I was naive in my estimation of how long it was going to take me to do it because it’s a difficult problem to get your head around. With books, because there are so many, in the many millions by now through all of written history, and from every country of the world; and because they contain all of human knowledge, every subject under the sun; and because they appeal to different audiences and serve different purposes in our lives, it’s not quite so intuitive about how you might structure something like that. Because if you just wanted to do the thousand best books ever written that gets kind of boring after the first hundred. And if you wanted to do it chronologically, you’d lose a lot of interest in those early years. And if you did it by the most popular of best-selling books of all time, you’d have a lot of stuff that, frankly, didn’t stand the test of time. I struggled with this for a long time.

I decided to approach it from the point of view of a reader of this book; not so much on the corpus of literature that was out there, but how might a reader use this book, and how might it be a good complement to a reading life. I really believe that we read the way we eat, so some days, we eat healthily. Some days, we just want a snack. And some days we want a fancy meal, or we want to go out to a gourmet restaurant. We kind of read the same way. Sometimes we read for edification, we’re learning for a specific purpose. Metaphorically speaking, we’re low in vitamin B, and so we’re going to arrange our diet that way for our health. And then other days, we want the equivalent of a bag of potato chips. We enjoy all of those things, and we enjoy every part of eating. So I wanted to be true to that in terms of a reading life.

I also wanted to cover books from childhood, through youth, middle age, and old age, where we read differently. And I wanted it to be welcoming. So I imagined in my head, because I’ve been a bookseller for quite some time: What if I had a bookstore, and I could only have 1000 books? And I wanted to have something for anybody who came into the shop in search of something. It might be that someone is looking to learn about time management or about Greek tragedy, or they’re going to be getting on a plane and they want a mystery; just absorb them for the flight, or they’re going to visit their grandkids and they want a good picture book to share with a young reader. That kind of gave me a little bit of a rubric for deciding. But I also knew that one of the great joys in a reader’s life is going into a library or bookstore looking for something specific, and then seeing something, out of the corner of your eye, and say, “Oh, that looks interesting. Oh, I wanted to learn about that,” or, “Oh, Sally told me about that,” or “I heard the author on the radio.” I wanted to give that sense of browsing and serendipity; go in looking for something, and then find something else. So I threw all that stuff together. I narrowed down the list of about 8000 books. I had originally, down to a thousand, and I tried to balance it unscientifically, I will add by all of those strictures I just talked about.

Sean Murray  05:58

Wow. Just to play off of the comment there about serendipity. Just browsing through your book, I’ve already come across countless titles that I had never heard of before, and I thought, “Well, that sounds interesting. Well, it made James’s list, it’s got to have some merit.” It’s been a delight. As bookstores become less and less a part of our life, sadly, I do find I don’t spend as much time in bookstores as I used to, so I’ve been missing that serendipity. And this list, because of its breadth, has brought that back a little bit. I think when you’re browsing on Amazon for a book, you just don’t get that. So that’s definitely a treasure. I want to talk a little bit more about the comprehensiveness of this list for those listening because when you look at a typical book list that’s usually the top 100 books of all time, or the top 100 history books or business books. It’s already kind of narrowed into a genre. And, to your point, you’ve tackled something much broader. While I was doing research for this episode, Amazon sent me their top 100 books of all time from their editors. I looked at the list and was just kind of comparing it to your book, and there was no philosophy on there. There are no detective novels. There are no comic books. There are no children’s books. There really is something about this list that you put together.

James Mustich  07:18

Well, thank you. That’s what I was aiming for, so I’m glad at least with you, I hit the target. As I said, a reading life is multi-faceted. We go into rabbit holes, periods of our lives, where we like a certain type of thing, and then we come out of it and we look around and we find something else. It’s not always purposeful, but it’s always meaningful. Because when we read a book unlike seeing a movie, where you can sit down, and you know whether it’s the greatest movie you ever saw or just a piece of fluff. In two hours, you’re going to be done, and you go on with your life. But for a book, you invest your time in it and your imagination. It takes you a while to read it. You’re thinking about it as you’re reading it over a week or a month, or sometimes a year, depending upon the length. Books are real companions in the way that they live inside our heads. And that, in choosing them, we have a sense of agency, because they are so many of them. They cover all subjects, so that we are, if not defining ourselves, exploring ourselves.

