Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
By: Ashlee Vance
Ecco; Reprint edition (May 19, 2015
399 pages

I am not sure what to say about Elon Musk that has not been said. The man is a force of nature in a way that is hard to put your finger on. His ability to focus and appetite for risk is incomprehensible to most. And he seems to mesmerize the media in a way similar to Donald Trump. I think this book illustrates that the line between smart and driven, and crazy, can sometimes look like a thin one.

Two of my favorite quotes:

He jumped right into dot-com mania in 1995, when, fresh out of college, he founded a company called Zip2—a primitive Google Maps meets Yelp. That first venture ended up a big, quick hit. Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million. Musk made $ 22 million from the deal and poured almost all of it into his next venture, a start-up that would morph into PayPal. As the largest shareholder in PayPal, Musk became fantastically well-to-do when eBay acquired the company for $ 1.5 billion in 2002.

The most striking part of Elon’s character as a young boy was his compulsion to read. From a very young age, he seemed to have a book in his hands at all times. “It was not unusual for him to read ten hours a day,” said Kimbal. “If it was the weekend, he could go through two books in a day.” The family went on numerous shopping excursions in which they realized mid-trip that Elon had gone missing. Maye or Kimbal would pop into the nearest bookstore and find Elon somewhere near the back sitting on the floor and reading in one of his trancelike states.

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Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant
By: Alan Jacobs
Eerdmans (June 28, 2010)
168 pages

Wayfaring is a delightful collection of essays by professor Alan Jacobs. He touches on everything from Harry Potter, to trees, to friendship, the efficacy of Christian community, and writing poetry. I particularly enjoyed his defense of the popular “penny dreadful” genre. Do not miss Jacobs’ other books. The ones I have read so far include How To Think, The Pleasure of Reading In An Age Of Distraction, and The Year Of Our Lord 1943.

Two of my favorite quotes:

Of all the many virtues of the essay as a form, it seems to be that the most wonderful of them is exhibited here. It is what I have elsewhere called a humble mutability of tone, a willingness to acknowledge and accept the vagaries of the mind, with its habit of following its own pathways in serene disregard of what we would have it do. Lamb may have meant to write a comical bagatelle; his mind, it turned out, contained a store of memories that would not confine themselves to the mood in which he began.

I HAVE COME late to the knowledge of trees, and while I would like to think that I have loved them all my life, that’s probably not really true. Had I loved them all along I would know more about them by now. The most enlightening and attractive writers about trees seem to have been lifelong aficionados -one book I recently read begins, “Having been partly arboreal since the age of eight, I . . .” -and the ease with which they describe their old friends shames me a bit. Reading them, I feel much the same envy I feel when watching an experienced skater flow across an iced-over pond.

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