Reading

Here are some of my top picks from among all the books I’ve read over the years.

Philosophy has wasted the finest minds of a thousand generations. The appeal of metaphysics is undeniable: let’s find out the underlying nature of things as they really are. However, as long as we’re dealing with blatant assertions about things that are by definition unobservable, with no objective way to decide between them, it’s impossible to make any progress from one generation to the next.

This book traces out in appalling detail the fruitless efforts of philosophers over the millennia. One philosopher says everything is made of fire. The next generation of philosophers says—no, everything is actually made of water. Then the students of the water-philosophers rebel and go back to arguing that everything is made of fire, and with nothing but vague definitions and opinions to argue about, things are right back where they started.

The only reason that all philosophy wasn’t a complete waste of time is because it did eventually lead to empirical science—but now that we have that, please, let’s not waste any more lives.

It’s widely believed that the brain stops growing when people reach adulthood, and that any trauma to it is irreversible. But scientists have recently uncovered a mass of evidence to show that that’s simply not true.

The book opens with a woman who lost her physical sense of balance after an injury—and who is trained to walk again by a computer. Each chapter interviews scientists who are actively doing things that conventional wisdom says is impossible, from restoring paralyzed stroke victims to full use of all their limbs, to training people with severe dyslexia to read analog clocks, to amputating phantom limbs.

The unifying theory behind all this work is easy-to-understand, and the techniques that are being used are easy to reuse in your own pursuits.

You think you have problems? They’re nothing compared to the problems that Britain and western civilization faced in 1940.

Winston Churchill was appointed Prime Minister of Britain the day Hitler invaded France. The Nazis had already conquered or allied themselves with half of Europe, and France would only last a few weeks. Britain was next on Hitler’s agenda, but it was basically unarmed. It had been conscripting for one year, but soldiers needed two years of training, and most of the army’s equipment had been sent to help France and was lost in a hurried retreat.

What could the British do? Would they make an agreement with Hitler to try to save themselves? No! “Without victory, there is no survival,” Churchill proclaimed:

“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

This was not empty rhetoric. Churchill had a sound strategy for winning: he believed that the Nazis were too terrible to be accepted for long by the people of the world, and if the British resolved themselves to defend their island to the last man, the United States would eventually enter the war bringing overwhelming force. That was the strategy and this is the story of how he carried it out.

For lessons about strategy and leadership, for gripping firsthand stories of history and extreme heroism, for seeing and understanding the process by which the largest project in the history of the world was managed to a successful conclusion—this is a fascinating and instructive work.

Back pain is horrible, but if you suffer from it, this book has a lot of practical advice to get you through it. It describes what the different major kinds of back pain are, what causes them, and why surgery or medication is only very rarely a useful option. While in most cases you will still have some pain that you will have to learn to live with, this book will help you with that, and gives exercises for each kind of back pain to reduce the pain and keep it down.

Every now and then I get back pain that makes it nearly impossible to get out of bed, walk, or sit—and this book gets me back to normal.

There have many amazing discoveries in psychology in the past few decades—discoveries about how people learn and get good at things, what intuition is and when to trust it, and the whole exploding field of neuroscience. Any recent textbook will explain it all clearly and understandably, and if you like people and self-improvement it will be lots of fun to read about. The one by Myers is good, but anything like it should be fine too.

This is an excellent how-to book about time management and writing. Instead of giving you vague principles, it gives concrete instructions that you can easily follow to get started. It made finishing my master’s degree a whole lot easier.

Most books that claim to be about time management really aren’t. For example, the extremely popular Getting Things Done by David Allen has a lot of useful stuff about staying organized, but what does it say about time management? On the first page of Chapter 9: “How do you decide what to do at any given point? As I’ve said, my simple answer is, trust your heart.” If you had enough practice at time management that relying on your intuition was optimal, then you probably wouldn’t be reading a self-help book to try to learn it.

Straight-A, by contrast, tells you exactly what to do, when to do it, and why to do it that way, without being rigid or overwhelming. Following this book’s procedures, you can get started right away and build up your skills so that someday you will be able to rely on your intuition.

More books

The best list of best books I’ve come across is the one titled “Book Value” by Jim Collins.