Sean Murray  08:23

Yeah, it’s a much more active medium than the typical movie or more passive ways of entertaining, isn’t it? It’s a door or an opening into learning. You can learn from watching movies, but I have certainly gotten a lot more life lessons and learning and wisdom from books than probably any other medium except for maybe people in my life. You’ve kind of quote at the beginning of your book. It really struck me. It’s from Virginia Woolf. Do you want to read that?

James Mustich  08:50

I was very glad when I found it. It’s from an essay by Virginia Woolf that was titled, How Should One Read A Book. And I quote, “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,” close quote. To me, that speaks of what we’re talking about before, of agency, of choosing your interest or the worlds you want to live in for a while. I looked at my task, as giving people a landscape to wander around in, where their attention could alight on something that was going to repay the hours they would put into the book. So, it’s not meant to be prescriptive. It’s not meant to be read from cover to cover, or the goal shouldn’t be to read all 1000. The most important thing is the book you’re going to read next. I think my book can help you choose that.

Sean Murray  10:07

Absolutely. And just to give the listeners a sense of what they’re getting, when they browse your book, it’s not just a title, an author, a publishing date, and the number of pages in a two or three-sentence synopsis on the plot. I would say, it’s a fairly sizable essay. Or, if not an essay, a substantive description of the book from the perspective of someone who has not yet read the book and might want to read the book. I found that extremely helpful. At the end, there’s also a list of other recognizable or popular titles by that same author, and maybe other books from other authors that are similar. I found myself kind of excited to read those, too. You get to the end, you think, “Okay, maybe it’s a book I’ve read before. Maybe it isn’t a book I’ve read before. But either way, when you get to that part of each entry, it’s always interesting to say, ‘Well, did James mentioned this book or that’ or, ‘This is new,'” and so it’s really a delight to read, in that respect.

James Mustich  11:07

Well, thank you! I’m glad you liked those notes. As I said, I had many more books than I could write about at length that I want to share. I think people love when they find something that speaks to them; to have other leads to other books in the same direction. And I thought, the way most people would use this book at the start is they’d go not in search of something they didn’t know, but they’d look for something they already knew they love to see if it was in it. And then to see if I had any idea of what I was talking about in describing it. So, to have those notes at the end of the description of Pride and Prejudice or the Old Man and the Sea, which might lead a fan of that book to something they didn’t know, I thought that was an important service to provide.

Sean Murray  11:56

Well, I think you’re right. The first thing that most readers do when they come across a list of all-time books or the top 100 is look at which books overlap with the books we’ve read.

James Mustich  12:09

One of the things that I discovered in my years of running book catalog, A Common Reader, part of the joy of that was the letters from people who had read the catalog, and bought books from us, and discovered something, and would write and say, “I found this book in your catalog about Antarctic exploration, but you don’t list this one, which is even better.” We discovered many books that way. We added books to the catalog that way. We’ve brought nearly 200 books back into print that way because readers had told us about them.

And I like to say, once people know you’re writing a book called, 1000 Books to Read Before You Die, you can never enjoy a dinner party like the way you did before. Because anyone who’s a reader wants to know if their favorite is in it, or they tell you about books that you might not know about. And that’s continued since the book has been published.

We did a book tour, and I would give a talk about how I wrote the book, and about reading, generally, and then we’d have a conversation with the audience, which was a lot of fun. People would champion their favorites, whether they were in the book or out. Everyone was very collegial about it, happily. There was no adversarial confrontations, but my wife had a wonderful idea after one of these *inaudible*. She said, “We should make that a thing,” so we’ve come up with these events called, Battles of the Books, where we go to a library or a bookstore. We get five people from the local community. Each of whom chooses a book not in my book, and gets five minutes to tell the audience why they should read it, and everybody votes. They don’t get a chance to talk about them all that often, and we’re having a great time doing that. That ongoing conversation is part of the larger enterprise for me.

Sean Murray  13:54

I think that’s a great idea. Is there a way for listeners to engage in that kind of conversation online?

James Mustich  14:01

People, if they’re not in the vicinity of one of those events, they can go to our website: 1000books.com. There is my list, which you can agree with; comment upon. You can disagree with a choice by clicking on a button that says, “Life’s too short.” You can build a list to read. But most importantly, you can add a book. You can add it. So that whole conversation is a great deal of fun.

