Alright, well, it's our first podcast in July, so I think we should talk about the books I read last month, the books I read in June 2022. As long-time listeners know, my goal is to read five books per month, which I do by making reading a default activity, by not using my phone for distraction, and by scheduling reading blocks on occasion into my actual time-blocked work schedule.

So Jesse, I actually, for the first time, did not read five books. I read six in June. That's what I'm talking about. Well, because we had to deal with a week of COVID, so you can't do stuff, right? You can't go and do other things outside of the house, so I read an extra book.

While you were doing the RAR? While I was doing the RAR. I didn't RAR with COVID. I probably should have. You use it as an excuse, right? You're like, "Oh man, technically I have COVID, so like really..." You could have done the RAR. I need to eat. I need to eat whatever.

David Goggins would have told you to do the RAR. Yeah. David Goggins would have wrote. No, no. You use it as an excuse. I think we're leaving that phase, by the way, where people care and feel bad for you. So you leave that phase, like, "I got to eat like crap.

I can't exercise." Now you can. You know it's just stuff you get on the RAR. No, actually what I did... This wasn't during COVID, it was more recently. I did this five day, like kind of intense daily free weight routine. At your house? Yeah. But that was after COVID.

All right. Anyways, six books I read in June 2022. The order here is arbitrary. Number one, Ball Four by Jim... I think it's Booten. I think I'm saying that right. You've heard of Ball Four? Yeah, I have. The baseball book? Yeah. It's a baseball book. It was written in the early 70s about a pitcher, Jim Booten, who was a Yankee.

I mean, he was really good for the Yankees and then sort of became a journeyman for a while. Anyways, it was a book about a year in the life and it's actually written diary format. And it's famous because it was the first book about baseball that pulled back the curtain on what life was actually like for these professional athletes.

I mean, it gets into the amphetamines they would take and the carousing with women and the drinking. I think this was the book that first revealed, kind of broke the myth of Mickey Mantle, the fact that he hit a home run while drunk. And so it pulled back the curtain and it was sort of a big controversy, but it's really influential book for a lot of people because it was the first, this is what sports is really like.

I read it for a book group. I'm in a book group, Jesse. Not something I would normally think to do given how much of my life professionally I spend reading and writing, but it's a sports book only book group. And I read sports books as a way to relax because they're completely unrelated to what I write about normally.

So I figured that'd be a good book group to join. So you guys meet once a month? I mean, last night was our first meeting, so I've only done it once. The book was ball four? Ball four. Yeah. So I'm officially in a book group. The style is interesting in ball four.

It's diary. I mean, day every day, March 17th, April 28th. And he would take notes during the day and then talk into a tape recorder at night. And then it got edited. He had a kind of a ghost writer and they would edit it, but it's almost impressionistic, right?

I mean, if you read now a sort of sports autobiography, it'll follow through time, but there's plot lines it's following and it's written in a way that's a little bit more coherent. This is more impressionistic. This happened, here's an observation. You will come back to plot lines, but not in a very structured way.

I mean, it's almost like early modernism, cubism and art being moved over to narrative nonfiction. It's the Mademoiselle, the Dabin Young of sports book. It's just impressionistic and it's 500 pages of just doom and this and this happened and that happened. And over time it's very effective. You get a very layered understanding of life as a player without any carefully constructed narratives without carefully constructed structured chapters.

So there's some sort of interesting experimental thing going on. I haven't seen a lot of that in books since. Who was the manager then? So this follows the, I think the 69 season where he spent a year at an expansion team. It was the Seattle pilot, which then became the Brewers.

Got it. So it was interesting. All right. Other interesting book I read, Take the Gun, Leave the Cannoli by Mark Seal. It's a account of the filming of the first Godfather. So that's a, it's a quote from the first Godfather. Mark Seal, I think is a Vanity Fair reporter.

And I was going to California. I was going to wine country, Francis Ford Coppola, you know, has vineyards up there. And so it felt appropriate to read a book about the making of the Godfather. So it was interesting. And it gets into Rob Evans and Mark Puzo and, and, and, you know, how the movie came together.

