6 New Books to Immerse Yourself in This Holiday Season

The holiday season is the perfect time to immerse yourself in captivating reads that enlighten, educate, and inspire. We've curated a list of new titles that will ignite your imagination and give you fresh perspectives to grow yourself personally and professionally.

1. Move Fast & Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems, by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss

Bestselling authors and cohosts of the TED podcast?Fixable, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss reinvent the playbook for how to lead change—with a radical approach that moves fast, builds trust, and accelerates excellence.

Speed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Facebook made "Move fast and break things" an informal company motto, it fueled a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. A certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for inventing the future. Leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this belief is deeply flawed—and that it keeps you from building a great company. Helping executives and entrepreneurs solve their toughest problems over the past decade, Frei and Morriss learned that the trade-off between speed and excellence is?false. The best change leaders solve hard problems with fierce urgency while making their organizations—employees, customers, and shareholders—even stronger.?

2. Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis

When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the?Forbes?billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side?

In?Going Infinite?Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride,?Going Infinite?is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own―until it all came undone.

3. The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories that Inform, Influence, and Inspire, by Karen Eber

We live in a story world. Stories are a memorable and engaging way to differentiate yourself, build connection and trust, create new thinking, bring meaning to data, and even influence decision-making. But how do you turn a good story into a great story that informs, influences, and inspires? In?The Perfect Story, Karen Eber—leadership consultant, professional keynote storyteller, and TED speaker—shares the science of storytelling to teach you to leverage the five factory settings of the brain to hack the art of storytelling.

Through interview vignettes,?The Perfect Story?also shares approaches from different storytellers, including the Sundance Institute cofounder, an executive producer of The Moth, the former creative director at Pixar, the TED Radio Hour podcast host, and many more. Whether you are leading a team, giving a presentation, hosting a podcast, selling a product or service, interviewing for a job, or giving a toast at a wedding, The Perfect Story will help you take your stories and make them perfect.

4. The Iliad, by Homer as translated by Emily Wilson

When Emily Wilson’s translation of?The Odyssey?appeared in 2017―revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was “fresh, unpretentious and lean”―critics lauded it as “a revelation” and “a cultural landmark” that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic―the most revered war poem of all time.

The?Iliad?roars with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss, and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world―the fierce beauty of nature and the gods’ grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson’s hands, this thrilling, magical, and often horrifying tale now gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem’s deep pathos and reveals palpably real, even “complicated,” characters―both human and divine.

The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity’s most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson’s?Iliad?now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.

5. The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, by Pico Iyer

Paradise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it’s in our midst—or just across the ocean—if only we can find eyes to see it.?Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into war zones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld—or can it be found in the here and now??For almost fifty years, Iyer has been roaming the world, mixing a global soul’s delight in observing cultures with a pilgrim’s readiness to be transformed. In this culminating work, he brings together the outer world and the inner to offer us a surprising, original, often beautiful exploration of how we might come upon paradise in the midst of our very real lives.

6. The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, with an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

Question: What books are on your looking forward to immersing yourself in this holiday season?

Sheri Nasim is President and CEO of Center for Executive Excellence, a leadership consulting firm headquartered in San Diego, CA. She is the author of Work On Purpose: How to Connect Who You Are With What You Do.

Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, visit us today at www.executiveexcellence.com or subscribe?to receive CEE News!