What I've been reading (Q1 '24)
- Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny. After reading Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile last year, I wanted to learn more about Churchill. Roberts’ Napoleon was not only one of my favourite biographies, but possibly in my top 10 books of all time (self-recommending), so I figured I could do worse than to start with his Churchill biography. Definitive yet accessible, Roberts captures the heroism and complexity of Churchill for a modern reader. I’ve been working through this 1,000 page behemoth on the Kindle, as my go-to sauna reading. Here’s Churchill’s resume at 25:
Before the new MP had even taken his seat, he had fought in four wars, published five books, written 215 newspaper and magazine articles, participated in the greatest cavalry charge in half a century and made a spectacular escape from prison. ‘At twenty-five he had fought in more continents than any soldier in history save Napoleon,’ a contemporary profile of him was to proclaim, ‘and seen as many campaigns as any living general.’
Michael Shelden, Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill. The image we have of Churchill in our collective memory is of him as an old man leading Britain through WW2, but I was more interested in his formative years—the crucible moments that forged him into the leader he would later become. I found this book which focuses on just that, covering Churchill up to 1915. The prose here is, like Churchill himself, endlessly quotable: “Believing himself a hero, Churchill worked the magic of making others believe it, too.”
John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. I’ve not yet read any Steinbeck novel, but I have a habit of reading a writer’s non-fiction works first, before diving into their fiction (Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running comes to mind). While working on East of Eden, Steinbeck would write a short letter to his editor every morning as a warm-up to his writing for the day. Reference on writing pace: Steinbeck aimed to write 1,000 words a day and completed the first draft of the 600-page book in 9 months. Like Murakami’s memoir, this is great book on craft and on the routines and mental fortitude needed to produce great work.
Chris Bailey, How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times (audiobook). A continuation bet from reading Hari’s Stolen Focus last year (which I enjoyed). “Idea book” writers, like Bailey, are a mirror to what society values at any given time. Case in point is Bailey’s arc from The Productivity Project in 2016 to this book in 2022. In that time, the vibe in the our discourse around work has swung from “how to do more” to “how to do less,” fuelled by the pandemic & remote work. But I think this is a pendulum and one that’ll swing back at some point. I didn’t find too much original insights here (boils down to: use your phone less, be offline more, etc.), but I nevertheless found it to be a soothing, comforting listen.
Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. I heard Ryan Holiday mention this book in an interview, which prompted me to check it out. He was talking about how we overvalue routines, pointing to how the guy who made a career out of writing about routines (Currey) has only published two books (this being one of them). I take his point, but I still enjoyed flipping through this collection. This description of Charles Darwin’s routine is a good summary of how the majority of artists covered in the book worked: “A few concentrated bursts of work, broken up by periods of walking, napping, reading, and letter writing.” And more importantly, they worked “with pleasure, not with any drag.”
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Enrol in any writing course and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style is bound to come up. While canon, that book was written in 1918 and shows its age. So Pinker, one of the great idea book writers today, set out to write a kind of writing guide for our times. One takeaway is how to write in “classic style,” which is about anchoring to a visual description of something in the real world, even when discussing abstract concepts. Recommend reading if you want to write clearer and better.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (audiobook) The only novel in this batch. I’d like to read more fiction going forward. I still haven’t made an earnest crack at War and Peace, this year’s literature project. I read an article about how Ishiguro wrote this book in a month, which made me want to read it. I found it a bit slow to get into at first, but the second half breezed by. One gets over the barrage of passive voices, indefinite pronouns, and circumlocution once one accepts that the narrator is a posh, old-school English butler and this is (presumably) what their inner monologue sounds like. I appreciated the themes here reminiscent of Tennyson’s Ulysses:
Don't keep looking back all the time, you're bound to get depressed. And all right, you can't do your job as well as you used to. But it's the same for all of us, see? We've all got to put our feet up at some point... All right, so neither of us are exactly in our first flush of youth, but you’ve got to keep looking forward.