A Year in Books - 2018
Books and quotes that shaped not only my writing, but me as a person, over the past twelve months.
Everyone who has spent some time with me or has followed my writing knows how important books are to me and what an impact they have had — and continue to have — on my life.
And 2018 was a great year for reading.
Over the past year I’ve settled into a routine that puts a heavy focus on reading.
Reading fiction just before going to bed has been a habit of mine for a long time now. But more recently non-fiction also got its dedicated place in my daily routine. Straight after waking up (and making a coffee), and importantly before turning on any electronic devices, I read for 30 to 60 minutes.
In that way, most of my days both begin and end with books.
Investing in yourself is by far the best investment you can make, and there are few better ways of doing that than reading widely.
This is not limited to non-fiction.
While the benefits of non-fiction are often more obvious and direct, fiction is at least as powerful at teaching us more elusive skills such as empathy. And lessons wrapped in gripping stories told by relatable characters often stick much more strongly than the direct instructions or explanations of even the best non-fiction book.
In this article I want to share with you the 38 books that I read this year.
If you have followed my writing you might have already seen some of their influences in many of my articles. In fact, I started writing in order to become a better reader, taking notes and paying closer attention to what I consumed. And much of my writing is directly based on the books I read, interwoven with my own personal thoughts and experiences.
The non-fiction books clearly have the more direct impact on my writing, many articles being based on specific books. So I will start with those, in chronological order in which I read them.
Initially I wanted to give a short summary of each, but then decided that this would get way too long and drawn out. Instead I decided to pick a single quote from each. Something that is both memorable and in many cases also actionable.
Boiling entire books down to single quotes wasn’t easy and I obviously had to omit many great things, but I hope it will wet your appetite and make you pick up some of these books yourself.
In addition to the quote, I have also included links to my articles that were influenced by a particular book, as well as a link to the book notes of that book (in those cases where I added them to my site yet). So if you want to read more, those are good starting points. As you will see, I’m a bit behind with my writing, there are still many great books here that I haven’t yet written about. But those books haven’t been forgotten, and most of them will find their way into my future stories in one way or another.
After the non-fiction books, I will do the same for the fictions books, sharing with you one memorable or just generally interesting quote from each.
So without further ado, here are the books that shaped 2018 for me.
Non-Fiction
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (Alex Soojung-Kim Pang)
“When we treat rest as work’s equal partner, recognize it as a playground for the creative mind and springboard for new ideas, and see it as an activity that we can practice and improve, we elevate rest into something that can help calm our days, organize our lives, give us more time, and help us achieve more while working less. […] Rest is not idleness!!”
Article: In Praise of Deep Work, Full Disconnectivity and Deliberate Rest
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr)
“Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts — the faster, the better.”
Article: Our Evolving Interaction With Technology
The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph (Ryan Holiday)
“Failure puts you in corners you have to think your way out of. It is a source of breakthroughs.”
Article: Cultivating Your Inner Citadel
Article: The Art of Taking Action
ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever (Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson)
“Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is home because she figured out a faster way”
Article: The Corruption of “Sense of Urgency”
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anne Lammott)
“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
Article: If You’re Lost in the Forest, Let the Horse Find the Way Home
Remote: Office Not Required (Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson)
“Offices have become interruption factories. A busy office is like a food processor — it chops your day into tiny bits.”
Article: Where do you go when you really want to get some work done?
Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy (Mo Gawdat)
“For human beings, simply put, the default state is happiness. If you don’t believe me, spend a little time with a human fresh from the factory, an infant or toddler. Obviously, there’s a lot of crying and fussing associated with the start-up phase of little humans, but the fact is, as long as their most basic needs are met — no immediate hunger, no immediate fear, no scary isolation, no physical pain or enduring sleeplessness — they live in the moment, perfectly happy.”
[Side note: Out of all the books here, this is the only one I can’t really recommend. See my note at the end of the following article for the reasons.]
Article: Happiness is Not an External Thing to be Found
Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex (Aubrey Marcus)
“DO LESS, DO IT BETTER!”
