The Books I Read In December

The new year means, as is our new tradition here on the podcast, it is time to go over my reading list. So as long-time listeners know, my target is usually to read about five books per month, and we've started the habit of at the beginning of each new month reviewing the books I read during the past month.

So now it is time to talk about the five books I read in December 2021. Are you ready for this, Jesse? I'm ready. Let's go. All right. So the first book I completed in that month was How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor. This is basically a George Lucas biography that has some pop culture reporting on the Star Wars phenomenon.

Now, you might remember this, Jesse. This was controversial. We talked about this back in December when I was reading it. I asked the listeners, "Is it okay that I am skipping the chapters that are about the cultural reception of Star Wars?" So early on, the book started going back and forth.

It would be a chapter from the timeline of George Lucas's career, so biography. And then it would switch to a chapter that would be about, "Here's a group of guys that dress up like stormtroopers and who they are and what's that like." I was not so interested in the cultural stuff.

I wanted the biography. This is part of my ongoing effort to—my movie effort. I'm reading book after book about various people in the movie industry for some weird reason. So I asked the audience if it was okay if I skipped that. Jesse, you gave me the thumbs up on that, I believe, if I'm remembering.

Yeah, that was okay. That was okay. Well, so here's the thing. I have more defense for my approach because he stopped—the author, Chris Taylor, stopped doing that switching before, I don't know, two-thirds of the way into the book. And so it became straight biography, really, for the end of it.

So in the end, I probably only skipped, I don't know, 30% of the material. So I'm going to count that. So as I mentioned, this is part of my random project to really dive into the film industry. This is maybe the fourth or fifth book I've read in a row that is on that topic.

I'm not sure why this is interesting so much, but it really has been this fall. I really wanted to learn about George Lucas, having finished the biography of Steven Spielberg the month before. And a few things I learned. One, Lucas was a really good director. So in this scene, there's this scene centered around USC where there was Lucas and there was Coppola, and Spielberg wasn't at USC, but he was in their circle.

Scorsese was in their circle, among some others. Brian De Palma was in their circle. So it's this big group of directors, and they all knew each other. In that circle, Lucas was considered a hotshot. So he had this great animated student short that won a bunch of awards and put him on the map.

Like, wow, Lucas is the guy that he's the auteur. He's the guy with the vision. And then he did the student version of THX, which also blew people away. So I think people didn't realize that about Lucas. Coppola really was trying to get Lucas to direct Apocalypse Now. But Lucas decided to do Star Wars instead, basically.

So he was considered like the artistic guy. So that's kind of interesting. The other thing I found out about Lucas is, like these other guys, timing is important. Him and Spielberg came up just as the movie industry was changing, just as they were leaving the studio system. So Coppola's first movie was Finnegan's Rainbow, which was a classic studio soundstage movie.

Then he did The Godfather. So it was like right as they were transitioning away from the studio system. And they invented this idea of the blockbuster, where you could have a movie that appealed to all these different age groups and could be in 3,000 theaters and make all this money.

And so their timing was right. They were talented. And Lucas, even more so than Spielberg, had a relentless go-big ambition. So if he was going to do a movie, just like a student movie, he was going to do THX student movie, he was going to find a way to get access to an abandoned military base and push the setting, push the technology.

He was going to make a movie where you're going to say, "Wow, this is a lot bigger than I thought someone with that budget could do." And that was the approach that made Star Wars big. He was like, "We're going to invent new technology for the special effects. It's going to be bigger than anyone's ever seen." Clearly James Cameron picked up that torch from Lucas after the fact.

So anyways, that's what I learned about Lucas, is this guy was incredibly talented, incredibly ambitious. He was going to do everything bigger than anyone had ever done it before, and really, really focused. Also, very rich. I don't know if you know that. Yeah, he's like a billionaire, isn't he?

Yeah, he's a billionaire. Were you a Star Wars guy, Jesse? I've seen some of the movies, not all of them. Probably not as much as you are. Is Lucas and Spielberg friends? Yeah, yeah, they were friends. They all knew each other. And they were going back and forth. It's hard to overestimate how much money they were making.

And I think that's what made Star Wars so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular.

I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular. I think that's what made it so popular.

I love that idea of having land with a name. I love that idea of having land with a name. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill.

I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill.

I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. I think this one's called Goose Hill. - Well, somewhere there, hopefully you'd have a writing shed so that wouldn't get burned down, so you could just escape to there. - Yeah. Well, that is my dream, is I want a writing shed, and I don't have room for a writing shed.

and I don't have room for a writing shed. It is a dream of mine, so I need... I was having this conversation. For real, I was having this conversation with two different people in the last month, writers, who have a getaway plot. writers, who have a getaway plot. It's kind of an interesting model.

A place they go... It's not like a large cultivated land, and it's not nice, it's quiet. and it's not nice, it's quiet. And they have a place to write. So I have a writer I was talking to who lives right outside New York City in a town that's kind of like Tacoma Park, and about 90 minutes up 87, he has some land, I guess that'd be like the southern Cascades.

