The Art of Manliness - #493： 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die

00:00:00.000 I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:18.500 There are over 100 million books in existence, and the average person only has eight decades

00:00:22.600 in which to read them.

00:00:23.600 So which books should you choose to read over others before you croak?

00:00:26.520 It's a question that's launched scores of lists and many in argument, and my guest day

00:00:29.660 has fired his own 900-plus page missive in the debate.

00:00:32.320 His name is Jim Mustick.

00:00:33.320 He's been in the book business for over 30 years as a bookseller, reviewer, and editor.

00:00:36.940 He's created the ultimate book list in his book, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die.

00:00:41.400 Today on the show, Jim explains his guiding philosophy on the books he decided to include

00:00:44.820 in his list and how he designed the book to have the feel of browsing through an ideal

00:00:48.520 bookshop.

00:00:49.260 Jim then makes the case for why book lists are helpful but should never be seen as strictly

00:00:52.400 prescriptive.

00:00:53.000 We then dig into the surprising genres of books that Jim included in his list, including science

00:00:57.040 fiction, detective novels, and children's books, and one or two of his very top recommendations

00:01:01.220 in each category.

00:01:02.340 And at the end of our conversation, we've got a nice treat here.

00:01:04.620 Jim makes a list of books just for the AOM audience of books every man should read before

00:01:09.000 he dies.

00:01:09.760 After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash 1000books.

00:01:13.780 And Jim joins me now via clearcast.io.

00:01:22.800 All right, Jim Mustick, welcome to the show.

00:01:29.560 Thank you for having me, Brad.

00:01:30.680 It's really a pleasure to speak with you.

00:01:32.780 So you've had a career in books for a long time.

00:01:37.780 You've been in the business in books as a reviewer, an editor, a bookseller, and you finally

00:01:42.880 got around to writing a book.

00:01:45.420 And it's a book about books.

00:01:47.860 So tell us, how did you get to this point where you decided it was time to write a book?

00:01:52.900 It's called A Thousand Books to Read Before You Die.

00:01:56.240 I, as you mentioned, I've been in the book business my whole life.

00:01:59.800 I started at an independent bookstore in the early 1980s in suburban New York.

00:02:06.300 And from that, I had the idea to start my own business in 1986.

00:02:10.960 I started up a catalog called A Common Reader, which was a catalog that we mailed out across

00:02:18.200 the country.

00:02:19.440 Usually, it was about 144 pages where I and some other colleagues would write about books.

00:02:25.760 It was very personal.

00:02:27.420 We'd find generally offbeat books or neglected books that weren't on people's radar.

00:02:33.700 And we grew a very nice business doing that.

00:02:37.240 And I did it for about 20 years, until at the end of it, we had a mailing list, subscription

00:02:42.280 list of about 250,000 people.

00:02:45.620 And it had lots of the flavors of a book blog or a website, but we had started it before the

00:02:52.980 internet.

00:02:53.760 And so we did it in the mail.

00:02:55.140 And through that experience of writing about books and of interacting with the readers of

00:03:02.660 the catalog who would buy books from us and send us wonderful letters about what they thought

00:03:08.960 of the books, but also recommending other books.

00:03:11.780 My wife and I still have six or eight file cabinets in our basement filled with these letters

00:03:16.560 of people talking about their favorite books.

00:03:18.380 And that got me, you know, writing about books a lot.

00:03:22.980 And so in the early 2000s, Peter Workman, who was the founder of Workman Publishing, which

00:03:29.340 is the publisher of 1,000 books to read before you die, he was a great fan of my catalog.

00:03:35.480 And he had published very successfully a book by Patricia Schultz called A Thousand Places

00:03:40.900 to See Before You Die, which some of your listeners may be familiar with.

00:03:44.940 And that was very successful.

00:03:46.280 And Peter decided he wanted to do a book like that about books.

00:03:50.380 So he asked me to do it.

00:03:52.580 I worked on it for 14 years.

00:03:54.880 It was finally published in October.

00:03:57.520 I can tell that it took 14 years.

00:03:59.600 It's large and the descriptions are just fantastic.

00:04:02.880 They're very detailed and they make you want to read the books you highlight.

00:04:08.960 But I'm curious, what was your guiding ethos as you selected these books?

00:04:13.480 Like, why 1,000?

00:04:15.360 Because it's a large number, but it's not like 10,000, right?

00:04:21.780 Right.

00:04:22.120 So like, why 1,000?

00:04:23.100 What was your ethos as you went about selecting these books?

00:04:27.200 Well, that's a great question.

00:04:28.520 And it puzzled me for a long time because I had been a reader for decades and a bookseller

00:04:34.800 for decades as well by the time I began.

00:04:37.860 And so I had so many books on a list that could potentially be included.

00:04:44.020 The number 1,000 came with the project from Workman because they had done 1,000 places

00:04:50.640 and they wanted to do a series.

00:04:52.720 So that was kind of my starting point, which I didn't have much negotiating power about,

00:04:58.300 but it seemed okay.

00:04:59.820 But the more I thought about it, the more complicated it became because I would joke

00:05:04.980 with Patricia Schultz, who wrote 1,000 places, that conceptually her job was easy because

00:05:12.740 you could just take a map and the structure of the book would be determined by the map.

00:05:18.740 And any reader of her book would understand what the structure was because people are all

00:05:25.280 familiar with maps of the world.

00:05:26.660 But when you're talking about 1,000 books, you could take many different approaches to

00:05:32.340 it.

00:05:32.560 You could have the 1,000 most popular books of all time, the 1,000 most important books

00:05:37.500 of all time.

