Mid-length Non-fiction Book Reviews: Volume I
Multiple books on ruminating without marinating—techniques drawn from Buddhism, Christianity, and Science! Also a review of Dumb Money (the book) and productivity advice from a ex-spook.
The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by: Michael A. Singer
Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by: Ethan Kross
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World by: John Mark Comer
Dumb Money: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by: Ben Mezrich
Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by: Shane Parrish
As you can see I continue to experiment with different ways to package my book reviews. Let me know what you think, and if this makes it easier to find (and potentially ignore) reviews you’re not interested in. I also continue to experiment with the AI voice clone. So far the reaction has been universally positive. One person even asked if there was a way he could get access to the clone so that he could have me “read” other articles. I’ll be honest, this surprised me, but it was good to hear. I still intend to actually read some pieces, anything that’s going into the eventual book (which is coming along pretty well) will be actual me, not fake me.
Of course for those of you who never listen to the podcast version and just read the newsletter this is all pretty boring, so without further delay…
Non-Fiction Reviews
The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
Published: 2007
200 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Defining a “you” separate from the talking in your head. If “you” can notice that you’re too fixated on some past harm, or some present annoyance. The “you” doing the noticing has to be a separate entity. Expanding on this distance is how you “untether [your] soul”
What's the author's angle?
Singer is a new age philosopher and an advocate for meditation, yoga, and the generalized mix of practices that come with that label. In spite of this the book didn’t feel very “new-agey” to me.
Who should read this book?
The first three reviews: this, Chatter and Elimination of Hurry, all touch on similar themes. I think if your goal is to have a more meditative relationship with your inner voice, then of the three this is the best, and it does a good job of describing why self-talk is frequently bad.
Specific thoughts: Creating a space between stimulus and response
I think I was 18 when I first really absorbed the idea that between something happening and our response to it that there was a space where one could intervene. It’s a powerful idea, but also one that, for me at least, I’m still trying to operationalize many decades later. I don’t know that this book is going to represent a major step forward in my attempts to operationalize it, but just being reminded in powerful, evocative language about the gap always fills me with optimism.
Of course, you don’t want to always be using this space. When a loved one comes to you for comfort you wouldn’t want to boot up an inner dialogue saying “well my immediate reaction is to give them a hug, but I can also choose to do something different”. And you certainly wouldn’t want to be trying to use this space when you’re about to get into a car accident. But when you’re sitting there doing nothing but reviewing some past regret, then you definitely want to take yourself to that space. Which takes us to the broader topic of one’s inner voice.
There has been a theme going through my writing recently that excessive introspective rumination is bad—specifically, excessive inner dialogue about the negative events in one’s life. You can see it starting with my review of Bad Therapy, and it got mentioned as well in my last set of reviews. When I mentioned this I get push back from a significant number of people who say that therapeutic self examination is mostly good.
I’ve never denied that some people need therapy, and that a skillful therapist, paired with someone who really needs that therapy, can have great benefits, but recently the majority of people seem to be engaged in a form of pseudo-therapy which is harmful. And it all comes from excessively focusing on their inner monologue of grievances. This summation is obviously not in-depth enough to convince anyone who isn’t already, it’s just a preface for discussing how this book tackles the issue.
Singer argues that when we’re accessing our inner voice separate from the stimuli—when we create a gap to query our “soul”—that inner voice is beneficial, but when the inner voice is being completely driven by stimulus, then it’s bad. And to a certain extent when we create the gap, it’s not even so much that we’re accessing a different inner voice, but rather accessing deep wisdom. Obviously this sort of thing closely ties in with the idea of meditation, and quieting our mind entirely.
There’s obviously more to the book than that. And quite a bit of it is pretty woo. But as a reminder to engage in a certain kind of meditative practice, this book really hit the spot.
Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It
By: Ethan Kross
Published: 2021
272 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
How to minimize the negative effects of our mental monologue.
What's the author's angle?
Kross is an academic, so this is his area of “expertise”. On his website he’s described (presumably by himself since it’s his website) as “one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind”. That seems like a difficult thing to be an expert on, but I might be jaded.
Who should read this book?
If you find yourself harassed by a negative inner monologue and you want a book with more self-help and less buddhism this is the book for you. (Choose the previous book if the reverse is true.)
Specific thoughts: Eliminating “chatter” is all about creating distance
Kross offers up several useful tips for controlling your own mental chatter. A few examples include:
Referring to yourself by your name.
Making your experience part of a broader set of experiences experienced by all people.
Thinking about yourself and your difficulties as if you’re looking back on it from years in the future.