And those are kind of interesting books to read. Yeah. And it's the 50th anniversary too, right? Yeah. Oh, interesting. And this is an older book, but my timing was good then. Yeah. The 50th anniversary is like a couple of months ago. Yeah. So Puzo went through this whole thing about the record for paperback rights.

So Puzo got, I think 500,000 for the paperback rights to the Godfather would set the record. And because Stephen King got 400,000 for Carrie kind of around the same time. So that was, that was the sort of records back then for rights was like four or $500,000. And that was back when paperback rights were something you sold separately.

And that's where you made all your money no longer today. All right. Then I read every tool is a hammer by Adam Savage, former myth busters. It's his memoir, an interesting memoir. He'll work in advice about workshops and making with the story of his own life and his personal philosophy.

Adam Savage, his critical connection to this show we do here is that he has the cave, which is this really cool warehouse in the mission district of San Francisco, which is his personal workshop. And it's this a cool, amazing space he goes to. And part of the inspiration for the deep work HQ was that he, he has this, this was his dream to have a dedicated space that what he does is builds things.

And it's this huge, cool workshop. Just like we have a dedicated space to come and record and in theory think. And so I liked the cave. I like his videos on tested.com. Interesting guy. Did it talk about the cave in the book? Yeah. And he started his first cave was like in a basement of a rental house.

And then after myth busters was doing really well and he made, made money is when he leased out, leased out this space. It's interesting there. I think they're having crime problems in the neighborhood. Like they don't, they don't nearly as much anymore. Have cameraman come film in there. He'll self film himself in there, which he was doing during COVID during the, like the lockdowns, but then he kept doing it even though now it's obviously not COVID concerns because he does lots of videos with other people in other places.

And I heard him say somewhere that it's because the cars are getting broken into so he can walk to the cave from his house. So he can go there and film himself. But when a crew would come just like clockwork, their cars are getting broken into. So there's a lot of self filming happening.

There you go. A little bit of, uh, Adam Savage trivia right there, but it was a good book. He talked, I mean, it's, you'll learn about glue, but also learn about, you know, his time at ILM and his struggles. I mean, so it's like, I think it's a really creative book.

I enjoyed it. All right. So next I read Cod by Mark Kurlansky. I like Kurlansky. There was a period in the, this would have been the early two thousands where these books were really big, where you would take one topic, uh, Kurlansky wrote Cod and then he wrote salt, but there was like a book about pencils that was really big at this time.

And you take one topic and you go deep on that topic. And in going deep on that topic, you learn a lot about history. And Cod was one of the first books to do that. I, I, I, when I lived in new England, I read this and salt. I love those books.

So it's the history of Cod and Cod fishing, but you learn the history of Europe and colonial America and all of these different things, um, beautifully written and he mixes it with recipes, but historical recipes. Like here's a recipe for preparing Cod from 1727 and it's all mixed together.

It's a, it's a really nice, uh, innovative, beautifully constructed book. So it was a reread? That I think I probably read at some point. Yeah. Back in new England, 10, 15 years ago. Have you tried any of the recipes? Well they're historic recipes. So we have cooked Cod though.

Cod's good. Uh, then I read, cause this is my weird compulsion. I don't know why I read these books, but I keep reading these types of books. Uh, another Bill Carter book, desperate networks. So Bill Carter is, you know, New York times TV reporter, desperate networks. It's just a book about like a five year period after NBC's must see TV lineup was, you know, friends and Seinfeld had all kind of disappeared and how NBC fell and ABC and CBS made their move.

So ABC got lost in desperate housewives and CB CBS got CSI. It just, that's it. Like Bill Carter just writes these books every so often years, he'll like take a period of time and write about it. So the last one I wrote, read by him and talked about on the show is late shift about what happened after Johnny Carson retired.

I don't know why I'm so interested in these books about the inside baseball of network television, but I find them relaxing and interesting. Basically just comes down to ratings and that just gets more advertisers, right? Is that how it's determined? Yeah. And, and, well, but how these shows come together, it's all kind of guesswork.

I, I, so I'll tell you the, the anecdote I've extracted from this book, that's going to make it into slow productivity. I'll preview this anecdote now because I'm always reading, looking towards anecdotes. They talk about CBS was really struggling and I think it was less moonves who took over.