00:05:38.460 You could create a canon of classics.

00:05:41.160 You could do it by age of reader.

00:05:43.740 And since books encompass within them all of human knowledge, you have all different kinds

00:05:49.120 of subjects.

00:05:49.720 You could do it by subject if you wanted to, by history, science, and so on.

00:05:53.300 So I had all these books, but organizing them was a bit of a puzzle to me until I came upon

00:05:59.940 a quote that really struck me, which was from the great literary critic, Edmund Wilson.

00:06:06.980 In one of his books, he talks about the miscellaneous learning of a bookstore unorganized by any larger

00:06:14.740 purpose.

00:06:15.860 And I said to myself, that's what I want.

00:06:18.700 I want readers to open this book, they might be looking for something in particular, but

00:06:23.680 they could really be empowered to browse around and follow their own instincts.

00:06:28.460 So how can I get something that would be fun in that way, that would give the user, the

00:06:34.240 reader, some agency in going through the book?

00:06:37.260 So I said to myself, what if I had a bookstore?

00:06:39.720 I could only have 1,000 books, and I wanted to have something for every kind of reading appetite.

00:06:45.240 If somebody walked into this metaphorical store and said, I want a book about ancient

00:06:53.740 Greece, or I'm getting on a plane for a long plane ride, I want a really absorbing thriller,

00:06:59.180 or I want some picture books to share with my kids.

00:07:01.720 I wanted to have something for everyone.

00:07:03.560 So that's kind of how I structured it.

00:07:04.980 And I love that structure and that metaphor, because really, when you're reading this,

00:07:09.720 it's like you're in a cool bookstore, and you're just like, oh, I wasn't looking for

00:07:14.360 that, but I'm glad I stumbled upon it, and now I'm going to buy this book.

00:07:18.140 Now, what's interesting about book lists, because they're all over the internet.

00:07:22.120 We have our own on our site, and every time we've published book lists on our site, it always

00:07:27.500 raises hires of readers, because we left out a book, or we have the gall to make a normative

00:07:32.400 claim that these are the books you should read.

00:07:35.160 Have you gotten that with this book?

00:07:37.440 Welcome to my world, Brett.

00:07:41.180 You know, I write in the introduction something that I learned very early as I was working on

00:07:46.820 this book, that once people know you're writing a book called A Thousand Books to Read Before

00:07:52.120 You Die, you can never enjoy a dinner party in quite the same way as you did before, because

00:07:58.120 everyone would want to know what's in it.

00:08:00.380 They'd want to know if their favorites are in it.

00:08:02.080 They'd have recommendations and so on, so I hear you loud and clear.

00:08:06.720 I get that all the time, but much to my delight, as I've gone around, I spent most of the fall

00:08:14.360 going to bookstores and libraries around the country talking about the book, and all of

00:08:19.200 those conversations have been tremendously fun and polite and generous, and so I've learned

00:08:26.540 a lot, my listeners and readers have learned a lot, because everybody's passionate about

00:08:32.700 what they love.

00:08:33.500 So it's a never-ending task of adding new books to my own list of things to read, but

00:08:40.120 also for the discussion, and part of what I wanted to share with people was the love of

00:08:45.460 that conversation.

00:08:47.340 You know, I mentioned to you before all those letters I used to get from customers of a common

00:08:51.640 reader, and the conversations about A Thousand Books have been the same thing.

00:08:56.900 People coming, wanting to see if something was in there, arguing in a merry way about their

00:09:03.120 own favorites, so it's been a lot of fun.

00:09:05.240 Yeah, the first thing I did when I got your book is like, are my favorite books in here?

00:09:09.140 And they were.

00:09:10.320 All of them were.

00:09:11.260 It was fancy.

00:09:12.140 You've got great.

00:09:13.040 You've got great.

00:09:13.680 Yeah, Lonesome Dove, I was happy to see was in there.

00:09:16.560 The Road was in there.

00:09:18.280 The Great Gatsby, very happy to see that.

00:09:20.580 Catch-22, all my favorites, so I was glad to see those all made the list.

00:09:25.620 But as a person who's a reader, a connoisseur of books, what do you think of book lists?

00:09:32.340 How do you think they're helpful for readers?

00:09:36.020 Well, I think there are so many books being published every week, and there are so many

00:09:43.780 books that have been published in the past, and there are so many byways in a library or

00:09:48.980 a bookstore that I think lists are very helpful if they are made by the maker of the list in

00:09:56.340 a generous way to share knowledge or enthusiasm in a way that's inviting rather than prescriptive.

00:10:04.460 You know, lists can give people the sense that, oh boy, this is a big homework assignment.

00:10:10.620 And I don't like that approach at all.

00:10:12.980 What I like to do is to invite people, here, look at this.

00:10:16.920 I think you'll be interested in this, and to kind of encourage them.

00:10:21.100 The epigraph to my book, let me read it now because it's right on this subject.

00:10:24.500 It's from Virginia Woolf.

00:10:25.640 She had an essay called How Should One Read a Book?

00:10:28.700 And this is what she says, and this is the way I feel.

00:10:33.380 The only advice that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow

00:10:41.060 your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

00:10:46.380 If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions

00:10:52.060 because you will not allow them to fetter that independence, which is the most important

00:10:56.720 quality that a reader can possess.

00:10:58.720 So, what I can do as a longtime bookseller and a knowledgeable reader is to make a list

00:11:05.080 and put in front of people things that they might not be familiar with, or maybe they were

00:11:09.540 a little afraid to tackle before.

00:11:12.340 But again, I try to do it in a very encouraging way.

