Here are some mini-reviews of some books I’ve read lately. As always, I read one non-fiction book and one fiction book at a time. The non-fiction book is usually a business book, but I will often read books on history and man-woman relationships. The fiction book is almost always fantasy, with the occasional sci-fi, business thriller, or novel from history.

Traction by Gino Wickman

Fantastic business book and perhaps the best business book I’ve read in several years, which is high praise. It’s written by a very experienced business consultant who has designed a detailed plan on maximizing a company’s performance based on his experience working with many companies over the years.

Not all of the ideas apply to Alpha 2.0 businesses, but a lot do, and I implemented some of his techniques immediately after reading it.

Highly recommend this book.

F.U. Money by Dan Lok

Dan Lok’s overly-corny marketing turns a lot of people off, as does his delivery style, and I agree it’s hard to get through sometimes. However, if you can ignore that stuff and focus on his content, much of his ideas are very good and are very effective. Since breaking through to a new income level in the last few years, I’ve been reading more about super-high-income guys like Dan to get more insights on both this kind of thinking and this kind of financial management.

F.U. Money is mostly a motivational book with the standard success stuff you’ve read before if you’ve already read a lot of success books like I have, but there are still a few standout chapters that helped me. I recommend this book if you don’t mind wading through some hype and some already-repeated success tropes.

The Black Company by Glen Cook

This fantasy series came highly recommended by a lot of people, and looked super interesting and entertaining. The problem is that, sadly, it bored me to death and I couldn’t even finish the book.

There’s nothing wrong with the writing per se, it’s just not interesting or exciting. I can’t recommend it. If you want to read a good fantasy series that features badass characters, read the Joe Abercrombe’s First Law series, or, if you can handle it (and most people can’t), Steven Erikson’s Malazan series.

Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Daniel Amen

Brain health has been something on my radar lately, since I believe the key to longevity is not only how healthy your body is, but how healthy your brain is. This is because as time goes on, technology will be able to replace or rebuild your body parts, but they can’t replace your brain since that’s where your consciousness resides.

If 50 or 80 years from now I’m still alive and they have the technology to put my brain into a young body (biological or technological) that will live on for hundreds of years, I want to make sure my brain is healthy enough to do this and survive healthfully until technology can make this happen (if indeed it will happen, but I think the odds are good).

Dr. Amen is, I believe, the foremost expert on brain health who actually writes books for normal people. This book was very interesting but I don’t think most people will care about the topic enough to read the entire thing. It also contains all the standard stuff about exercising, eating right, not stressing too much and so on, which gets repetitive when you read a lot of health books like I do.

Mild recommendation.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Holy crap, what an amazing book. I was riveted. I love those old authors from a bygone era. (My favorite is The Count of Monte Cristo, a book with similar themes).

I love one-man-against-nature stories and concepts, though in this book, he also goes up against other men.

Strongly recommend this book. A great Alpha Male tale of rugged independence.

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