I might have that wrong. I'll go back and I listened to it, but I have to buy the book to get the quotes out of it. And he was upset that the offices were emptying. There'll be three o'clock on a Friday and the office would be half full and he's a people aren't taking at the CBS headquarters there in in Manhattan where I've been, because I've done some CBS stuff.

People aren't here. We need energy. He's like, NBC was number one. They probably had a lot of energy. So everyone has to be in the office. You can't leave till after five. And if you step back, you say, yeah, under him, CBS did rock it up to be much more successful.

Why I think it's an interesting anecdote though, is as Bill Carter gets into exactly what happened, why did CBS become more successful because all of the executives and ad people and HR people are in the office till five? No, it was because of CSI. And when you hear the story of CSI and Bill Carter, it's actually the story of a, of someone spending a lot of time thinking through and polishing this concept.

And it's a slow productivity parable. Less moonves thought was important for success is that everyone was busier and more visibly active. And in the end, what actually saved the company was something that was very slow and creative. And there's this story of this, this television writer who had, had, had a, had gone up in his career and had fallen and had gotten obsessed with this idea and slowly developed something of such value that it saved an entire network.

So I'm going to pull that together in the book. You'll see when the book finally comes out into a cool reversal anecdote about, you know, less moonves didn't save the company by making everyone more busy, but instead it was this guy whose name I forgot, but we'll obviously learn, um, slowing down and, and, and inhabiting this idea that ended up actually making the difference.

So there's a little proto idea that by the time it comes into my book will be quite polished. So that, that alone made it worth reading that book. I think a final thing I read, it was June summer. I love to read adventure books and thrillers. I read David Morrell's first blood.

So first blood it's known now is the first Rambo movie. So John Rambo is the, this is the book that introduced John Rambo, but people don't remember properly the lineage of Rambo. So first blood is this, this book about political polarization post Vietnam. And it's, uh, it was used to be taught in colleges a lot.

And it's, it's really the plot of the book is that John Rambo, former green Beret, who had been, had this traumatic experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and is now sort of a drifter, just sort of walking through across the countryside has a run in with the, the straight lay police sheriff in this small town.

And I think it's in the, I forgot where it is in the movie at specific Northwest. I think this is like Virginia or something. And he snaps and, uh, he snaps the PTSD snaps. He kills one of the police officers flees into the woods. The police come after him.

Long story short, he basically kills everyone, but the chief and then the national guard comes back and it says back and forth. But the way David Morrell wrote the book is alternating viewpoints, Rambo police chief, Rambo police chief. And he was very clear that there's no clear hero or anti-hero.

It's not, this is the good guy. This is the bad guy. The whole point of the book was the ambiguity. To kind of understand the police chief and the he's, he's been divorced and the issues he's having his life. And you understand Rambo and the PTSD, and you're not even sure who's the good guy, who's the bad guy.

And that was the whole point of the book, because that's the weird ambivalence of the post Vietnam era polarization. It was this messy time where it was unclear who was right and who was wrong. And so it's actually like a really interesting book and they made it into the movie first blood, the first Rambo movie starring Sylvester Stallone.

And the movie is not like you think about with Rambo. I mean, it's a, it's shot like today we would see it more like an indie film. It's in the early seventies and it's a small movie. I did invent some very important tropes that this is one of the very first sort of had some of the very first tropes that action movies of the eighties would then pull from, but it's not a, it's not a recognizable shoot them up action movie.

So it's, it's, it's like a small movie. I rewatched it. I've had some, some guys that we do a movie club. We rewatched it not too long ago. Then after that was very successful, they did Rambo two and by Rambo two now, Sylvester Stallone has biceps roughly the size of a cantaloupe and he's holding M sixties under both arms and has the red bandana and he goes back to Vietnam and he's, you know, the body counts pile up.

It became the cliched sort of this weird over the top Reagan era rah, rah, rah movie. But first blood was not that. And the first blood movie was not that. So I went back and read the original novel. Um, that's pretty good. He it's, he just kills everybody, but he's, it's, it's psychologically interesting.

