I’ve spent a whole lot more time reading/consuming than writing/creating this past month. I’ve been keeping up with my morning pages, for the most part, but beyond that, I’ve been feeling a little creatively blocked. So, when pressed for content, what better way to churn out material than to compose a list, right? So here’s what I’ve read this past month, in chronological order:

The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

Greasy Lake and Other Stories by T.C. Boyle

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

1984 by George Orwell

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

From all of them I’ve extracted some really big ideas. Ideas that each would take a lifetime to fully explore and serve justice. Needless to say, it’s been an edifying month. There’s both so much, and not enough, I want to say about each of them. If I had to pick one that I think every person should read, it would definitely be Man’s Search for Meaning, followed by 1984 (I’m a little ashamed to admit it took 27 years of living to read it). I’d like to follow up this post with more substantial things to say about some of these books, but I wanted to at least get this out there. The antidote to the Resistance (a concept introduced in The War of Art to describe that force that separates what you want to do from what you’re actually doing), after all, is to just sit down and do it. That’s what I’m doing here right now.