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Hey everyone,
I got this email after sending out last month’s book club email:
Hi Neil,
I've been a lover of 1000awesomethings.com for 6 years now and I have bought your books as gifts on several occasions, so thank you so much! I am really enjoying your monthly book recommendations and I have a question. Did you read all of these books in December? And if so, how do you read so many books in one month? How much time do you spend reading a day? I am trying to read more this year and I am interested to learn how you do it as I know you are very busy and if you can do it, I'm sure I can too. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.
Best regards,
Erick Jackaman
Well, massive shoutout to Erick (for the note and for letting me share it) because it caused me to write a new article for Harvard Business Review called “8 Ways To Read (A Lot) More Books This Year.” The article got some traction and now there are a couple thousand more of you reading along as a result. (Hey, guys!)
Hope you enjoy this month’s books,
Neil
1. There Is No Good Card For This: What To Say and Do When Life is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Loveby Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell. Have you heard of Empathy Cards? Emily McDowell started the company making perfectly articulate and hilarious greeting cards. Her new book – tag-teamed with empathy expert Dr. Kelsey Crowe – perfectly brings to life those same themes around empathy and compassion and is sprinkled with hilarious drawings throughout. Just came out and getting serious press. Feels like it should be a mandatory book for others whenever you’re going through a tough time in life. (Sidenote: The book reminds me a lot of this great article I cut out of the New York Times over five years ago.)
2.How Not To Write: The Essential Misrules of Grammarby William Safire. Did you ever read the On Language column in The New York Times Magazine? It was a thing of beauty. One full page, every week, examining every detail of a different word from all angles. Written by William Safire, Pulitizer-Prize winning journalist, former Presidential speechwriter, and NYT columnist for forty years. He died in 2006. (Sidenote: One of my most prized moments while writing The Happiness Equation was getting a letter from his 90+ year old widow allowing me to use some of his “Never Retire” Op-Ed in the book.) This book is a treasure. It contains fifty grammar rules like “#50 Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague” and “#27 Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.” The whole book is completely meta since he’s constantly using and stylistically breaking his examples. A fave example from #44 De-accession euphemisms: “The U.S. Embassy in Budapest used to hand each arriving diplomat a packet that included this warning: ‘It must be assumed that available casual indigenous female companions work for or cooperate with the Hungarian government security establishment.’ It would have been better for our counterintelligence efforts if somebody had said, ‘The local whores are spies.’” Fun book for grammar junkies.
3.The Roadby Cormac McArthy. I remember watching the Coen Brothers go onstage at the 2007 Oscars to accept Best Adapted Screenplay for No Country For Old Men. I had seen that movie. It scared the crap out of me. They smiled and said something like “We just take works of genius by other people. Cormac McArthy wrote this! We just filmed it!” And I was like, “Who’s Cormac McArthy? That thing was a book? Why haven’t I heard of it?” And then I realized it’s because nobody has heard of any book, on average. Most people can maybe name the top five movies last year. I’ve never met a person who could do this with books. My point is the Movie-To-Author-Effect really is a great discovery mechanism. In this millions-of-books available era, we need whatever filtering we can get. Cormac McArthy lodged in my head from that Oscar speech a decade ago so I casually did The First Five Pages Test on The Road and was hooked. Dark, sparse, brooding, touching. How does a book this long contain almost no commas? Amazingly spare writing about a father and son walking a dark and lonely road in the US a few years after a fiery apocalypse wiped out nearly everything. Doesn’t sound like a heartwarmer but produces incredible feelings of appreciation, gratitude, awe, and love for the world around us like almost nothing else.
4. Danny the Champion of the Worldby Roald Dahl. I can still fondly remember my first grade teacher Miss McKay reading James and the Giant Peach to us on the ugly green linty carpet in our classroom. I got hooked on Roald Dahl back then so I enjoyed this Telegraph ranking of the sixteen best Roald Dahl books. I realized there were a ton I hadn’t read so picked this one up at the library. It seems like the book is about poor Danny living in a one-room trailer with his dad and plotting the greatest ever pheasant poaching hunt on the land of the local ruthless billionaire. But it’s really just about the beauty of true love between father and son. I loved it and actually found it inspiring on how to be a more fun and upbeat dad.