Like there's, he's broken and the police chief is at anyways, in the end they both die. They kill each other in the spoiler alert. They kill each other in the end. I mean, it's kind of an interesting book, but David Morrell said after the second Rambo movie came out, they stopped teaching the book in colleges because the second Rambo movie was very much associated with like rah, rah Reaganism and you know, mindless action and it tainted his original work and they stopped teaching it.

So there you go. David Morrell first blood. All right. Those are my six. What was the beast of a book that you were reading like back in the springtime? Um, did you finish it? I don't know. I've had a, I've had a few beast recently. I don't know which one in the spring might've been the beastiest.

I'd have to go back and look at our, are you still working through like a beast of a book right now? Franklin's a beast of a book. Yeah. I'm 200. I mean, ball four was a beast of a book just in length. It's not hard. It's not a hard read, but it's 500 pages.

Franklin's five or 600 pages. And it's small. It is making me feel old. It's reading glasses small. You know, probably read a lot of books about Franklin, right? Yeah. I mean, I read Gordon Woods book, uh, Americanization of Ben Franklin and Gordon. What is great Gordon? What is, uh, well, brands is an academic too, but what is, um, the most academic of the semi-public facing writers about colonial history.

So he's great on the philosophical context of, of the revolution, like the, the currents of thought going on in England and specifically like what Jefferson had read and what was going on, uh, the, the impacts of these various rebellions that were happening in the English countryside in the 18th century and how they influenced what was happening in America.

So like, if you really want, I think what's at Brown, he's more academic brands is he's a distinguished professor at UT Austin, but he writes more. He's a beautiful writer, but he's also like McCullough or someone he, he, he's writing for a non-academic art audience, but that's a piece of a book that's 600 pages.

Um, so that, that might take me a minute. Yeah. I'm reading four books concurrently right now. I just, I'm jumping between things. I'm finding things I like. I'm just, I'm just all over the place right now. Any audio? Yeah. Um, what am I listening to an audio? Ooh, golden eye.

It's a book. It was, it's free on audible right now. So if you have audible, it's free right now. And it's the story of the house that Ian Fleming built in Jamaica when he turned 40. And it's where he wrote all the James Bond novels. So it's, it's a Jamaican history.

Like what was going on in Jamaica. It's the colonial relationship between Britain, Jamaica, who was living there, all these different my, uh, lesser aristocrats and others, and Ian Fleming coming there and building this house and, and where he, he wrote all of his books. And so I'm enjoying that.

Here, I'll just give the quick bullet. I always say I'm always pattern, pattern matching, interesting bullet points. The interesting bullet points is one. So after the war, so, you know, Fleming served, uh, with intelligence during the war. This was, if you want to look up, uh, British privilege after the war, he went to get a job at, at a paper and he was going to be the foreign reporter for some paper run by Lord someone, someone he's like, here's the thing.

I need three months off a year to go to Jamaica and Lord so-and-so was like, good show old chop. That's fine. You can take three months off a year so you can go to Jamaica. That seems reasonable. So then he goes and builds this house. So he'd visited Jamaica in the war.

And so he goes and builds this house in Jamaica and just partying is partying at this house. It's not very nice. I mean, it's a beautiful overlook in the water, but the house it's, it's, uh, there's no windows. It's just Louvers. So it's like full of bugs at night and the bathroom doesn't really work, but you know, he's just partying and womanizing.

So he builds it when he's 40, he's just out there drinking and womanizing and then gets his mistress pregnant when he's 43. Now he's all freaking out. He's like, I can't be a dad. I can't raise a kid or whatever. I don't know. He's all freaking out. So she's like, look, you need to distract yourself.

Um, yeah, you can't just be carousing womanizing. Why don't you write like while you're out here? And so at 43, he's out there at Jamaica freaking out about having a kid and writes casino Roy, casino Royale. Wow. And he gets it down to a science where he can write these, he, the, he writes one novel per annual Jamaica visit.

So in three months, one novel right in the morning and again in the afternoon, overlooking the water with the swim in between. Yeah, he's got it figured out. The downside is he smoked 80 cigarettes a day, which if you do the math is constant, it has to, you have to light one with the other.

So a spoiler alert, Ian Fleming did not live to a ripe old age, dead at 57, but he did some damage. Anyway, so I'm listening to that. So, so more, more on that when we report on the July books. (upbeat music)