Jordan Mattox

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November Reading List

My Struggle: Vol. 1 Karl Ove Knausgaard

This is the first volume in a six volume series of books that have been referred to as the modern-day Proust. The books are autobiography mixed with memoir mixed with some novelistic elements. The three major periods covered here are adolescence, a brief glimpse into a time before Knausgaard became a father, and then the aftermath of the death of his father. If you are looking for a straight-ahead narrative with a clear structure, this is probably not for you. If you are looking for some of the best writing and the most honest and vulnerable narratives I’ve read in recent memory, please check this one out.

The Lincoln Highway Amor Towles

I don’t typically read big, contemporary novels like this, but I heard from multiple people that this is one of those stories with a cast of characters who stay with you. I was not misled. Towles’ narrative has a way of absorbing you and the characters feel so real and relatable. The story follows two brothers on a journey to retrieve a missing car and along the way they meet a medley of characters and visit a diverse range of places. I would definitely encourage you to listen to the audiobook format of the book, which uses some great voice actors. Highly recommended.

One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This one has been on my list to read for years. Like many people, I’ve started and stopped this one many times, but this time I managed to persist and made it through. One of the more famous reviewers of the book said that this book is the the “first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” While that certainly sounds hyperbolic, it is not inaccurate. The story follows the Buendia family who found a town called Macondo on an unnamed island in the Caribbean. Marquez is the virtuoso magical realist and blends realistic family drama with the most fantastical elements, like endless floods, ghosts and sorcerers, and through all of that tells a meta-story about the history of Latin America.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention–and How to Think Deeply Again Johann Hari

This book, probably more than any other book this year, has caused me to radically rethink my relationship with technology and how technology is shaping us. After finishing this book, I deleted my personal social media accounts, deleted my email app from my phone, created a batching system for when I do check my email, limited the number of books I read at once, slowed down the speed at which I listen to audiobooks, and a lot more. The central thesis of the book is that our focus has been stolen by technology companies and other forces, and our ability to focus and concentrate on the things that do matter has been severely hampered as a result. While our society holds up tech industry leaders as innovators and disruptors, many of them are in fact destroying our ability to focus and profiting off of it. This may be the most important book you read in a long time.

December 6, 2022
Construction and Talent or Training Deficits

I just recorded a conversation with Bill Cummings from Legacy Construction about the state of the construction industry in the central valley. One of the takeaway points was that there are simply not enough project managers and superintendents to complete the work needed for the projects that they have under, or would like to have under, development. Bill claimed that their company would be twice its size if they could find the people that are needed. I imagine that this deficit will grow larger as many schools move toward more white collar professional pathways and toward college and away from the trades. There are some bright spots in the valley certainly, like CTEC for example, but we do have a long way to go to meet the needs of industry.

November 15, 2022
Leonardo and Leaving Things Undone

I just finished listening to Walter Isaacons’s nimble and brief biography of Leonardo Da Vinci and one of the things that I took away from the book was that Leonardo left many projects undone. Per my discussion yesterday of wandering attention while reading, I have often tended to feel guilt when I either left something undone or moved on from a task to something that seemed more exciting. I think that may incorrectly assume the purpose of a project is just to finish it. Perhaps, the purpose of a project can be to learn something that you need to do the next thing or to learn about what doesn’t interest you.

November 14, 2022
Reading One Book at a Time or Seventeen?

Many people share my malady of book lust. Here’s how the story typically plays out: you are reading a 1000 page biography of Sylvia Plath, for example, and you’ve reached a section where the plot slows and your eyes wander to the pile of recently purchased and library books. In the battle of wills, typically my wandering mind wins and I drop my half plowed field to go wandering through the forest of my interests. Occasionally, I am able to persist through one book at a time, but not usually. It is unclear which path is better for me.

November 13, 2022
October Reading List

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.

November 3, 2022
Borgen and Political Realism

I am making my way through Season 1 of Borgen and am thoroughly enjoying it so far. I agree with Tyler Cowen:

If you are looking for a new “intelligent TV show” to watch, this is my nomination. I don’t like this as much as my all-time favorite shows, but if you are only going to watch twenty good TV shows in your lifetime, this should be one of them. You don’t have to care about politics, much less Danish politics, but if you do that will make it all the more intriguing.

I also agree with this take from American Affairs (I definitely don’t agree with the whole take, which can be summarized as it’s not real enough and it does not include people from the bottom):

Despite its reputed realism, Borgen in fact presents a romantic view of politics, set within a hermetically sealed universe. In addition to its idealized main character, the show resembles the Arthurian romances in what it leaves out: as in most tales of the Round Table, we learn nothing at all about the ordinary people of the country. Throughout the first season, not a single scene so much as alludes to how the government’s decisions affect anyone’s survival or well-being. Every figure who appears on screen is directly connected either to the government or to the media.