00:11:15.740 You know, the thousand books in my book, it's not a test.

00:11:19.200 I say to people, open the book anywhere, look for your favorites, and then poke around and

00:11:23.960 see what suggests itself to you.

00:11:27.060 Yeah, I love that epigraph.

00:11:27.880 And that's kind of how I always approach book lists.

00:11:30.820 I never see it as like, oh, this guy's telling me what I should read.

00:11:34.040 You know, you bug off guy.

00:11:35.620 Like, it's like, oh, you know, I just think, oh, this is interesting.

00:11:39.520 This is this guy's take.

00:11:40.840 Maybe I'll find something new.

00:11:41.980 But there's some people that, man, they get really fiery when they're told this is what

00:11:46.780 you need to read.

00:11:47.660 But I love that quote from Virginia Woolf.

00:11:50.480 Well, I mean, let's dig into the books you included and the genres you included.

00:11:55.620 Because typically when people make book lists, there's like, it's always like the classics

00:11:59.840 or, you know, highbrow, you know, nonfiction or nonfiction that people should read.

00:12:06.240 But you've got sci-fi in there.

00:12:08.480 I was really pleasantly surprised by the number of sci-fi books you have on your list.

00:12:13.260 Why do you think sci-fi often gets the short shrift on book lists?

00:12:16.900 Well, I think when it comes to book lists, even the people making them approach it as

00:12:23.640 a kind of homework, you know, and let's face it, most of us who do these lists are, we're

00:12:28.400 English majors at one point or another.

00:12:30.200 So we have this sense of the classic works, which are generally the books that are taught.

00:12:35.360 And sci-fi only recently has been kind of accepted into that conversation.

00:12:40.080 But I believe that genre works and are really where people's imaginations flower, you know,

00:12:49.220 not just the writers, but the readers.

00:12:50.760 Because when you get a great work of sci-fi and the author is building a world, it's so

00:12:56.980 full of ideas and interesting things that it far outstrips in terms of mental exercise or

00:13:04.940 mental exhilaration, what you might get in a very good literary novel about, you know,

00:13:11.300 a couple living in Manhattan or something, the book can be great, but you're not stretching

00:13:16.460 ideas and kind of, in the exact sense in sci-fi, creating worlds for people to explore.

00:13:22.740 And so I love when people expand their kind of spirits by going into sci-fi.

00:13:29.760 You can even do it in romance or in children's books where the sense of story is really

00:13:34.920 allowed to take over.

00:13:36.660 Are there any sci-fi books that, you know, just from the list, the ones you include in

00:13:40.520 your list that are like good starting points for people who maybe they've always been turned

00:13:44.160 off by sci-fi because they're like, well, that's just sort of, you know, that was what

00:13:47.480 the nerds read in high school.

00:13:49.020 But I want to get into like, what would you recommend?

00:13:51.640 That's a good question.

00:13:52.500 I like one, the one that really excited me is a book called The Star is My Destination

00:13:58.760 by Alfred Bester.

00:14:00.720 That's one that really got me hooked.

00:14:03.060 And it was written in the fifties and it's, it's essentially a retelling of the Count of

00:14:09.740 Monte Cristo and out of outer space.

00:14:12.060 There's a lot of revenge and, and someone disappears for years, but it's so fast paced.

00:14:18.280 People can kind of teleport themselves from one place to another.

00:14:22.900 And it's just exciting.

00:14:24.460 You get caught up in the story.

00:14:26.220 There are ideas there.

00:14:27.600 Many ideas in science fiction turn up, you know, decades later as being new technologies.

00:14:33.540 So that's a good place to start.

00:14:35.260 I love that one.

00:14:36.640 There's, you know, the classics like Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy or edgier stuff like J.G.

00:14:43.500 Ballard more recently, who writes terrifically absorbing and kind of frightening books that

00:14:50.020 have you on the, on the edge of your seat, both physically and metaphysically.

00:14:54.480 Yeah.

00:14:54.520 Isaac Asimov, that I'm just starting to get into him.

00:14:56.680 And what, one thing that surprised me about him, I didn't know is like how much that guy

00:15:01.420 wrote, like he had a tremendous amount of output.

00:15:03.960 When I started out in the book business, we used to joke, this was in the early 80s, he

00:15:09.580 was such a polymath that not only did he write science fiction and serious works of science,

00:15:15.460 he seemed to have a book on every subject in the bookstore.

00:15:19.600 There'd be a book, you know, in the religion section, in the history section.

00:15:22.780 He wrote about everything.

00:15:24.740 A truly, a phenomenally prolific and smart writer.

00:15:28.360 And the one that I, I think, got me into science fiction was Ender's Game by...

00:15:34.260 Ah, yeah.

00:15:35.040 What a great book.

00:15:35.920 I read that.

00:15:36.700 My daughters, my daughters have both grown now in their 20s.

00:15:40.160 But when my elder daughter was reading it, she said to me, you got to read this.

00:15:44.460 And I couldn't agree more.

00:15:46.620 What a terrific book.

00:15:47.760 And that must be nice too.

00:15:49.200 What nice things about sci-fi is that it can cross generations, right?

00:15:52.080 Like not only young people like them, but older people can like them as well.

00:15:55.320 So let's move another genre that was included in your list that you often don't see on book

00:16:01.480 lists.

00:16:01.760 Because again, when people make book lists, they're kind of trying to be snobbish or think

00:16:05.380 of as homework.

00:16:06.560 And this genre is often looked down upon as lowbrow.

00:16:09.400 And that's crime fiction.

00:16:11.240 Why does crime fiction, you know, get seen?

