This month, I am attempting to blog regularly to get my writing skills back into practice. My original goal was to write a post every day, but I didn’t set aside time over my birthday weekend to write anything. Maybe I will stick to writing every weekday. Regardless, my goal is to write regularly.
Last month, I focused on reading. In the month of September I read:
- Hiring The Best by Martin Yate
- The Four-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss
- The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein
- The Last Policeman by Ben Winters
- Countdown City by Ben Winters
- World of Trouble by Ben Winters
- The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer
- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman
- Anything That’s Peaceful by Leonard Read
- Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney
- Thinking As A Science by Henry Hazlitt
- The Science of Success by Charles Koch
- The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
- Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
- The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis
These books fell into three general categories which dominate my overall reading: economics/philosophy, management, and fiction. In total I read 16 books in 30 days at a pace of roughly two days per book. Sure, the last 4 books from the Narnia series (which I still want to finish) are children’s books. But on the other hand, The Problem of Political Authority was difficult and required a lot of attention!
There weren’t many within economics/philosophy, but my favorite was The Problem of Political Authority. Huemer did a knockout job in the first half of the book and provides a lot of ammunition for anarcho-capitalists arguing with statists about the necessity and moral authority of governments. In finally getting around to Anything That’s Peaceful, I was struck with the importance of faith to Read’s case for a free society. His central thesis aside (which I found convincing), Alex Epstein reminded me in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels how energizing Objectivists can be because of their love for life.
While I was not completely sold on the interviewing and hiring system outlined in Hiring The Best, it demonstrated to me the importance of a system. I wasn’t blown away by the findings presented in Willpower but the evidence in favor of willpower’s existence, importance, and potential for cultivation was interesting. Thinking As A Science was underwhelming and felt like more of a pet project than a worthwhile contribution. While I was already familiar with many of the concepts in The Science of Success due to my work in the libertarian movement, I was surprised to see how well it meshed with The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Paul Erdos, the subject of The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, was an interesting and funny character but the book didn’t draw me in to the mathematical topics.
The majority of my reading in September was fiction. The The Last Policeman trilogy was a real pageturner that drew me in to the world so much that I woke up the next morning thinking the world was really going to end in a few months. My favorite book was Countdown City, full of humorous insights for a detective novel. World of Trouble was a well-executed finale. I don’t have much to say about the Narnia series, but may write a separate post about it when I finish the other three books.