Last week, I asked y’all for some book series recommendations. Big thank you to the 200 of you who replied, with 164 different series recommendations. At the bottom of this email, I’ve listed the top 10, in case you’re looking for some fiction recommendations 🙂
Anyway, I don’t feel like I have anything useful to say this week lol, so in addition to the book recommendations below, here are 5 quotes from various sources that I’ve been reflecting on recently 👇
1 – From Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
Many people these days report the feeling that they begin each morning in a kind of ‘productivity debt’, which they must struggle to pay off over the course of the day, in hopes of returning to a zero balance by the time evening comes. If they fail – or worse, don’t even try – it’s as though they haven’t quite justified their existence on the planet. If this describes you, there’s a good chance that like me you belong to the gloomy bunch psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers’, which is a diplomatic way of saying that our accomplishments, impressive as they may sometimes be, are driven ultimately by feelings of inadequacy.
2 – From Die with Zero by Bill Perkins, referencing The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying by palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware
Along those lines, the second regret—and actually the top regret among Ware’s male patients—was this: “I wish I had not worked so hard.” That hits right at the heart of what I’m preaching. “All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence,” Ware writes. Women had this regret, too, but, as Ware points out, her patients were from an older generation, when fewer women worked outside the home. And when people say they regret working so hard, they are not talking about the hard work of raising children; they are talking about working to make a living to pay the bills and, as a result, missing “their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.”
3 – From The Second Mountain by David Brooks
The natural tendency is to put oneself at the center of any activity. To ask, How am I doing? That question is fine to ask once. But it becomes paralyzing if you ask it all the time. A pitcher who is thinking about how he is pitching cannot pitch well. His focus is on self, not the task. “In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian,” the philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford writes, “one submits to things that have their own intractable ways.”
4 – From How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett. This quote is the ultimate secret to time management, on how to make time to do all the things you need to (and want to) do:
I have found no such wonderful secret. Nor do I expect to find it, nor do I expect that anyone else will ever find it. It is undiscovered. When you first began to gather my drift, perhaps there was a resurrection of hope in your breast. Perhaps you said to yourself, “This man will show me an easy, unfatiguing way of doing what I have so long in vain wished to do.” Alas, no! The fact is that there is no easy way, no royal road. The path to Mecca is extremely hard and stony, and the worst of it is that you never quite get there after all.
The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one’s life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one’s daily budget of twenty-four hours is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands. I cannot too strongly insist on this.
5 – From Good Work by Paul Millerd
Good work doesn’t usually happen on a factory schedule and often has a natural seasonality. But when you stop doing it, good work seduces you back. It is something you must do. Once you discover your good work, take it seriously and protect it, as it can be one of the most powerful ways to show up in the world, contribute, and feel useful.
Now to the book recommendations.
These were the most recommended, along with some of my own notes.
- The Kingkiller Chronicles Series by Patrick Rothfuss – Recommended by 9 people. I read books 1+2 back in like 2018, and have been waiting patiently (like the rest of the fanbase) for book 3 for what seems like forever. I’d actually kinda recommend you not start this series until the third book comes out though…
- Eragon by Christopher Paolini – Recommended by 4 people. Banger series that I remember reading way back when I was a teenager. I haven’t read the latest installation Murtagh just yet though, so that’ll be soon on my reading list 🙂
- Throne Of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas – Recommended by 4 people. I bought the set in paperback a few years ago, thinking “ooh these look really pretty” but never actually read any of them. Given the glowing recommendations, guess it’ll have to be the next series I read.
- The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien – Recommended by 4 people. This is one of those series where I’m like: “yep there’s no excuse for why I haven’t read this yet”. I tried Fellowship a bunch of times over the years, but kept getting stuck on the Tom Bombadil stuff. Then I listened to some of the audiobook and got beyond that point, but fell off around Rivendell. Might be time to resume.
Then we had a few different series that were recommended by 3 people each:
- Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (with the final 3 books written by Brandon Sanderson after Robert Jordan’s death) – I read this around 2018-2020 and would definitely recommend. It gets super slow about halfway through the series, but it’s totally worth pushing through the pain of those middle books to get to the final few.
- Beartown by Frederick Backman – never heard of this, will add to the list.
- Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – obviously incredible, loved the original trilogy when I was in school, and loved the first prequel a few years ago, and currently listening to Sunrise on the Reaping on Audible
- Gentlemen Bastard Series by Scott Lynch – I’ve heard this recommended over the years but never tried it, the name always sort-of put me off, making me think: “oh it doesn’t sound like a ‘serious’ series” but given the recommendations from y’all, guess it’ll have to go on the list.
- The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang – Never heard of it, will add to the list.
Big thank you to everyone who replied to last week’s email with book recommendations 🙂
And apologies for no real “content” from me this week – if you’ve reached this point in the email, I hope you got enough value from the quotes + book recommendations that it’s been worth your while. (And just an fyi, some of the links above are affiliate links).
Have a great week!
Ali xx