00:16:14.380 Why is it seen as lowbrow?

00:16:15.620 Because when I've read crime fiction, like really good crime fiction, Dashiell Hammett, I

00:16:20.300 mean, the writing is just top notch.

00:16:22.420 So why does it get overlooked and sort of snubbed?

00:16:25.320 I think, you know, for years people thought that it wasn't engaging serious themes, but

00:16:33.640 it is, to me, there's two appeals to crime fiction.

00:16:39.540 One is there's just the puzzle of what's happening.

00:16:43.520 Another great appeal is atmosphere.

00:16:45.620 You know, Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco or Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles or Sherlock Holmes'

00:16:51.140 London, those are great places to be in your imagination.

00:16:56.100 So that's part of it too.

00:16:58.000 But I think there's also a lot about how you approach the world.

00:17:03.360 You know, Sherlock Holmes in approaching problem solving or just thinking about things that

00:17:10.240 you eliminate.

00:17:11.260 When you eliminate all the impossible things, no matter how extraordinary the answer seems,

00:17:17.880 that's probably it.

00:17:18.940 But also about how to behave under stress, you know, in Hammett and in Chandler, you have

00:17:26.820 people, detectives, who are wandering through murky areas of behavior and morality and trying

00:17:35.840 to uphold some kind of personal code that may not be pristine in its virtue, but that it has

00:17:44.940 to work in the real world.

00:17:46.620 And I think that's really important.

00:17:48.640 That's why people like to read about Hammett's detectives or even Jack Reacher in the Lee

00:17:57.040 Child novels or Michael Connolly's Harry Bosch.

00:18:00.900 These are men, they're women detectives as well in the same situation where they're trying to

00:18:07.980 navigate a world in which the answers aren't clear, that right and wrong aren't always clearly

00:18:15.220 demarcated.

00:18:16.580 And I think people vicariously take some solace from that.

00:18:20.780 Yeah, that's like real life.

00:18:22.780 Yep.

00:18:23.400 And I think the other appeal to detective novels is that the detective is like the American

00:18:29.020 version.

00:18:29.740 There's also British and other countries, but it's a primarily American phenomenon.

00:18:33.200 It's like the American version of like a knight errant, right?

00:18:35.580 It's like-

00:18:36.120 Mm-hmm.

00:18:36.480 Yes, well put.

00:18:37.620 Exactly.

00:18:38.240 He's not a good guy, not a bad guy, doesn't really work for it.

00:18:40.760 He's on his own, but he's trying to figure out what's good.

00:18:43.860 Yep.

00:18:44.120 Any books there that you'd recommend people start off with that they want to get into crime

00:18:47.740 fiction?

00:18:48.460 Well, I was just talking about this last night, and it depends on your taste, but my own favorites,

00:18:55.620 and I say this because I have a pile of them right outside the bedroom, and there's always

00:19:01.340 one on my nightstand, and I don't know if you know those, but he started writing them in the

00:19:12.920 late 30s, and he wrote them all the way into the late 70s.

00:19:17.400 So there's about 40-something of them, and I've read them several of them many times. I tend to forget who actually, you know, did the crime, but the characters are so wonderful.

00:19:31.100 Nero Wolfe, the main character, is this obese man who almost never leaves his house. He lives in this brownstone in Manhattan.

00:19:41.980 He has a gourmet, and he has a cook who lives with him. He keeps orchids on his roof. He has 10,000 plants, and he has all of these quirky personal characteristics.

00:19:54.660 But the books are narrated by his assistant, Archie Goodwin, who is much more like a Hammett or a Raymond Chandler detective.

00:20:03.800 So Archie goes out and has all the adventures, and then he brings everything back to Wolfe, and Wolfe, with his genius, figures out the crime.

00:20:13.840 So in these books, you get the pleasures of two kinds of detective fiction. One is like the Sherlock Holmes or the Hercule Poirot, where you have this genius figuring stuff out,

00:20:25.320 but you also have the hard-boiled type where somebody's going out and getting into fistfights and the like.

00:20:32.400 And so there's a great mix of them there, and I just love them. I mean, I call it comfort reading.

00:20:38.500 I love it. And I love how you have comfort reading on this list, which is pleasant, right? Because most lists are sort of a chore.

00:20:45.000 Well, you know, one of the things that I wanted to do in making the book is, I really believe, I know this is true of myself,

00:20:53.040 and I know from the many readers I've talked to over the years, it's true of a wide group of readers,

00:21:00.000 is that we really read. It's not all seriousness. You know, we read the way we eat.

00:21:07.100 And so one day, we may feel like having a very healthy salad, you know, granola for breakfast and a salad for lunch.

00:21:16.040 But the next day, we're walking down the street, we're hungry, and we see a hot dog truck, and we really feel like having a hot dog.

00:21:22.380 And then two nights later, we may go out for a very fancy dinner in a high-end restaurant.

00:21:27.520 All of those meals are satisfying. They all speak to hungers that we have and to our appetites.

00:21:35.440 And our appetites as readers are not the same all the time, just like our appetite for food changes, our appetite for reading does as well.

00:21:44.080 So, you know, you want a couple of bags of potato chips in the list of books as well as nutritious meals.

00:21:51.960 And that's how I approached my reading. I belong to a book group here in town in Tulsa.

00:21:57.180 We're reading the great books. We started at the Iliad. Now we've worked our way. We've finished the Divine Comedy.

00:22:03.760 And a lot of those books, some of them are really a joy to read, enjoyable, like Inferno and Purgatorio, really fun to read.

00:22:10.980 Sort of like the beginning of sci-fi or fantasy in Dante.

