Books & Reflections - Q2 2025 Edition

Books & Reflections – Q2 2025 Edition

June 30, 2025

6–8 minutes

Brené Brown, George Orwell, Georgette Heyer, Jon Stewart, Mary Ann Shaffer, Scott Berkun, Trevor Noah

Welcome to the second installment of Books & Reflections, my regular roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, and reflecting on. This series tracks the ideas shaping my work, my writing, and myself.

📚 Inputs & Influences

Books – Fiction

Arabella. Georgette Heyer, 1949.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Mary Ann Shaffer, 2008.

Books – Non-fiction

Confessions of a Public Speaker. Scott Berkun, 2009.

Dare to Lead: Brave Work, Tough Conversations, Whole Hearts. Brené Brown, 2018.

Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays. George Orwell, 1965.

Essays & Editorials

A Hanging. George Orwell. The Adelphi, 1931.

Why I Write. George Orwell. Gangrel, 1946.

‘Careless People is the Book About Facebook I’ve Wanted for a Decade. Jason Koebler, 404 Media, 2025.

🔍 What’s Sticking With Me

George Orwell is my newest literary crush. I’ve long admired Animal Farm and 1984 for their wisdom and warnings – but in January 2025, I stumbled upon his essay Notes on Nationalism, and it blew my mind.

Written as WWII was ending, Orwell defines nationalism as “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing not other duty than that of advancing its interests.” While Europe’s leaders celebrated the defeat of fascism, Orwell warned that unless Europe’s intelligentsia could recognize subtler forms of nationalism still at play, rebuilding society would fail.

Orwell’s path to democratic socialism was unexpected. Born to an upper-middle-class family in British India and educated at Eton, he served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma before rejecting imperialism. His essay A Hanging recounts one moment of moral strain. After years living in poverty, he turned to writing, but it was his time fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War that provided him with a deep unlock. In Why I Write, he explains:

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it… The more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”

In the 14 years between his political awakening and his untimely death at age 46, Orwell wrote two of the most iconic political novels of all time – and hundreds of essays and articles that are still reprinted today. His writing is crisp, his arguments are pointy, and his tone is so chatty that, aside from the odd turn of phrase, his work reads like present-day commentary… only sharper. No AI sludge, just one man at the peak of his craft, fueled by a clear conscience. If Orwell were alive today, I bet he and Jon Stewart would have a lot to talk about.

I am eager to track down the rest of his writing.

💬 One Sentence I Can’t Shake

All good public speaking is based on good private thinking.

Berkun, Scott. Confessions of a Public Speaker. O’Reilly, 2009.

🧠 The Big Question

I’ve always known I was a creative at heart. But growing up, I believed creatives came only in two flavours: the starving artist, or the tortured genius who oscillates between divine beauty and self-destruction. Neither appealed to me, so I decided to go into accounting.

Over time, my career evolved beyond debits and credits to business partnering, where I could apply creative thinking in a structured setting. But when it came to creative hobbies like writing, I’ve floundered. My recent reading has helped me unpack why.

Clarity of thought. Scott Berkun & William Zinsser (from my Q1 reading list) insist that “clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.” Yet I’d compartmentalized structure as part of my “professional brain” – never something to bring to writing. Unsurprisingly, I struggled to get any momentum.

Raison d’être. Orwell called it the political purpose: a “desire to push the world in a certain direction.” I assumed that because writing was a hobby, I didn’t need to define mine. So I kept throwing spaghetti at the wall – without noticing what sticks.

Guardrails. I assumed creativity needed total freedom and space. But Toastmasters has taught me that structure can actually be a springboard. Clear values – like guardrails – make it safer to take creative risks. As Brené Brown puts it, “More often than not, our values are what leads us to the arena door (…) . And when we get in there and stumble or fall, we need our values to remind us why we went in, especially when we are facedown, covered in dust and sweat and blood.“

What surprises me is how much writing resembles business strategy – really! Strategy is about defining your value proposition, identifying where you are, where you’re going, and how to get there. Writing is the same: clarify your purpose, define what’s yours to say and why, and build the habits (processes) to say it well. I used to think my professional and creative identities were separate. I see now that the same principles – clarity, structure, and intention – are what enable them both.

💡 What I’m Curious About Next

In Trevor Noah’s recent conversation with Jon Stewart, they discuss how both legacy media and social platforms strip away context to maximize outrage and clicks. I’ve felt this firsthand: unless I’m immersed in a book, I tend to skim headlines and scroll through soundbites instead of engaging with long-form stories. Then I sit down to write… and wonder why I can’t think clearly. Surprise.

An unexpected benefit of tracking what I read and listen to is that it slows me down. It shifts my focus from consumption to integration – not just passively receiving information, but absorbing it into my own internal framework. Integration is much slower, but I feel more grounded… and more curious.

And that curiosity? It feeds my hunger for context. It pushes me to ask better questions, dig deeper, and connect the dots. I’ve noticed the difference not just in how I write, but in how I lead. Slowing down is helping me move forward.

📝 Creative Update

Oliver Burkeman’s insight from my Q1 reading list rattled me. “Attention just is life (…) So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.” So I did a very accountanty-thing.

Assuming 8 hours of sleep per night, I’m awake 112 hours a week. I made a list of everything I want to give my attention to – projects, goals, relationships – and allocated the time I wished to spend on each. My first draft added up to 160 hours. In a 112-hour week!

