Transcript
Brett McKay:
I’m Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. There are over 100 million books in existence, and the average person only has eight decades in which to read them. So which book should you choose to read over others before you croak? It’s a question that’s launched scores of lists and many an argument, and my guest today has fired his own 900 plus page missive in the debate. His name is Jim Mustich. He’s been in the book business for over 30 years as a bookseller, reviewer, and editor. He’s created the ultimate book list in his book, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. Today on the show, Jim explains his guiding philosophy on the books he decided to include in his list and how he designed the book to have the feel of browsing through an ideal bookshop. Jim then makes the case for why book lists are helpful, but should ever be seen as strictly prescriptive.
We then dig into the surprising genres of books that Jim included in his list, including science fiction, detective novels, and children’s books, and one or two of his very top recommendations in each category. And at the end of our conversation, got a nice treat here, Jim makes a list of books just for the AOM audience of books every man should read before he dies. After the show’s over, check out the show notes at aom.is/1000books. And Jim joins me now via clearcast.io.
All right, Jim Mustich, welcome to the show.
Jim Mustich:
Thank you for having me, Brett. It’s really a pleasure to speak with you.
Brett McKay:
So you’ve had a career in books for a long time. You’ve been in books as a reviewer, an editor, a bookseller, and you finally got around to writing a book, and it’s a book about books. So tell us, how did you get to this point where you decided it was time to write a book, it’s called A Thousand Books to Read Before You Die?
Jim Mustich:
As you mentioned, I’ve been in the book business my whole life. I started at an independent bookstore in the early 1980s in suburban New York. And from that, I had the idea to start my own business in 1986. I started up a catalog called A Common Reader, which was a catalog that we mailed out across the country. Usually it was about 144 pages where I and some other colleagues would write about books. It was very personal. We’d find generally offbeat books or neglected books that weren’t on people’s radar. And we grew a very nice business doing that. And I did it for about 20 years till at the end of it, we had a mailing list, subscription list of about 250,000 people. And it had lots of the flavors of a book blog or a website, but we had started it before the internet. And so we did it in the mail.
And through that experience of writing about books and of interacting with the readers of the catalog who would buy books from us and send us wonderful letters about what they thought of the books, but also recommending other books, my wife and I still have six or eight file cabinets in our basement filled with these letters of people talking about their favorite books. And that got me writing about books a lot. And so in the early 2000s, Peter Workman, who was the founder of Workman Publishing, which is the publisher of a thousand books to read Before You Die, he was a great fan of my catalog. And he had published very successfully a book by Patricia Schultz called A Thousand Places to See Before You Die, which some of your listeners may be familiar with. And that was very successful. And Peter decided he wanted to do a book like that about books.
So he asked me to do it. I worked on it for 14 years and it was finally published in October.
Brett McKay:
I can tell that it took 14 years. It’s large and the descriptions are just fantastic. They’re very detailed and they make you want to read the books you highlight. But I’m curious, what was your guiding ethos as you selected these books? Why a thousand? Because it’s a large number, but it’s not like 10,000, right?
Jim Mustich:
Right.
Brett McKay:
So why a thousand? And what was your ethos as you went about selecting these books?
Jim Mustich:
Well that’s a great question. And it puzzled me for a long time because I had been a reader for decades and a bookseller for decades as well by the time I began. And so I had so many books on a list that could potentially be included. The number a thousand came with the project from Workman because they had done a thousand places and they wanted to do a series. So that was kind of my starting point, which I didn’t have much negotiating power about, but it seemed okay. But as the more I thought about it, the more complicated it became because I would joke with Patricia Schultz who wrote A Thousand Places that conceptually her job was easy because you could just take a map and the structure of the book would be determined by the map. And any reader of her book would understand what the structure was because people are all familiar with maps of the world.
