Category: Books
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Review: Newport’s Digital Minimalism
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World Cal Newport I’m a big fan of Cal Newport’s work (I’ve read Deep Work, twice). This feels like his best book yet. Part evisceration of social media and what it does to our brains, part guidebook on how to live a less distracted life, this…
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Review: Zelnick’s Becoming Ageless
Becoming Ageless: Four Secrets To Looking and Feeling Younger Than Ever Strauss Zelnick Part memoir of the super-rich and successful Strauss Zelnick, part guide to aging well, this book is just like many many others that claim to have some new information but are really saying – eat well, exercise regularly, sometimes hard, sometimes easy,…
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Review: Tomlisin’s Elephant in the Room
The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America Tommy Tomlinson Tomlisin is a lifelong reporter. It shows in this memoir of eating (and over-eating), love (and loss), and what it means to try to wrestle back a healthy life with a body that is fighting you, in…
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Review: Robinson’s New York 2140
New York 2140 Kim Stanley Robinson In the New York City one hundred and thirty years in the future, much has changed. Most of coastal Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island is gone. What’s left of downtown Manhattan floods with the tides. The power of the city has moved far uptown to the…
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What Are You Reading? For March 3, 2019 (Feat. Harari’s Sapiens, Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Tomlinson’s Elephant in the Room)
This month, I started a monthly newsletter of book recommendations call “What Are You Reading?”. I’ll be archiving the newsletter here on good old Milo. If you want to sign up for the newsletter head on over here. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the inaugural edition of “What Are You Reading?”, a monthly newsletter of book and…
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Nelson’s The Red Parts
The Red Parts: A Memoir of a Trial Maggie Nelson Maggie Nelson wrote a book called Jane: A Murder about the brutal murder of her aunt allegedly by a serial killer who was targeting women in Michigan in the late seventies. As she was finalizing the book, and getting ready to go on a book…
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Nelson’s Jane: A Murder
Jane: A Murder Maggie Nelson Maggie Nelson is one of my favorite writers. Her book the Argonauts knocked me on my ass. Its still one of my go-to gift books. I’ve read almost everything she has written and honestly, you can’t go wrong. But if you want to start somewhere really excellent, I suggest the…
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Cline’s The Girls
The Girls Emma Cline A novel about a cult leader, very much like Manson, and a woman, very much like Susan Atkins, who befriend / seduce a very young teenage girl and bring her into the dark side of the post-summer of love hippie land. Our hero, the very young teenage girl (Evie) is lost,…
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Lewis’s The Fifth Risk
The Fifth Risk Michael Lewis I’ll read anything Michael Lewis publishes, even the minor works, like this one that examines what happens in the institutions of government when the new leaders not only disdain the institutions, but are also entirely incompetent. A brisk narrative telling celebrating the important of bureaucrats, and the power they hold,…
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Brown’s The Boys in the Boat
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics Daniel James Brown Dad literature in extremis. Which usually isn’t something that turns me off, but this time, it was all just a bit too much bootstrapping, a bit too much greatest generation propaganda, a bit too…
Milo and the Calf 