It took several rounds of budgeting to bring it down to 120. The process forced me to confront not only my priorities, but also the inefficiencies and distractions I was paying for with my life. Then I took it a step further: I inputted my “attention budgets” into Clockify and have been tracking every hour for the past two months. The results were jarring – my time spent looked nothing like my intention. I had an attention problem.

It’s taken a few weeks of conscious effort, but I am finally seeing alignment. I’m spending most of my time on what matters, and much less on what doesn’t. Attention is life – and I’m finally spending mine with purpose.

📣 Closing Thoughts

How are you nurturing your curiosity? What are you reading, watching, or tracking that’s helping you think more clearly or live more intentionally?

7 responses to “Books & Reflections – Q2 2025 Edition”

Peter

July 30, 2025 at 5:36 pm

“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. They have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”

— Orthodoxy, C. K. Chesterton.

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1. JuneSky
  
  July 31, 2025 at 10:50 am
  
  I have many of Chesterton’s books including his non-fiction ones, from my mother’s collection, but I haven’t yet read anything other than a few from his Father Brown series (because… Detective Novels are my escapism, lol). From what I understand, his book Orthodoxy was written in 1908, before his formal conversion to Catholicism in 1911, and was profoundly influential on the Inklings (J.R.R. Tolkien, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, and C.S. Lewis), a group of writers I greatly esteem. So I found it very interesting to read Orwell’s views on Chesterton (taken from his 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism) – cited below.
  
  “Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent – though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one – was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. Every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealization of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it – as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine – had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous over-estimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton’s battle poems, such as ‘Lepanto’ or ‘The Ballad of Saint Barbara’, make ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.”
  
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  1. Peter
    
    July 31, 2025 at 11:36 am
    Whilst I appreciate Orwell’s concerns about nationalism (and they’re very timely for today), I feel he’s dreadfully unfair and misses his own blindspots when critiquing Chesterton.
    
    A few responses to his criticisms: (disclaimer: the following thoughts were refined with some help from AI, but the conviction is my own.)
    
    Chesterton held genuine faith and conviction, he was no propaganda tool. How is an argument not propaganda just because it’s made with conviction?
    
    Propaganda is the deliberate use of information (often selective, misleading, or emotionally manipulative) to persuade others toward a political or ideological end, frequently regardless of the objective truth.
    
    Genuine conviction is the sincere adherence to a belief that one holds to be objectively true, often arrived at through reflection, experience, or moral reasoning, and expressed with integrity—even when it is unpopular.
    
    On Mussolini – I don’t know all the details, nor have I read all his writings or can profess to be much of a scholar – but my take (my cautious attempt to read his heart – is that his bombastic, poetic language could be mistaken for a more nuanced respect for both Italy and Catholic France – loving what is good, but falsely accused by mere association, or misunderstood poetic bombast, of what is not.
    
    In Mussolini’s early rule, some perceived a welcome restoration of order, respect for the Church, and traditional values— before the full horror of fascism became clear. The Vatican City was even given its statehood* that is largely respected across nations today. France, too, was worthy of celebration for its sacramentality, festivals, and the merriness of Catholic culture. Meanwhile, Orwell, overlooks Chesterton’s fierce denunciations of British imperialism. Chesterton stood against the Boer War, attacked British actions in Ireland, and consistently upheld the dignity of “small nations.” His support for native cultures and distributism were deeply anti-imperialist at their core. If he was occasionally silent on Italian or French imperialism, it was not because he approved it, but because his critique was primarily inward-looking—aimed at his own nation.
    
    Orwell appears blind to his own assumptions. While Chesterton was acutely aware of the Protestant biases of English public life, Orwell seems unaware of his own secularism—imbibed from the same Protestant and post-Enlightenment framework. Where Chesterton grounded his views in the Incarnation—where reason meets mystery—Orwell remained trapped in a materialist paradigm, suspicious of any meta-narrative larger than man’s social condition.
    
    And yet, ironically, Orwell’s critique confirms Chesterton’s thesis: that modern man has become allergic to orthodoxy, to joy, to hierarchy, and to the supernatural. Orwell saw these as threats to freedom. Chesterton saw them as the only things that could protect it.
    
    So yes, “The old Christian virtues gone mad. They have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”
    
    – prophetic today perhaps, where progressive ideology is unmoored from truth, and conservatism devoid of mercy. The cure, I feel as Chesterton saw it, was found in a very realm, very living, miraculously present in the Eucharist, Christ.
    
    A sentiment that Orwell’s England (still hung over from Henry VIII’s outrageous nationalization of the church) – might naturally be blind to.
    
    (GPT thought I should cut out the last sentence, “though possibly true” it said, it’s “sharp enough to distract from your main point”. Oh well. Sorry mate, I left it in.)
    
    *interestingly I curious kind of statehood that transcends race, ethnicity and national borders.
    
    Final, final thought is that you often hear complaints against people who believe in truth; but the objectors sometimes again feel blind to their doing this, placing themselves above others looking down somehow on the naive truth holders. But even the belief there is no truth is a kind of truth, and just as presumptuous perhaps?
    
    Where should we place ourselves and our hearts in society? Should we be the chap on his ladder, looking down? https://www.nobelpeacecenter.org/en/pressrelease/the-echo-chamber-showing-at-the-nobel-peace-center Or should we look up?
    
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June Svetlovsky

The Philosophical Accountant

Books & Reflections – Q2 2025 Edition