My Journey to 100 Books in a Year (58/100)

SKIP BELOW FOR REVIEWS OF THE BOOKS

First of all, happy 4th of July to everyone! It has been a while since I posted my original article about my first 25 books but I am still on track and am finally past the half way point in my journey! I am actually on track for about 110 books!

My reading journey has had its painful moments but I have finished up my Spring semester at the Naval Academy and it worked out really well. I have been reading at least two books a week to keep up the pace. I have tried to read the bigger books during my least busiest and the smaller books during exam weeks. When I started driving my car more I switched to more of an audiobook/reading mix, going back and forth between the two. For a few books like Greenlights, for example, I just got the audiobook because it was better to hear the author read the book.

Some days were a little off balance because of the difference between the work I was doing and the material I was reading. For example, I was working on developing an app for my summer internship while reading a gruesome biography of Mao. At times, I did not want to read it (or other books) but I am glad I finished them.

One last note, my title says 58/100 books but I am only going to review 25 of the books since my last article. I will review the 8 other books for the next article post. If you are curious to know, those 8 other books were: The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier by Joseph Plumb Martin, The Social Contract by Rousseau, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle and the first Harry Potter book.

So without further ado, please check out my short observations about the other 25 books I have read:

BOOK REVIEWS

26. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

"You can't fight us-Gray, there, got away from five of you. Your ship's in irons, Master Silver; you're on a lee shore, and so you'll find. I stand here to tell you so; and they're the last good words you'll get from me, for in the name of heaven, I'll put a bullet in your back when I next meet you." - Capt Smollett not hearing any of it. Much better than the movies; more action, violence and grit. Not a long read. I had grown up watching the Disney space movie adaption; this is way better. But the basic story is the same as the movies I have seen.

27. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

Du Bois was an interesting person who lived to the ripe age of 95. One of the founders of NAACP, he was a prolific writer and activist. This remains one of his more famous books. I have read Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington as well. In this book, Du Bois shares his belief that intellectual pursuits are more important for lifting up blacks after reconstruction as opposed to Washington's trade school approach. It is a very prosy, poetical work. I am not really a fan of the verbose language but I gained an appreciation for his views. He really goes over the good and bad of the Reconstruction Era, from both sides. Overall, I felt it was a more tragic work in tone as opposed to Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington.

28. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

This was a very quick read. I don't remember anything that really stuck out for me in this. Not to say it was a bad story but its also similar to the Disney movies. I did highlight the last paragraph of the book. It is there that Carrol urges the reader to hold onto all the wonder and silliness of our childhood when we grow up. Never let it go!

29. The Republic by Plato

A very good read. One of my favorite books so far and I want to read more of him. The whole thing is narrated by Socrates as he does his famous "Socratic Method" of back and forth questions. Plato explores the meaning of justice which leads him down the path to some crazy ideas, including what would later become Communism. He says we should get rid of private property, rich/poor, woman and children should become common to the community, children will be taken from their family and given to nurses away from the family, etc. This inspired Utopia by Thomas More (which I also read) and both of these stories heavily influenced Communism. I do not support Communism though haha, but I think we can be more forgiving of something written 2400 years ago than of the modern day gulags we got from Stalin and Mao.

30. Sandworm by Andy Greenberg

Nice history on the famous Russian hacking group that has caused so much misery to the Ukrainians and the rest of the world. I did not know about the Holodomor and forced starvation of about 3 million Ukrainians by the Soviet Union. This was interesting to read about. The Soviet Union, like the CCP, has shown a complete disregard for human life throughout the 20th century. The main thesis of this book is that the Russian hacking group Sandworm tested out all of its hacks on the Ukraine power grid to be used on the rest of the world. Crazy that we are experiencing this right now!

31. Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe

This book was recommended by a very smart anthropologist I know at the Office of Naval Research. I am building an app based on crowdsourcing and this is the original book that coined the term back in 2007-2008 (?). This has really cleared up a lot for me and made my ideas more succinct. All the networks we use are crowdsourcing. Google, Facebook, instagram, Kickstarter, etc. are crowdsource tools. What the book has found is that crowdsourced networks are actually beating PhD research in many cases. Not all and its not saying that it is the end of PhD work but rather... we need both amateurs and expert help. This goes for the private sector and government.

32. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

I absolutely loved this! Wow, this was funny but also heroic in its own romantic way. I won't spoil the story but its about a brilliant 17th century French soldier who is self conscious about his big nose! Haha I know this sounds stupid but its brilliant and has become a very famous play. The main gist of the story though is that Cyrano will not sacrifice his romantic convictions for anything. This play is famous for coining the word "panache."

