📚 Books I read in June 2024
My notes and recommendatios on the 3 books I read in June 2024. Two Fiction and Two non-fiction books.
One of my goals for this year is to make reading my default activity. That's why I recently started a new segment in my newsletter, reviewing the books I read in the previous month.
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Here we go with the June 2024 edition, which includes 2 fiction and 2 non-fiction books, presented in the order I finished them.
📓 Peak Performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness
Peak Performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness
240 pages, First published: June 6th, 2017
The core idea of this book is to investigate and distill the ideal approach for achieving peak performance in a healthy and sustainable way, both in sports and at work.
The analogy between sports and knowledge work is not new. It originates from the background of the two authors: Steve Magness is a former athlete now coaching other athletes, and Brad Stulberg is a former high achieving consultant now coaching executives in the knowledge work sector.
It's an easy and relatively quick read, structured around 3 sections:
Section 1: The Growth Equation
Section 2: Priming
Section 3: Purpose
The first section focuses on what the authors call the growth equation:
Stress + Rest = Growth. This equation holds true regardless of what it is that you are trying to grow.
This section explores the need to deliberately alternate moments of muscular or psychological stress with rest and what makes up for good rest. They explore the topic of deliberate practice as the most effective way to push your limits and the importance of struggle.
Section two focuses on the power of routines as a critical way to prime yourself for performance. It touches on the importance of the environment you work in, as it significantly influences your results. The authors cover the importance of cutting out the noise to allow ourselves to focus on what matters most and the influence people we surround ourselves with have on us.
In the third and final section of the book, the authors explore the importance of transcending ourselves as a means to achieving even more excellent performance, citing many examples from sports and research.
One finding I found particularly interesting in this section is that physical fatigue occurs in the brain, not the body. Our brain shuts down muscles when they still have a few left to give as a protection mechanism.
Overall, it is interesting but not groundbreaking, as most of the concepts presented here come from other sources. I think it's a good summary of all the research on peak performance up to 2017 when the book was published.
📙 The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
908 pages, First published: September 21st, 2004
I finally finished the last book in the Baroque Trilogy, which I started back in March.
I must admit I felt a bit of fatigue when I attacked this tome, especially as the first part progressed relatively slowly. One of the main reasons for that was the almost complete absence of Jack Shaftoe — one of the series's main characters - for what felt like too much.
But the reappearance of the anti-hero in the book's second part abundantly makes up for the wait. His (mis)adventures in the trilogy's final chapter reach an all-time peak of boldness, extravaganza, and poetry. The final chapter is the culmination of the character's trajectory that went by many names through the saga: from Half-cocked Jack to The King of the Vagabonds to Jack the Coiner.
When I let the book down, I reflected on the insane amount of work Neal Stephenson had to put into research and writing to develop such a magnificent opus.
As I said in the reviews of the first two books, this trilogy is not for everyone. It's long, slow at times, and talks about a period where politics, science, and economics intersected in exciting and novel ways.
Reading this book is a good exercise in enjoying the attractiveness of taking things slowly. It's hard to rush 4000 pages full of details, digressions, complex characters, and different scenarios.
It's a great exercise in appreciating the craft of mixing fiction with historical events, with borderline obsessive attention to detail.
Even though you are supposed to read Cryptonomicon before the baroque cycle, I believe that's precisely the next Stephenson book I'll pick up after a short break of more accessible novels.
I covered the trilogy's first two books in a previous post, which you can find here.
📗 Trilogía Sucia de la Habana (Dirty Havana Trilogy) by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Trilogía Sucia de la Habana (Dirty Havana Trilogy) by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
447 pages, First published: January 1st, 1994
This book has been on my to-read list for so long that I completely forgot where I got the recommendation. My best guess is some radio program about books.
It's the first book I read from Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, but likely not the last one.