00:22:16.200 But then I also, some of them are just sort of a slog, Aquinas, you know, it's like hard.

00:22:22.480 Yeah, the Inferno always struck me, and I'm sure somebody has already done this, but if you read the Inferno in our day and age, it's almost like you're inside a video game, you know?

00:22:33.460 Yeah.

00:22:33.640 Where there's all these characters and you have to navigate through the different levels of hell. It's the same kind of idea.

00:22:41.140 So that's a very good connection that you made. But Aquinas is not like that.

00:22:45.460 Right. Yeah. But then I also read books just for fun. Right now I'm reading some of my favorite novels, Lonesome Dove. I've read it like four times.

00:22:52.380 Right.

00:22:52.600 And I finally decided, okay, it's time I move on. There's other books in the series. So I started with the beginning in the sequence, and now I'm on Comanche Moon.

00:22:59.300 And that's what I do before I go to bed, just read a few pages. It's for pleasure. It's nothing more than that. I'm not trying to improve my life by reading Larry McMurtry novels.

00:23:09.140 Right. That variety is really important, and I try to get that in the book, and I try to also get books for every age.

00:23:17.700 So you could kind of start with Good Night Moon and Where the Wild Things Are and go all the way up to, you know, C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed. You could really have a kind of cradle-to-grave reading lifetime.

00:23:30.200 I wanted all of that in the book because, you know, for people who have families, reading with their kids is really important when they're young. It's important to the kids, and it's rewarding to the parents.

00:23:42.800 So I wanted to point in that direction as well and to have that sense of surprise when, you know, you could go into my book, you look for Larry McMurtry, and then next to it, there might be something different.

00:23:55.840 I know you mentioned The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Right after that in my book is a wonderful picture book for kids called Make Way for Ducklings.

00:24:05.800 And so, you know, that juxtaposition is really what I was after to kind of surprise people a little bit.

00:24:12.800 That is a stark juxtaposition there.

00:24:16.020 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:24:19.360 And now back to the show.

00:24:21.060 I mean, so yeah, you include children's books on the list, and that's another thing you often don't see on book lists.

00:24:25.300 What were some of the highlights from that list or genre of children's book that you have on there?

00:24:30.980 Well, there's one that I particularly like, and it's a book written for, aimed at an audience of around 12-year-olds.

00:24:39.020 And it's written by a man named Russell Hoban, H-O-B-A-N.

00:24:46.060 And he is fairly singular in the book because, or really among writers, because he's famous for two things at the opposite ends of the literary spectrum.

00:24:58.920 First, he wrote a marvelous series of picture books for kids about a badger named Francis, Birthday for Francis, Best Friends for Francis.

00:25:09.440 These books have been around for 30 or 40 years.

00:25:11.740 They still sell very well, very popular in stores.

00:25:15.360 It's just about a mischievous little animal and her family trying to keep her under control and happy.

00:25:22.920 They're marvelous, fun books.

00:25:24.480 Then he wrote novels for adults, the most famous of which is Ridley Walker.

00:25:32.020 And they're kind of speculative fiction in apocalyptic circumstances.

00:25:37.440 But in between those two audiences, he wrote this book, A Mouse and His Child.

00:25:42.040 And this book is about a toy mouse.

00:25:47.400 It's a wind-up toy, a father mouse and a child mouse.

00:25:50.940 And when the toy is wound up, the father mouse lifts up the child mouse and they dance around in a circle.

00:25:58.300 And the book starts, they're happily ensconced in the toy shop, having a wonderful life with all of their toy friends.

00:26:05.940 And then they get sold and they end up out in the cruel world and they have all these kinds of harrowing adventures.

00:26:14.740 And it's a novel.

00:26:16.080 It's about 250 pages.

00:26:17.240 It's a full-length novel.

00:26:18.440 It's a gripping story.

00:26:20.160 It is extraordinarily diverse in its dealing with different themes, even though it's this kind of all of these toys interacting with each other.

00:26:30.120 And I say this quite honestly, and I said this many times on the book tour, this book has as much to say about being alive on the earth as any book I've ever read, whether you're 12 or 60.

00:26:45.560 I recommend it to everybody because it's just about how we have to go out into the world and learn to be more resourceful and resilient and more imaginative than we might be if life didn't kind of force us to do that.

00:27:05.200 So it's an extraordinary book.

00:27:07.320 All right.

00:27:07.480 We'll put that on our show notes.

00:27:09.160 So besides fiction, there's a lot of nonfiction.

00:27:11.660 And one genre of nonfiction you have in there is memoirs.

00:27:14.680 Yes.

00:27:15.120 And I've read a lot of memoirs, and a lot of them I've read are terrible, but the ones I've read that are good are really good.

00:27:23.420 And I can't really figure out what makes the difference.

00:27:26.140 I'm not sure, but what do you think makes a good memoir a good memoir?

00:27:30.680 Well, the first thing for me is generally speaking, the person has to write especially well if it's a memoir.

00:27:38.480 And so the kind of character of the author's mind as it comes through his or her sentences is really important.

00:27:48.600 I think of my favorite memoirs as a terrific memoir of growing up in the West, in Montana, I think it is, on sheep farms.

00:28:01.720 The author's name is Ivan Doig, and he passed away a couple of years ago.

00:28:06.460 But it's about him growing up with his father and his grandmother.

00:28:10.640 They were kind of itinerant ranchers, and they'd go from farm to farm.

00:28:14.740 And from this very hard, scrabble life, he went on to take a different direction.

00:28:21.360 He went to university and became a very eloquent writer.