There's a little writing shed. And then another guy, a good friend of mine, was telling me, he lives in Chicago, in the city in a row house, and they just bought a plot that is four or five acres, near one of the... I don't know what the Great Lake is, near there, but whatever that is, Lake Michigan.

It's not on the water, it's one lot in from the water. And it has like an old barn, and they're planting an orchard on it, and they can get there in 90 minutes as well. And he's building, he was showing me these plans, like a fireman forest fire watch tower.

You know, like you would build, they used to build to look for forest fires, and at the top of this tower, so it's like an elevated gazebo. And that's where he's going to do his deep work, because you can see the lake. How does he get up there? Does he take an elevator?

It could be a ladder. It's like icy up there. Well, you know, a little bit of danger gets the heart going. So I'm excited about that. So I don't know, maybe this is, I like this notion of having a getaway plot, that it's not super hard to maintain, you don't need like a really big house, but the key to a getaway plot is, I think it has to be non-trivially sub two hours away.

If it's two hours or more, you can't go and write for a day and come back. Yeah, I see that. Two quick points. I, there's no doubt in my mind that you'll find something like that. I've been listening to your stuff for a long time, and I think you'll find it eventually, because you talk about it a lot.

And then, secondly, in terms of self-help books, I was listening to Ferris' podcast recently, and he quoted you on giving him a suggestion for the self-help book that he read when he wasn't even going to read new books. So that was kind of cool. I just listened to that recently.

Yeah, that's a good book. So it's Oliver Berkman's book, "4,000 Weeks." I talked about it, I told Tim about it, and then Tim read it, and then Tim did the thing that I think every publisher wishes would happen. I said, "Tim, I believe he, you listen to this, he released the first chapter, the audiobook version of the first chapter of Oliver's book on his podcast.

Is that right? Yeah, I just listened to it, actually. Man, could you imagine having the first chapter of your audiobook on Ferris' podcast? So "4,000 Weeks" is a cool book. I read it a long time ago, because I blurbed it. I read it back before it came out. And it's a great concept.

It's called "Time Management for Mortals," and 4,000 weeks is roughly how many weeks you live. Oliver's whole point is most things you're not going to get done, you have a very limited amount of time. All these wild dreams you have, most of them won't happen. And be okay with that.

And spend more time enjoying what you do have and what you can do, and don't be so aggressively goal-oriented. It was that book hit a nerve well before Ferris mentioned it. That thing was, yeah, that thing crushed it. I think it's one of the better-selling in our world of the people we know that write the sort of New Yorker-style self-help.

He's a Guardian guy. He's a very smart guy. I think that book is the one that really crushed it this year. I'm very happy for Oliver. I've always loved his stuff, and he's been very kind to my stuff. So, circle goes around. All right, one more book. I finally read some Wendell Berry.

So I don't know, do you know any... He's not as well-known as I thought. Have you heard of Wendell Berry? No. Cool guy. He's old now. He's in his 80s. But he went... grew up in Kentucky on a small farm. Went to New York City. Got educated. I don't know, Columbia or NYU or something.

Got sort of overly educated. Got a writing job in New York City. He wanted to be a writer, and he was going to do the whole modern cosmopolitan writer thing, where you live in a city. You're not from somewhere. You're just observing things around the world. And for whatever reason, he's like, "I don't like this.

I'm from Kentucky. I want to go back to Kentucky. I want Kentucky to be my muse. I want to be from a place and write about the place. I don't want to be just this abstraction writer that just is commenting on the world from a cosmopolitan detached place. I want to go back." So he moves back to Kentucky, gets a professorship at a small Kentucky college near where he grew up.

Him and his wife buy... I think it's 12 acres. Like a hobby farm. He grew up farming, but this is not a production farm. He's like, "We're going to live on 12 acres. I'm going to be a professor, and I'm going to write about Kentucky." And then another plot became available.

"We should probably buy that." And then another plot became available after that. "We should probably buy that." And he ends up with a real production farm, 100-plus acre farm. And this is why he's awesome. He's like, "I'm not into this whole gasoline thing. I'm going to farm the way I learned to farm, which is teams of horses." And he still...

I mean, he doesn't farm. He's 80 now. But all throughout his career, he never went to tractors. He farmed with horses. This guy's awesome. So he leaves New York to farm with horses this farm in Kentucky, rural Kentucky, and is a novelist poet, but mainly an essayist. And he writes essays.

He writes a series of essays, Bill McKibben-style essays about the economy and the environment, and a very influential writer. And writes it from this farm where he doesn't own a computer and you can't read. If you want to talk to him, you have to call the farmhouse and come out to the farm.

He's an awesome guy. And they just released the first definitive essay collection where they pulled together. It's called "The World Ending Fire." This came out in 2019. If you get it, you'll love it. And I think Nick Offerman, who I also love from Parks and Recreation, Ron Swanson, who by the way is a guy who lives in LA, is a working actor, but also has a giant woodworking wood shop in a light industrial warehouse in LA.