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion about the fourth season and so I am trying to move along at a brisk pace.

November 1, 2022
Minimizing My Life and Making Time
I just finished a book by two former tech workers called Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day. The book pinpointed areas in my life where I could certainly improve how I use my time. The book is both philosophical and practical. And while I don’t agree with all of their points and findings, there are a few areas where I have made changes to my life following their prescriptions.
1. Delete Email App from my Phone: I am definitely the person who checks (now checked) my email on my phone compulsively. I probably check north of 100 times a day, which sadly is probably a conservative estimate. Since I deleted it from my phone and started batching email (I check now once in the morning just to make sure there are no emergencies and then in the afternoon to answer all of the emails), I have felt much freer and more able to focus on big projects.
2. Severely limit social media and TV time: I can binge watch a show with the best of them, spiral out on TikTok and Instagram, and watch every second of a 49er game, but when you live that way, your mind starts to match the medium that you are addicted to. While I still want to spend a good amount of time enjoying these amazing entertainment tools, I want to start to view them as treats and less like fuel to get me through the day.
3. Daily Highlights: I have spent so many hours filling out and reviewing endless tasks on my To Do List. What ended up happening most of the time though is that I would automatically complete the simplest tasks on my To Do List and put off the harder things till later in the day, which would make me less likely to do them. Now, I create one item that is my daily highlight that I build into the first part of my day, adding it to my calendar and blocking out everything else. I am finding that I am able to use the fuel of getting that one hard thing done to do a bunch more hard things as well.
October 28, 2022
The Street: Nico Muhly and Alice Goodman

I am not usually one to gravitate towards the harp when putting together my classical music playlists, but I really enjoyed The Street: Nico Muhly and Alice Goodman. The album contains two parts: Bach’s Partita No. 2 in C minor and the aforementioned piece called The Street. As someone not particularly religious, the beauty of the words, the plainchant, and the marvelous harp work by Parker Ramsay are enchanting and well worth the listen.

October 27, 2022
National Parks, M. Kat Anderson, and the Path Forward

I am working on a podcast about Galen Clark, which has led me to think a lot about the national park situation. Like many of you, I read the amazing Atlantic piece which argued we should return the land to indigenous people. I like the idea from a justice perspective, but I do think there are so many variables in how to implement such a large proposal that it may be just too difficult. Perhaps, a better solution would be to combine the forces of the national park service and utilize the knowledge discussed in M. Kat Anderson’s wonderful book Tending the Wild Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources to create a new amalgamation of the best ideas from indigenous communities and ecological science. We often are pulled by bulldozer style progress and then those who want to return to some Edenic past that just can’t exist. Instead, we need to look forward and take the best ideas from both worlds.

October 26, 2022
September Book List

1. The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency Tove Ditlevsen

This book received a lot of publicity in the past few years. Ditlevsen is considered one of the greatest Danish writers. These books, memoirs of different phases of her life, were published in Denmark in the 70s, but were published as a set of three in 2019. She has one of the clearest and most unflinching voices of any writer I’ve read recently. While the story seems uneven in terms of “plot,” the writing is of the highest quality.

2. What We Owe the Future William MacAskill

There was a lot of hype around the release of this book. MacAskill is the philosopher behind the effective altruism movement. And in this book, he is asking us to consider our ethical obligations to future generations. He makes some fascinating arguments for why we need to think long term. He looks at the average mammal species lifespan, and we are just at the start of the human experiment if we just hit the average. The metaphor that stuck with me was the idea that we are in the adolescence phase of our species and our choices now can have lasting consequences. An interesting book and I think I buy more than fifty percent of it.

3. The Carrying: Poems Ada Limon

This is the first collection of poems I’ve read by Limon, but I listen to her every morning on the Slow Down, my favorite daily poetry podcast that she took over from Tracy K. Smith recently. In this collection of poems, she wrestles with age, motherhood, boredom, mundane inspiration. What makes her exceptional is her conversational tone and tender honesty. Recommended.

4. Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future Margaret Heffernan

This is a super-smart exploration of uncertainty and the dangers of over-planning. It is one of the best books that I’ve read in support of uncertainty and experimentation. One of the underlying concepts is that we have little to no idea what’s going to happen in the future and trying to predict it, means you are trying to own it. Lots of super fascinating examples. This book was a financial times best of the book of the year and I’d highly recommend it!

October 14, 2022