00:28:25.240 And this is his memories of that time.

00:28:27.240 And the quality of the writing is extraordinary.

00:28:33.180 And so he takes something of a very, could be a mundane story, and elevates it by the expansiveness of his own reflections.

00:28:43.060 I think that's really important.

00:28:45.080 Someone writing a memoir has to be thinking about their life and assessing it at the same time as they're repeating it to a reader.

00:28:53.880 So I think that's one quality that I look for.

00:28:57.240 What's another quality you look for?

00:28:59.780 Generally, it's, for me, I like finding that quality attached to experiences that are foreign to me completely, like growing up on a sheep farm.

00:29:12.080 Or in other memoirs, there's a great memoir by Mary Carr called The Liars Club about growing up in Texas.

00:29:20.660 I grew up in the New York metropolitan area.

00:29:23.300 So the sense of place and atmosphere and even character in the people that comes from being in a different location, both physically and kind of figuratively, is really important.

00:29:35.800 Besides memoir, what other genre of nonfiction did you have a lot of fun selecting for?

00:29:42.200 Was it like theology or philosophy or architecture?

00:29:46.160 What was a genre that you had a lot of fun picking up books for?

00:29:50.700 Well, I love books myself that push us to think about big things, like theology and philosophy or mythology as well.

00:30:01.540 And science fiction does this too, but in the nonfiction realm.

00:30:04.980 And I think people like to engage those ideas.

00:30:10.540 They like to find meaning in what they're doing.

00:30:15.760 You know, we're all so busy and we're running around doing all of the activities that our life dictates, our jobs and our families and so on.

00:30:25.020 And we may be having a terrific time doing all of that, but we also want to enrich that with some sense of a larger sense of being.

00:30:36.840 There's a great description in passage in a book by Norman Mailer where he talks about, if you're asked to describe yourself, you can say you are six feet tall and weigh so many pounds and brown eyes and so on.

00:30:58.160 But we all have an existence that's separate from the description, where we really live in our inner life that we kind of see as moving through the world.

00:31:12.740 And books can help us inform that inner life in a way we don't always have a chance to do when we're at the office or however we spend our day.

00:31:20.840 And so books about religion or philosophy, whether or not one believes the dogma's being espoused or even the direction of the thinking, it gets us thinking about things.

00:31:35.060 You know, why are we here?

00:31:36.220 What does it mean?

00:31:37.080 How can I put a little more purpose in my life?

00:31:41.460 And people love to do that.

00:31:43.440 They are sometimes, they don't know how, and books help them to do it.

00:31:48.300 So I think it's really important.

00:31:49.400 The longest conversation and most important ongoing conversation we have in our lives is the one inside our own heads that we have with ourselves.

00:32:00.520 And so books of any stripe that can give us new words and new ideas to enrich that conversation are really important.

00:32:10.760 And the thing I like about books, I mean, a lot of people get their information from social media.

00:32:14.420 The problem with social media, I found, is that it's other people telling their opinion on things.

00:32:19.860 You never have a space where you can just think about the thing on your own.

00:32:24.020 But with the book, it's just you and the author.

00:32:26.540 Yes.

00:32:26.780 You don't have comments coming in saying, you know, hot take, this is what I think.

00:32:31.580 It's none of that.

00:32:32.700 It's just you and the author.

00:32:33.660 And then you really have a chance to think, what do I think about this idea?

00:32:36.980 That's really well said, Brett.

00:32:38.880 Couldn't agree more.

00:32:40.360 One of the things, you know, in addition to the kind of heat and distemper of much of social media, is that it's all ephemeral.

00:32:50.020 You know, it's, I write in the introduction to the book about this, and I talk about what I think of as the great amnesia of our in-the-moment news feeds.

00:33:04.860 Because not only are all of these distractions, first, distracting, second, often toxic, but they go away quickly.

00:33:16.420 And they're replaced by something else.

00:33:18.660 They don't last.

00:33:21.200 And one of the marvelous things about a book, and in this it's even different than a movie or music, is that we, as readers, invest a lot of our own time in a book, just as the writer has.

00:33:36.700 And as we invest that time, I think this is part of what you were saying, we create space in which our thoughts can kind of, you know, stretch their limbs and wander into places where they don't normally go.

00:33:51.140 So that element of putting the time in is part of the value that we get from reading, regardless of what the individual book is.

00:34:01.000 And speaking of this ephemeral age we live in, one book that I got from your list that I read, I picked it up, read it in a day.

00:34:08.840 It's a quick read that really describes this time, is Within the Context of No Context by James Trow.

00:34:16.620 And it's a weird read.

00:34:17.740 The guy, he's an essayist.

00:34:18.660 He was an essayist for The New Yorker.

00:34:20.300 His style is kind of weird.

00:34:22.340 It's different.

00:34:23.440 But he has these nuggets that when you read it, you're like, wow, this is our current age.

00:34:28.140 This is crazy.

00:34:28.880 And this was written in the 1980s.

00:34:31.620 Exactly.

00:34:32.280 And he's, I'm so glad that you connected with that book because I love that book.

00:34:37.500 And as you say, it's very quirky, but it's short and digestible.

00:34:43.860 And he's saying all these things about there being no context for our actions anymore, that the context is being stripped away.

00:34:52.020 And as you say, he's writing about this almost 40 years ago now, and he's talking about television.

00:34:57.900 So I can only imagine what he'd have to say about what we're dealing with now in terms of social media and the like.

00:35:04.400 But it's a very rewarding book.

00:35:06.720 Yeah.

