Boom! This is Books & Biceps #390!

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Welcome to This Month’s Title Sponsor: Momentous!

Fitness headlines always shout: “Studies show Creatine is great for strength! And power! And recovery!” And yes, those studies are true and important to every sophisticated meathead reading. BUT, these new headlines I’m seeing are equally as exciting. They say stuff like: “Creatine Boosts Cognitive Performance!” That means if you read a ton (us), and if you’d like to remember more of what you read (um, 100%), or maybe you just feel a mental fog come on in the afternoon (always), Creatine may offer a solution. It’s been a GIANT help for me, especially since I upped my dose to 10g/day instead of 5g (do your own research and consult your doctor for your own dosage).

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At the end of every year I write my “Most Memorable Books I Read This Year” list…

It’s one of my favorite issues to write (you can read 2025’s here) and I’ve always thought I put out the first one in 2018 (a few years before I started Books & Biceps). I’ve said this publicly many times in interviews and on podcasts. I’ve even written it in this newsletter.

But one thing you’ve got to keep in mind at all times, however, is that I can be a moron and I was wrong. After someone asked me how long I’ve been writing an annual book list recently I said 2018 again. And then they Googled it and… I actually wrote my first annual book list in 2016, which makes it 10 years ago!

In honor of my lack of knowledge about my own work, I thought I’d share my list from ten years ago. I’ve recommended a few of these again over the years for various timely reasons, but this is a strong list from a great year of reading. Fun to look back and see how my reading has changed (I read way more fiction now) and stayed the same (still lots of biographies).

NOTE: It would be very confusing if I went in and changed the tense of each recommendation, so they read just as I wrote them in 2016. It’s basically a newsletter time machine without the DeLorean. Enjoy!

This was my favorite book and a tie for most memorable. I absolutely loved this book. If it were fiction I’d have still loved it, but the fact that it’s true makes it ten times better. If I had to recommend one book on this list it would be Shoe Dog. I wrote a longer post about this book HERE after I read it, but it’s inspiring, extremely entertaining as a story, gives an inside look at one of the world’s most recognizable brands (Nike), and is full of instantly classic characters, who happen to be real people. Read it.

Imagine if an ex-president decided to cut himself off from civilization to lead an expedition to chart an unknown river of the Amazon for over a year. Now imagine it’s almost 100 years ago and you don’t have any modern technology to help you navigate, communicate or eat. You have no Under Armour cold gear or Goretex or elite sleeping bags or even bug spray. You have nothing. Teddy Roosevelt took on this challenge a few years after his presidency ended. This is one of the most incredible true stories of exploration and survival I have ever read…and it’s a about an ex-President of the United States. Also, Millard became one of my favorite writers over the last few years. Every story she tells is superb.

I’m a complete and total technology idiot, yet I use so many awesome tech devices I can barely keep track. My knowledge of how any of this stuff works is less than pathetic. If I was learning magic powers like Doctor Strange, I’d be forever making circular motions with my hand, like some mime drawing a tire. I’d never create a spark. If I got put on Mount Everest, I’d high five the ghost of Tenzing Norgay and prepare for the afterlife. In short, I know nothing.

The Innovators is the story of technology from the written word to the Renaissance to the first tabulators to vacuum tubes to ones and zeroes to where we are today. Some of the names I had heard of. Most I hadn’t. And even though I learned a few things about how we went from the Stone Age to Siri in what is merely a few seconds on the cosmic clock, I still only know how to unplug my DirecTV, wait one minute, and plug it back in if something happens to the signal, but at least I know a few of the names along the way that made TiVo possible.

This is the definite biography of Brett Favre by one of the best sports biographers in the business, Jeff Pearlman. It’s fantastic and Pearlman’s vintage, exhaustive research comes through on too many occasions to account. Favre’s upbringing has an almost mythical status. For some reason I kept thinking of Jane Leavy’s book on Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy, while reading this, because for all of the cliche about Favre “looking like a kid out there” on the field, there is an unmistakeable sense of boyish awesomeness about his story. It’s almost like the movie Big, except instead of working at a toy company, Favre got to play in the NFL, and instead of choosing to go back to being a kid like Josh Baskin, Favre said “screw it”, this life is too much fun, and decided to stay an adult. A must-read for football fans.

LeBron. KG. Kobe. Dwight Howard. At one point all of these guys were just really tall 14-year-olds with promising hoops skills. This is the behind-the-scenes story of the path these boys took to NBA stardom. But what makes this book truly memorable are the heartbreaking stories of the guys you don’t know about. If you’re not an NBA fan, then it goes without saying that this book won’t do much for you…

But if you are, and you remember what a huge deal it was for Garnett to be drafted right out of high school, and you remember the hype surrounding LeBron and Tracy McGrady as teenagers, and you remember the awful stories about Kwame Brown not being able to adjust to the League, then you have to dive into this book. Fifty pages will fly by before you even know it.