In all of these cases you’re basically attempting to establish distance. To create a remove. This is similar to the practices Singer recommends, but more tactical. I was certainly familiar with the third of these tactics, but not the first two. I’ll definitely be trying them out.
Explaining these tactics was the great strength of the book. Its weakness was that it didn’t really lay a foundation. This is to say, the book provided tools to help one eliminate chatter, but it didn’t do much to explain why chatter was bad in the first place. Or how it came about. Or much about why we might engage in this harmful practice, and whether modern information technology has made it worse. To be fair he didn’t completely ignore the topic, but he only spent maybe 6 pages on it. It was kind of “blink and you miss it”. Not the in-depth examination I was hoping for.
I guess he assumed, being deep in this discipline, that everyone realizes that introspective “chatter” is bad, but as I’ve discovered, not everyone does believe that, so it’d be nice to have more backing for this idea.
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World
By: John Mark Comer
Published: 2019
304 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Comer’s journey from completely stressed pastor of a megachurch to discovering and implementing Jesus’ teachings on slow living and minimalism more broadly.
What's the author's angle?
Christianity, which is different from most other books recommending you slow down.
Who should read this book?
I wouldn’t put this among the top tier of self-help books, but as I’ve said in the past many times these books are more about getting you excited to do what you already know you should be doing. This book is pretty good at that. So if you already know you need to slow down and want motivation, this is the book for you.
Specific thoughts: Slowing down brings necessary space
This book and the previous two all recommend creating some distance or space between the normal “chatter” of life, and a more reflective space. In this book the distance is created by slowing down, and the reflective space comes from religion. I’m definitely a fan of both, though I also struggle with both. Struggling with religion is to be expected. If you think your religion is easy then you’re probably not doing it right. So what about struggling with hurry?
Comer puts a lot of emphasis on the idea of the sabbath, but he points out how beyond slowing down on that one day Jesus urged people to slow down more generally. His discussion of Jesus’ “easy yoke” was particularly interesting. Take for instance his dissection of Matthew 11: 28-30-
Okay, let’s read it one more time. Even slower. Breathe deeply; don’t rush this part; God has something for you in this moment:
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened…
And I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me…
For I am gentle and humble in heart…
And you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy…
And my burden is light.
Now read Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of those same verses in The Message. Again, slowly:
Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.
“Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.” How good is that line?”
I’m not sure if that’s precisely how I would restate Matthew 11:28-30, but between the two versions you should probably be able to see his point. I enjoyed the book, and it definitely gave me a much needed push in the direction of slowing down, though I was surprised that despite doing a very deep dive on Matthew 6, he never talks about verse 34:
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Dumb Money: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees
(Originally published under the title The Antisocial Network)
By: Ben Mezrich
Published: 2021
304 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The meme-stock craze, where certain stocks, but primarily Gamestop (GME), were pushed to stratospheric heights by a large number of retail investors coordinating on the Reddit board r/WallStreetBets.
What's the author's angle?
Mezrich was very interested in getting to a story first, this does not necessarily mean that the book is shoddy, merely that his number one priority was having the first book on the shelf. Writing a really good book was number two.
Who should read this book?
I assume that the one question everyone is going to ask is “Should I read the book, or watch the movie?” I read the book, and then tried watching the movie and it didn’t really grab me. Perhaps if I’d reversed the order it would have worked better. If you are curious about the crazy memestock ride this book provides a lot of insight, but I feel like it missed some things. Speaking of which…
Specific thoughts: Reading between the lines
The book does a good job of covering some of the many personalities involved in the meme stock madness of 2021, but it doesn’t do a very good job of digging into the underlying factors for why the madness happened. You might say that this book presents the “Great Man” narrative of the event, where “Roaring Kitty” squares off against Gabriel Plotkin. I’m looking for the “Social Forces” angle.
Clearly the whole phenomenon could not have happened in the absence of social media. And the fact that everyone was stuck inside and on their computers because of the pandemic definitely acted as an accelerant.
You might be familiar with a common social science experiment called the Ultimatum Game. In this game two strangers are paired up and given some money to divide. The first person gets to choose how to split the money. And the second person can only accept or reject the split. If he accepts it then both participants get the money as per the split decided by the first person. If the second person rejects it then neither person gets any money. From a pure value maximization standpoint the second person should take any offer over zero, but (at least in Western countries) when the experiment is actually run, the second person almost always rejects offers that aren’t 50/50 or close to that. This doesn’t make any sense from a value maximization standpoint, but it makes perfect sense from a norms enforcement standpoint.