Sean Murray  14:27

A Common Reader sounds like a fascinating product that you put out for many years, and it sounds like it’s sort of continuing in this 1000books.com. But how do we find out about books in a way that is similar to when you put out A Common Reader years ago?

James Mustich  14:45

Well, I don’t publish a catalog anymore, but I do do a newsletter every other Friday, where I talk about what I’m reading, or books that I’ve discovered, or books that people have told me about. So it’s kind of on a smaller scale what A Common Reader did. And as I said, we have the website, where people go and talk about them, so that’s one route of discovery that we’re building up as we go along, since I finally finished writing the book. But it was a great experience. A Common Reader was a little digest catalog, where we wrote about books very personally; how we discovered them; where we were reading them; why we liked them. And we built an audience of a few hundred thousand subscribers around the country. All of this was before Al Gore had invented the internet, so it’s the old fashioned way: by paper.

Sean Murray  15:36

I’d like to go back to something you said earlier, “We read books a lot like we eat food.” I like that because it sort of gives us the license to pick up a novel or a book that maybe we wouldn’t normally. I noticed The Da Vinci Code is on your list, and people like to pan The Da Vinci Code. I remember reading it. You know, I was into it. I was turning the pages. It’s sold a lot of copies. Some books: Lonesome Dove; some Stephen King. Sometimes you just want to have that bag of potato chips. But sometimes, we were raised on a certain home-cooked meal from our mothers or our families. It’s our comfort food. And, if you look at the side of my bed, you’ll see some books that I never let go too far. It’s like I just keep going back to them.

One thing that I’m hoping to get out of this list, and maybe you could talk a little bit about this from your experience or from others in your world, is broadening our perspective. I think this list is an opening to getting a little bit out of your comfort zone in your reading. I’m not a big sci-fi reader. I have to admit after going through your list, it got me thinking. I’ve got teenage kids now. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how to broaden our perspective. Where should we go? And how should we use the book to get out of our comfort zone?

James Mustich  16:53

That’s a great point. First…two points actually that you made, which I identify with strongly. One is the comfort reading that you’d like to have these things go back to. I do read a lot, but if I had to say, “What have I spent the most time reading?” It’s probably Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, because I read them every night before I go to bed for exactly that reason there. They give me this comfort, and my wife looks at me and laughs because the paperbacks are falling apart. She’d say, “You must have read that six times.” I never remember who done it, but I love the book.

Comfort reading is really an important part of life, but it can be hard to broaden your horizon and discover things. Because people, who are passionate about, whether it’s science fiction or historical fiction, they can be such devotees of the genre that they’ve lost touch with their own entry points into it; what got them excited about it. What I tried to do in the book was find books in types of reading, even if they weren’t especially congenial to me, that would allow readers to start exploring, so something in science fiction; something like Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, or Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, and many other ones. But just to say, “Here are some science fiction books.” I tried to write about them in a way that was inviting to have a kind of halo effect. If you read something else I’ve written in the book about something you have liked, and say, “Okay, this guy seems to know what he’s talking about. He says, The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester is really worth reading. I’m going to give that a shot.” And that’s important.

One of the things that has really expanded my reading life was my daughters. They are grown now, but when they were younger and in their teen years, we used to listen to books in the car all the time. I discovered so many things through them and with them. Not only was it a great family experience that we look back on. We looked at a great trip we had, we always identified it with whatever book we were listening to while we were driving to Maine, or wherever we were going. So that’s important, that kind of shared imagination. And it reconnected me to the pure pleasures of story, of listening to something to find out, or reading something because you want to know what happens next. The appeal of that is often more direct in young adult or chapter books. And that was liberating for me.

Sean Murray  19:25

It’s funny that you mentioned the story about being in the car with your teenage daughters and listening to the audiobook, because I had a very similar experience of being in a car with my kids, listening to an audiobook and vividly associating the geography around me with the book I was listening to. Whenever that book comes up again, if we’re reading it, or listening to it, I think about the geography of the area I was in when I first heard it.

James Mustich  19:55

Well, we do that even with physical books. You can look at a shelf, and physical books are kind of souvenirs of our lives, almost snapshots of a time, and evoke a period or a circle of friends in a way that most other things don’t.

Sean Murray  20:12

That brings up a good point about just this idea of reading on our Kindle versus paper book. Do you have an opinion on that point? How do you think that’s going to change how we read? How should we approach that if we’re trying to get the most out of reading in our lives?

