Some Good Books I’m Reading
In which I give up looking for lost cats
Good morning and happy Valentine’s Day from the snowy Continental Divide. I woke up around 4am and heard wolves howling at the moon, and captured this enormous lenticular cloud over the lodge at sunset yesterday.
Actively In Progress
The Future and Its Enemies: the Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress by Virginia Postrel
Fuel for envisioning how I can build companies with an orientation toward dynamism, rather than central planning
Powerful reminder that the belief that we can predict and control the future gets humans into all sorts of trouble
Possibly explanation for why my politics don’t seem to fit into the left or the right, but often are mistaken for being “conservative” by people my own age and “liberal” by people closer to my parent’s age
After reading Future Shock I see it everywhere!
Winnicott on the Child by D.W. Winnicott
Winnicott was a pediatrician who was among the first to also train as a psychoanalyst, and his writing influences to many parenting specialists
He is widely know for the concept of “the good enough parent” to combat the emerging anxious parenting styles of mid-century women
Kevin and I like to joke that part of our job as parents will be to play the role of Chief Disappointment Officer. After all, someone has to do the dirty work of slowly introducing children to the reality that they’re not the center of the universe
This book is a compilation of post-humously published transcripts of popular radio talks and other presentations he gave in the 1960s that were not previously published
Right Weight, Right Mind: The Immunity to Change (ITC) Approach to Permanent Weight Loss by Dr. Robert Kegan, Dr. Lisa Lahey, Dr. Deborah Helsing
This book is about a lot more than losing weight, and I’ve been working through it faithfully in my morning pages since the start of the year to support me becoming as healthy as I can before getting pregnant
I am considering getting formal training in this methodology to support my coaching clients, as about 50% of them mention weight loss as a goal
If you decide to read this, I recommend the Kindle book rather than Audible so you can copy/paste the questions and workbook items easily into wherever you take your reading notes.
Want more? Visit my Goodreads profile to see all 367 books I’ve marked “In Progress”
New Recommendations
Values in Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide to Helping Clients Explore Values, Increase Psychological Flexibility, and Live a More Meaningful Life by Jenna LeJeune and Jason B. Luoma (2019) — thank you Andy Sparks for the rec!
What else? Visit my Goodreads profile to see all 2,731 books I’ve marked “Want to Read”
Recently Finished & Five Star Rated
The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
Lord of the Flies meets The Handmaid’s Tale with a dash of The Power
Strong female protagonist
Sex, violence, love, friendship, and radical self-reliance
Excellent Audible narration
Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Lanugage of the the Human Experience by Brené Brown
Beautiful hard bound book of nearly coffee table size
Describes 87 emotions, to increase your emotional granularity
Make sure to jump to the end, where Brené lays out a new theory of emotional connection and meaning-making
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
If you’ve ever felt stuck in a rut in life, this book will resonate
Inspiring female protagonist and also a female “Gandalf” character (!)
Grief, depression, searching, redemption, and self-acceptance
I also loved his previous book How to Stop Time
How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson
Being lazy is surprisingly punk rock
Written by the publisher of the delightful periodical The Idler
I also loved Jenny O’Dell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and this is in the same vein but set in Britain instead of Oakland
To see all my reading progress, including books I finished that didn’t get a 5 star review, visit my Goodreads profile and let’s be friends there.
Happy reading!
“What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.”
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami