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Hey everyone,
Hope you’re having a good month and gearing up for the holidays.
Thanks so much for all the feedback after my Book Club email last month. Your notes pushed me into another batch of books this month which I’m excited to share below. Also, total aside, my brand new TED Talk “How Do You Maximize Your Tiny, Short Life?” is live!
Happy holidays and happy reading.
Neil
1. The Art of Livingby Epictetus. Last March I stayed in a hotel called The Taj in San Francisco during my book tour. Indian chain. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table and there was a copy of The Vedas lying there. But it was strangely jarring. I’ve been used to seeing Bibles in hotel rooms my whole life. And then suddenly there was something else. “Hmmm,” I thought, “It’s not the Bible, necessarily, it’s a thousands-of-years old guidebook of stories and lessons for people sleeping far from home.” That got me thinking. What book would I put in the bedside table of my own hotel chain? What would you put? I never answered the question until now. I think it has to be The Art of Livingby Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca may hog the Stoic philosophy press, but I’ve found great joy paging through this two-thousand year old book of simple philosophical notes written by a slave born on the edges of the Roman Empire in 55 AD. It’s a perfect book to flip through before falling asleep or after waking up in the morning if you can spare a few minutes before getting out of bed. Part of the appeal is that , despite being written so long ago, the translation feels like an email you got this morning from a wise friend. Sample entry to share a taste: “It is better to do wrong seldom and to own it, and to act right for the most part, than seldom to admit that you have done wrong and to do wrong often.” (More sample entries here.)
2.Dark Matterby Blake Crouch. I was complaining to my friend Alec a while back about Lost. You know, twisting plotlines, endless branches, totally confusing TV show. “Yeah, but you’re thinking about it in terms of plot,” he said. “It’s a character show. It’s not about plot.” Since then I always thought this was a fun little scale to think about. Plot vs Character. Overly simplistic, for sure, but a kind mental model that lets a lot more art into my life. In fiction I’ve lately veered to more character based stuff so Dark Matter was a nice rubber band snap back. It’s all plot. Plot, plot, plot. I don’t even think we know what the characters look like. But the plot in Dark Matter sizzles like frying bacon. Hot, loud, fills the room, jumps up and bites your wrist here and there. This is the fastest paced book I’ve read this year. Reminded me of reading The Martian or old suspenseful Michael Crichton books. (Anyone else still thinking about the ending to Sphere?) I felt like it was a bit predictable at the beginning but he has enough twists and turns that the ending feels completely wild and results in an ultimately beautiful story about love and regret wrapped in a crispy sci-fi phyllo pastry crust. Fantastic fun.
3.How To Develop Self-Confidence & Influence People by Public Speakingby Dale Carnegie. If you’re like me you know and probably enjoyed How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. This book was written before that one and is a lot lesser known unless you went to a Carnegie course. (By the way, Warren Buffet calls the Dale Carnegie course he took his most important degree.) I think this book is gold, honestly. Timeless advice that shows how to make a speech about the listener. That’s the key. Favorite chapters were templates with examples on how to open and close speeches (i.e., Arouse curiosity, share a human interest story, use an exhibit, share a shocking quote or fact, etc.) Super easy read. Perfect for anyone shoulder-tapped for a toast at a wedding all the way up to the corporate honcho in the big hat.
4. Hereby Richard McGuire. We all think in pictures, right? That’s all babies have! And then they grow into picture books. When images become too complicated to draw – the nuance of emotions, the fast pace of a long plot, whatever – we move to chapter books, then YA, then whatever you’re reading now. Where are the pictures? Still there. Just in our heads. I think it’s because of this picture-brain mindset I’ve always been attracted to graphic novels like Killing and Dyingby Adrian Tomine or Ghost Worldby Daniel Clowes. Realistic characters, strong plotlines, major emotions of good fiction, all complemented with realistically beautiful images and no superhero tights. That’s what makes Here such an incredible graphic novel with a really strange hook: every page is a snapshot of the exact same location at a different time in history. Native Americans have sex in the forest, construction of a century home begins on another, a man keels over in the 1970s rec room after someone tells a joke. Little boxes on each page give glimpses of what happened exactly here at other times, too. On most pages it’s within that century home but it often goes way farther into the past and future, too. Planet formation to post-apocalypse. It’s no comic book. And there’s no plot. It’s a guided meditation that dilates your brain into zooming way further out from wherever you happen to be. Where are you while reading this email? I guarantee you’ll be somewhere else after reading this book. I loved it. (Wired did a great overview of it, too.)