33. The Bhagavad Gita

The "Gita" is a Hindu story taken from the larger work of Mahabharata. It is about a prince named Arjuna who is concerned that he has to go to war against family and friends. But the god Krishna comes down to convince him he must fulfill his duty to uphold the "Dharma." At one point Arjuna is shown the entire universe through Lord Krishna. It is a very short work but I wanted to get more familiar with Hindu religion and culture. I plan on reading the whole Mahabharata next year.

34. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life by Jordan Peterson

So there are about 8 books that I read that aren't actually on my reading list and this was one of them. I had read Dr. Peterson's first book and liked it so much I went and bought this one. This book focuses more on understanding the balance of life. We need to be able to push for new ideas and institutions but we also have to realize there is value in traditions and some things have been around so long because they work. I have gained a more balanced view of life through reading this. One of my favorite chapters though was about not ignoring problems. We need to bring our issues to light and confront them head on. BTW I also got a signed copy! :)

35. The Aeneid by Virgil

This should be on the Navy reading list if its not already! I have been reading a lot of ancient Greco-Roman works and I freaking love them! They are so different. This book literally became a religion for the Romans as The Iliad and The Odyssey became for the Greeks. The Romans would decide their destiny by opening up The Aeneid and pointing to a random page. But anyway the story is about a man named Aeneas who escapes the sacking of Troy to become one of the fathers of Rome. Greco-Roman works are so amazing because their history is mixed with legend. Aeneas is literally a half-god.

36. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

This was hilarious but I loved the message of the book. Kind of a silly story but its about "phoniness." We all grow up and put on a sort of show for each other. The main character Holden tries to break away from all the nonsense. I really enjoyed it but at the same time the book almost has a kind of elitism to it. Holden is a rich kid who leaves school and just screws around with daddy's money. So that kind of puts me off. It's easy to critique the world when you don't need a job.

37. Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

If you are gonna grab this, then listen to the audiobook because he narrates it very well. I don't remember why I grabbed this (and its also not on my reading list). At first I was really enjoying it but near the middle of the book it started to really bother me. The book is just non-stop craziness that gets stale. At one point I stopped listening to it because I just thought he was embellishing a lot. I have never read or listened to an autobiography from an actor. And in my experience, autobiographies are much more embellished than biographies. One of the strangest parts of the book is him celebrating his brother almost beating his father to death with (if I recall correctly) a metal pipe. That was apparently a rite of passage. IDK you decide how you feel about this book.

38. Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

This is actually on my reading list. I am not a Hindu or a Buddhist. I decided to read this because Steve Jobs read this book every year of his life ever since he was about 17ish. Steve Jobs was a strange dude and this book is very very strange haha. But a great book nonetheless. Its about a guys transformation into a world famous yogi who brings yoga to America. Yup. This guy is the reason why Yoga is so popular in the United States. He was welcomed by a few celebrities and American Presidents. Great success story and funny at times. Some of weirder stuff is his mixing of teleportation, levitation, etc. into his tale. But worth the read.

39. The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

Damn this was good. The book is wild. Just a crazy story. I don't want to spoil anything but read this book! Its very short. You can read this in a day. The story sounds so real and terrifying. Hard to believe this was written in 1896. Sorry but that's all I am going to say.

40. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

So the beginning of this book seemed pretty cool. It was just a suave dude going to bars in France. But then it just goes all downhill. I did not like this story. I found it depressing and pathetic after reading it. Keep in mind too, Hemingway shot himself in the face with a shotgun. That's how I felt reading this. I have heard similar views from friends about his other works. It was either they hated it or loved it. I am going to check out his other works but this book just left me feeling terrible about life.

41. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

THIS. This was one of my favorite books I read in the 25. Beautiful sci-fi, philosophy and explores the inner workings of humanity. I now rank this high among all the books I have ever read and I have read four of Dostoevsky's works and much of Victor Hugo's novels. So why the high rating? For one, I love sci-fi. But this book combines my love of philosophy and human nature as well. The book explores how ideologies spread; a topic extremely interesting to me. The author argues that humans need philosophy whether its Christian, Greek, Marxist, etc. It shows how easy it is to spread dangerous ideologies that end up leading to mass genocide.

42. An Island Hell by S.A. Malsagoff

You will not find this book in any libraries. You cannot buy a copy. Someone luckily found a copy in some foreign country and scanned it to the internet which is where I got my copy. The Soviets heavily suppressed the printing of this book. This is the first ever book written by a survivor of a Soviet gulag. I only know about it because it was mentioned in The Gulag Archipelago which I read last year. The first gulag was created at the Solovetsky Islands. It is a monastery. The Reds came in, killed over 90% of the priests, destroyed much of the religious relics, looted the valuables and turned it into a nightmare death camp. What most don't know is that it was Lenin who coined the word "concentration camp." The author of the book turned himself over to the Reds only to be put into this camp where the most inhuman nightmares of mankind happened. Everyday, countless people were randomly shot in the head. Punishments included being forced to stand stark naked in a mosquito pit for around 9 hours to being sent to live in a dark cave for months. From reading this and many other works to include one about Mao and Laogai it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can say "we have never tried Communism." I am Jewish; my father grew up in NYC with many holocaust survivors. Most people today would not say "we never tried Nazism."

