October ‘22 Recap

This episode of Books for Men is a short recap of all the books and authors we covered in October '22. It also shares a little more about the intent of the show. Listen for more!

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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So. I want to thank everybody who has continued to support the podcast, whether it's been through word of mouth and telling friends and family and people who you think might like it, or if you are really doubling down and subscribing, following rating. All of that stuff really, really helps mostly to push the initiative forward, which is to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do, and I apologize if I'm being repetitive, but I'm being repetitive for a reason, right? This is something that I am really, really passionate about. And as the months move on here, even since I started this podcast, I start to see the importance of the initiative and the importance of this podcast. And although on the surface it might appear to be trivial, I assure you it's not.

(01:08)

It's a small dent that I hope to make in society, and if I can even inspire one man who wouldn't normally read to pick up a book, one of the books that I recommend, or any book for that matter, then I feel like I've done my part in my job as the host of this show and the creator of this show. Young Men need leadership just as young women do, and although that's not going to come from one singular source, being a small part of that puzzle is really, really important to me. On that note, I should say that just because this is a show designed for men, and this is called Books for Men, doesn't mean that I don't want female listeners or doesn't mean that I'm not going to feature books written by females. I've featured several already over the first couple of months that would just be silly and dumb and not reflective at all of the reading I do or I want you to do.

(02:08)

Because one of the biggest points of emphasis that I want to make on what reading can do for you is it provides an immense amount of empathy when you're intimately involved with a book, let's say, it brings you close to that person's perspective. And so the wider range of books that you can read, the more empathetic you're going to be with the world around you. It's important to not only read men but also to read women and to read books that are authored by individuals from all different races. And if you've noticed, which you probably haven't because I haven't made it a point of emphasis for a reason, I've featured all of that so far on Books for Men because I think that it's really important to make you a more well-rounded reader. Now, I'm a realist, and I understand that you're not going to read every single book that I recommend here.

(03:07)

And if you read one of them that I am lucky, and I know from my own reading experience that you're more susceptible to doing that if you feel some kind of connection with the writer, you get interested in a book or in a topic of a book because you feel some kind of connection. And so the wider of a net that I can cast within, of course, my interests, the more or the greater likelihood there is that I'm going to feature something that you may enjoy. And that's the goal of the show really along with fully inspiring the people who do read, which is, I know a lot of you who listen to this show for obvious reasons to pick up something new or to try a new book. This is a recap episode, so I will get off my soapbox now and I will recap the month of October.

(03:57)

It was a really good month. We stuck with the trend both in the fiction and non-fiction realm. So in the fiction realm, we featured two books that will probably outlive all of us. The first one was called The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and it's a post-apocalyptic novel about a boy and his father trying to survive in what remains of a burned-down America. It's painfully good in many ways, and it's also a story that focuses solely on the relationship between a boy and his father. So, it's hard to find a book that would be more for a man than The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The episode also features a cool story about Cormac McCarthy's life, for those of you who are interested. The second work of fiction that we featured in October was a classic work by Albert Camus called The Stranger. And it's a short novel.

(04:51)

It's a novella, but don't let its life fool you because it is extremely profound and extremely impactful. It is a novel or a novella that will challenge you to think about life and humanity in a way that perhaps you don't do very often. In short, the book is about a man who is faced with the absurd. So events that don't have any logical reasoning, and how does he respond and what does that say about humanity at large? So both of these books were in the literary fiction genre, and I will move away from that in the next month and feature two books that are completely different. And in the non-fiction realm. In this past month, I featured two books that are in the world of music. One of 'em is a biography, and that was the first one called Love Me Do! by Michael Braun.

(05:40)

And it's a book about a historic moment in cultural history, really Beatlemania, it's a behind-the-scenes look at The Beatles during their first British tour right before they set the world on fire. And it's a very unique book because most books will claim to be a behind-the-scenes look. But this is literally because Michael Braun was a journalist who was covering The Beatles at that time and published this book originally at that time. So in the early sixties, I can't remember if it was 62 or 63 right before they came to America. The Beatles camp actually didn't want it to come out because of how close it was to representing who The Beatles actually were, which was different than the image The Beatles wanted to portray to the world. So, it was originally pulled and then it got republished, and the most recent one was published in 2019. For more on that, you can go back and listen to the episode.

(06:28)

The last book that we featured was Life by Keith Richards, and it's exactly what it sounds like, a book about the life of Keith Richards. It reads more like a conversation with the legend himself, and I couldn't think of a more entertaining thing to do for close to 500 pages. To be honest, it's probably one of the more entertaining books that I've ever read, and I don't say that lightly. And before I wrap this up, if this is your first time listening, I should mention that the episodes aren't just a recap of what the book is or just what the book is about. In fact, I try to spend very, very little time describing what the book is actually about and more adding a little bit of context about the author or about the angle at which the book is written, and ultimately hoping to provide you a way in, right, something that will engage you enough to say, oh, yeah, this is for me, or, I like this.

(07:27)

Or maybe you just find it interesting. But again, that's for you to decide. You're the listener, but I do want to make sure that you understand that it's not just a recap, and that's really not the emphasis or point of the episodes at all, really. Okay. This episode is a wrap. I want to thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed it, please as always share it with friends and family. As I said at the beginning of this episode, that means a lot to the exposure of the initiative and providing awareness around inspiring more men to read and bringing together men who do. You can always get more information at BooksforMen.org where you can also sign up for the newsletter, which is a monthly roundup of all the books and authors that you hear on the podcast. And I should mention that I'm making a little bit of a change to the newsletter, which will be going out tomorrow. And instead of having the Books for Men Hall of Fame, I'm going to feature a couple of bonus books at the end of the newsletter instead. So they're not books that I featured on the show, but they're books that I read in the past month, just give you some random books that I read and I thought were interesting enough to share with you in the newsletter. Now you just got to go sign up for it if you haven't already.