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Hey everyone,
Hope you’re enjoying a beautiful Spring or a warm Fall, wherever you are. Here are this month’s recommendations.
Neil
1. Exit Westby Mohsin Hamid. Fantastic love story told about refugees migrating from violence in a slightly futuristic world. Now, if everybody has their favorite punctuation mark, then Mohsin Hamid’s is definitely the comma. (According to Fortune, mine may be the exclamation mark!) Sentences regularly extend to entire pages, with all kinds of metaphors poking in like squiggly little worms, and regressed thoughts, the kind which poke other parts of your brain, those parts of your brain that make you want to grab a notebook before some lightning bolt leaves you, and then the commas kind of loop you back suddenly to where the sentence started, like little worms on roller coasters maybe, and he pulls this feat off frequently, haltingly, nimbly, over and over, and okay, I’ll, stop, now. You get my point. It’s super ornate. The thesis is that we’re all migrants, either from place to place, or by standing still through time itself. Really fun quick read though I didn’t love it as much as The Reluctant Fundamentalist or How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia because I felt like the narration was a bit scientifically distant from the characters at times. He talks about what they do a little more than lets you live with them. I also want to point out this was the first novel I read after East of Edenso I had a bit of a fiction hangover happening.
2.The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way To Live Wellby Meik Wiking. If you haven’t heard then hygge (pronounced “hoo-ga” or “hugh-ga”) is the Danish term describing a combination of coziness, soulfulness, and hominess. And since Denmark always ranks at the top of World Happiness Rankings, people are saying “Gimme some of what they got!” Candles, warm cups of tea, big cozy sweaters, that’s what they got. This book is pretty but doesn’t get much beyond that. It feels like a marriage between Wikipedia entries and Shutterstock photos. I feel it would have been better as a tongue-in-cheek book like Stuff White People Like or a big, juicy coffee table book with lots of golden hour shots of people skating and sipping hot chocolate. But it’s not tongue in cheek at all (as I feel the whole trend kind of is… or should be) and it’s not quite all-in on hygge either. Didn’t give me the hygge hit I was jonesing for, basically.
3.The Street Beneath My Feetby Charlotte Guillain and Yuval Zommer. My three-year old has been asking “Daddy, what’s under our house?” a lot lately and my wife Leslie picked up this perfect book to answer his questions. The book was just published a few weeks ago but I feel like it’s going to be a huge classic as the entire gigantic hardcover unfolds like an accordion and takes you all the way into the center of the Earth on one side of the pages and then back again on the other side. I’ve never seen a book like it. Water pipes, subway trains, archaeological treasures, gold mines, and the layers of the Earth are all explored in a real sumptuous visual feast. New permanent book on the kid’s shelf.
4. Wilson by Daniel Clowes. This is the latest graphic novel from Daniel Clowes but it’s a bit depressing to read the life story of a constantly angry person. Unless you’re there yourself, which I guess I wasn’t when I read this. I love the ups and downs but this felt like mostly downs. Still, the format and style is enough to get excited about. Clowes tells the biographical story of Wilson through a series of one-page comic strips of various formats. There are all kinds of little windows into design and communication here. Some are realistically stylized (like his famous Ghost World), some are like L’il Jinx cartoon boxes from Archie Comics, and some are just strange experiments.
5. Leadership BS by Jeffrey Pfeffer. I took a course at Harvard called “Power and Influence in Organizations” and everything in the class was written by Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, the longtime Stanford prof who teaches Paths to Power. A rare example of a Harvard class going off market. It felt like drinking a smuggled Coke in the Pepsi head office. Anyway, this book is his latest and paints a dystopian portrait of the state of corporate culture and the leadership “industry” (which he somewhat vaguely defines as the billions spent on training and developing leaders.) His point is that nothing’s working. Lies, deceit, arrogance – these are the traits of those at the top and he explains why those traits actually help them get ahead even if we pretend they don’t. If you’re struggling in a corporate gig this is a great read because it demystifies who gets power inside companies and every statement is underpinned by a quality research study. What can we do about it? A bit thin at the end but it advocates for leaderless systems and built in self-interest inside organizations. Setting those up is the tough part.
6. All Our Wrong Todaysby Elan Mastai. I used to edit a weekly comedy paper called Golden Words back at Queen’s University. It was built up over decades by a lot of blood, sweat, and tears from people before me. Elan Mastai was one of those people. He edited it in the 90s and graduated before I arrived but we connected when I became a fan of his Toronto comedy troupe maybe fifteen years back. We then lost touch until only a few weeks ago when we reconnected on Twitter and I noticed he got a seven-figure book deal (!) … for his debut novel (!) … which just came out (!). I ordered it right away and it didn’t disappoint. A fast-paced, mindbending time-travel book that reminded me of The Martianand Dark Matter. (There’s even a glowing blurb by Martian author Andy Weir on the back.) The pace of the book just keeps accelerating and seemingly goes faster and faster the deeper you go. I can’t recommend it enough.
7. Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever by Tad Friend. This is one of those gigantic 20-page articles in The New Yorker that takes me an entire flight to read. It was worth it, though. By the end I felt like I was living in this strange world of emerging science and questionable practices that (maybe not surprisingly) is entirely based in California. I cannot imagine how long it took to research this article because you go from shady labs funded by billionaires to parties with Hollywood celebs discussing and researching how we can all live a few extra decades… at least. Spoiler alert: It’s proving to be a little more challenging than we though.