But when you’re talking about a thousand books, you could take many different approaches to it. You could have the thousand most popular books of all time, the thousand most important books of all time. You could create a cannon of classics. You could do it by age of reader. And since books encompass within them all of human knowledge, you have all different kinds of subjects. You could do it by subject if you wanted to by history, science, so on. So I had all these books, but organizing them was a bit of a puzzle to me until I came upon a quote that really struck me, which was from the great literary critic, Edmund Wilson. In one of his books, he talks about the miscellaneous learning of a bookstore unorganized by any larger purpose. And I said to myself, that’s what I want. I want readers to open this book.
They might be looking for something in particular, but they could really be empowered to browse around and follow their own instincts. So how can I get something that would be fun in that way that would give the user, the reader, some agency in going through the book? So I said to myself, what if I had a bookstore? I could only have a thousand books and I wanted to have something for every kind of reading appetite. If somebody walked into this metaphorical store and said, I want a book about ancient Greece or I’m getting on a plane for a long plane ride, I want a really absorbing thriller, or I want some picture books to share with my kids. I wanted to have something for everyone. So that’s kind of how I structured it.
Brett McKay:
And I love that structure and that metaphor because really when you’re reading this, it’s like you’re in a cool bookstore and you’re just like, oh, I wasn’t looking for that, but I’m glad I stumbled upon it and now I’m going to buy this book. Now, what’s interesting about book lists, they’re all over the internet. We have our own on our site and every time we’ve published book list on our site, it always raises eyes of readers because we left out a book or we have the gall to make a normative claim that these are the books you should read. Have you gotten that with this book or?
Jim Mustich:
Welcome to my world, Brett. I write in the introduction something that I learned very early as I was working on this book that once people know you’re writing a book called A Thousand Books to Read Before You Die, you can never enjoy a dinner party in quite the same way as you did before because everyone would want to know what’s in it. They’d want to know if their favorites are in it, they’d have recommendations and so on. So I hear you loud and clear. I get that all the time, but much to my delight, as I’ve gone around, I spent most of the fall going to bookstores and libraries around the country talking about the book. And all of those conversations have been tremendously fun and polite and generous. And so I’ve learned a lot. My listeners and readers have learned a lot because everybody’s passionate about what they love.
So it’s a never ending task of adding new books to my own list of things to read, but also for the discussion. And part of what I wanted to share with people was the love of that conversation. I mentioned to you before all those letters I used to get from customers of a common reader and the conversations about a thousand books have been the same thing. People coming, wanting to see if something was in there, arguing in a merry way about their own favorites. So it’s been a lot of fun.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. The first thing I did when I got your book is like, “Are my favorite books in here?” And they were. All of them were. It was fancy. You got great. Yeah. Lonesome Dove, I was happy to see was in there. The Road was in there. The Great Gatsby, very happy to see that. Catch 22, all my favorites. So I was glad to see those all made the list. But as a person who’s a reader, a connoisseur of books, what do you think of book lists? How do you think they’re helpful for readers?
Jim Mustich:
Well, I think there are so many books being published every week and there are so many books that have been published in the past and there are so many byways in a library or a bookstore that I think lists are very helpful if they are made by the maker of the list in a generous way to share knowledge or enthusiasm in a way that’s inviting rather than prescriptive. Lists can give people the sense that, oh boy, this is a big homework assignment and I don’t like that approach at all. What I like to do is to invite people, “Here, look at this. I think you’ll be interested in this.” And to kind of encourage them. The epigraph to my book, let me read it now because it’s right on this subject. It’s from Virginia Wolf. She had an essay called How Should One Read a Book?