James Mustich  20:27

Well, I read promiscuously. I have found that e-books, one, they’re convenient if you’re commuting, or if you’re traveling. And like me, you used to spend time trying to decide whether to pack six or eight books, as if we’re really going to read them all, while you’re at the beach. To have that kind of storage conveniently is important. They’re great for taking notes and being able to retrieve passages. They are a true gift for readers, who may have some issue with vision, where being able to control the size of the type is a real boon to them. If I’m reading a story that’s driven by narrative, where I’m turning the pages fast, I don’t see much difference in the reading experience between electronic books and the physical book. But if I’m reading a long biography or a book I’m going to spend a lot of time in, maybe take notes on, and that I want to flip around in, that I might not be able to read from cover to cover, I much prefer a physical book. So generally, if by circumstance and every other reason I can read a physical book, I do. But I think e-books and e-readers have great usefulness.

Sean Murray  21:43

I agree with everything you said. I do feel like I retain information better from a physical book.

James Mustich  21:50

You know, it’s true for me, too. I spent a lot of time organizing my day electronically, making a list of things to do on my phone and on my laptop. But every morning, I take a notecard, and I write down a list. There’s something about tactile sensibility that makes it feel this is real.

Sean Murray  22:12

And there’s something to me about, spatially, how I remember information. If I’m reading a certain passage in the upper right-hand part of the book, I remember that that’s where it is. I can take a pen, and I can underline. I can make little notes. I know there are great features and applications for doing similar types of activities in the Kindle. But in all reality, there’s nothing like picking up the book I read a year ago, thumbing through, and looking and seeing, oh, I underline this and that, and here are some notes. It’s important to me. I realized I’ve tried both, but for all the convenience you talked about, I do like the Kindle, but there’s something I keep coming back to.

James Mustich  22:47

If I’m reading a physical book, a character will reappear, and I don’t quite remember who it is, and so, my left hand will go flip back, because I know it was about 35 pages ago, and it was on the left-hand side. But on an e-book, you can’t do that. You’re like in the middle of the ocean.

Sean Murray  23:08

Yeah, there’s no point of reference.

James Mustich  23:10

Exactly.

Sean Murray  23:11

Maybe we could go through a few of the genres that may be of interest to the audience here in The Good Life. This podcast is distributed to The Investor’s Podcast Network, so I know there are quite a few business professionals out there. What about business books; learning about business, economics?

James Mustich  23:30

In the book, I have The Great Crash by John Kenneth Galbraith, which gives a fascinating detail of the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression. It is a marvelous read, particularly for investors, I think. But also for anyone interested in history. And, a biography of JP Morgan, Morgan: American Financier by Jean Strouse, which is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. It’s absolutely fascinating: his personality, the control he had over the economy, not only his holdings, but because of his insight, and his ability to marshal forces, when it was needed. There’s a great section of the book, which I believe is about the Crash of 1907, where he every day was calling all the bankers into his office and controlling this, I believe, by and large, for the public good, because somebody had to exert some kind of authority and responsibility. He’s a fascinating figure. I never really understood capital markets until I read about how he was reacting to these crises, and getting his colleagues to react to them. It’s informative in that way. He was a terrific figure because not only was he a great financier, but he was one of the great art collectors and book collectors of all time. It’s so interesting to read how, essentially…this is not quite right, but close enough: every year, he’d work for 9 or 10 months, and then kind of have something like a nervous breakdown, and have to get away. That’s when he would go to Europe, and buy art. And then he’d come back, rejuvenated and everything, and then he’d get back to work. He had a very…not really a steady temperament. And it’s so beautifully written, so that’s another one. And then there are books like Meditations of Marcus Aurelius to a wonderful book called Time and the Art of Living by an author named Robert Grudin, which are just filled with lessons that are applicable to life broadly through leadership.

Sean Murray  25:40

Well, the topic that we are most interested in here in The Good Life is how to live a good life; how to live a meaningful, flourishing life; how to achieve the life well-lived as Socrates said. So, we’re also quite interested in books that teach us how to live a good life. So where would you go there? I noticed there was a lot of philosophy. There’s a few that really popped out for me that I saw some. I’d read some; I hadn’t. Where would you point people for how to live a good life?