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (Steven Pressfield)
“The more Resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art/project/enterprise is to you — and the more gratification you will feel when you finally do it.”
Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (Seth Godin)
“The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. […] Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.”
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Anders Ericsson)
“The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of ‘good enough.’ The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in.”
Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln: 21 Powerful Secrets of History’s Greatest Speakers (James C. Humes)
“The pause is your most powerful tool in speaking. […] The pause may seem like an eternity to you, but to your audience it is a microsecond — a microsecond that ‘punctuates’ the sentence, builds audience anticipation, and helps listener understanding.”
Show Your Work (Austin Kleon)
“Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.”
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships (Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha)
“No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied — including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all of this bloody retribution, it’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers — even presidential legacies — for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.”
Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work (Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal)
“Ectstasis [and altered states are] an information technology. Big data for our minds. […] And what you’re after is quality data.”
The Storm of Creativity: A Storm’s Eye View (Kyna Leski, John Maeda)
“Creativity is making connections or making the existing connections visible. […] Creativity is a path with no beginning or end. What you create is never an end point. Creativity per se has no formal output. Rather it is an ongoing process.”
Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly (John Kay)
“Direct approaches make a distinction between means and ends that often does not exist in reality. […] Oblique approaches often step backwards to move forward. […] The oblique problem solvers do not evaluate all available alternatives: they make successive choices from a narrow range of options.”
Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing — Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth (W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne)
“If you want buy-in, surprises do not tend to go down well in most organizations. Even good surprises may be rejected if the process leaves people feeling discredited and rolled over. […] Human dynamics is something many leaders gloss over.”
Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl)
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (Mitchell Whitelaw)
“The artist first creates the systems of the virtual world […] then becomes a gardener within this world he has created.”
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Susan Cain)
“The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers — of persistence, concentration, and insight — to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems. make art, think deeply.”
Fiction
Seveneves (Neal Stephenson)
“As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.”
On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
“‘Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.’
‘Where we going, man?’
‘I don’t know but we gotta go.’”
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick)
“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
On A Magical Do-Nothing Day (Beatrice Alemagna)
“The air was so damp. I knew this smell from when I was small — my grandparents’ basement. My cave of treasures.”
Neuromancer (William Gibson)
“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…”
Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists… it is real… it is possible… it’s yours.”
Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)
“It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words — are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?”
Dune (Frank Herbert)
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
After the Quake (Haruki Murakami)
“The whole terrible fight occured in the arena of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.”
The Woman in the Dunes (Kobo Abe)
“One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.”
Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)
“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.”
Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
“Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”
Side note: This book inspired me to name a track I produced this year after it.
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (Ryunosuke Akutagawa)
“The human heart harbors two conflicting sentiments. Everyone of course sympathizes with people who suffer misfortunes. Yet when those people manage to overcome their misfortunes, we feel a certain disappointment. We may even feel (to overstate the case somewhat) a desire to plunge them back into those misfortunes. And before we know it, we come (if only passively) to harbor some degree of hostility toward them.”
The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
“If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”
Besides the books mentioned above, there were a few more that I read in a slightly different way, not the usual cover to cover.
Over the course of the year I finished most of Coffee with Tim Wendelboe (Tim Wendelboe). It took me almost a year to read because I actually read the Japanese version (which I got signed by Tim) as part of my Japanese studies.
There are also some books that I picked up on a regular basis.
Particularly Ryan Holiday’s wonderful The Daily Stoic. It’s got one Stoic quote plus a little bit of modern context or elaboration for every day of the year. Reading each day’s “lesson” has been part of my morning routine for quite a while.
Two other books that I regularly took from the shelf if I felt like I needed some additional inspiration or motivation were Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors.
I hope you enjoyed these quotes and found some books that you want to explore for yourself.
Personally I have a long list of books I want to dive into over the next 12 months and I’m already excited about all the mental adventures they will take me on. Some of the treasures I will find there I will certainly share with you in my writing.