And this is what she says and this is the way I feel. The only advice that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence, which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. So what I can do as a longtime bookseller and a knowledgeable reader is to make a list and put in front of people things that they might not be familiar with or maybe they were a little afraid to tackle before. But again, I try to do it in a very encouraging way. The thousand books in my book, it’s not a test. I say to people, open the book anywhere, look for your favorites and then poke around and see what suggests itself to you.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I love that epigraph. And that’s kind of why I always approach book lists. I never see it as like, oh, this guy’s telling what I should read. You bug off guy. It’s like, oh, I just think this is interesting, this guy’s take. Maybe I’ll find something new. But there’s some people that, man, they get really fiery when they’re told, “This is what you need to read.” But I love that quote from Virginia Wolf. Well, let’s dig into the books you included and the genres you included because typically when people make book lists, it’s always like the classics or highbrow non-fiction or nonfiction that people should read, but you’ve got sci-fi in there. And I was really pleasantly surprised by the number of sci-fi books you have on your list. Why do you think sci-fi often gets the short shrift on book lists?
Jim Mustich:
Well, I think when it comes to book lists, even the people making them approach it as a kind of homework. And let’s face it, most of us who do these lists were English majors at one point or another. So we have this sense of the classic works which are generally the books that are taught. And sci-fi only recently has been kind of accepted into that conversation. But I believe that genre works are really where people’s imaginations flower, not just the writers, but the readers. Because when you get a great work of sci-fi and the author is building a world, it’s so full of ideas and interesting things that it far outstrips in terms of mental exercise or mental exhilaration, what you might get in a very good literary novel about a couple living in Manhattan or something. The book can be great, but you’re not stretching ideas and in the exact sense in sci-fi, creating worlds for people to explore.
And so I love when people expand their kind of spirits by going into sci-fi. You can even do it in romance or in children’s books where the sense of story is really allowed to take over.
Brett McKay:
Are there any sci-fi books that, just from the ones you include in your list that are good starting points for people who maybe they’ve always been turned off by sci-fi because they’re like, “Well, that was what the nerds read in high school.” But I want to get into what would you recommend?
Jim Mustich:
That’s a good question. I like one. The one that really excited me is a book called The Star is My Destination by Alfred Bester. That’s one that really got me hooked. And it was written in the ’50s and it’s essentially a retelling of the count of Monte Cristo in outer space. There’s a lot of revenge and someone disappears for years, but it’s so fast paced, people can kind of teleport themselves from one place to another. And it’s just exciting. You get caught up in the story. There are ideas there. Many ideas in science fiction turn up decades later as being new technologies. So that’s a good place to start. I love that one. There’s the classics like Isaac Asimov’s foundation trilogy or edgier stuff like J.G. Ballard more recently who writes terrifically absorbing and kind of frightening books that have you on the edge of your seat, both physically and metaphysically.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Isaac Asimov, I’m just starting to get into him. And one thing that surprised me about him I didn’t know is how much that guy wrote. He had a tremendous amount of output.
Jim Mustich:
When I started out in the book business, we used to joke, this was in the early 80s, he was such a polymath that not only did he write science fiction and serious works of science, he seemed to have a book on every subject in the bookstore. There’d be a book in the religion section, in the history section. He wrote about everything, a truly phenomenally prolific and smart writer.
Brett McKay:
The one that I think got me into science fiction was Ender’s Game by –
Jim Mustich:
Ah yeah, what a great book. I read that when my daughters, my daughters are both grown now in their 20s, but when my elder daughter was reading it, she said to me, “You got to read this.” And I couldn’t agree more. What a terrific book.
Brett McKay:
And that must be nice too. The nice things about sci-fi is that it can cross generations, not only young people like them, but older people can like them as well. So let’s move another genre that was included in your list that you often don’t see on book lists because again, when people make book lists, they try to be snobbish or they think of it as homework. And this genre is often looked down upon as low brow and that’s crime fiction. Why is it seen as low brow? Because when I’ve read crime fiction, really good crime fiction, Dashiell Hamet, I mean the writing’s just top notch. So why does it get overlooked and sort of snubbed?
