14 years ago I set the goal of reading 100 books in a year. (spoiler alert: I failed to achieve this goal but I did read a lot more than I would have had I not set the goal)
A few years later, I read this great post visualizing our life in weeks (from Tim Urban at Waitbutwhy).
Then in 2024, Dino Ambrosi came to my school to launch Project Reboot (here is a TEDx
talk he gave making great use of this graph and helping our faculty and students understand how it can be a useful tool to think about how we use and fail to safeguard our time.
After his talk, whenever I thought about possibly consuming media, I remembered to think to myself about
the ratio of time it took to produce the content compared with the time it would take me to consume it: if the ratio was high enough and I had the time and inclination, I would try to consume it. This led me to try reading a lot more books and long form content and try to read a lot less news.
As I watched my behavior, I realized that my habits were getting in the way. I would have an itch to pull out my phone and read the news and I realized that I was not mindful enough yet to resist it. So, in 2024, I bought myself and my wife two Kindle eReaders, and I connected to the Libby App. Whenever the itch arose to read the news, I would rewire my brain, pulling out the kindle instead. The following timeline represents the raw data of my borrowings since that December 1.5 years ago:
Going through it with a finer tooth come (removing duplicates and books I didn't finish), I have the following books read (or listened to) over that 1.5 year period:
| Book Title | Author |
| Martyr! | Kaveh Akbar |
| The Fire Next Time | James Baldwin |
| Big Dumb Eyes | Nate Bargatze |
| Talking It Over | Julian Barnes |
| Utopia for Realists | Rutger Bregman |
| The Meaning of Your Life | Arthur C. Brooks |
| Hyperbole and a Half | Allie Brosh |
| Solutions and Other Problems | Allie Brosh |
| The Body | Bill Bryson |
| Meditations for Mortals | Oliver Burkeman |
| Possible Side Effects | Augusten Burroughs |
| Something Deeply Hidden | Sean Carroll |
| Influence, New and Expanded | Robert B. Cialdini |
| Atomic Habits | James Clear |
| The Other Significant Others | Rhaina Cohen |
| Born to Flourish | Richard J. Davidson, Cortland Dahl |
| The Emotional Life of Your Brain | Richard J. Davidson |
| Why Is Sex Fun? | Jared M Diamond |
| Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | Philip K. Dick |
| Turing's Cathedral | George Dyson |
| QED | Richard P. Feynman |
| The Character of Physical Law | Richard P. Feynman |
| What Do You Care What Other People Think? | Richard P. Feynman |
| The FBI Way | Frank Figliuzzi |
| Running the Dream | Matt Fitzgerald |
| Man's Search for Meaning | Viktor E. Frankl |
| Abiding in Mindfulness, Volume 3 | Joseph Goldstein |
| Abiding in Mindfulness, Volume 2 | Joseph Goldstein |
| One Dharma | Joseph Goldstein |
| Think Again | Adam Grant |
| Hidden Potential | Adam Grant |
| Originals | Adam Grant |
| Mastery | Robert Greene |
| The Anxious Generation | Jonathan Haidt |
| Happiness | Thich Nhat Hanh |
| The AI Con | Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna |
| Nexus | Yuval Noah Harari |
| Lost Connections | Johann Hari |
| Magic Pill | Johann Hari |
| Stolen Focus | Johann Hari |
| Making Sense | Sam Harris |
| Visible Learning | John Hattie |
| ADHD is Awesome | Penn Holderness, Kim Holderness |
| When Einstein Walked with Gödel | Jim Holt |
| Endure | Alexander Hutchinson |
| When We Were Orphans | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| An Artist of the Floating World | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| Nocturnes | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| A Pale View of Hills | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| Klara and the Sun | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| The Vegetarian | Han Kang |
| Parent Management Training | Alan E Kazdin |
| Grace | Cody Keenan |
| Braiding Sweetgrass | Robin Wall Kimmerer |
| The Singularity Is Nearer | Ray Kurzweil |
| The MANIAC | Benjamin Labatut |
| Relationship-Rich Education | Peter Felten, Leo M. Lambert |
| Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12 | Peter Liljedahl |
| Sensemaking | Christian Madsbjerg |
| Do Hard Things | Steve Magness |
| Born Standing Up | Steve Martin |
| Greenlights | Matthew McConaughey |
| Why Fish Don't Exist | Lulu Miller |
| Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World | Haruki Murakami |
| Sputnik Sweetheart | Haruki Murakami |
| Norwegian Wood | Haruki Murakami |
| First Person Singular | Haruki Murakami |
| What I Talk About When I Talk About Running | Haruki Murakami |
| Born a Crime | Trevor Noah |
| Happy Money | Elizabeth Dunn, Michael Norton |
| The Memory Police | Yoko Ogawa |
| Untangled | Lisa Damour, Ph.D. |
| A World Appears | Michael Pollan |
| Figuring | Maria Popova |
| The Overstory | Richard Powers |
| Fair Play | Eve Rodsky |
| Yearbook | Seth Rogen |
| Run Like a Pro | Matt Fitzgerald, Ben Rosario |
| The Everyday Parenting Toolkit | Alan E. Kazdin, Carlo Rotella |
| Seven Brief Lessons on Physics | Carlo Rovelli |
| Helgoland | Carlo Rovelli |
| Anaximander | Carlo Rovelli |
| White Holes | Carlo Rovelli |
| Knife | Salman Rushdie |
| Everything in Its Place | Oliver Sacks |
| Gratitude | Oliver Sacks |
| Last Acts | Alexander Sammartino |
| Vigil | George Saunders |
| In Persuasion Nation | George Saunders |
| Pastoralia | George Saunders |
| The Braindead Megaphone | George Saunders |
| The Best of Me | David Sedaris |
| Little Weirds | Jenny Slate |
| Lifeform | Jenny Slate |
| If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies | Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares |
| On the Hippie Trail | Rick Steves |
| Calculating the Cosmos | Ian Stewart |
| The Way of Excellence | Brad Stulberg |
| Life 3.0 | Max Tegmark |
| Super Agers | Eric Topol |
| A Gentleman in Moscow | Amor Towles |
| The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, with eBook | Mark Twain |
| What's Our Problem? | Tim Urban |
| Aging Well | George E. Vaillant |
| Oblivion | David Foster Wallace |
| So Far Gone | Jess Walter |
| What Is ChatGPT Doing | Stephen Wolfram |
| 10 to 25 | David Yeager |
| The Amateur Hour | Jonathan Zimmerman |
This summer, I plan to reach for my kindle (or pull out my earbuds much more often). I want to focus on reading because I believe it has enriched my life significantly. The posts that follow will represent some of my thoughts, book by book, one book at a time.