5. How To Be Successfulby Scott Adams. I reread this Wall Street Journal article by Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) this month. I bookmarked it a long time ago because it’s such a great and funny overview of why systems are better than goals.
6. Purityby Jonathan Franzen. 2016 was my Franzen Year. I read The Corrections,Freedom, and now Purityfrom January till now and not a single word he wrote before then. Don’t you love discovering an author and then realizing you’ve got a whole biography of theirs to explore? Purityis all kinds of layered emotional regression after emotional regression. We follow a character for a hundred pages only to regress into the backstory of the person she meets at the end of the hundred pages only to regress into the backstory of the person they meet at the end of the next hundred pages. Even though the book is Franzen’s usual 600 page paperweight there really wasn’t much wasted space until the end. His ability to describe personalities is so strong. You feel like you know these people better than your own family at times. Their secret desires, their shattered confidences, their disgusting thoughts. I felt like a better husband and dad while reading this book – feeling lucky for what I have and more grateful for the love around me in a world of heartbroken people. For anyone who hasn’t read Franzen’s stuff, I’d personally recommend this only after The Corrections and Freedom. Doesn’t quite get to the level of those two though it’s not far off.
7. Both Flesh and Notby David Foster Wallace. For years I tried and failed to get into David Foster Wallace. I tackled Infinite Jest like a mountain and slipped down the rocky hills just above base camp. It taunted me from my bookshelf for years. (Here’s a fantastic piece written recently about Infinite Jest for the twentieth year anniversary.) I loved the little bits and pieces of David Foster Wallace I’d read over the years (like his incredible This Is Water commencement speech) and was always looking for a new way into his writing. Now I have it. This book. It’s a collection of non-fiction essays he wrote for outlets like The New York Times Magazine and they are flabbergastingly beautiful and intense. The title essay is about Roger Federer at the beginning of his tennis career. It’s like nothing I’ve read before on sports. He has a funny essay on the seminal importance of Terminator 2. His collection of “word notes” on commonly misused words. And my favorite is his essay called The Nature Of The Fun which is about the emotional roller coaster of the creative process after having success in the creative process. (Brainpickings did a nice overview of it here.) Any of those essays are worth the price of admission alone. This is truly original, high-flying, mind-bogglingly good writing. Now I really need to tackle Infinite Jestagain…
8. The Verificationistby Donald Antrim. This was one of the strangest, most frustrating, and most emotional novels I’ve read this year. Completely absurdist comedy written by Antrim who is a longtime New Yorker writer, Professor at Brown, and MacArthur Fellow. Tom is a middle-aged psychotherapist hosting all his pschyotherapist buddies for a big night at the local pancake house. When he tries to start a food fight he’s put in a bear hug by a coworker and the rest of the book trips into a hallucination with him flying around the top of the restaurant looking down at the group. I kept wanting to just quit the book (I probably quit three or four books for every one I finish…) but something was strangely gripping about it. Real characters, blunt unflinching dialogue, psychosexual tension. And there are no chapters or any kind of mental resting stops to actually jump out of this car while it’s moving. If this is all starting to sound strange then let me tell you the book is actually a lot stranger than it sounds.
9. Before and Afterby Anne-Margot Ramstein & Matthias Aregui. When I wrote my children’s book Awesome Is Everywhere last year my editor warned me: “Everyone buys the classics.” You know how it is. Grandaddy grew up with Goodnight Moon, Auntie Pat’s Patted The Bunny for decades. So when it’s time for them to buy a gift for their grandchild or nephew, they defer to what they know, and the cycle continues. Kid’s classics get bigger and the cornucopia of contemporary delights gets routinely overlooked. But then, why are there so many new picture books and why are so many so good? I think it’s because even though advances and royalties are much smaller, because of market size and jackpot rate, the people doing them really are doing it for love. You can feel the TLC oozing off the pages. And Before and After is a book oozing with TLC. First off, no words appear at all in the entire book. On the left side of each page is an artistically clean drawing of something before -- like an acorn, caterpillar, or egg. On the right side is something after – like an oak tree, butterfly, or chicken. Some are obvious, some aren’t, all provoke great conversation. The bookseller who recommended it to me said it’s her favorite children’s book because it serves such a wide age, language, and development range. She didn’t mention parents but I love it, too. A great go-to gift for friends with kids because hardly anyone has heard of it. Beats Goodnight Moon any night.
