​The Reading List Email: July 2024​

I have a very vivid memory of finishing and sending in the manuscript for The Obstacle Is The Way on a flight from Sydney to Perth in March of 2013. It must have been a little bit before then that I read Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country, one of the funniest and greatest travel books ever written. I picked it back up last week to re-read it because I’m heading back down under for two talks in Sydney and Melbourne at the end of the month (you can grab tickets here), and I’m bringing my family. It seems unreal to me that Obstacle could be ten years old… and also that Bryson’s history of Australia could have held up so well! His other books are amazing, of course. We carry A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Body: A Guide for Occupants and A Walk In the Woods at the bookstore. I suppose I’ll have to re-read Notes from a Small Island later this summer, too, because I’ll also be doing a talk in London. You can get tickets to my London, Dublin, Rotterdam, Vancouver, and Toronto talks here. Anyway, I hope to see you in person. I don’t get to do a lot of theater talks, so I’m excited/nervous about it. But mostly, I’m eager to swim in the rock pools in Sydney, which are unparalleled anywhere in the world… except Central Texas, which has not only Barton Springs (there last week), but a bunch of amazing swimming holes (detailed in this lovely book).

In other news, I was lucky enough to get asked by the New York Times to share my picks for the 10 Best Books of the 21st Century. It wasn’t an easy task, but I did my best. You might be familiar with the books I selected—I’ve recommended them here countless times—but if you haven't read them yet, check them out here.

​Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller (Audiobook)

Speaking of swimming, I found myself reading this book just down the street from the Blue Hole in Georgetown. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it. It’s a story about a fish scientist. It’s a story of the history of taxonomy. It’s a memoir of a woman who blew up her relationship. It’s a story about finding order and meaning in life. It’s somehow about all these things, even though it’s only a short 250 pages? I dunno, I just need you to trust me: It’s great. Very sweetly written. You’ll learn a bunch of stuff you didn’t know. And if you think it’s weird that I’m recommending a book about taxonomy, let me also tell you I have an all-time favorite book about taxidermy. It’s called Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals. It also should not be good, but it’s awesome.

​The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel (Audiobook)

Ok look, this is another book I should have listened to my wife about earlier. Was she right about Tunnel 29 being spectacular? Yes. Has she been right about most of the books she recommends? Yes. Have pretty much all the major misses in my life been things that she advised against? Also yes. But I dragged my feet on this. Maybe I would have read it sooner had I realized that Michael Finkel wrote another book I was fascinated by (The Stranger in the Woods). But really, I have no excuse. In any case, people, please, learn from my painful mistakes. Read this book! How is this a real story? How have I not heard about a guy who stole two BILLION dollars worth of art, which he decorated the attic apartment in his mother’s house with? Again, I have no explanations, only a heartfelt plea: Go read this book.

​Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road by Neil Peart (Audiobook)

There are some books that you simply cannot fully appreciate until you have kids. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is one of those books. Ghost Rider, which I read on Kindle in May 2010 (crazy, I just checked the dates–I bought it again exactly 14 years and 2 days apart), is another. Neil Peart, probably the greatest drummer of all time (of the band Rush), lost his 19-year-old daughter and then his wife 10 months apart. A car accident and cancer shattered his life… so he hit the road on a motorcycle, trying to preserve his “small baby soul.” As David McCollough detailed in his book Mornings on Horseback, when Theodore Roosevelt lost his wife and mother in the same house on the same day, he did something very similar. “Black care,” he wrote, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” Ghost Rider, although a very different style than Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country, is another great among the travel/road trip memoirs. It hit me very differently now that I have a family of my own, and because I now know that after Peart picked up the pieces of his life, he would be struck down by cancer in 2020. What a life and what a talent, though. I saw Rush on their 30th-anniversary tour in high school. I was very lucky to witness his greatness in person.

​Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality by Renee DiResta (Audiobook)

My friend Jordan Harbinger (who I just had on The Daily Stoic Podcast, listen here) pointed me to Renee’s book, which I read with horror and understanding. As hard as it is for me to believe that Obstacle is 10 years old, it’s even crazier to me that I started writing Trust Me I’m Lying in 2011! I remember thinking, as I worked on that book in New Orleans, “I hope I’m not too late with all this.” If anything, these ideas are more timely and more urgent now, as Renee points out. When people can make things trend… they can make things real. Sadly, people were much earlier to this stuff than either of us. When Renee was at The Painted Porch, I gave her a copy of Upton Sinclair’s (author of The Jungle) book The Brass Check. The Brass Check was written about media manipulation in 1919! Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is another classic and so is Daniel Boorstin’s The Image. If more people read these books and familiarized themselves with Reene’s work, perhaps we would not be so susceptible to demagogues and grifters and crazy people. But we are. (There’s a line in Sinclair’s book where he says in a country governed by public opinion, what forms public opinion governs the country). Media literacy is a foundational skill and if you do not have it, you are at the mercy of forces (and fools) you cannot even begin to comprehend. Thirteen years ago, I knew things were bad, but even I could not have imagined the consequences that would follow (the death toll from anti-vaxxers alone is mind-boggling). After reading this book, I shudder to think of what comes next…

Misc.

Keila Shaheen was nice enough to come out to the bookstore and sign some copies of The Shadow Work Journal (which Tony Gonzalez was nice enough to recommend to me last summer). Here’s a little video of me showing how I used one of my favorite journals (One-Line A Day Journal).

Kids

We just love Jon Klassen’s books in our house. We like The Skull and The Dark and I Want My Hat Back. Lately, my youngest has been a big fan of The Rock From The Sky and now we troll each other around the house with lines from the book. I am reading The Call of the Wild by Jack London to my oldest (we’ve been reading the Puffin Edition but I remember my father reading The Great Illustrated Classic to me as a kid). Also because of the Australia trip (again please come out!), we’ve been watching a lot of Bluey together. I happen to think this episode of Bluey might be the funniest 7 minutes of children’s television I’ve ever watched. And lastly, Gary Vaynerchuk just joined me on The Daily Stoic Podcast (keep an eye out for that episode, it's coming soon) and we talked about his new children’s book Meet Me In The Middle.

As always, I appreciate you supporting my bookstore, The Painted Porch. Please note that because a lot of the books we sell are backlist titles, there can sometimes be delays in stocking/sourcing. And with that, I hope that you’ll get around to reading whichever of these books catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Whether you buy them at The Painted Porch or on Amazon today, or at your nearest independent bookstore six months from now makes no difference to me. I just hope you read!

You’re welcome to email me questions or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of a good book on a related topic, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these books comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I’d never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it. This means that I treat reading with a certain amount of respect. All I ask, if you decide to email me back, is that you’re not just thinking aloud.

Enjoy these books, treat your education like the job that it is, and let me know if you ever need anything.

All the best,

Ryan