00:35:07.240 One of the points that stuck out to me is that television kind of collapsed this middle area of life, you know, social clubs, churches, like, you know, where people would sort of socialize.

00:35:18.760 And now there's just like, there's broadcast world and there's intimate world, and there's no longer that middle space.

00:35:24.780 And that's why everyone wants to be a celebrity, because you get to have an intimate world as well as that broadcast world.

00:35:30.960 And I think it explains, like, the whole phenomenon of social media influencers.

00:35:35.320 Like, every kid wants to be a social media influencer, because that's pretty much all there is.

00:35:40.300 Yeah.

00:35:40.720 Yeah.

00:35:41.540 It's amazing how prescient that book is.

00:35:45.940 Well, let's, here's a list that, you know, what I love to do about the book is at the end, you have like sub lists.

00:35:52.080 Right.

00:35:52.280 So, if you want to do children's books or books to read before you're 12 or mystery books or sci-fi, you have those lists.

00:35:58.900 I'm going to have you make a new list that wasn't there.

00:36:01.620 And this is the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:36:04.560 So, let's do like a short, you know, list of books of manly man books every man should read before they die manfully.

00:36:12.680 What would be on your list?

00:36:14.020 I would put on that list, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius by Roman Emperor, great proponent of the Stoic philosophy, but very much someone in the world trying to figure out how to behave, even though he was the emperor.

00:36:34.600 And it's very thoughtful, and it speaks to us now.

00:36:37.760 It almost, you know, reads in a very good way like a self-help book.

00:36:41.960 You know, here's one quick passage from that.

00:36:44.980 This is from The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

00:36:48.140 Everything you're trying to reach by taking the long way around, you could have right now, this moment.

00:36:54.740 If you'd only stop thwarting your own attempts, if you'd only let go of the past.

00:37:00.700 And anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one.

00:37:05.560 So, that's a terrific book, which I would really recommend to people.

00:37:08.820 The second one, I already talked about, A Mouse and His Child by Russell Holdman.

00:37:14.860 Whether you have kids or not, if you have kids especially, it would be a great book to read with them.

00:37:19.480 As I said, it's for about 12-year-olds, maybe 10 if you're reading it aloud together.

00:37:24.160 But this book is filled with very rich life lessons about coping with what the world throws at us.

00:37:32.680 So, I would add that, kind of maybe surprisingly for this list.

00:37:38.200 The next book is a book called Endurance by Alfred Lansing, which is about Ernest Shackleton's remarkable expedition in crossing Antarctica.

00:37:50.520 And it's a very, one, it's a fantastic story.

00:37:55.380 It's thrilling and suspenseful.

00:37:58.260 Two, it is a book about leadership and bravery in remarkably trying circumstances.

00:38:07.780 So, I'd recommend that as well.

00:38:10.320 Third book is a little more offbeat, not well-known, called Independent Spirit by an Irish writer named Hubert Butler.

00:38:20.860 And it's a series of essays.

00:38:23.980 So, this is a book you can pick up and put down and just read in its 10 or 12-page essays.

00:38:30.060 He's a beautiful writer.

00:38:31.120 And he lived most of his life within an area of 25 miles.

00:38:37.040 And he talks about, he gets really into his community, its history, all the way from its archaeology to current farming concerns.

00:38:48.400 But with a kind of global perspective that makes it not parochial at all, but all about how you make your life where you are, which I think is important.

00:39:01.120 He sounds like an Irish Wendell Berry.

00:39:03.640 Yeah.

00:39:04.220 That's a great connection.

00:39:06.340 I would put on there the personal memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which is probably the best book written by an American president.

00:39:18.520 Surprisingly, given Grant's reputation, it is a marvelously written book.

00:39:23.940 It's all about his, mostly about his military campaigns.

00:39:27.760 And his ability to kind of read a battlefield and read the mood of a situation is remarkably conveyed.

00:39:36.840 And it's a surprisingly rich book, whether or not you're interested in the Civil War, even more so if you are, of course.

00:39:45.180 But that's a worthwhile book.

00:39:46.980 Also, speaking about U.S. presidents, there's a book about Lyndon Johnson called Master of the Senate by Robert Caro.

00:39:56.880 Now, Caro has been writing Johnson's biography.

00:40:00.880 He's written four volumes.

00:40:02.280 There's a fifth one coming.

00:40:03.820 I think he's been writing it almost as long as Johnson lived.

00:40:07.180 Caro's in his 80s now.

00:40:08.860 But this book is how Johnson rose to power in the Senate and then how he used it and how he both inspired and manipulated everybody around him to pass the legislation he wanted and so on.

00:40:25.620 And it sounds like it would be dry and not interesting, but it's just the opposite.

00:40:31.680 I found it compelling reading.

00:40:33.740 In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway, which was Hemingway's first book, it's a collection of short stories about a young man growing up in Michigan and then going from Michigan and being in World War I.

00:40:49.900 It's kind of elliptical.

00:40:52.160 It's about being a soldier, part of it.

00:40:55.600 But it's more about someone trying to make sense of difficult experiences as he's having them and stripping away all kind of frippery from his language and his thinking to make it happen.

00:41:11.280 So In Our Time by Hemingway is one I would put there.

00:41:16.040 Another, I'll give you a couple more.

00:41:18.240 One is Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugene Harigel, which is about learning how to be in the moment.

00:41:29.600 You don't have to be particularly interested in Zen.

00:41:32.580 You don't have to be particularly interested in archery.

00:41:35.680 But it's a book about getting our heads in a place where we can have mastery of experience.

00:41:42.080 It's like if you play golf, for instance, which I don't, but I know that you can take a lot of lessons.

