A Year in Books - 2019
49 books and quotes that shaped and inspired me in 2019
For as long as I can remember, books have been an important part of my life. Some of my earliest memories are of my mum reading books to me. And as soon as I could read myself I started devouring books and building my own little library.
This year my relationship to books has developed an entirely new level: I started writing a book myself: Time Off! And it has become by far one of the most meaningful things I have ever done. I can’t wait to share this book with the world in the first half of 2020.
A book is not written in a vacuum. As Cormac McCarthy wrote, "books are made out of books,” and this is certainly true for Time Off. Reading and researching were some of the most important (and time-consuming) parts of the writing process. As a result, the daily reading routine I developed in 2018 got even further solidified this year, with mornings being reserved for non-fiction, and evenings for fiction.
Below I want to share with you the 49 books I have read this year, as well as one interesting or memorable quote from each. You will definitely notice a strong bias towards books and quotes related to Time Off, but there are also many other topics and ideas in this list.
When reading non-fiction, taking extensive notes is part of my routine. For those books where I have already transcribed my notes, I included a link to them.
And now, without further ado, here are the 49 books that shaped my year 2019.
Non-Fiction
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (John McPhee)
“If your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer. […] If you tell people that you ‘just love to write’, you may be delusional.”
Form + Code: A Guide to Computational Aesthetics (Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams)
“The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”
- Sol LeWitt
Leonardo DaVinci (Walter Isaacson)
“Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”
- Leonardo
Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (Matthew Walker)
“Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset out brain and body health each day.”
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative (Austin Kleon)
“Do the work you want to see done!”
Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day (Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky)
“Being more productive didn’t mean I was doing the most important work; it only meant I was reacting to other people’s priorities faster.” - Jake Knapp
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Cal Newport)
“Digital Minimalism: A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”
It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson)
“Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity. […] The answer isn’t more hours, it’s less bullshit.”
The Five Hour Workday: Live Differently, Unlock Productivity, and Find Happiness (Stephan Aarstol)
“If you were done with work by 1 pm ever day, it’s easy to see how you, depending on your interests could become a different type of productive. Productive in exercise, learning, parenting, social causes, community and more. Productivity that advances society, and creates a better world around you, goes far beyond merely being productive at your job.”
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (Jim Collins)
“The main point is to first get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before your figure out where to drive it.”
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win (Jocko Willink and Leif Babin)
“Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame.”
Leisure: The Basis of Culture (Josef Pieper)
“Leisure […] is a mental and spiritual attitude - it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a week-end, or a vacation.”
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari)
“Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. […] Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.”
The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High Tech World (Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen)
“The impact of boredom is not just to make us switch between information patches; we also seem to have lost the ability to simply do nothing and endure boredom. This leaves little time for reflection, deep thinking, or even just simply sitting back and letting our random thoughts drive us places we might not have gone while immersed in direct thinking.”
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (Al Ries and Jack Trout)
“The basic issue in marketing is creating a category you can be first in.”
Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad (Austin Kleon)
“Worry less about getting things done. Worry more about things worth doing.”
How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Jenny Odell)
“In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative.”
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays (Tim Kreider)
“One of the dancers asked whether Annie and I were really married […] ‘Just friends’, I answered after a telltale hesitation. ‘Liar’ she said. I mean, it’s true, we were having sex. But this was more in the spirit of two people who happen to have a common enthusiasm for an extremely fun activity, the same way two guys who both enjoy drinking or chess might say ‘It’s five o’clock somewhere’ or ‘How about a quick game?’”
I Will Teach You to Be Rich: No Guilt. No Excuses. No BS. Just a 6-Week Program That Works (Ramit Sethi)
“Automating your money will be the single most profitable system you ever build.”
Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It (David Graeber)
"There seems to be a broad consensus not so much even that work is good, but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he’d like at something he doesn’t especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief."
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Michael Pollan)
“Psychedelics are far more frightening to people than they are dangerous.”
Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World (Michael Harris)
“A frantic, distracted mind may be broadly characterized as ‘wandering’, but one requires a luxury of empty time before the mind can be expected to engender fresh insights. True wandering requires a long leash.”
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Peter Drucker)
"If there is any one ’secret’ to effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time."
How to Not Always Be Working: A Toolkit for Creativity and Radical Self-Care (Marlee Grace)
“Identifying what is not your work can be one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself.”
Degrowth (Giorgos Kallis)
“By logical necessity economic growth must come to an end, independently of what one measures or how. Constant compound growth of anything quickly runs to infinity.”
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel (Rolf Potts)
“The first step of vagabonding is simply a matter of making work serve your interests, instead of the other way round. Believe it or not, this is a radical departure from how most people view work and leisure.”
The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance (Josh Waitzkin)
“In virtually any discipline, one of the most telling features of a dominant performer is the routine use of recovery periods.”
The Scribe Method: The Best Way to Write and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book (Tucker Max and Zach Obront)
"Your audience doesn’t care about your book; they only care what your book GETS THEM.”
Principles: Life and Work (Ray Dalio)
“I believe that what’s most important is to know one’s own nature and operate consistently with it. […] The happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.”
This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See (Seth Godin)
“People don’t want what you make. They want what it will do for them. They want what it will make them feel. […] Empathy is at the heart of marketing.”
Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones (James Clear)
“Making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily habits - not a once-in-a-lifetime transformation."
Fiction
The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)
“By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules.”
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
“To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I’.”
The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
“We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that pertains to our questions...this especially applies to what we used to call bad things...the challenge is to find the silver lining in every event, no matter how negative.”
[Side note: This book is the only one on this list I can not recommend to anyone. Redfield is trying to sell his new-age pop psychology and pseudo-scientific BS vaguely wrapped in a shallow and predictable narrative, with bad writing and structure. I was shocked to see how popular and successful this book was.]
Burning Chrome (William Gibson)
“The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.”
The Dharma Bums (Jack Kerouac)
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges)
“There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought and we surrendered ourselves to it.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
Birthday Girl (Haruki Murakami)
“No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.”
The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)
“People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.”
Hyperion (Dan Simmons)
“In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.”
A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini)
“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”
The Sirens of Titan (Kurt Vonnegut)
“His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand—passive resistance and open displays of contempt.”
City of Thieves (David Benioff)
“I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”
Quicksilver (Neal Stephenson)
“You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin, and our feeble university men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long, they simply say it in Latin.”
Others
Why My Cat is More Impressive Than Your Baby (The Oatmeal)
Since this is a collection of comics, here’s a comic rather than a quote.
How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems (Randall Munroe)
"If you want to beat a high jumper, you have two options: 1. Dedicate your life to athletic training, from an early age, until you become the world's best high jumper. 2. Cheat."
I hope you found some inspiration in these quotes and are maybe considering picking up a few of the books yourself. If you still haven’t had enough quotes, here is my list of 2018.
And with that, I wish you all a great start into the new year! And hopefully one of your books in 2020 will be Time Off.