Jim Mustich:
I think for years people thought that it wasn’t engaging serious themes, but it is, to me, there’s two appeals to crime fiction. One is there’s just the puzzle of what’s happening. Another great appeal is atmosphere. Dashiell Hammett, San Francisco or Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles or Sherlock Holmes’s London. Those are great places to be in your imagination. So that’s part of it too. But I think there’s also a lot about how you approach the world. Sherlock Holmes in approaching problem solving or just thinking about things that you eliminate when you eliminate all the impossible things, no matter how extraordinary the answer seems, that’s probably it. But also about how to behave under stress. In Hamet and in Chandler, you have people, detectives who are wandering through murky areas of behavior and morality and trying to uphold some kind of personal code that may not be pristine in its virtue, but that it has to work in the real world.
And I think that’s really important. That’s why people like to read about Hamet’s detectives or even Jack Reacher in the Lee Child novels or Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch. These are men, they’re women detectives as well in the same situation where they’re trying to navigate a world in which the answers aren’t clear, that right and wrong aren’t always clearly demarcated. And I think people vicariously take some solace from that.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, that’s like real life.
Jim Mustich:
Yep.
Brett McKay:
And I think the other appeal to detective novels is that the detective is like the American version. There’s also British in other countries, but it’s primarily American phenomenon. It’s like the American version of a night era, right?
Jim Mustich:
Yes. Well put. Exactly.
Brett McKay:
He’s not a good guy, not a bad guy, doesn’t really work for it. He’s on his own, but he’s trying to figure out what’s good.
Jim Mustich:
Yep.
Brett McKay:
Any books there that you’d recommend people to start off with that they want to get into crime fiction?
Jim Mustich:
Well, I was just talking about this last night and it depends on your taste, but my own favorites, and I say this because I have a pile of them right outside the bedroom and there’s always one on my nightstand, are the Rex Stout novels about a detective named Nero Wolf. Now, I don’t know if you know those, but he started writing them in the late 30s and he wrote them all the way into the late 70s. So there’s about 40 something of them. And I’ve read several of them many times. I tend to forget who actually did the crime, but the characters are so wonderful. Nero Wolf, the main character, is this obese man who almost never leaves his house. He lives in this brownstone in Manhattan. He’s 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. But the books are narrated by his assistant, Archie Goodwin, who is much more like a Hamet or a Raymond Chandler detective. So Archie goes out and has all the adventures and then he brings everything back to Wolf and Wolf with his genius figures out the crime. 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, but you also have the hard boiled type where somebody’s going out and getting into fist fights and the like. And so there’s a great mix of them there and I just love them. I mean, I call it comfort reading.
Brett McKay:
I love it. And I love how you have comfort reading on this list, which is pleasant because most lists are sort of a chore.
Jim Mustich:
Well, one of the things that I wanted to do in making the book is I really believe, I know this is true of myself and I know from the many readers I’ve talked to over the years, it’s true of a wide group of readers, is that we really read. It’s not all seriousness. We read the way we eat. And so one day we may feel like having a very healthy salad, granola for breakfast and a salad for lunch, 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. And then two nights later, we may go out for a very fancy dinner in a high end restaurant. All of those meals are satisfying. They all speak to hungers that we have and to our appetites. 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. So you want a couple of bags of potato chips in the list of books as well as nutritious meals.
Brett McKay:
And that’s how I approached my reading. I belong to a book group here in town in Tulsa where we’re reading the great books. We started at the Iliad. Now we’ve worked our way. We finished the Divine Comedy. And a lot of those books, some of them are really a joy to read, enjoyable like Inferno and Purgatorio, really fun to read, sort of like the beginning of sci-fi or fantasy in Dante, but then also some of them are just sort of a slog, Aquinas. It’s hard.
Jim Mustich:
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 where there’s all these characters and you have to navigate through the different levels of hell. It’s the same kind of idea. So that’s a very good connection that you made, but Aquinas is not like that.
Brett McKay:
Right. Yeah. But then I also read books just for fun. So right now I’m reading. So my favorite novel is Lonesome Dove. I’ve read it like four times. And I finally decide, 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 in Comanche Moon. 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.