He's often referred to as the Cuban equivalent of Charles Bukowski. While there is some truth to that, these comparisons tend to miss out on some crucial, unique details. Let's say they're good enough for a recommender to suggest you read Gutiérrez books if you liked Tales of Ordinary Madness.
There are quite some elements that make Gutiérrez's work really stand out.
First of all is the context in which he wrote this book.
Trilogía Sucia de la Habana came out in 1994 in Cuba when the country was going through one of the worst crises in its history. It takes a lot of courage to publish a book that illustrates the misery — both material and moral — in which a big part of the Cuban population was forced to live or rather survive.
Gutiérrez does it with the brutality of reality in a way that resonates very well with the American pulp literature.
But while Bukowski didn't risk a lot when publishing his books, Trilogía Sucia de la Habana was banned in Cuba, but luckily found a lot of success in the rest of the Hispanic world.
On this background, the book is a collection of short stories, most of which revolve around the main character, Pedro Juan, a man in his forties who is constantly living in the present. Every day is a fight to earn enough pesos or dollars to indulge in food, rum, marijuana, and sex. Smuggling goods from the countryside to the city, digging through garbage, or prostituting are just some of the many activities he engages in to satisfy his daily needs.
The third book that makes up the trilogy is a bit different, as it focuses more on covering the remarkably unremarkable lives of other characters, each with their dark sides that make them profoundly and unapologetically humans while they struggle to survive.
While the author resists the temptation of engaging in lengthy rants about the Cuban regime, the reality he describes — though still a work of fiction — does a great job of making the economic, social, and moral issues self-evident.
If you're looking for a picturesque and romantic introduction to the Cuban culture and context in the nineties, this book is not what you're looking for.
But if you're ready for brutally honest and disturbing snapshots of life in that context, this book will satisfy your curiosity.
📘 Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
273 pages, First published: August 10, 2021
The title of the book reflects a simple calculation. If you were to live for 80 years, that would add up to approximately 4000 weeks.
I like this title as it reflects the primary intention of the book: to adopt a different perspective when thinking about time.
We're used to thinking about our lives in terms of years, not weeks. Years are long; therefore, we often believe we can cram everything into them. Weeks, in contrast, are short.
Once you realize you “only” have about 4000 weeks to spend on this planet, you'll have to accept that you'll need to sacrifice many things you'd like to do.
Burkeman himself used to be a productivity geek, obsessed with filling his time with “productive” activities, using time, and never really stopping to reflect on more profound questions around meaning, purpose, or happiness.
This book is a refreshing perspective on time management: one focused on living a better life, which is not synonymous with a fuller or busier one.
In Chapter 1, he cites the following quote from Nietzsche:
‘We labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because, to us, it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.’
Throughout the book, Burkeman articulates some powerful concepts, such as the joy of missing out, in stark contrast with the dominant culture of FOMO, which permeates both our physical and digital lives.
His justification is powerful in its simplicity: if you didn't have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn't truly mean anything.
He also talks about the efficiency trap; as you get more efficient with dealing with obligations, more obligations will only make you busier as the demands will increase to offset any benefits.
But the fundamental idea in the book can be summarized in the following quote:
Once you truly understand that you're guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven't experienced stops feeling like a problem.
Most of the book elaborates on this concept, offering principles and strategies to deal with our finitude in a way that can be a source of calm and happiness, aligning with and taking inspiration from Taoism and Stoicism.
Some people might find it repetitive, but I didn't, for two reasons.
On the one hand, the author keeps adding different perspectives, references, and stories that reinforce and support the key arguments. It's a well-researched book.
On the other hand, repetition helps to emphasize what is important. The tempting reaction, “This book could have been a blog post, " falls into the same pitfalls the book points at.
The glorification of speed and the act of confusing the action of skimming through an idea once with the thorough work of staying with it, contemplating it from different perspectives, and then making it your own.
This book goes straight on the list of books I will revisit regularly, as I think it will take a lot of deliberate practice to make some of those concepts part of my default approach to time.
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