Hey there! We’re back with a tropical episode of That Book Podcast. We were on vacation for the week that we covered in this podcast, so our reading’s a little different than normal.
Here’s what we read this week:
- An Atlas of Extinct Countries by Gideon Defoe
- The Heist by Daniel Silva
- The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell
Our book recap of the week is I Will Teach You to be Rich by Ramit Sethi
An Atlas of Extinct Countries – Gideon Defoe
This was an awesome, hilarious book. I (Julianne) literally didn’t want to read anything else on vacation until I’d finished it.
Weird connection: Japan and WWII. We went to the Pearl Harbor Museum, and then I’m reading this book the next day one of the countries is Manchukuo (note- I may have called it Manchuria in the episode- those are wildly different things), which was a Japanese puppet state they set up in their quest to rule all of Asia.
Found this joke funny but also can’t get it out of my head, especially since we were in Hawaii and there’s such a lot of history there with imperialism:
“In the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan woke up from a self-imposed slumber, blearily rubbed its eyes, looked at all the appalling things the Europeans were getting away with and said, ‘Think you guys are bad? Hold my Asahi… We’ll show you how it’s done.’ *To be fair, Japan rightly realized that they were now faced with a choice: get busy throwing their weight around or face the same unhappy fate as everyone else the Europeans had dealings with.”
Gideon Defoe, An Atlas of Extinct Countries
You can hear more about my experience with this book in these episodes: Think You Have Atomic Habits? Think Again, A Minute to Finish, and The Mafia of Extinct Countries.
The Heist – Daniel Silva
Note: We thought this book was the third in a series. We’re not sure where we got that information from (probably made it up, tbh), but it’s not the third. It is the 14th book in the series.
What book’s about – a European spy who is working to uncover an art-related crime (who will presumably put on a heist to solve it)
Finished the book on vacation. It was great! It went in places I (Andrew) didn’t see coming but felt like a smooth story the whole time.
You can hear more about this book in A Minute to Finish.
The Bomber Mafia – Malcolm Gladwell
I (Julianne) am not actually that into WWII history (although my conversation on this episode of the podcast may beg to differ) but I do love history… More importantly, I’ve said multiple times that I will read anything Malcolm Gladwell writes.
*NOTE: I have not read everything he’s written. But I’m willing. I’ve read Talking to Strangers and a Paul Simon autobiography (which is actually an audiobook but whatevs) and they’re both excellent.
So far, The Bomber Mafia is no exception. It opens with this really dramatic chapter and now I get to read how the story unfolds up to that point.
Book Recap: I Will Teach You to be Rich by Ramit Sethi
We both read this one, so we presented it together! You can see us present it on Youtube.
If you’re interested in the slides that contributed to that chaos, here they are (plz don’t mind the typos):