James Mustich  26:08

I would perhaps start with the book I just mentioned, Time and the Art of Living. It has many things to recommend. It explores the idea of time in all its guises, so from alarm clock time to memory, but it’s in these little short reflections on it that are often anecdotal. It’s easy to digest in bits, but the lessons that sneak up on you, as you’re reading this book, are profound. There’s one passage in the book, where he just says something, it’s kind of simple, but I never heard it expressed this way. It’s that every time you put something off in the moment, you are making a decision that your future time is less valuable than the time you’re living in right now, so whether it’s not washing the dishes or not repairing the house, or not going on a vacation. Whenever you’re saying I’m going to put this off from a small thing to a large, and I guess you can look at it from an investment lens, you’re saying the future value of my time is less than this moment now, where I’m procrastinating doing this thing. I’m investing it all in this moment of procrastination. This passage really changed my life or allowed me to mobilize for life much stronger consistent fashion. That lesson, of course, is about, not only what you’re doing in the moment, but how you spend your time. So, I’d recommend that.

A second book is this book of essays by an Italian writer named Natalia Ginzburg. It’s very slim. The title essay is called The Little Virtues. It’s about raising children, but it views from the lens: the best way to raise your children is to have your own passion and vocation, where you are present in your own life in a way that your children will see and recognize and value.

The third one I’ll say is going to sound a little loopy, but it’s true. There’s a book called The Mouse and His Child by a man named Russell Hoban. Russell Hoban is distinctive as a writer because he has had success at two ends of the reading spectrum. He started as a writer of picture books for children. Your listeners may be familiar with Frances the Badger. There are Best friends for Frances, Birthday for Frances, and Bread and Jam for Frances, I think, is the most famous one. Then he grew and he started writing fiction. At the end of his career, he was a very accomplished, sophisticated literary novelist, and wrote a book called, Riddley Walker, which has it’s invented language. It’s kind of a specular sci-fi thing. Brilliant and acclaimed. But in between, in his first novel; it’s a full novel, and extensively for 12-year-olds or around that age, called The Mouse in his Child. It is about a wound-up toy, which when you wind the key in the mouse’s back, the father mouse lifts up the child, and they dance around in a circle. It begins with them happy in the toy shop with all their friends. They get purchased by a family. They have a happy life with family. They get relegated to the attic, and then they get thrown out on the dump. Their adventures are harrowing, and it’s an effective tale for a young reader. You can share it with them, and read it aloud for a family read. But it is to me, in the end, extremely profound. It has more to say about being alive on the earth than most books I know on how to make your life fulfilled. The last two words in it are, “Be happy,” after all this harrowing stuff. In fact, this is how much this book means to me: We just had a birthday party for a teacher I had in high school, 50 years ago. My first class in high school, as a freshman, was his first class as a teacher. He’s now 80, and at his birthday party, I gave him this book. I inscribed it to say, “I’m giving this to you for your 80th birthday. I would give it to you if you were 12 or 20, or 40, because it has so much to say.” I just got a note from him yesterday, he said, “I thought you were crazy when you gave it to me, but I see you were right.” So, The Mouse and His Child. It will be a respite from business thinking, but an immersion in life thinking.

Sean Murray  30:39

Well, I’m looking forward to reading it. It sounds fantastic. There are not too many books you can hand or gift to someone that is relevant at each stage in their life. That’s a special gift. How about if we were to broaden our perspective and take on maybe a few other genres? You know, detective novels, it’s not something that I normally read. What would you suggest there?

James Mustich  31:03

Well, there’s a marvelous series of books about a detective in Venice by an American writer named Donna Leon. L-E-O-N. There’s about 25 of them, and the detective’s name is Guido Brunetti. He’s a very thoughtful and reflective man, and he reads ancient history. He’s always reading a volume of Greek or Roman history. His wife’s a literature professor, and the book is filled with the atmosphere of Venice and the food, and with murders, and all kinds of gruesome things that he has to solve. It has a recurring cast of characters’ history, but his presence is so congenial. Like every year when she has a new one coming out, I want to check-in. It has a much broader perspective than just solving a mystery.  There’s another series of books by a man named Edmund Crispin. It’s a kind of wacky British mysteries about an Oxford don, who gets mixed up in solving all these murders. The first book is the best. It’s called The Moving Toyshop. I think I described it in my book as something like this: if you can imagine a plot that has drunk too much champagne, this is the book. It’s kind of giddy, and it’s fun. So those are two I’d pick in the mystery genre.

