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Good Monday Morning! We are excited to welcome the 378 of you that joined the Reading Journal last week.

🧠 Reading Facts

📷 Bookshelf Humble Brag

📚 Staff Pick of the Week

🎥 Reading Talk's

📈 Rising Quickly - Week of August 22, 2022

🪄 Most Talked About Fiction  - Week of August 22, 2022

✍️ Most Talked About Non-Fiction  - Week of August 22, 2022

🆕 New and Noteworthy

📖 Reading Journal Book Club

In 1971, passionate technologist and futurist Michael Stern Hart was given access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois. Inspired by a free printed copy of the Declaration of Independence, he decided to transcribe it into the computer.

He made the file available to other users of the computer network, with the annotation that it was free to use and distribute – marking the beginning of the legendary Project Gutenberg, an initiative dedicated to making books freely available in digital format.

📷 Bookshelf Humble Brag

📚 Staff Pick of the Week

Rapt is a masterful analysis on all bridges of attention and how it impacts our lives. Published in 2009, the book is reaching its teen years, but offers a relevant and fresh outlook on the importance of living a focused life.

Drawing research from multiple renowned scientists, professionals and peak performers, Gallagher synthesizes the role of attention in our lives with comprehension and clarity. Citing a personal tragedy that would demand attention, Gallagher realizes that what you pay attention to ultimately determines the quality of your life and went on the pursuit of research to support this hypothesis. Gallagher’s work shows the role of attention on all aspects of lives including work, leisure, relationships, friendships, and family. She shows that turning your attention the right way can greatly improve the way you live.

More than 10 years after it’s been published, the ideas portrayed in Rapt hold true today. Much has changed throughout the past decade, and being able to pay attention for longer periods of time seems to be becoming a forgotten art. This is a book for those looking to understand attention, or those simply looking to improve their lives. It is a captivating read that will leave you wanting to pay attention in a more deliberate, positive, and reflective way.

🎥 Reading Talk's

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis.

Recommended by Barack Obama.

🪄 Most Talked About Fiction  - Week of August 22, 2022

The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city.The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her. Now all Blandine wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads.Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents—especially Blandine—go to achieve it? Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale about the tensions between loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.

Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster-care system: three boys and one girl, Blandine, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her. Now all Blandine wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads.

Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents—especially Blandine—go to achieve it? Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale about the tensions between loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.

📚 Most Talked About Non-Fiction  - Week of August 22, 2022

As a homeless teenager writing college essays in her rusty Toyota Corolla, Emi Nietfeld was convinced that the Ivy League was the only escape from her dysfunctional childhood. But upward mobility required crafting the perfect resilience narrative. She had to prove that she was an “overcomer,” made stronger by all that she had endured.

The truth was more complicated. Emi’s mom was a charming hoarder who had her put on antipsychotics but believed in her daughter’s brilliance—unlike the Minnesotan foster family who banned her “pornographic” art history flash cards (of Michelangelo’s David). Emi’s other parent vanished shortly after coming out as trans, a situation few understood in the mid-2000s. Her own past was filled with secrets: mental health struggles, Adderall addiction, and the unbecoming desperation of a teenager fending for herself. And though Emi would go on to graduate from Harvard and become a software engineer at Google, she found that success didn’t necessarily mean safety.

Both a chronicle of the American Dream and an indictment of it, this searing debut exposes the price of trading a troubled past for the promise of a bright future. Told with a ribbon of dark humor, Acceptance challenges our ideas of what it means to overcome—and find contentment on your own terms.

🆕 New and Noteworthy

In his New York Times bestselling book Courage is Calling, author Ryan Holiday made the Stoic case for a bold and brave life. In this much-anticipated second book of his Stoic Virtue series, Holiday celebrates the awesome power of self-discipline and those who have seized it.

To master anything, one must first master themselves–one’s emotions, one’s thoughts, one’s actions. Eisenhower famously said that freedom is really the opportunity to practice self-discipline. Cicero called the virtue of temperance the polish of life. Without boundaries and restraint, we risk not only failing to meet our full potential and jeopardizing what we have achieved, but we ensure misery and shame. In a world of temptation and excess, this ancient idea is more urgent than ever.

In Discipline is Destiny, Holiday draws on the stories of historical figures we can emulate as pillars of self-discipline, including Lou Gehrig, Queen Elizabeth II, boxer Floyd Patterson, Marcus Aurelius and writer Toni Morrison, as well as the cautionary tales of Napoleon, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Babe Ruth. Through these engaging examples, Holiday teaches readers the power of self-discipline and balance, and cautions against the perils of extravagance and hedonism. 

At the heart of Stoicism are four simple virtues: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Everything else, the Stoics believed, flows from them. Discipline is Destiny will guide readers down the path to self-mastery, upon which all the other virtues depend. Discipline is predictive. You cannot succeed without it. And if you lose it, you cannot help but bring yourself failure and unhappiness.

👀 In Case You Missed It

📖 Reading Journal Book Club

September's Book is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is the creatives equivalent of Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins. It's an ass-kicking manifesto on “breaking through blocks and winning our inner creative battles”. It's also one of the most recommended books on this site.

Pressfield took a radically different, no-bullshit approach to writing this book. It focuses on every creatives' arch-nemesis—The Resistance—and how this enemy can stop us from achieving anything if we let it.

"Why do so many people fail in their artistic endeavours and creative projects?" Pressfield asks. The answer: "Because each of us has to defeat an incredibly strong inner enemy."

More than just a self-help book to overcome procrastination, The War of Art is a call-to-arms on professionalism, artistic integrity and drive, whatever your field may be. It's essential reading for any artist, writer, UX designer or creative professional.

"Steven Pressfield has written the most important book I've ever read on creativity and why it doesn't happen. The resistance is the most profound force in the life of the artist, the writer and the leader, and Steve has given it a name and called it out." —Seth Godin, author of This is Marketing

The War of Art is recommended by David Perell, Ana Fabrega, Alex and Books and 20 others.

✍️ Quote of the Week