And he spends a lot of time building canoes. Like Ron Swanson, he does the intro or the prologue. So on the audio book, Nick Offerman reads it. Anyways, so I read my first collection, full collection of Wendell Berry essays. Are you going to take a field trip out there and check it out?

I should, man. This guy's awesome. He has an essay in there that I might write an essay about for my newsletter that's called "Why I Didn't Buy a Computer," which is cool. And I think this was the '80s when he wrote this essay. And he's like, "Look, here's my rules for technology." And it's very much like I wrote about in Deep Work, where I go and I talk to a farmer, Forrest Pritchard, and say, "Farmers care.

Farmers have pretty strict criteria for when they're going to spend money on a new tool, otherwise they'll go bankrupt. And we should have that same strict criteria when thinking about technology. We shouldn't just say, "I don't know. I heard about TikTok. I should probably use it." We should have a farmer's mindset.

That was my point in Deep Work. It'd be like, "What's the value? What's the cost? Is there better ways to get that value?" Wendell Berry wrote this essay about this in the '80s. I didn't know about this. He gave this whole list of, "Here's how I decide whether or not to use a new technology, and the computer doesn't pass that test." He published it in Harper's.

But what's cool about it is he got in trouble. The whole thing is in the essay collection. He wrote this essay. He's like, "I don't need a computer. See if you can see the part here we got in trouble." He's like, "Yeah. I write my things longhand, and my wife types them up, and we're good." That got him in a lot of trouble.

In the essay collection, Harper's published a lot of these letters, and they published the letters in the essay collection. Then a lot of people got mad about that. They say, "Oh, well, you have a great technology called Wife, and that's how you actually blah, blah, blah." Then he wrote an essay in response.

This is like analog Twitter. You're like Twitter, but if Twitter was in Harper's magazine, and there was a week between every ... He writes this thing in response, and he's like, "Basically, screw you. You don't know our family. You don't know how our marriage works, or this or that." He goes on this big, long, whatever.

He's like, "Why are you all so defensive? I must have touched a nerve saying I don't need a computer, and you're all so mad at me. You're all techno-determinists, apologists." It's really interesting, this heated back and forth. This was kind of interesting. He introduces this very grounded in farming idea of home economics, which is quite different than what you would see in suburban D.C., where it's all salary, job, dual-income government families.

He's like, "We have a home economy." It's a very farmer way of thinking about it, and that we all are ... Everyone in the family, me and my wife, we're all part of. We have this farm we run, and there's all these different things that have to happen, and this fence has to get repaired, and the milking has to happen, and the horses have to be fed.

I don't know how it works. We're all just working on everything as part of keeping this very incorporated, this household economy functioning, which is a very pre ... When you're not thinking about salaried work, but I'm producing from land, it's the way you think. It's like we have endless things that have to happen that we're all working on and trying to keep collectively our farm running.

He thought of his article writing, he just placed it in that same context. He's like, "Yeah, these articles that go out as part of what keeps the household economy running, we're all just part of it. I do some writing, she does some editing, we do some whatever. It's just like I put the staves on the fence, and you whitewash them." It was really interesting to see this clash that was happening.

It's like a culture clash. He was coming from a world where you owned land, and that was your source of income. It was very ... You're a ... I don't know what the right term is, but like yeoman farmer type thing. I'm trying to make a living off of ...

Our family's trying to make a living off of our land. We all work together to try to do it. He was coming from that mindset, but in the '80s, everything was shifting towards most people weren't on farms. Most people weren't running their own small businesses in town, where just the whole family works at it, the donut shop to keep it running.

It was salaries, and it was typically dual income salaries. This whole discussion about work and meaning and who's working and not working, all of that was just beginning, and this "Why don't buy a computer?" came out, boom, right as that was happening. You could see in that frision this is when this huge cultural shift was happening.

That was a cool part of the book, is in this essays and the letters and the back and forth, you can see these worlds colliding. In the collision, you actually got more insight than what any individual essay or letter was saying about. It was a very dialectical thing. It was really cool.

In the collision of Barry with these letter writers in the '80s, you got more insight into the changing culture than you got from just reading any one individual essay about that period. I just wanted to point that out. It was a pretty cool part of the book. You should send him a letter, because earlier you were talking about how your friend saw you mention on Twitter, but this way you only get in touch with him if you send him a letter.

That's literally how you get in touch with him, by the way. I know. You should do it. That's how reporters do it. That's how this essay book came together. You have to send him a letter, and then he may answer. He's very old now. Probably doesn't get much mail.

Yeah. I wonder what that's like. If you only do letters... He probably liked getting mail. But it's the Internet age. Does he get a lot of... I'm sure he gets a lot of stuff from publicists, like books, where you blurb this, that type of stuff. Anyways, Barry's a cool guy.

I'm going to read some more Barry. That's what I read in December 2021. I'm deep into working on January 2022 books, and we will check in at the end of this month with how my current reading is going. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

The Books I Read In December | 2021

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