Jim Mustich:
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. So you could kind of start with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are and go all the way up to C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. You could really have a kind of cradle to grave reading lifetime. I wanted all of that in the book because 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. So I wanted to point in that direction as well and to have that sense of surprise when you could go into my book, you look for Larry McMurtry, and then next to it there might be something different. 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.
And so that juxtaposition is really what I was after to kind of surprise people a little bit.
Brett McKay:
That is a stark juxtaposition there. We’re going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show. 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. What were some of the highlights from that list or genre of children’s book that you have on there?
Jim Mustich:
Well, there’s the one that I particularly like, and it’s a book aimed at an audience of around 12 year olds. And it’s written by a man named Russell Hoban, H-O-B-A-N. 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. First, he wrote a marvelous series of picture books for kids about a badger named Francis, a birthday for Francis, Best Friends for Francis. These books have been around for 30 or 40 years. They still sell very well, very popular in stores just about a mischievous little animal and her family trying to keep her under control and happy. They’re marvelous, fun books. Then he wrote novels for adults, the most famous of which is Ridley Walker, and they’re kind of speculative fiction in apocalyptic circumstances. But in between those two audiences, he wrote this book, A Mouse and His Child.
And this book is about a toy mouse. It’s a windup toy, a father mouse and a child mouse. And when the toy is wound up, the father mouse lifts up the child mouse and they dance around in a circle. And the book starts, they’re happily ensconced in the toy shop, having a wonderful life with all of their toy friends. And then they get sold and they end up out in the cruel world and they have all these kinds of harrowing adventures. And it’s a novel, it’s about 250 pages. It’s a full length novel. It’s a gripping story. 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. 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.
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. So it’s an extraordinary book.
Brett McKay:
All right. We’ll put that on our show notes. So besides fiction, there’s a lot of nonfiction and one genre of nonfiction you have in there is memoirs.
Jim Mustich:
Yes.
Brett McKay:
I’ve read a lot of memoirs and a lot of them I read are terrible, but the ones I’ve read that are good are really good. And I can’t really figure out what makes the difference. I’m not sure, but what do you think makes a good memoir a good memoir?
Jim Mustich:
Well, the first thing for me is generally speaking, the person has to write especially well if it’s a memoir. And so the kind of character of the author’s mind as it comes through his or her sentences is really important. 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. The author’s name is Ivan Doig, and he passed away a couple of years ago, but it’s about him growing up with his father and his grandmother. They were kind of itinerant ranchers and they’d go from farm to farm. And from this very hard scrabble life, he went on to take a different direction. He went to university and became a very eloquent writer. And this is his memories of that time. And the quality of the writing is extraordinary. And so he takes something of a very, could be a mundane story and elevates it by the expansiveness of his own reflections.
I think that’s really important. 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. So I think that’s one quality that I look for.
Brett McKay:
What’s another quality you look for?
Jim Mustich:
Generally, for me, I like finding that quality attached to experiences that are foreign to me completely, like growing up on a sheep farm or in other memoirs. There’s a great memoir by Mary Carr called The Liars Club about growing up in Texas. I grew up in the New York metropolitan area, 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.
Brett McKay:
Besides memoir, what other genre of nonfiction did you have a lot of fun selecting for? Was it like theology or philosophy or architecture? What was a genre that you had a lot of fun picking books for?
Jim Mustich:
Well, I love books that myself that push us to think about big things like theology and philosophy or mythology as well. And science fiction does this too, but in the nonfiction realm. And I think people like to engage those ideas. They like to find meaning in what they’re doing. 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. 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. There’s a great description in passage in a book by Norman Maller 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. 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.
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. 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. Why are we here? What does it mean? How can I put a little more purpose in my life? And people love to do that. Sometimes they don’t know how, and books help them to do it. So I think it’s really important. 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. And so books of any stripe that can give us new words and new ideas to enrich that conversation are really important.