At this point, I can’t tell if Susan Casey is one of my favorite writers because she writes about things I like (surfing, the ocean, dolphins) or because she’s always writing from places I want to live (the beach, Hawaii) or because she’s just an awesome storyteller – but it’s safe to say I love her books. Devil’s Teeth, about great white sharks, is as vivid in my mind today as it was when I read it about four years ago. This book feels like it will have the same effect.

100% of the time people ask the question about what kind of animal you’d be if you were an animal, my answer is “a dolphin”. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a swimmer my whole life and dolphins are so damn cool, but it’s been my answer for as long as I can remember. This book actually makes me want to be a dolphin more…as long as I don’t have to endure some of the horrors and torture that it’s revealed they suffer through at SeaWorld and in countries who mercilessly hunt them around the globe.

In fact, I’ll probably never go to a SeaWorld again. Or have anything to do with swimming with dolphins in captivity or anything like that. I’ll spare you the atrocities that people commit, but if half this book deals with falling in love with dolphin and explaining why they’re essentially humans with fins, the other half deals with how far people go out of their way to torment them. Casey’s writing is phenomenal, as usual, and if you love the ocean, you should really read all of her books and finish with this one.

I wrote an extended review of this book and Alexander Hamilton as a ghostwriter HERE, so I won’t repeat myself. Suffice to say, this book was on my must-read list for a long time and I finally tackled it over the course of a few business trips this year. It was absolutely well worth it.

I don’t read much fiction, but when I do, I read Stephen King. As far as I’m concerned, he saved me from a life of miserable reading. My post on that is HERE. This is the end of a trilogy that started with Mr. Mercedes a few years ago that I slowly found myself getting addicted to. It’s typical King, with relatable, yet charismatic characters, good dialogue, suspense and enough paranormal to keep you spooked. Not in his pantheon by any means, but there are about a half-dozen scenes that have stayed with me long after I finished the book.

I plopped down in a Barnes & Noble over the summer and someone left this on a table nearby. I had always wanted to read it and I began flipping through it out of curiosity. About an hour and a half later, I was hooked. This book is a character-driven masterpiece. It’s everything you want to know about the Joker and more. It almost reads like a psyche profile at times, or a flashback, or even a case study on insanity… But it is without question brilliant and entertaining and somehow portrays the Joker as sick and evil and almost sympathetic at the same time. This one isn’t for everyone, but it was for me and well worth it.

This book is not meant to be read all at once…or even to be read in its entirety. Ferris says this right up front. As with his other books, this is essentially a buffet of brilliant information that you can choose from. I have found the opening section on health to be the most useful and helpful because right now that’s what I was looking for information on… Specifically, I’ve been trying to solve a few flexibility and posture issues.

The section with Amelia Boone at the very start of the book has already paid huge dividends. I have literally solved a problem in my left shoulder with her advice to use a Rumble Roller and a few other things she suggests.

The list of of other luminaries (Titans) that Ferriss has gone to for their tips, tricks and tools to achieve higher performance may be the best ever assembled, with chapters on everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Navy SEALS to billionaire investors and tech guys. Like I said, I’m focusing on the health section right now and some of the advice helped immediately, including a new stretching routine that has completely gotten rid of a tweak I had in my lower back from sitting too much. I’m sure you’ll find little hacks and solutions for nagging problems as well.

I’m very proud of my garage gym, AKA, the Flex Factory. I’ve built it piece-by-piece over the last decade. I’ve never added up the total cost of equipment that I have, but I’d guess it’s around $2,500 or less. And I have just about everything I need.

Yeah, it would be cool to have an Assault Bike and Rower… And sure, I ordered myself a cool new piece of equipment I’ll reveal soon (only a few hundred bucks), but overall, I love my spot.

I love it even more when my kids train with me, which they’re doing more now that they’re older. But THIS DUDE JUST DROPPED $2 MILLION ON A HOME GYM!

And he says he did it so he can work out with his kid. Is it bad ass? For sure!

Will your kids have just as much fun tossing a $20 football around your front yard with you? Yep.

Either way, look at this place:

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I write a column every Tuesday called The Manologue. This week, I laid out the case for why everyone, everywhere, needs to take adult chill days once in a while. Yes, a day where you do absolutely nothing, with no guilt. Read this, then share it with someone who needs it.

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It’s up to you whether you want to take creatine. You can read a ton more info about it here. What I can tell you is that brands often reach out to me to partner up and I usually say ‘no’, but in this case, I already take Momentous Creatine, so this was a no brainer. Also, I asked them to up the standard 15% or 25% off to get us up to a full 35%.

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