Great Unread Books

Can thinking less make you a better golfer—or at least a happier one? And can a non-golfer learn anything from one of the most highly influential golf books of the past five years? Robin finds out, to his golf-hating surprise, that the answer is yes.

This week, Robin and Alex tackle Be a Player by Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott, the acclaimed coaches behind the VISION54 method. Alex explains his increasingly obsessive relationship with golf, while Robin investigates why perfect technique on the driving range so often falls apart on the course.

Along the way, they explore the “Think Box,” the “Play Box,” and the “Memory Box”; the strange appeal of sports psychology; and the art of observing a bad shot without turning it into a verdict on your entire personality.

The conversation then travels from The Inner Game of Tennis to Zen in the Art of Archery, via Silicon Valley, teenage gurus, corporate consulting, dubious translations—and Robin’s unforgettable encounter with an exceptionally patient star of golf.

The lesson for golfers, athletes, and readers alike: trust yourself, enjoy the game, and don’t beat yourself up when you fail to finish.

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Welcome to the nightmare realm of golf
02:17 — Why Alex bought Be a Player—and never read it
05:07 — Inside Alex’s golf obsession
07:07 — The dream of shooting 54
08:26 — Why perfect technique fails on the course
12:07 — What golf reveals about your personality
15:38 — Strava, data, and the competitive nightmare
19:59 — Why good coaches teach you to coach yourself
21:48 — The VISION54 system
24:30 — The Think Box, Play Box, and Memory Box
29:29 — Alex’s inner golf-course powder keg
31:39 — Remembering that golf is a game
33:37 — Robin’s troubled history with golf
38:33 — Robin accidentally insults Tiger Woods
41:52 — The wider world of sports psychology
43:23 — The Inner Game of Tennis
49:08 — Perfecto, Competo, Learno, and Enjoyo
53:05 — Zen in the Art of Archery
56:59 — Is Western Zen really Zen?
59:34 — The troubling history behind a spiritual classic
01:02:16 — Next episode: A Short History of Byzantium
01:04:14 — What we’ve been reading and acquiring
01:07:39 — The inner game of book reading

BOOKS DISCUSSED

Be a Player — Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott
Every Shot Must Have a Purpose — Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott
The Inner Game of Tennis — W. Timothy Gallwey
Zen in the Art of Archery — Eugen Herrigel
Golf in the Kingdom — Michael Murphy
A Short History of Byzantium — John Julius Norwich
The End of History and the Last Man — Francis Fukuyama
The Finest Hotel in Kabul — Lyse Doucet
The Last Kings of Hollywood — Paul Fischer

Robin's a Dad and American Lion, Jon Meacham's masterful and clever look at the seventh president of the U.S., Andrew Jackson, is very much a Dad book. He abandoned it at page 130 almost a decade ago.

What remains is a vivid sense of a personality — and a latent confusion over a period of American history that's messy, confusing and hard to get your head around. Is the coziness of a Dad book really appropriate, though, for a man who marched thousands of people to their deaths in the wilderness?

Alex and Robin return from their summer reading — regrettably, with several books actually finished — to tackle Andrew Jackson, the strange blank spot in American history between the founding and the Civil War, and the peculiar appeal of biographies about Great Men.

They look at why Jackson remains such a historical Rorschach test: champion of the common man or proto-authoritarian; defender of the Union or destroyer of Native American communities; political innovator or enemy of institutions. They also ask whether Jon Meacham's deliberately empathetic approach makes Jackson more understandable — or just a little too comfortable to spend 400 pages with.

00:00 — Summer reading and fallen unread comrades
Robin discovers that biographies of important men become mysteriously more attractive somewhere around your thirties.

02:25 — Enter Andrew Jackson and American Lion
Jon Meacham, the Battle of New Orleans, Johnny Horton and Jackson's extraordinary durability as an American historical character.

05:10 — Is Meacham too cozy with Jackson?
The case for an empathetic biography — and whether empathy is really the alternative to hostility.

06:25 — The Great Man Biography Industrial Complex
Walter Isaacson, Leonardo, Einstein, Steve Jobs and the prestige hierarchy of being important enough to receive a Big Biography.

