2024 Bookshelf
Non-Fiction / Personal Development
Effortless: Make it Easier to do What Matters Most, by Greg McKeown
In the “sequel” to his first book Essentialism, Greg McKeown explains how to make doing what’s essential feel effortless. If nothing else this book served as a reminder that doing the things you love don’t have to be so hard. In fact, they can be enjoyable.
Non-Fiction / Immigration / Foreign Policy
The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, by Sonia Shah
It shouldn’t be surprising, but it was, to find out that immigration and our views of migrants are largely based on lies. For years people in power have been publishing lies under the guise of facts to deter us from accepting people from other countries looking for refuge in our own. The reality is that migrants bring with them vast wealth in the form of culture, family, and work ethic. They don’t commit crimes and degrade cities and towns the way media purports them to. Moving, leaving your home country, to seek new opportunities or to flee existential threats or persecution, is as fundamental a human trait as any. Sonia Shah lays all of this out and more.
Non-Fiction / Health / Processed Foods
Include this book in the processed food and food system curriculum along side The Omnivores Dilemma, Food Fix, Animal, Vegetable, Junk, and others. Robert Lustig pulls no punches in his attack on Big Food and the Healthcare Industrial Complex. He also provides a framework to allow anyone to better understand how to navigate the wold of processed food and to take back your health.
Non-Fiction / Personal Development
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, by Charles Duhigg
Some books teach you something new. Others offer a reminder of what you already know. And some do both. That was the case for Supercommunicators, by Charles Duhigg. We all know the importance of good communication, yet very few of us are ever taught how good communication is facilitated. As George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion it has taken place.”
Charles Duhigg is the author of The Power of Habit, a book I reference and recommend often as it profoundly changed my understanding of habits, their formation, and how to get rid of them. In Supercommicators he takes on our inability to properly communicate with one another. The key to good communication is the ability to connect with the other person. And in order to do that we need to understand what kind of conversation we’re having. In short, do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?
Non-Fiction / Health
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew Walker, PhD
I finally finished Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, Ph.D. The moral of the story, once you understand the power of sleep it is both terrifying and empowering. Terrifying because poor sleep quality or quantity is linked to chronic illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and stroke, to loss of memory, dementia, and Alzheimer’s, to low testosterone, and low libido, to a decreased ability to learn and an increased chance of accidents such as car crashes. But it’s empowering because what sleep taketh sleep also giveth. Click here to read more…
Non-Fiction / Politics / Foreign Policy
War Made Invisible: How America Hides The Human Toll of It’s War Machine, Norman Solomon
This is a book that every American should read. Regardless of your political leanings or fundamental beliefs, the fact of the matter is that the U.S. War Machine wreaks havoc around the world costing thousands upon thousands of lives to be taken or ruined. As an American this should concern your for one very important and selfish reason: All of the attention and resources (trillions of tax payer dollars) directed at war is attention and resources that our country is neglected of. Even if you cannot empathize with the lives impacted around the world, look around your own community and think about how much change could be impacted if we stopped fighting the world and gave our attention to our own citizens.
Non-Fiction / Personal Development
How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon
How Will You Measure Your Life provides a practical framework to shape your life and achieve the outcomes you desire. Using examples from business and their persona lives, the authors make success a tangible goal that will give anyone the confidence they need to reach it. “The type of person you want to become – what the purpose of your life is – is too important to leave to chance.”
Non-Fiction / Health / Personal Development
The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Healthy, Happy Self, By Michael Easter
They say that the key to life is being happy. But what exactly does that entail? Ask 1,000 people and you might get 1,000 different answers. It’s been my belief recently that happiness boils down to the ability to listen to and follow your intuition. But it’s occurred to me, and Michael Easter points out, that we now live in a society where our natural instincts are muted by all the “comforts” around us.
Non-Fiction / Cognition
The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language, by Steven Pinker
The first dense book I ever read was Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It probably took me 4 years to finish. During that time I read a lot of other books but I just couldn’t sustain Thinking, Fast and Slow for long and I’d always put it down in favor of something easier to read.
The reason I never gave up on it though was because it was gifted to me by a close colleague and mentor. And even though he’d never know if I finished it, I wanted to prove to him through way of the universe that I valued him and his recommendation. It turned out to be one of the most life changing books I’ve ever read.
Non-Fiction / Foreign Policy / Memoir
They Called Me A Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight For Freedom, by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri
A well written and eye opening account of a young Palestinian girl’s struggle to find hope and freedom while living under occupation and constant threat of imprisonment, injury, and even death. Her story will change your perspective about the ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel.
Non-Fiction / Agriculture / Food System
A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food, by Will Harris
In 2020 the pandemic revealed cracks in our food system and I became interested in learning more about it. In 2021 I leaned in a little more and worked part-time on a farm near Los Angeles. Through my reading and experience I became a believer that fixing the food system was a path to fixing most (if not all) the ailments we face as a nation. November 2022 I listened to Will Harris on the Joe Rogan Experience and the episode provided even more fuel and I started manifesting a trip to visit his farm, White Oak Pastures, to learn more.
Non-Fiction / Agriculture / Culture
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, by Wendell Berry
On a recent podcast Andrew Huberman recommended reading the works of Wendell Berry. I had never heard of him. But I did some research and found this interview, Going Home with Wendell Berry, which prompted me to buy, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Originally published in 1977, it remains today one his most well known and influential pieces of literature. In addition to being an author, Wendell Berry is an environmental activist, and has been a farmer in rural Kentucky since the mid 1960s. These credentials I think give him a unique perspective that’s hard to find.