We see something similar, but not identical, in this story. In other words, the interesting part is not that a Reddit board stumbled onto a short squeeze opportunity. The interesting part is how they turned it into something akin to the Ultimatum Game. From a pure value maximization standpoint, people should have been selling off their GME stock, at least bits and pieces of it, as it rose to staggering heights. Instead we ended up with the phenomenon of diamond hands, another very strange aspect of things that was undercovered (even in this book).
Diamond hands are those people who have committed to hold onto the stock no matter what happens. By doing so they help keep the price high, which punishes the short sellers, but also keeps these people from realizing any profit from the short squeeze. Did it matter that (as far as I can tell) they really only punished one hedge fund, Melvin Capital? A fund that was created in 2014, many years after the financial crisis? It did not. The way they saw it, they had been getting screwed since 2007, and finally they had managed to create an ultimatum game where they were finally being offered actual gains, but they were more interested in refusing the split and harming the other side (Wall Street writ large as they saw it) than they were in taking the pittance they were being offered.
We often hear that a lot of people feel powerless. I have every reason to believe that this is the case, but how does one get a sense for the magnitude of that feeling? I suspect that one proxy is the amount they’re willing to sacrifice in order to get some smidgen of power. The book suggests that they were willing to sacrifice a lot. There was a lot of pent up fury. And perhaps that fury was even righteous fury.
One could easily see a way of extending this lesson to the phenomenon of Trump. There is a sense in which Trump voters don’t necessarily care what sort of “profits” they’re accruing, but they care a lot about punishing “the other side”. The side that’s been screwing them since 2007. This is the main thing I took away from the book. The shadow of the financial crisis is a lot longer than people expected, and it’s going to continue to haunt the landscape for a long time to come.
Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results
By: Shane Parrish
Published: 2023
284 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Various strategies for making better decisions, with an emphasis on avoiding certain default behavior and replacing it with various avenues of self improvement.
What's the author's angle?
Parrish is an organizational guru, improve your life motivator, and get your shit together influencer. Similar to Tim Ferris, Cal Newport, and James Clear, etc. Apparently he’s especially popular on Wall Street.
Who should read this book?
I read this book for the same reason I read most books in this genre: it was short. If I can spend two hours listening to a book (6 hr at 3x) and it makes me 0.0001% more effective for the rest of my life then it’s more than paid for itself. I understand that’s not a calculation everyone wants to have to make, so beyond that I would recommend it to anyone who likes their self-help books to be more straight-talk and less “dare to dream!”
Specific thoughts: The intelligence agency angle was very interesting
Parrish got his start working for Canadian national intelligence, and one gets the sense that despite all the talk about the misdeeds, shady behavior, and weirdness of intelligence agencies that they really care about doing a good job. Many of the stories Parrish tells about finding the best way to be effective involve him overcoming self-pitying excuses and just getting the job done. This is a message a lot of people need to hear.
I’d describe this as sort of the halfway point between a Jocko Willink style motivation book with a lot of stuff about working out, and a James Clear/Cal Newport cerebral style self-help book. And to be honest I really appreciated that. It felt less “woo!” and more actionable without also demanding that I lift a lot more (I mean I do need to lift more, but not a lot more.)
Another thing I appreciated were the insights from Charlie Munger he passed along. It’s possible you don’t know who Charlie Munger was (he passed away in 2023). He was Warren Buffet’s right-hand man. So all of the amazing success that Buffet had? He was the face of the enterprise, and while I’m sure Buffet is very talented, quite a bit of his success came from Munger being in the background.
Putting all of this together, I found it to be one of the better self-help books I’ve read. I’m sure there’s a recency bias, but, even so, I’d probably put it in my top ten. What are the other books in my top ten? Perhaps that needs to be the subject of its own post, but I’d definitely put the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey in there as well as Getting Things Done by David Allen. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman would also be in there, even though it sent me into an existential and productivity spiral that I've only barely recovered from.
I guess summer is also something I’m still trying to recover from. The weather isn’t helping. The high today is supposed to be 82, which is ridiculous for October in Utah. Fortunately tomorrow it’s supposed to cool off. It’s about time.
Yes, I’m talking about the weather, how bad is that? But by saying that something happened today it forces me to actually get it out the door, today. Out of such little hacks is productivity made.
>> “Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman would also be in there, even though it sent me into an existential and productivity spiral that I've only barely recovered from.”
Details, PLEASE! (I’ll say that I read it in the midst of a burnout a month ago, and I’d describe its effect as “consistent bliss state” rather than “productivity spiral”… but maybe that’s the same thing from different perspectives?)