September ‘22 Recap

This episode of Books for Men is a short recap of all the books and authors we covered in September '22. Listen for more!

Listen to the episode:

*Subscribe to The Books for Men Newsletter, a monthly round-up of the episodes w/ links, full book and author info, all the best quotes, and newsletter-only book recommendations!

READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So just like the first month, we did a recap episode, I wanted to stick with that trend and continue to do the recap episode this month and potentially, moving forward. But that's one of the things that I wanted to address or put out into the ether so to speak, is in the future or now if you have any ideas of how you think that this show could be better, I don't want to promise I will do things that I don't want to do, but I do want to have the forum open, so to speak, and a line of communication out there for suggestions or feedback, things that you would like to see, maybe author interviews or more structured format for the episodes or more quotes or I don't know, any kind of feedback would be beneficial.

(01:04)

I'm always looking to improve my process, and improve the quality of whatever I am doing to a certain degree, right? I want to be clear that I also got to want to do it in order to do it, but this is a show for you. This is a show to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. And so if you have any ideas on how we can do that, whether it be from a promotional standpoint or a design standpoint, I'm all ears. And you could contact me at dv (at) booksformen.org. Now, with that being said, this is a recap episode, so I'm going to recap the books that we covered and we had a kind of interesting month. We started the month with an essay slash criticism book about The Sopranos called The Sopranos Sessions. And I think it's a great book, especially if you're a television fan.

(01:56)

There's probably no show that's been more influential, at least to modern television than The Sopranos. So it's not only entertaining, but it's also educational and set the stage for every show that you love today. So, we started with that book and then we went into a fiction book, a thriller slash noir Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby. And again, that's a great book. It's just superbly executed. The story is just so well put together, and I should mention that I just finished his other book, Razor Blade Tears, which I had mentioned in that episode. And if I have to put 'em next to each other, which one I'm going to recommend, I would still stick with Blacktop Wasteland by probably a wide margin. I'm not going to get into too much about Razor Blade Tears now, but if you're trying to decide which essay Cosby Book to read, I would 100% go with Blacktop Wasteland.

(02:50)

If you want more on why I think that, I'm not going to cover that in this episode, but you could always contact me and we could have a conversation about it. I love talking about books. Now, moving on to the next book that we covered in September, and that was Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. It was a science book, the first science book that we've ever featured on Books for Men. And just to remind you, the difference between a science book and pretty much every other style of book in the non-fiction category is that it's mostly an exploration of one particular subject matter in a very deep way. And you're reporting back on the actual research and the science that has been conducted around that subject matter. It's not a book that's trying to convince you as a big idea book would be, say one way or the other.

(03:37)

For the record, you should know that there are both strengths and weaknesses to this style of book. Probably the weakest point is that it has a chance of not being entertaining, the strongest being, it's probably the most depth that you'll get in any one particular subject matter. With that being said, I think that Why We Sleep is so fundamental to our performance as humans, and that's why we should read it and check it out. The last book that we featured this month was another thriller. So, I coined this the month of thrillers, and you heard it earlier this week. It was by the female author Jax Miller. And just to reiterate, I wanted to make sure that I hammered home, and I definitely said it inside of that episode is just because this is Books for Men doesn't mean there's going to be not going to be books written by female authors.

(04:25)

That would just be dumb and silly and honestly not representative at all of the reading that I do. And I don't want that to be a reflection of the show as a whole either. I think one of the things that I am always a little bit scared of with this show is that because it's titled Books for Men that people will think it's exclusionary and that I don't want female listeners and that I don't know, I have some kind of social agenda or something of that nature, but in reality, the only agenda that I have is that I want more men to read and to continue reading in their lives because of the impact that I think reading has on one's life. Call it empathy, call it patience, call it understanding. It does all of the above and more, and it's not something that you can access from doing other activities that a lot of men choose to do with their time these days.

(05:19)

I realize that this is reality and people are going to do what things entertain them and what's engaging to them. But it wasn't always the case that men didn't read, especially in the fiction world as much as they are not reading today, I should say. In fact, at one time, reading was a very, very popular thing, and one can make the case that the way society has gone, it has not been favorable to reading as a whole, which is definitely true. And I get all of that, but that still doesn't change the fact that I want men to read more and I hope they read more. You can expect a full brand new slate of books. We're going to cover some different genres, even sub-genres that we haven't covered today. I have the schedule set for October, and we have some truly great books on the way.

(06:01)

If you enjoy the show, please, please remember to share it with family, friends, and people who you think might enjoy it as well. Word of mouth is super important to help push anything along. And with this specifically the initiative of inspiring more men to read and bringing together men who do, and if you've been a consistent listener, you can really double down on the impact by subscribing or leaving a review or rating the show on whatever podcast provider you listen to this on. Lastly, issue number two of the books for a newsletter is coming out tomorrow, and I've heard from many of you that it's a good addition and a good companion to the podcast and the show, which makes me happy as a whole. But anyone who hasn't subscribed already, you should know that there are quotes from the books, all of the detailed information about the book's genre, page count, publisher, and description of each book. It's all combined into one monthly email. And it also has the Books for Men Hall of Fame inductee. So it's a special section at the end of each newsletter that features one author, a dead author, I should say. That is one of the rules the author cannot be living, and that isn't something that is not featured at all on the podcast, so it's a little something extra, and you could sign up for that newsletter at BooksforMen.org.