Brett McKay:
And the thing I like about books, I mean, a lot of people would get their information from social media. The problem with social media I found is that it’s other people telling their opinion on things. You never have a space where you can just think about the thing on your own, but with the book, it’s just you and the author. You don’t have comments coming in saying, “Hot take, this is what I think.” It’s none of that. It’s just you and the author. Then you really have a chance to think, “What do I think about this idea?”
Jim Mustich:
That’s really well said, Brett. Couldn’t agree more. One of the things, in addition to the kind of heat and distemper of much of social media, is that it’s all ephemeral. 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 newsfeeds because not only are all of these distractions first distracting, second often toxic, but they go away quickly and they’re replaced by something else. They don’t last. 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. 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 stretch their limbs and wander into places where they don’t normally go.
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.
Brett McKay:
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, it’s a quick read that really describes this time is Within the Context of No Context by James Trou. And it’s a weird read. The guy, he’s an essayist. He was an essayist for The New Yorker. His style is kind of weird. It is different, but he has these nuggets that when you read it, you’re like, wow, this is our current age. This is crazy. And this was written in the 1980s.
Jim Mustich:
Exactly. And I’m so glad that you connected with that book because I love that book. And as you say, it’s very quirky, but it’s short and digestible. And he’s saying all these things about there being no context for our actions anymore, that the context is being stripped away. And as you say, he’s writing about this almost 40 years ago now and he’s talking about television. 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, but it’s a very rewarding book.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. One of these points that stuck out to me is that television kind of collapsed this middle area of life, social clubs, churches, where people would sort of socialize and now there’s broadcast world and there’s intimate world and there’s no longer that middle space. And that’s why everyone wants to be a celebrity because you get to have an intimate world as well as that broadcast world. And I think it explains the whole phenomenon of social media influencers. Every kid wants to be a social media influencer because that’s pretty much all there is.
Jim Mustich:
Yeah. It’s amazing how prescient that book is.
Brett McKay:
Well, here’s a list that. What I love too about the book is at the end you have sub lists. So if you want to do children’s books or books read before you’re 12 or mystery books or sci-fi, you have those lists. I’m going to have you make a new list that wasn’t there. And this is the Art of Manliness Podcast. So let’s do a short list of books of manly man books every man should read before they die manfully. What would be on your list?
Jim Mustich:
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. And it’s very thoughtful and it speaks to us now. It almost reads in a very good way like a self-help book. Here’s one quick passage from that. This is from the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Everything you’re trying to reach by taking the long way round you could have right now, this moment, if you’d only stop thwarting your own attempts, if you’d only let go of the past and anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one. So that’s a terrific book, which I would really recommend to people. The second one I already talked about, A Mouse and His Child by Russell Holband.
Whether you have kids or not, if you have kids especially, it’d be a great book to read with them. As I said, it’s for about 12 year olds, maybe 10 if you’re reading it aloud together. But this book is filled with very rich life lessons about coping with what the world throws at us. So I would add that kind of maybe surprisingly for this list. The next book is a book called Endurance by Alfred Lansing, which is about Ernest Shackleton’s Remarkable Expedition in Crossing Antarctica.
One, it’s a fantastic story. It’s thrilling and suspenseful. Two, it is a book about leadership and bravery in remarkably trying circumstances. So I’d recommend that as well. Third book is a little more offbeat, not well known, called Independent Spirit by an Irish writer named Hubert Butler. And it’s a series of essays. So this is a book you can pick up and put down and just read in 10 or 12 page essays. He’s a beautiful writer and he lived most of his life within an area of 25 miles. And he talks about, he gets really into his community, its history, all the way from its archeology to current farming concerns, 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.
Brett McKay:
He sounds like an Irish Wendell Berry.
