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Adults Should Have a Summer Reading List Too (and the benefits of microdosing words)

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You can probably tell from previous editions of Scott’s 1-1-1 that I love to read. I grew up in a household with a lot of books (my mom is an avid reader) and I’ve loved reading ever since I could pick up a book. My parents had the entire hardcover sets of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and I devoured them as a boy. From Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series to Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, I fell in love with reading.

I mostly read non-fiction now, but I managed to finish almost twenty novels in the past year. My guilty fiction pleasure is adventure/suspense novels featuring ex-CIA agents, Navy SEALs, military investigators, etc. They are so far removed from my daily life that they serve as a valuable divergence for my mind. I’ve been devouring them for decades and here are my favorite series:

  • The Mitch Rapp Saga (there are 22 books now!) by Vince Flynn. These are not to be missed.

  • The Scot Harvath series (number 23 is coming out later this year!) by Brad Thor are phenomenal.

  • The Terminal List series by Jack Carr featuring Navy SEAL James Reece (the series on Amazon Prime is worth watching but should definitely not replace the books; the Tom Cruise film is also fun but a very different interpretation of main character, Commander Reece).

  • The Gray Man series by Mark Greaney

  • The Orphan X series by Gregg Hurwitz featuring Evan Smoak (which are WAY better than the movie).

  • The Jack Ryan Jr. series by Mike Madden (under the banner of Tom Clancy) are fun to read, especially if you read all of Clancy’s original novels featuring Jack Ryan Sr.

I rediscovered Michael Crichton (with the help of James Patterson) this summer by reading Eruption (a geological/military suspense novel about a potential eruption of Mauna Loa in Hawai’i) and read the first two books in Tana French’s new Cal Hooper series, The Searcher and The Hunter.  I loved these, especially The Hunter. They feature Cal Hooper, a divorced ex-Chicago PD Detective who decided to leave everything and move to rural Ireland. I highly recommend the audiobooks because you get the full experience of the Irish brogues.

As for nonfiction, I read like a flaneur (and I try to travel like one). Leadership, cookbooks (yes, I read cookbooks 😊), memoirs, history, food/spirits, business, investigative journalism, artificial intelligence, psychology, and more. Here’s my non-fiction list for the summer (in no particular order):

My list is constantly growing, and I look forward to hearing what you’re reading this summer (check out our 1 Quick Question below!).

People ask me how I read so much. Like many of us, I have a job that requires a lot of evening and weekend commitments, four kids, a large family, yada yada yada. I love the feel, smell, and visual experience of reading a bound book, but I rarely have the time for that. A few years ago, I switched almost entirely to audiobooks and I read (listen) to books while working out and every minute I am in my car, even when it’s a short drive. The benefits of listening while working out (my favorite workout for the last few years has been my at-home water rower) isn’t just the fact that I’m “killing two birds with one stone” but the audiobooks make the workout fly by! In fact, there are times when I want to keep working out so that I can keep reading and finish a chapter!

My second trick: I listen to audiobooks at 1.5 speed. Typical narration sounds extremely slow to my ears and 1.5 speed both sounds better to me and allows me to finish books much faster. Try it out!

My third trick: Use the Libby app. Get a library card and download this free app to get both Kindle style books and audiobooks. There may be times when you have to wait to get a selection because it’s so popular, but the options are huge and the whole thing is free!

Reading is good for you. Even if you’re comfortably curled up with a book and your favorite beverage is nearby, the benefits of reading are numerous and well-documented:

Micro-dosing words can even provide a “survival advantage.” According to Avni Bavishi, Martin Slade, and Becca Levy in “A Chapter a Day: Association of Book Reading with Longevity,” published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, “book readers experienced a 20% reduction in risk of mortality over the 12 years of follow up compared to non-book readers.” Their findings also suggest that reading books is “protective regardless of gender, wealth, education, or health.” The study cohort was drawn from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), collected by the University of Michigan's Institute of Social Research (which just received a record $195 Million grant), and supported by the National Institute on Aging.

Are you gaining the benefits of reading? What are you reading this summer? Let us know by answering our 1 Quick Question.

Happy reading!

Scott

P.S. - Here are some of my favorite cookbooks and food/drink-related books:

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