• Link to the book: https://archive.org/details/1926AnIslandHellMalsagoff

43. A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War by Ronald K. Fierstein

Amazing. But also many boring points as it was written by one of Polaroid lawyers so it has a lot of legal stuff that was a slog for me. I grabbed this book because I heard he was a heavy inspiration for Steve Jobs. And indeed, before Land died, he mentored the young Jobs. I feel like most people these days don't know who Edwin Land was but I rank him highly now among people I look up to. A radical individualist, he dropped out of Harvard twice, to start a lab in his Manhattan apartment. He slept with a book on optics under his pillow. Everyday he read and worked to figure out how to make a polarizer; something that stumped physicists for about 100 years. Mixing sickly dog urine and some crystals he could make polarizers. Then from there he changed the world with instant photography. Entrepreneur. Radical Individualist. This man was crazy.

44. The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan

I decided to read this because it was heavily recommended by Ben Franklin in a biography of him I read. It is an extremely Christian allegorical story of a man named... Christian who goes through the trials of life to reach heaven. I really liked it although I am not a Christian myself. I have a lot of respect for all religions. This story might be pretty off-putting to most people however. All the characters in the story are named after virtues and vices.

45. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Yes I read this whole thing. Its all poetry. It includes the famous O Captain! My Captain! which is a poem about President Lincoln. Walt Whitman was a free spirit and his poems show that wild spirit. One of them was about a common prostitute; another about a girl he hooked up with for a week. This collection of poetry was condemned during his times but I believe it has the American spirit. He loved America and all that he knew she could be. It shines through in his poems. You get a sense that he loved life and his country. Maybe that sounds crazy but I loved his poetry.

46. Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles

Very short but I wanted to finish up the trilogy. The most philosophical of the plays and the last one. Oedipus explores the fact that it was the gods that caused this fate upon him. Something that I always thought when I read Greek works as a kid.

47. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

So I bought this book in high school but didn't read it until now! The week I read this book was hell because I read this AND The Federalist Papers. Both of these books can be extremely boring and are very long. This was a bad choice on my part but I learned so much reading them both. I learned about the history of coinage, and the mercantile system. Smith mainly bashes this system he lived under where the governments of his time heavily upheld monopolies and guilds at the detriment of everyone else. He argued for a more open market although he is not entirely against regulations. And the famous "invisible hand" quote I always hear people criticizing him for, he only uses once, on page 300 (I have the Barnes & Noble Essential Reading copy). Its not exactly a radical screed but at the time it was. What's interesting is that him and Alexander Hamiliton are seen as the fathers of Capitalism so it was a good synergy to read both books at the same time (as painful as it was haha). I will also be reading Marx's Capital (vol. I) this year.

48. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamiliton, James Madison and John Jay

Yes, I read all 85 Federalist Papers. Every single one. At times boring, because I have read a lot about the amazing government system we have. The most fascinating parts were their justifications of our system through their references to many Greco-Roman governments. A popular author among many of the Enlightenment philosophers was Plutarch and he is mentioned quite a bit in here; a favorite of Jefferson, Hamiliton, Smith and Napoleon. A big takeaway from reading this is that our founding fathers were on another plain of existence in terms of knowledge of governments and history. I feel like we as Americans do not know enough Greco-Roman history. Our government is unique in being a mixture of a democracy, constitutional-republic and bits of a dictatorship. All governments have their pitfalls and our government is NOT a democracy, strictly speaking. Pure democracies have lead to many issues which the founding fathers wanted to guard against. Hamiliton and Madison called this issue "the passion of men." America is a democracy but also a republic with a constitution and a head President conferred with some of the benefits of a dictatorship. The founding fathers considered having 2 or even 12 (if I remember correctly) Presidents as the Greeks tried this too.

49. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

Mr. Chernow is a great biographer. I had read his Hamiliton biography. His biography on Rockefeller is very balanced; not focusing too much on Ida Tarball but also not glorifying Rockefeller. What struck me most about reading this is that when Rockefeller started his first business around the age of 18, he went around telling everyone he was going to be the richest man in the world. He ended up being the richest man in modern times and second richest in history. He supposedly died with a net worth around $423 Billion. He had so much money that he actually single-handedly bailed out the entire US economy. At one point, his wealth accounted for 2% of the US GDP. He did a lot of good things that helped the world including starting medical research. That is not to ignore any of his bad business practices but it is worth reading more about the whole man; not just one side.

50. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

So, I will actually be going Subs in the US Navy when I graduate from the Naval Academy. I absolutely loved this book and its amazing how much modern Subs seems to be as described in this old 19th century work of fiction. Very good story too but I won't spoil it for you!