08:10 — Casting Andrew Jackson
Charlton Heston, Sean Penn and the strange bipartisan appeal of wanting to play Old Hickory.

10:35 — Jackson as historical Rorschach test

11:30 — Why Robin bought the book

12:45 — American history's difficult middle seasons

14:45 — The duel

16:50 — Rachel Jackson and the emotional opening of the book

19:10 — The Petticoat Affair

23:00 — Jackson's real communications genius
He wasn't a great writer or speaker. His message was himself.

26:55 — Authenticity, personality and political power

29:15 — The Nullification Crisis

31:20 — Alex puts Jackson near the bottom
The Indian Removal Act, the Trail of Tears, patronage and why Jackson's legacy looks particularly dark from the present.

35:00 — Would liberals once have loved him?

38:15 — Are we just seeing Trump in Jackson?

41:25 — The Andrew Jackson book we'd actually read

44:15 — Will Robin ever finish American Lion?

44:40 — What makes a Dad book?

46:15 — Did podcasts kill the Dad book?
The Rest Is History provides all the pleasures of reading 600 pages about a statesman without the irritating requirement to read 600 pages.

48:10 — Events are the new Great Men
Why microhistories and tightly focused historical episodes may have replaced traditional doorstop biographies.

50:00 — Books Alex and Robin actually finished
John Richardson's Picasso biography and Colin Thubron's The Amur.

51:30 — Next time???

Alex loves history. He sort-of likes novels. He adores anything east of Germany and west of China. So what’s stopping him from even cracking open what was acclaimed as Georgia’s answer to War and Peace?

Robin guides Alex through Nino Haratischwili’s thousand-page family saga: eight lives spanning revolution, Stalinism, exile, the collapse of the Soviet Union—and a cursed recipe for hot chocolate. Along the way, they ask whether magical realism improves historical fiction, why prestigious historical novels can feel less inviting than genre fiction, and whether Alex bought The Eighth Life to read it or simply to establish a Caucasus section on his bookshelf.

Plus: the books they actually finished, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Ezra Klein’s highly political interpretation of it, and next episode’s unfinished biography of Andrew Jackson.

Spoilers throughout, although they may matter less when one host hasn’t opened the book and the other has mainly read the plot summary.

Chapters

00:00 — Georgia’s thousand-page War and Peace
01:39 — The highest-rated unread book so far
03:39 — Eight lives, one family and a century of Georgian history
06:43 — Why Georgia fascinates Alex
12:49 — God’s own holiday paradise
16:32 — Why Alex bought the book
20:01 — Why history works for Alex—and novels don’t
22:37 — The entire family saga in ten minutes
25:03 — Cursed chocolate and the limits of magical realism
33:00 — Is Alex any closer to reading it?
34:16 — Would The Eighth Life work on television?
37:24 — What makes historical fiction enjoyable?
44:43 — Why Alex prefers institutional histories to spy novels
46:00 — Award-winning history versus history with “genre juice”
48:56 — Ratings, completion rates and the final reckoning
52:03 — Will Alex ever open the book?
53:43 — The Caucasus section of the bookshelf
55:35 — What Robin and Alex have actually been reading
56:44 — The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan and Ezra Klein
59:05 — Next time: Andrew Jackson and American Lion

Mentioned in this episode

“Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse” — The Ezra Klein Show

The podcast becomes therapy as Robin reckons with one of the biggest lies about books he has ever told—and the guilt that has blocked him ever since from finishing Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness classic. NOTE: SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

Robin and Alex explore the perilously high stakes of buying flowers, hosting dinner parties and pretending to have read books to impress people. Along the way, they celebrate Woolf’s astonishing sentences, question whether anything actually happens in Mrs Dalloway, quarrel with the Guardian’s 100 greatest novels, and diagnose Alex’s deeper problem: he may not like fiction. Finally, Robin makes a legally non-binding commitment to finish the book by 2030.