5. Coachby Michael Lewis. You know how you used to double-space your essays and increase the margins to make it look bigger? This book did that. Giant font, double spacing, and even a few unrelated stock images for good measure. “Why is that old man crying into a catcher’s mitt? This was never discussed!” It’s really just a long Vanity Fair article stretched into a book. Really great read, though. Michael Lewis was fascinated that while everyone in his generation loved his old high school coach (alumni had just finishing raising money to build a gym in his name), somehow all the parents of the current generation were trying to get him fired. Why? The answer is a beautifully articulated story about what we used to trust and need coaches to do – find and develop our most cherished values through trial and tough love – and how we don’t make space for that type of growth anywhere in our lives anymore. It’s more than a “special snowflake” piece though. There is real heart, beauty, and subtlety in this tale. You’ll read it in an hour and it’s perfect for parents or teachers. A gem.
6. Steal The Showby Michael Port. I picked this book up in an airport and expected a couple nuggets on giving keynote speeches. It delivered a lot more. The sub-headline is “From speeches to job interviews to deal-closing pitches, how to guarantee a standing ovation for all the performances in your life.” Michael Port shares lessons learned as an actor and applies them to giving speeches. Biggest value is when he lays out the detailed, step-by-step approach to developing a new keynote speech from scratch. If you have a big speech coming up (and a few months to prepare for it) then this is a great pickup.
7. The Wonderful Things You Will Beby Emily Winfield Martin. Most kid’s books have two names on the cover. Writer! Illustrator! So I’m already impressed when I stumble on a great kid’s book with only one name on the front. I can’t believe someone was talented enough to do both. This is a beautifully poetic hymn to a child’s potential from the perspective of a loving parent. I can read it over and over with my older son.
8. We Are Not Materialistic Enoughby David Cain. I told Leslie when I met her that I hated winter. “Too cold!” I’d say, shivering in my flimsy coat and thin Walmart boots that turned my toes into ice cubes. “You don’t hate Winter,” she said. “You just have crappy boots.” She convinced me to buy a good quality pair and six years later they’re as good as new. I love walking in them. My feet are never cold. They’ve completely changed my view. And that’s the exact philosophy underpinning this article I loved by David Cain who authors the popular blog Raptitude: Getting Better At Being Human.
9. White Noiseby Don DeLillo. A National Book Award winning novel written in 1984 that was honestly just a slog for me to get through. If I don’t finish a book (which happens a lot) then I don’t include it in this email. But with this book I kept saying “Ten more pages” over and over and over until I was done. It’s a comic look at the various phobias of the age that really doesn’t feel outdated at all. Technology taking over, chemical spills, and the big shrink-wrapped capitalistic squeeze over everything. Crisp confident writing with twisted characters and plotlines. I got lost in it a few times but liked it enough that I’d still recommend it to those of you on the more literary side than me…
10.The Sun Is Also A Starby Nicola Yoon. Do you know that balcony scene in Annie Hallwhere Alvy and Annie are hitting on each other and all their awkward little phrases are subtitled with their actual thoughts? Well, this whole Young Adult book is written like that. Two-page chapter from his perspective, two-page chapter from hers. It’s the story of one day in the life of two star-crossed teenage lovers meetings in New York City as one is being deported as an illegal immigrant and the other has his big interview to get into Yale. It was a fun read but a big part was just about momentum. Since I struggled to get through White Noise above I needed a moving-sidewalk book to get my pace back up. This one did the trick. If you liked the final scene of Six Feet Under where they give flash-forwards of all the characters, you’ll probably like this book.
11.Brave Enoughby Cheryl Strayed. Beautiful, simple, profane book of snappy quotes from the author of Wild. Three examples: “If it is impossible to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have,” “Our most meaningful relationships are often those that continued beyond the juncture at which they came closest to ending,” and “Love can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued by sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and loaded by promises and commitments that we may or may not want to keep. The best thing you can possibly do with your life is tackle the [motherbleeping bleep] out of it.”
