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Hey everyone,
Hey, hey, what do you say? It’s time to read some books today. Here are my February faves. Thanks for reading!
Neil
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1. On The Come Upby Angie Thomas. Have you heard of sequelitis? It’s a publishing term for the idea your second book won’t be as big as your first. I heard this a ton after The Book of Awesome. “Sure, nice one, now get ready for a bomb.” The idea is that if your first book was big then there were probably a ton of factors. Luck, timing, a key TV spot, Oprah picked it, whatever. So if your first book was the 100-week New York Times bestseller The Hate U Give, then you’re probably in trouble. Good luck following that! Well, Angie Thomas followed that. On The Come Up is the powerful and vivid and captivating story of a young woman named Brianna who wants to be a rapper. Her dad was murdered, her aunt’s a drug dealer, her mom can’t pay the bills, and so we get a beautifully braided plotline of fumbling love and family dynamics and fighting for your dreams set in the same modern, racially-charged setting as The Hate U Give, but a year later. Includes some great 8 Mile-esque rap battle scenes. Angie Thomas is a force. This is a great book. Sequelitis be damned.
2. What Makes Sammy Run?by Budd Schulberg. Apparently this novel is a portrait of Budd Schulberg’s own father who rose to the top of the Hollywood elite through swashbuckling, hucksterism, and questionable ethics. We see the dirty tricks up close in Sammy’s story which is told from the view of his only friend who is endlessly fascinated by Sammy’s trickery and lecherous ways. The book feels something like a House of Cards script written fifty years earlier. A cautionary tale about the dangers of unbridled ambition. I have some pretty raw ambitious streaks and this was a nice reminder to constantly ground and recenter. Super snappy and fast-paced, too. Couldn’t put it down.
3.Pushby Sapphire. Do you remember the movie Precious? Nominated for a slew of Academy Awards. I never saw it. And then I came across the book recently and had that clichéd dawning moment. “Wait, this was a book first?” I should have known. I read the first few pages and was hooked. Gritty and gripping voice that pulls you in sharing the first-person story of Precious, an obese, illiterate teen in Harlem in the 1980s pregnant with her second child from her father. There is pleasure amongst the pain but the pain is pretty harsh. Soul jolting.
4. The Art of Simple Livingby Shunmyo Masuno. A peaceful meditative listicle of 100 Buddhist principles for living a content and simple life. In my blurb for this book I wrote: "Our mind is blazing in the new dopamine war between alarmist news and attention-hooking apps. The Art of Simple Living is a bucket of water on the flames." Add this one to the Enlightened Bathroom Reading series.
5. HatchetbyGary Paulsen. What’s one of the most common questions I get in Q&As these days? “How can I help my kids be more resilient?” It’s a good one. Because we’re softies, aren’t we? I talk about resilience in my TED Talk and it’s the focus of my next book, too. (More details in the next few months.) As for books, I feel like Solitude by Michael Harris, The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday, and Brave Enough by Cheryl Strayed get at some of what we need here. And this YA book could fit there, too. A boy is taking a tiny prop plane from his mom’s place in Boston to his dad’s place in Canada when the pilot suddenly has a heart attack and dies mid-flight. The boy crash lands the plane in the middle of the Canadian wilderness and is suddenly lost in the barrens with bears, tornados, and a barrage of inner battles. If you don’t have the stomach for dropping your child in the middle of a forest for a few months, then maybe grab them this book.
6. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cryby Mildred D. Taylor. I didn’t realize I read so many young adult books until writing up this book club. Maybe I’ll read more adult books next month. Or maybe I’ll get a new pack of inflatable bath books about dinosaurs that fascinate me. Either way. This is a gem. It’s an autobiographical scenescape like, say, Little House in the Big Woods, which tells the story of a young black girl growing up in rural Mississippi in the 1930s. This book is a vitamin for growing empathy. The characters pop, the dialogue crackles, and it reads like an action movie with the constant acceleration to the finish line. This is my “kept me flipping pages till 3am” book this month. I finished it in the middle of the night and then let out a huge deep breath.
7. Fun Homeby Alison Bechdel. I feel like graphic memoirs can sometimes hit an emotional high water mark that words or pictures alone can’t quite always reach. (Maus is a great example.) Alison was raised in a funeral (“fun”) home by parents with secrets. When she came out as a lesbian her mother said “Well, your father’s been sleeping with men for years.” Dark, introspective, and especially perfect for word nerds as she writes with a David-Foster-Wallace-like vocabulary. Not surprised she won a MacArthur Fellowship.
8. Autobiography of Redby Anne Carson. Do you have any Once A Decade books? These are books you keep on your shelf just to open them once a decade. You can’t quite toss them. You wouldn’t call them favorites. But maybe they remind you of somebody. Maybe you feel an obligation to them. Maybe you’re hoping to grow into them. Whatever! Well, I’m marking Autobiography of Red as a Once A Decade book. It’s a mythological parable written in a book-long poem about a gay monster. Seriously. If you haven’t heard of Anne Carson, this NYT Magazine profile sheds light on why she’s kind of the literary writer’s literary writer. Parts of the book were way over my head but other parts shook me emotionally. I can’t quite toss it. I wouldn’t call it a favorite. So when will I check it out again? Look for it in the February, 2029 book club.
9. F---yourF---ingCellphone.com. Not a book but a website. My friend Chad and I have been talking for a long time about how addicted we are to our phones so we came up with a list of tiny solutions. Are you as addicted as us? If so, here’s a cuss-filled site to feed you suggestions for easing off the drug. Cell phone addiction is the next epidemic. We have to prepare for battle!