00:00 — Equal-opportunity non-readers
01:13 — What actually happens in Mrs Dalloway?
03:42 — Virginia Woolf: genius, snob and literary juggler
08:11 — Clarissa’s loves, choices and dinner party
15:53 — The epic stakes of buying the flowers yourself
20:47 — The lie that stopped Robin finishing the book
26:28 — Why people pretend to have read great books
29:36 — The problem with leaving the stream of consciousness
30:42 — Quarrelling with the 100 greatest novels
38:22 — Does Alex actually like fiction?
39:38 — Will either of them finish Mrs Dalloway?
44:02 — Where to read Woolf performatively
46:00 — New arrivals for the unread pile
49:00 — Next time: the terrifyingly enormous The Eighth Life

Chapters

The books aren't getting any shorter, but the cuts are getting deeper. Alex rushed out to buy this book the moment it came out, having waited decades for a translation. He didn't make it past page 30. What happened?In this episode, Robin and Alexander explore Between Two Millstones, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of his first four years in Western exile. They trace his extraordinary journey from the Soviet prison system to literary fame, his bewildering arrival amid the Western media circus, and his growing frustration with the society that had celebrated him as a dissident.Why did the author of the accessible One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich increasingly produce books that almost nobody finished? What did Solzhenitsyn see in Switzerland, Vermont and the archives of Stanford’s Hoover Institution? And why did his notorious 1978 Harvard address transform him from a Cold War hero into an awkward, seemingly ungrateful critic of the West?Along the way, Robin presents the Goodreads evidence for just how profoundly unread Between Two Millstones remains; Alexander explains why he bought it in the first place; and both consider whether Solzhenitsyn was unfairly dismissed, temperamentally impossible—or simply constitutionally incapable of telling people what they wanted to hear.Timestamps00:00 Introducing Solzhenitsyn and Between Two Millstones03:29 The incredibly obscure book that even Solzhenitsyn readers haven’t read05:45 Using Goodreads to measure which books people actually finish07:07 Why readers complete One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich10:01 The scale—and strange power—of The Gulag Archipelago15:23 Only 41 ratings: the astonishing unreadness of Between Two Millstones18:06 Why Alexander rushed out to buy the book—and stopped at page 3021:23 Solzhenitsyn’s life before exile and the memoir’s historical setting23:42 From Soviet prison to an overwhelming Western media circus27:51 How isolation shaped the mind and habits of a Soviet dissident30:25 Switzerland, Vermont, Stanford and the expanding Red Wheel35:35 Ranking Russian writers—and Solzhenitsyn’s revealing encounter with Nabokov39:39 Why the West wanted a simpler, more grateful Cold War hero42:41 The Harvard address that destroyed Solzhenitsyn’s Western reputation46:19 His case against Western legalism, materialism and cultural exhaustion51:34 Caught between the two millstones of communism and the West52:43 The Red Wheel, Russia’s collapse and the warnings nobody followed55:29 Was Solzhenitsyn treated unfairly—or was he simply impossible?57:49 Would Solzhenitsyn have been the perfect Substack writer?01:00:19 Where should an unread Solzhenitsyn go on the bookshelf?01:01:32 Will Alexander ever finish it—and why is he buying another one?01:03:59 Recent reading and the announcement of Mrs Dalloway as the next book

Alex and Robin take a fun trip to a Dad book classic, a history that sold 1 million copies when it was released and has since been attacked by almost every professional historian of Hitler in the 8 decades since.

We're coming into our new season with one of the best-selling economics books ever, the best-selling book ever from the Harvard University Press ever and a hall-of-famer. Has any book since the OG "Capital" (Marx's version) ever had this much impact while being read so little? The 1%... The evils of inequality... Piketty put billionaires on everyone's radar as an economic problem in their own right.

Alex has bought the book and failed to finish it twice. What motivated him to buy it? What does he remember about it? Why don't people mention Piketty in conversation, when his ideas seem to be everywhere? Why is France not producing the same amount of intellectuals as they used to? Do you need to read the whole book when it's basic argument is so easy to understand that people repeat it without thinking?

Will Alex pick it up again?

And what does Piketty himself think of the book?