2015 Reading List

This post is part one of two.

At the end of 2013, I challenged myself to ship something each week. Some project: a client piece, short film, short story, book… whatever. It could be anything as long as I put it out into the world each week. My strategy would be that at the end of the year, I’d have 52 projects completed – that would be rad. Well I didn’t finish with 52, I finished with 67. I couldn’t believe it.

At the end of last year, Steven Soderbergh listed all the media he consumed and I thought that would be a great idea. So why not try it? One of my largest strengths according to Strengths Finder is Input, so I knew that I was consuming a fair amount very day/week/month/year but to the extent that I did… It was great to find it out.

Here’s my list.

1. You Are a Writer – Jeff Goins
2. Connect The Dots – Paul Jun
3. How to Turn Your Boring Movie into a Hitchcock Thriller – Jeffrey Michael Bays
4. Apocalypse Weird: The Red King – Nick Cole
5. Take the Stairs – Rory Vayden
6. Yes, Please – Amy Poehler
7. Ready Player One – Ernest Cline (Seriously amazing, best reading experience in over a decade)
8. Scary Close – Donald Miller
9. The Martian – Andy Weir
10. The Abolition of Man – C.S. Lewis
11. Red Dragon – Thomas Harris
12. Everyone Belongs to God – Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt
13. Words for Pictures – Brian Michael Bendis
14. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation – Lynne Truss
15. Do Over – Jon Acuf
16. Armada – Ernest Cline
17. Leap First – Seth Godin
18. How Not to Make a Short Film – Roberta Monroe
19. Make Your Mark – Jocelyn K. Glei
20. Modern Romance – Aziz Ansari
21. Writing Great Fiction – James Hynes
22. On Writing – Stephen King (again)
23. Writing the Blockbuster Novel – Albert Zuckerman
24. Contagious – Jonah Berger
25. The Story Grid – Shawn Coyne
26. Do The Work – Steven Pressfield
27. Steal Like An Artist – Austin Kleon
28. Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks and Build an Incredible Career – Jocelyn K Glei
29. The Art of Exceptional Living – Jim Rohn (again)

Discoveries: You can see that I was researching and educating myself about writing most of the year. From Brian Michael Bendis’ memoir and guide on writing comics, Words for Pictures, to Albert Zuckerman’s Writing the Blockbuster Novel. These books were so helpful to me.

I tend to read a lot of non-fiction to help find ways for more efficiency, better modes of thinking and great philosophy towards life, but this year my most rewarding reading experiences were in the fiction dept. Ready Player One and Red Dragon will go down as all time favorites for me.

At the end of the year I needed some encouragement, reminders about the creative process and Steven Pressfield and Austin Kleon delivered just what the doctor ordered.

Most of the books on my list I would recommend but both offerings from Amy Poehler and Aziz Ansari were gems!

Biggest takeaways for the year? Here’s some notes and highlights I made while reading this year.

• If at first you don’t succeed, that’s totally normal. Who told you that would happen? Nothing works that way. Seriously nothing. – Portnoy Original
• Homer began both The Iliad and The Odyssey with a prayer to the Muse. The Greeks’ greatest poet understood that genius did not reside within his fallible, mortal self—but came to him instead from some source that he could neither command nor control, only invoke. – Steven Pressfield
• What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original. – Austin Kleon
• Obligatory scenes are the most difficult ones for a writer to crack—the discovery of the dead body scene, the hero at the mercy of the villain scene, the first kiss scene, the attack of the monster scene, etc. – Shawn Coyne
• Focusing on the struggle to get objects of desire will make up for almost every other kind of Story misstep. – Shawn Coyne
• The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. – C.S. Lewis
• Maybe I’ll post a consumer review. “Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10. – Martin Weir
• The problem is this: those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we’re perfect. – Donald Miller
• “No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful.” – Ernest Cline

For 2016 I’m still deciding exactly what I’ll be doing for my goals. More than likely it’ll be completing some of the larger projects that have been stewing on the back burner for more than 12 months. What do you think? Any book recommendations for 2016?

Next post is all about the movies I watched in 2015. Believe me, it was a lot.