Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
I felt great when somebody told me that ESPN wrote a big feature today about how NHL rookie-of-the-year candidate Cale Maker is reading You Are Awesome in the playoffs bubble. I felt less awesome when I found out a serial killer in the Netflix show (Un)Well was spotted with The Happiness Equation on his bedside table.
Books for everyone!
Below are my recommendations this month.
Neil
1. Halfbreedby Maria Campbell. It is beyond shameful how little I learned in my formal education about Canada’s cultural genocide of indigenous people. Basically: nothing. When Leslie told me about residential schools a few years ago I had never heard of them. Nothing was mentioned in high school history classes and I clearly failed to do any self study. To say I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do is an understatement. I think the only books I’ve read that discuss the indigineous experience are There, Thereby Tommy Orange and Heart Berriesby Terese Marie Mailhot. And now I have this astounding coming of age memoir by Maria Campbell to add to the mix. Published in 1973 with “missing pages” detailing her rape at the hands of the RCMP, this 2019 edition has been restored with the full script as well as an Afterword written by Maria Campbell last year. The book takes place through the 50s and 60s in Western Canada and includes a lot of first nations history told through memorable exchanges with Maria’s 104-year-old (!) Cree great-grandmother Cheechum. Braided with bleakness, horror, and revelation, it’s a story I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I finished.
2. The Invisible Pyramidby Loren Eiseley. Naturists, anthropologists, environmentalists, philosophers, and teachers, lend me your ears. This is the book for you! Loren Eiseley lived from 1907 to 1977 and is listed as all of those things in his online biography. Thankfully those diverse experiences come together wonderfully in this powerful series of essays originally delivered as a series of lecture at the University of Washington in 1969. Eiseley offers a wild sense of vertigo as he masterfully zooms us across spacetime to give us a sense of place in the cosmos. Did you ever read that “Pale Blue Dot” passage by Carl Sagan? If you liked that, you’ll love this book. I think this is the book I was always hoping to find whenever I picked up A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking which I found difficult. Also great for folks who loved Sapiens or The Power of Myth.
3. Smithsonian Field Guide to Birdsby Ted Floyd. I am falling deeper and deeper in love with birds. Like madly in love. Like making-them-a-mix-tape in love. Why? So many reasons! Their earth-dominating scale (50x our population!), their wild evolutionary histories, their gorgeous plumage, their majestic flying, their gonzo behaviors. Nevermind their collective nonchalance about the pandemic. That alone is worth something! A couple years ago in this book club I shared the National Geographic cover story Why Birds Matter by Jonathan Franzen and last year I shared the urban birding memoir Birds, Art, Love by Kyo Maclear. I know it’s a pandemic cliché but I just can’t stop looking at the birds. It’s why I wrote about them 1, 2, 3 times in my new 1000 Awesome Things. I love this guide because before every type of bird there’s a page or two about its history and behavior. Helps you get to know the birds you love better.
4. Bad Feminist: Essaysby Roxane Gay. Roxane Gay’s writing flows like a river: calm, smooth, burbling, and then you hit the rocks. She offers accessible welcome mats into complex and thorny issues like her essay “What We Hunger For” on the emotional trauma of sexual abuse told through her love of The Hunger Games. (That full essay is online here.) The essays are short, easy to read, and have a huge range of topics as one moment you’re hearing what it feels like to be a typical first year professor and the next you’re discussing problematic issues in The Help or Django Unchained. Highly recommended. (PS. If you want to fall into a Roxane Gay rabbit hole I recommend following her on Twitter, reading this wonderful essay she wrote recently about her wife Debbie Millman, and checking out her reviews on Goodreads where she is the #4 (!) overall best reviewer on the whole site.) (PPS. If you’re wondering like I was how she can be so prolific, she answers here.)
5. Black Beautyby Anna Sewell. Anna Sewell wrote this book in the 1870s while lying in bed as an invalid. She died five months after it came out but was alive long enough to see the book take off. And take off it did! 50 million copies sold and counting. A wonderful first-horse view of life from the mid-1800s which includes simple but profound lessons about kindness, friendship, and animal rights. I read this to prepare for my interview with Temple Grandin which will be dropping on the exact minute of the full moon next week. (Click here to subscribe to 3 Books on Apple Podcasts)
6. Meanby Myriam Gurba. I mentioned Myriam’s sizzling essay on American Dirt last month and now I’ve read her poetic “true crime memoir.” A fiery, queer, brassy Latina coming of age in the world today.
7. The Common Loonby Terry Miller. I read this thin, road-atlas-sized book in one night and couldn’t shut up about loons for days. I sounded like this in my house. Did you know loons are the oldest flying birds in the world? (Been here 60 million years to our paltry 300,000!) Did you know they have bright red eyes to help filter out blue light so they can see prey below 15 feet underwater? Did you know due to their heavy bones and good-for-swimming-bad-for-everything-else feet they actually need a quarter mile of water just to take off? Did you know that as a result of this many loons unfortunately die each year during their fall migration to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans because they land on wet pavement slicks that look like water and then can’t take off again? Loons, loons, loons, everybody. Yes, I have gone crazy for bird books. (PS. Just for fun: This book appears to be completely out of print and isn’t even on GoodReads but I found a few copies left for five bucks each on ThriftBooks. Click fast or forever hold your peace.)
8. A Wizard of Earthseaby Ursula Le Guin. In my interview with David Mitchell on 3 Books last month I introduced this book as “A Wizard of Earth-See-Ah” to which David interrupted and said “Earth-See, Neil, it’s pronounced Earth-See.” I read the entire book mispronouncing the most common word in the book and then proceeded to make a fool of myself in front of an author I was hoping to impress. Anyway, A Wizard of Earthsea is a wonderful book classified as “young adult fantasy” but actually is about dozens of other things such as how we shape our identity, the psychology of loneliness, and how we find purpose. Poetic, vivid, raw, and rugged. I loved it. (PS. Speaking of David Mitchell, he wrote this article in The Guardian about the book. I guarantee if you read this article you'll buy the book.)
9. Life Doesn’t Frighten Meby Maya Angelou and Jean-Michel Basquiat. My cousin-in-law got this book for our kids and I found it completely entrancing. Almost 30 years ago an editor named Sara Jane Boyers had the idea to marry Angelou’s famous poem “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me” with Basquiat’s spine tingling and soul penetrating art and the results are completely transfixing. Here’s the full text of Maya Angelou’s poem if you want to read the words first.