Jim Mustich:
Yeah, that’s a great connection. I would put on there the personal memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which is probably the best book written by an American president. Surprisingly, given Grant’s reputation, it is a marvelously written book. It’s mostly about his military campaigns and his ability to kind of read a battlefield and read the mood of a situation is remarkably conveyed. 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, but that’s a worthwhile book. Also speaking about US presidents, there’s a book about Lyndon Johnson called Master of the Senate by Robert Caro. Now, Caro has been writing Johnson’s biography. He’s written four volumes. There’s a fifth one coming. I think he’s been writing it almost as long as Johnson lived. Caro’s in his 80s now. 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.
And it sounds like it would be dry and not interesting, but it’s just the opposite. I’ve found it compelling reading. 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. It’s kind of elliptical. It’s about being a soldier, part of it, 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. So In Our Time by Hemingway is one I would put there. Another, I’ll give you a couple more. One is Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugene Herrigal, which is about learning how to be in the moment. You don’t have to be particularly interested in Zen.
You don’t have to be particularly interested in archery, but it’s a book about getting our heads in a place where we can have mastery of experience. It’s like if you play golf, for instance, which I don’t, but I know that you can take a lot of lessons, 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. You have to get beyond thinking about the mechanics of situations. And that’s what Zen and the Art of Archery is about. Another book that I would recommend is a book called Adventures on the Wine Route by Kermit Lynch. It’s one of my favorite books. And Kermit Lynch, as a young man, decided that he was going to open this wine shop in Berkeley, California. He really didn’t know exactly what he was doing. He didn’t know the business, but he taught himself.
And this book is about his first trip to France and meeting all the winemakers. 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. He was really a forerunner of a lot of the artisanal movement that we have now, both in wine and in beer. But this is about his discovering all of this as a young man 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. So it’s a lot of fun. And finally, there’s a book, it’s a very, very thin little book called The Little Virtues, and it’s by a woman named Natalia Ginsburg, who is an Italian writer.
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. 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 this sense of a vocation that you’re doing something that’s meaningful to you. 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.
Brett McKay:
Well, James, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Is there some place people can go to learn more about your work?
Jim Mustich:
Yes. We have a website called 1000bookstoread.com, 1000bookstoread.com. Not only can they learn more about me and the book, but the whole list is there. Not all the writing that’s in the book because as you know, the book is a thousand pages. It’s a lot of writing, but I have the list of books. You get to the site and on the homepage, there’s a banner with one question that says, “What book should everybody read before they die?” And then there’s my list and I have a sentence or two about each book and there’s three buttons. You can click agree and you can add your comments. You can click a second button that says, “Life’s too short. I don’t want to read this one.” And a third button to add it to a list and build a profile so you can keep track of it. But what I really like about this, to get back to kind of where we started with your question about when you make lists on your site, people can add their own books.
If there’s something not on my list that you love and you want to tell people about, put it on our website. Lots of people will see it. I do a newsletter which you could subscribe to at the website as well, 1000bookstoread.com, where we talk about what other people have added to the list. And then I have posts to a lot of other writing that I do that are posted to medium.com, just @James Mustic on Medium. And you can read what I’m reading now and what I’m writing now is all posted there.
Brett McKay:
Fantastic. So you’re keeping the conversation going about these books.
Jim Mustich:
I’m trying.
Brett McKay:
Well, hey Jim, thanks so much for your tim has been an absolute pleasure.
Jim Mustich:
Well, same for me, Brett. I really appreciate it. I like what you’re doing and I’ve enjoyed our conversation enormously.
Brett McKay:
My guest today is Jim Mustich. He’s the author of the book, 1000 Books to Read Before You Die. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Also check out the website, 1000bookstoread.com where you can find more additions to the list as well as create your own list of books to read before you die. And also check out our show notes at aom.is/1000books where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic as well as a list of books that Jim recommended for the AOM audience. So again, check it out aom.is/1000books. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find all the podcast archives. Got over 490 there now. Also, the thousands of articles written over the years, just about anything, personal finance, fitness, relationships, we got it. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher.
It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who would think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the community support and until next time, does Brett McKay remind you not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