Sean Murray  32:24

How about history? Recently, what’s been recommended to me are some of the Robert Caro books.

James Mustich  32:31

Yes!

Sean Murray  32:31

I have not read the Power Broker nor the one about Robert Moses, but every time someone’s read that, and they talk to me about it, they had the same reaction you just said, “Yes, Sean! You’ve got to read it.”

James Mustich  32:42

Caro is fascinating. He wrote a very long book about Robert Moses. It’s eight or nine hundred pages. I believe he wrote four or five hundred more, but they couldn’t fit in when he first wrote it. And Robert Moses, for people who don’t know, really built most of metropolitan and suburban New York in the middle years of the 20th century. In many ways, it’s a business book about how he created these power or municipal authorities. He built a bridge like the Triborough Bridge, and it would be a Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which collected all the money from the tolls of drivers. But the way he structured it was that he and the bridge authority had control of the money. It was kind of like outside the government, so he amassed more power than any governor or mayor. His story is just fascinating. If you’re interested in development, in urban planning, in the life of a city in New York, or more importantly, in how power is coalesced and wielded in real-time, it’s a fascinating book; as is his book about Lyndon Johnson.  He’s been writing a biography of Lyndon Johnson for almost 40 years now. He has four volumes already. He’s still working on the fifth, which I hope he completes before he dies because he’s in his 80s. They’re marvelous books. They’re very forgiving books in that they’re written episodically. He has a gift of telling you what you need to know from previous episodes and the new episode, so you can read them over months, and not feel lost at sea. Again, on how lay power is amassed and deployed in American business and politics, there’s probably nobody better.

Sean Murray  34:34

Well, I was going to add that it’s also about getting things done. We might have great ideas and strategies, but to get things done in this world requires amassing power, relationships, coalescing groups, and politics. And it sounds like both Robert Moses and LBJ were masters at that.

James Mustich  34:55

He (Robert Caro) also wrote a book about the Senate when he (LBJ) was the Senate Majority leader. The way he would be able to remember what individual members of his caucus or opposing caucus needed when he needed a vote, was just phenomenal over the years. It’s very instructive about power, and also about life and organizations. Getting Things Done would be a good overall title for it.

Sean Murray  35:25

Before we leave Caro, I’d want to mention that he recently wrote a book about how he writes books. It is fantastic. I want to go to the biography. Are there one or two biographies that you would recommend? James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is supposedly the best biography ever. I’ve never read it.

James Mustich  35:43

Great biography. An interesting thing, and I actually focused on this in my book. Johnson is a great writer in his own right. He made one of the first English dictionaries; a poet and essayist, and a literary critic of great renown. But he’s probably most distinguished with the fact that so many good biographies have been written about him. There’s Bosswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Boswell knew him and traveled with him, so it’s very conversational. You’re following them both around on their adventures, and it’s filled with Johnson’s voice. But there’s another book by a man named Walter Jackson Bate, just called, Samuel Johnson. It’s an extraordinary biography of a man, who suffered from melancholy and wasn’t always successful. And his trials and tribulations of his life, it’s tremendously moving and inspiring. And then, there’s another one by Richard Holmes, whose great biography called, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, which is a book about Johnson’s long friendship with a narrow do well poet. And I have all three of those in my book. My favorite biography is a biography of Alice James, sister of Henry James and William James. She lived most of her life, plagued by illness. Jean Strouse, who also wrote the biography of J.P. Morgan, a figure at other end of the spectrum of activity in the world, wrote a biography of Alice James that is rich and informative and has what may be my favorite four cents of any book. I think I can recall it, directly, which is, “Imaginative achievement preferable to marketable activity only when there was enough money to go around.”

Sean Murray  37:33

I can subscribe to that, James.

James Mustich  37:36

That’s another terrific biography.

Sean Murray  37:39

Yeah, it’s a luxury we can’t always afford.

James Mustich  37:41

Right.

Sean Murray  37:43

I thought it might interesting to just rattle off a few books that as I was going through the list in your book that caught my eye, and I thought, “Boy, I want to read more about that.” One was The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins.

