climate change.

Like the whole book was just him being grumpy. This is kind of what I had heard about, about, uh, environmentalist and climate change scientists. Uh, reality that's true. It does read as like he's, he was a grumpy guy, but I mean, it was, it was grumpy. He has these long, let me just, he, he has citations throughout the book and he has this character, this MIT professor whose whole job is to have conversations with a good intention, but annoying environmentally minded people who are like, but everyone just knows that blah, blah, blah about climate change.

And then the MIT professor speaking as a proxy for Crichton would be like, well, it's actually not true, blah, blah, blah. And then Crichton would put real citations under there. So I don't know. Someone got under his skin about this. Um, I think a green piece boat ran over his dog or something.

I'm not sure. So that is true. Uh, also it's not his best unrelated to that because it starts too slow. It's a, it's, it's 150 pages before you're really rolling at what the actual plot is. Once it gets rolling though, actually very well paced thriller, really great set pieces.

And we've got, there's one in Antarctica. That's pretty cool. The, and again, this speaks to his grumpiness. There's a, a actor who's clearly supposed to be Martin Sheen. It's an actor who played the president on TV. Actually yeah, that's right. The timing's right. He was like very environmentalist spoiler alert gets eaten by cannibals in the Solomon Islands.

It's anyways. So here's what I'd say. If you can get through a hundred pages, it's a, it's a fine paced thriller. He's good at pacing thrillers. Um, and if you don't like climate change, you'll love it, but it's also otherwise kind of annoying. All right. Uh, quickly, two other books.

Washington goes to war written by David Brinkley in the 1980s, David Brinkley, the former ABC news correspondent. It is a book about Washington DC and the transformation it made because of world war two. And the, the interesting thing about the book is that in the eighties, when Brinkley was writing this, the leaders, the people who were, you know, not 18 year olds, but were a little bit older during world war two, they were all dying.

And so there was this sort of race against time where he went to gather all these oral histories. And if you live in Washington DC, it's a cool book. It talks about how 1940 Washington DC is a sleepy, very Southern town. And by 1945, it's completely different thing. So if you live in DC, very interesting.

If you don't probably not well-written though, Brinkley's, it's a really good, really well-written nonfiction book. So hats off. And then finally, uh, Tolkien. The 2015 biography of Tolkien written by Raymond Edwards, caveat, M. Tur, it is an academic biography. So it really gets deep into the, the work academically that Tolkien was working on and its influence on the books he eventually wrote.

So this is, it's written by a scholar who's in a similar field and it's the study of, it's the study of ancient linguistics, but, but from a standpoint of using the language to try to recreate stuff about the culture and it's a very precise field. And so it can be a little bit rough going two things I'll point out about this.

Then we'll move on. Number one, uh, the reason why Lord of the Rings was so successful is that Tolkien just spent decades building a mythology for Anglo-Saxon England because there wasn't one. So there was a, a founding mythology for Norse culture. There's a founding mythology for Germanic cultures, uh, but it was lost.

Whatever this was for Britain was lost. And so he was basically creating one from scratch and he was to spend decades. He called it his legit legendarium. And he, and at some point he, he kind of moved away from it being specifically about England and about a sort of fantastical realm.

That is what he pulled from for the Hobbit a little bit and then deeply for Lord of the Rings. So he spent decades of work as someone who is, uh, it's called philology is what they called it back then an expert at ancient languages and its connection to culture and mythology.

And he had all of that worked out. So that's why when you read Lord of the Rings, it feels like one of these lost culture books where they're just referencing this rich, deep world. It feels like it's real. It's because he, he, he not only created this world, but he created this world with academic soundness.

I mean, this is a guy who for fun was organizing, uh, I I I Icelandic, uh, Icelandic mythology reading groups where they would read in the ancient Islandic languages, you know, saw Viking sagas. So that's why that was so good and why it's so hard. Nothing else really approaches the depth.

You get more of the rings that, uh, that sense of reality. If there's a deep culture here that just takes place on it's because it was like the world's expert on doing that, who spent his whole life doing it. Number two, it's a painful book to read if you're a professor, because the whole thing is about his frustration with academic administrative load.

I mean, his whole life was defined by being overwhelmed by academic load and, and, and non research type of work. And he was constantly short on money and constantly stressed out. And this was sort of post-war liberal England. So even after you couldn't just sort of leave and be like, I'm just going to write because even after Lord of the Rings became a huge hit, the taxation rates were such an England at the time that as Edwards talks about it, you know, it helped, but like, it didn't make him wealthy even at like a lower level.

Because you could lose like 80 plus percent of your royalty income like that. The government was like, thank you. So he was not, so that's, so it's not like he could. So even at the, the very height of his success, like he couldn't, wasn't making them that that wealthy.

Interesting. So it stressed me out, Jesse, though, all I was like, man, this is just like detailing. It makes modern academic life seem, um, free and flexible and great. I mean, Oxford in the early part of the 20th century just sounds like it was brutal. Just the work they would pour on you.

And it was in the infighting and it's an interesting portrait of academia. Talk about slow productivity though, when he was coming up with that world, right? Decades. Yeah. Yeah. Like the Hobbit, uh, it's a 10 year window between when he was like starting to work out the story for his kids and when he sort of finally published it, like you just spend decades on things.

Yeah. It's definitely slow productivity. Like you can't have Lord of the Rings without 20 years of, uh, philology. That's incredible. Yeah. So it was a cool book. Again, it's not super approachable. His son wrote a book. Christopher wrote a book that gets really into like his work habits and stuff like this and focuses more on the Lord of the Rings.

Like that's probably the better book than this, unless you like your into linguistics. (upbeat music)