00:41:50.980 But if when you're swinging the club, you're thinking about what somebody told you, you're not going to hit a good shot.

00:41:57.800 You have to get beyond thinking about the mechanics of situations.

00:42:01.840 And that's what Zen and the Art of Archery is about.

00:42:04.400 Another book that I would recommend is a book called Adventures on the Wine Route by Kermit Lynch.

00:42:12.760 It's one of my favorite books.

00:42:15.040 And Kermit Lynch, as a young man, decided that he was going to open this wine shop in Berkeley, California.

00:42:25.120 He really didn't know exactly what he was doing.

00:42:28.720 He didn't know the business.

00:42:30.280 But he taught himself.

00:42:31.440 And this book is about his first trip to France and meeting all the winemakers.

00:42:37.040 He went on, Kermit Lynch went on to become one of the great wine merchants and importers in America because he found all these winemakers, mostly in France, who were passionate about their work, did idiosyncratic things, and he brought them back to America.

00:42:55.440 He was really a forerunner of a lot of the artisanal movement that we have now, both in wine and in beer.

00:43:03.340 But this is about his discovering all of this as a young man.

00:43:07.060 And it's on the order of follow your dream and figure out how you can make it work and also have good meals and good wines while you're doing it.

00:43:19.420 So it's a lot of fun.

00:43:21.480 And finally, there's a book.

00:43:23.440 It's a very, very thin little book called The Little Virtues, and it's by a woman named Natalia Ginsberg, who is an Italian writer.

00:43:34.940 And the title essay in this book, it's about raising children and how we need to focus on how we teach them bigger virtues and how to have bigger lives.

00:43:52.660 But the book is really about how the parent or the adult does this by having bigger lives themselves, that you have to have some sense of vocation and of purpose in your life that is making you get up every day with energy and good cheer, even if you're in difficult circumstances, because you have the sense of a vocation, that you're doing something that's meaningful to you.

00:44:21.340 And if your children or those around you see you modeling that behavior and living in that way, that's the best influence you can give in the world to them and to yourself.

00:44:36.840 Well, James, I've really enjoyed this conversation.

00:44:38.740 Is there someplace people can go to learn more about your work?

00:44:41.060 Yes.

00:44:41.360 We have a website called 1000bookstoread.com, 1000bookstoread.com.

00:44:48.100 Not only can they learn more about me and the book, but the whole list is there.

00:44:54.080 Not all the writing that's in the book, because as you know, the book is 1,000 pages.

00:44:57.620 It's a lot of writing.

00:44:58.700 But I have the list of books.

00:45:00.060 You get to the site, and on the homepage, there's a banner with one question that says,

00:45:04.380 what book should everybody read before they die?

00:45:08.040 And then there's my list, and I have a sentence or two about each book, and there's three buttons.

00:45:14.160 You can click agree, and you can add your comments.

00:45:17.680 You can click a second button that says, life's too short.

00:45:20.860 I don't want to read this one.

00:45:22.640 And a third button to add it to a list and build a profile so you can keep track of it.

00:45:27.600 But what I really like about this, to get back to kind of where we started with your question

00:45:32.600 about when you make lists on your site, people can add their own books.

00:45:38.680 If there's something not on my list that you love and you want to tell people about, put

00:45:44.080 it on our website.

00:45:46.300 Lots of people will see it.

00:45:48.000 I do a newsletter, which you could subscribe to, at the website as well, 1000bookstoread.com,

00:45:53.740 where we talk about what other people have added to the list.

00:45:56.900 And then I have posts to a lot of other writing that I do that are posted to medium.com,

00:46:03.680 just at James Mustick on Medium.

00:46:06.600 And you can read what I'm reading now, and what I'm writing now is all posted there.

00:46:12.640 Fantastic.

00:46:13.060 So you're keeping the conversation going about these books.

00:46:16.040 I'm trying, yep.

00:46:18.060 Well, hey, Jim, thanks so much for your time.

00:46:19.500 This has been an absolute pleasure.

00:46:20.840 Well, same for me, Brett.

00:46:22.300 I really appreciate it.

00:46:23.200 I like what you're doing, and I've enjoyed our conversation enormously.

00:46:25.820 My guest there is Jim Mustick.

00:46:27.840 He's the author of the book, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die.

00:46:30.540 It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:46:33.060 Also, check out the website, 1000bookstoread.com, where you can find more additions to the list,

00:46:37.420 as well as create your own list of books to read before you die.

00:46:40.080 And also check out our show notes at aom.is slash 1000books, where you can find links to

00:46:44.140 resources where you can delve deeper into this topic, as well as a list of books that Jim

00:46:47.960 recommended for the AOM audience.

00:46:49.420 So again, check it out, aom.is slash 1000books.

00:47:04.340 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.

00:47:07.360 Check out our website at artofmanliess.com, where you can find all the podcast archives.

00:47:11.220 Got over 490 there now.

00:47:12.920 Also, the thousands of articles written over the years.

00:47:15.100 Just about anything, personal finance, fitness, relationships, we got it.

00:47:18.400 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review

00:47:21.480 on iTunes or Stitcher.

00:47:22.520 It helps out a lot.

00:47:23.400 And if you've done that already, thank you.

00:47:25.100 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who would think will get something

00:47:28.120 out of it.

00:47:28.700 As always, thank you for the community support.

00:47:30.480 And until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you not only listen to the AOM podcast,

00:47:34.120 but put what you've heard into action.

00:47:48.400 Thank you.

00:47:49.400 Thank you.

00:47:49.420 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - March 25, 2019

#493： 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die

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