Recommended Reading

No one goes north this time of year, so I took a weekend off and headed up north with my son on a road trip to Door County.

A whole bunch of new books were released, so the timing was perfect to catch up on some reading.

Alex Van Halen’s new book, Brothers, is really two books. It’s a love letter to his brother, Ed, and it’s Van Halen History 101. I’m glad he did the book at all, but I wish he would have chosen to go deep on one topic or the other. I suspect it was the publisher’s decision to keep it light and approachable. Hopefully, there’ll be a follow-up, given how well this book is selling.

The print edition of Derek Siver’s new book, Useful Not True, just arrived a few minutes ago in the mail. I’ll report back, but he’s reliably fascinating.

I’m still working through Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Meditations for Mortals, the follow-up to his blockbuster hit Four Thousand Weeks. It’s best described as a guide to “imperfectionism,” or as he puts it, to be “free to aspire not to a life without problems, but to life of ever-more interesting and absorbing ones.” It’s one of those books I could re-read as a reminder, over the course of a lifetime, and never quite complete – in a good way.

Austin Kleon announced he scored a publishing deal for his next title, Don’t Call It Art. It’ll be an instant buy.

Jamie Thingelstad was nice enough to visit me in person recently. He recommended subscribing to a blog that’s right up our alley by Josh Bernoff. I concur, go subscribe.

Read on! – CJ

P.S. For the last three weeks, I’ve posted a photo of a chapter from my new book to LinkedIn every weekday just to see what would happen. Book sales and subscriptions had a slight bump, but LinkedIn says my profile got 7000%+ more “engagement.” Hey, I’ll take it.