James Mustich  38:03

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a look at mythology over time, as it is played out in the imagination by a very elegant writer named Roberto Calasso, who’s a publisher in Italy. And Carrying the Fire is a too little known book written by Michael Collins, who was the third astronaut in the first moon landing trip. When Armstrong and Aldrin went to the moon, Collins stayed in the capsule orbiting the moon all by himself. He came back, and he wrote this terrific book about his life as an astronaut, and about that voyage to the moon, which should be better known than it is. It’s a lovely book.

Sean Murray  38:47

Yeah, I guess that’s what surprised me. I thought, “Wait, one of the three astronauts that went to the moon wrote a great book. How come we don’t read it in high school? How come it’s not more well known?” Zen in the Art of Archery was another one that caught my eye. I’m sort of interested in eastern thought and Buddhism and stoicism. Maybe you could tell us a little about that, because that one really jumped out at me, too.

James Mustich  39:11

Right. A German writer went to Japan and immersed himself in eastern learning and wisdom. He wrote about the art of archery and really the art of focusing one’s self and one’s mind, and immersion in something. It was lost in a very interesting way in another book in my book, called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig decades later. But it’s more expansive. The Zen and the Art of Archery is very focused and elegant, and Pirsig is very expansive in its writing and kind of rambunctious. But they’re both marvelous books.

Sean Murray  39:53

Confessions of a Philosopher. I like philosophy books.

James Mustich  39:56

It’s kind of an autobiography. It begins with him lying in bed as a kid, thinking about things. Then he goes his own life as he became a student, and then a professor of philosophy, and relating what he studied and what he learned, in real-time, to his life. He writes very well, and very invitingly, so we could see the connections to our own lives.

Sean Murray  40:21

I’m looking forward to that one. And maybe just one more, The History of the Conquest of Mexico by Prescott. You had a note in your essay on that. You said something to the effect of that we read a lot about the Iliad and the Peloponnesian War, and these great mythic conquests and wars from Western civilization in history. It’s a little amazing that we don’t study, learn nor talk about or read more about the conquest of Mexico. This incredible story is right here on our side of the Atlantic. I’m sure there are some leadership lessons there.

James Mustich  40:58

It always helps if you seem to have descended from heaven with the sun behind you, and you make everybody worried about how powerful you actually are. That’s just kind of what happened. It’s a fascinating story. I think I quoted someone, who wrote that the conquest of Mexico and the loss of the civilization there that was there before the Spanish arrived, is the equivalent on our continent to, as you say, the Homeric epics or tales of King Arthur. So it’s a very, very powerful book. And there are many other histories since then, but this was, certainly, from one point of view, at least, an early draft of history. And it’s still a compelling reading today.

Sean Murray  41:46

You’ve come from the world of reading, you’re obviously very well-read. Not everyone comes out of that world. Not everyone naturally goes to reading to make it a part of their life. In closing, James, I was going to ask you, if you could, for our listeners, make the case for making reading a part of your life.

James Mustich  42:06

I would say two things. One is reading is the best way to form the longest and richest conversation we have throughout our lives, which is the conversation we have with ourselves in our own head. We’re always, even when we’re not aware of it, the context for what we do and for what we think is this conversation that’s ongoing with ourselves. And that is not often nourished by what we’re dealing with at work, or in front of us in the real world. But in reading, the vocabulary of that conversation is replenished, and so, that’s very valuable. And the second thing, if I can, I’ll just quote from the end of my introduction. “A good book is the opposite of a selfie; the right book at the right time can expand our lives in the way love does, making us more thoughtful, more generous, more brave, more alert to the world’s wonders and more pained by its inequities, more wise, more kind.

Sean Murray  43:11

That’s beautiful.

James Mustich  43:13

Thank you.

Sean Murray  43:13

Well, James, where can people find out more about this book and engage with it?

James Mustich  43:19

I encourage everyone to go to my website, www.1000books.com. That’s 1-0-0-0 books.com. There, you can review the list, comment on it, and you can add books of your own. You can also sign up for my newsletter, which comes out every two weeks, in which I talk about new books I’m reading, or old books I’ve gone back to, or talk about some of the events we have like these Battles of the Books I described earlier. And it’s a good way to keep in touch with what I’m up to.

Sean Murray  43:49

Well, James, it’s been a delightful conversation. Thank you for being on The Good Life!

James Mustich  43:54

Thank you, Sean. I enjoyed it very, very much!

Outro  43:57

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