Jordan Mattox

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World Andrea Wulf 

This book has been sitting in my Kindle, almost since publication, and I finally got to it seven years later. Humboldt is a name we recognize from places named after him, but many (myself included) have no clue who he was. Humboldt was an amazing polymath who inspired generations of scientists, writers, philosophers, and naturalists–people like John Muir, Thoreau, Darwin, etc. The list could go on and on. His book about the journey through South America and his writing and research about ecological zones were probably some of the most important writings in the 19th century. Overall, a fascinating human who has been mostly lost to history. Highly recommended.  

In Praise of Wasting Time Alan Lightman 

I have mentioned other books by Lightman, who writes some amazing science books that combine his gifted prose style with wonderfully clear descriptions of abstruse scientific concepts. This book is different. Here, Lightman is writing a self-help book focused on our attachment to the grid and lost ability to spend time frivolously (I don’t mean this word in its pejorative sense). Lightman wants us to detach from the digital merry-go-round and enjoy lazy afternoons, walks, and play. He makes a pretty persuasive case that our attachment to digital devices are trapping us in unhealthy cycles and creating dependencies that hamper our growth and decrease our happiness. 

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon Colin Bryar and Bill Carr 

While I do not support some, or a lot, of things Amazon does, and has done, to our world, it would be impossible to deny what an amazing achievement it is to handle the level of complexity and create the products and services that this company has done at scale. This book is written by two former executives from the company, and they explain, in occasionally excruciating detail, how Amazon operates and built the services that they offer. There were quite a few particular anecdotes and concepts that were interesting and worth applying in more work context around single-threaded leadership, avoidance of PPT, hiring processes, and more.

Leonardo da Vinci Walter Isaacson  

I love a good biography and Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is one of my favorites, which, if you haven’t read, you should definitely add it to your list. Before reading, I had a cursory understanding of Da Vinci, informed by random anecdotes and the one art history course that I took in college, but I would say I didn’t have an understanding of the person behind the mythology. The book shows him to be a genius with a mind that wandered between projects, painting, and passions. I appreciated the connection between his genius and his tendency to leave projects undone. One fact that I knew little about was his obsession with dissections, both of animals and humans. Not my favorite Isaacson biography, but the subject matter was fascinating enough to hold my attention to the end.  

Cost of Living [a play] Martyna Majok 

This is one of those books that you might happen upon in the library stacks that is like a landmine for the mind. The play follows the relationship between two groups of people, one able bodied and the other not. The first couple is Eddie, the unemployed truck driver, and his ex-wife Ani, who is left quadriplegic after a terrible accident. The other pair is John, a PhD student with cerebral palsy, and Jess, an immigrant bartender and first generation college grad whom John hires as his aid. The play seeks to undermine our assumptions about certain kinds of people and leaves the reader in awe and haunted. Highly recommended. 

Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are John Kaag 

I think that a lot of us have stereotypes of Nietzsche–I certainly do. In particular, growing up religious, he was on the list for me as one of the villains. But I never invested the time to read him, in part because I always viewed him as someone that rebellious teenagers resonate with, which isn’t altogether wrong. That’s why this book was a welcome read for me to try to see him with fresh eyes. John Kaag, a philosophy professor, was one of those rebellious teenagers described above. The premise of the book is that he is returning to hike the same trails Nietzsche hiked and that he did as a college student to try to understand Nietzsche’s mind and philosophy through the landscape. The highs are high in this book, and there are definitely periods where he is describing hiking that are bland and maybe go on a few pages too long.