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Hey everyone,
The beat rolls on.
How’s your pandemic life?
Here in Toronto they’ve just reopened schools after another multi-month shutdown but everything else (including our beloved bookstores) remain closed.
One thing that’s been helping me is my daily #pandemicawesome which I’ve now written for 320 straight days. Feel kind of like tick marks on some crumbling prison wall but give me a sense of movement. It’s been harder to come up with awesome things lately so if you have a suggestion, just reply and let me know. You can get them on email or the dreaded socials.
Thanks as always for the love and notes. I really do read and (try my best!) to reply to each one. If someone forwarded you this email, welcome! This is a community dedicated to intentional living. It’s great to have you with us. You can sign up right here.
Shall we get to this month's book recommendations?
To the pages!
Neil
1. Team Humanby Douglas Rushkoff. Fiery, unblinking, culture-shifting manifesto imploring us – Team Human! – to come together in the face of autonomous technologies, runaway markets, and weaponized media. My mind was set ablaze reading this magnificent book beautifully organized into 100 short, powerful essays, each of which feels like it’s been simmered down into its most flavorful parts like a pot of all-day spaghetti sauce. Douglas Rushkoff is founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is professor of media theory and digital economics and known for coining terms like ‘viral media’, ‘digital native’, and ‘social currency.’ So many of you have told me you loved The Social Dilemma. Well, if you liked that, you’ll love this. I found it higher level, more informed, and a lot farther ahead on what’s really happening and what we can do about it. All backed by well-sourced Notes that constantly sent me scurrying to look up some study or article. As the sub-headline says: “Our technologies, markets, and cultural institutions – once forces for human connection and expression – now isolate and repress us. It’s time to remake society together, not as individual players but as the team we actually are: TEAM HUMAN.” This book implores us to 'find the others.' So that's what I'm doing. I can’t recommend it enough!
2. The Westing Gameby Ellen Raskin. Did you like Ready Player One? This book feels like the 1978 Newbery Medal-winning YA precursor. Samuel Westing is dead! The millionaire tycoon’s last will and testament lays out a strange game to a roomful of seeming strangers on how they can win his vast fortune. Despite the fact this book is written for “Age 10 and up”, I confess I needed to read the Wikipedia entry a couple times to understand it. Lots of hidden characters and missing links. There’s a wonderful little cultural portrait of the book by Jia Tolentino (author of Trick Mirror) in The New Yorker right here. And, finally: This is one of rockstar professor Adam Grant’s 3 most formative books. Listen to Chapter 72 of 3 Books with Adam Grant on Apple or Spotify.
3. Fauja Singh Keeps Going: The True Story of the Oldest Person to Ever Run A Marathonby Simran Jeet Singh. I’ve always felt there was a weird gap somewhere between fiction and non-fiction picture books. On one hand: Fiction! So much fiction! Saying goodnight moon from the great green room and running around with thing one and thing two. But on the other hand? Non-fiction. But really nonny-non-fiction, you know? That’s not a word but I mean it’s mostly in the vein of Wikipedia Lite with books like The Milky Way or Ants or Mother Theresa: A Nun's Life. A blow-by-blow of how something scientific works or a biography of someone famous. I often find myself more interested in the Everyman – the Vishwas the Uber Drivers and Robin the Bartenders and Shirley the Nurses of the world. Well, enter Fauja Singh! Fauja is currently 109 years old and is the oldest person to ever run a marathon. Did he train all his life? No, he began running only a few decades ago in his 80s! A wonderful true story about a skinny boy growing up in Punjab with weak legs and a strong spirit. Also doubles as a nice introduction to Sikhism which the book calls the fifth largest religion. (Wikipedia says ninth but who's counting?) A truly wonderful picture book that I highly recommend. (PS. The book doesn’t say whether author and subject are related but I suppose either way they need this T-shirt from Humble the Poet. My chat with Humble just dropped on this morning’s Snow Moon. Listen on Apple or Spotify.)
4. From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweilerby E.L. Konigsburg. Here comes another Newbury Prize-winning YA book with a twisting plot from over 40 years ago. Clearly I am on some bizarre kick! As a sidenote, for the discerning young reader in your house, I recommend bookmarking this list of Newbery Medal and Honor books from 1922 up to today. That’s a nice long HTML page and this PDF is a treasure trove. The plot of this one is two pre-teens running away from their home in Greenwich, Connecticut to hide out for a week amongst the mummies and mastodons at The Met. They do this just as a potentially-real-potentially-fake Michelangelo statue is attracting big crowds to the museum and then attempt to crack the case themselves. The writing is spare and realist and if you’re missing museums and art galleries this is a great way to visit. I will say that the title of this book makes no sense until the final act of the book so hang in there!
5. It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying is Cool Too)by Nora McInerny. In the span of six weeks Nora McInerny had a miscarriage, lost her father to lymphoma, and then lost her 35-year-old husband Aaron to brain cancer. After her blog My Husband’s Tumor and especially the Spider-Man themed obituary they penned together went viral she was approached by publishers to recount her experiences in a memoir once she had the benefit of looking back from the future. Well, she didn’t want to pacify readers with a peanut-butter-smooth story from yonder so she wrote the memoir in the six months following the series of brutal losses. While it sounds like a recipe for a tough read -- and sure, parts are -- Nora has such a sharp wit and empathetic ability to make you feel like you’re chatting about easy stuff when you’re talking about tough stuff. No wonder she hosts the award-winning podcast Terrible, Thanks For Asking (I was a guest last year) and gave the wonderful TED Talk “We don’t move on from grief. We move forward with it.” Nora is a voice I will be listening to for years. And, she even has a special book-only Instagram account, too!
6. Hadji Muradby Leo Tolstoy. I read this book while prepping to interview George Saunders for 3 Books. He said he loves it because it’s short (a 149-page novella compared to his War and Peace and Anna Karenina phone books) and yet showcases the same dazzling style of zooming way above a scene, deep down into a little detail, all while dancing in and out of minds of endless characters, many of whom appear once to corkscrew a plotline before disappearing forever. This was the first Tolstoy I have ever read (No book guilt, no book shame) and I really enjoyed it. It’s almost non-fiction, too: Tolstoy enlisted in the Russian army in 1851 and became privy to the story of Hadji Murád, a great warrior who broke with the Chechen leader Shamil and fled to the Russians for safety, thereby entering a byzantine saga of tense meetings, extravagant balls, political blunderings, and a final fatal battle. He would have had to make up a lot of scenes and what-happeneds but the story is steeped in a rich broth of truth.
7. The Very Persistent Gappers of Fripby George Saunders. Speaking of George Saunders, did you know he wrote a kids book? It’s worth watching this 2015 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert where they discuss the book as well as sing a wonderful (and wonderfully surprising) duet. The book tells the story of small, orange, sponge-like annoyances called gappers who crawl out of the sea every night and attach themselves to the goats of the Town of Frip before being brushed off by the children every morning. What follows is a story about empathy and kindness as neighbors react differently when the gappers leave them alone and attack their neighbors. Pairs nicely with George’s 2013 Commencement Address on kindness, too.
8. Think Againby Adam Grant. I had trouble interviewing Adam Grant because my armchair expert jibber-jabbery style was – properly! accurately! – questioned by Adam at every turn. “What data are we talking about?,” he’d say, and then I’d slip into realizing I had no idea what data I was talking about. And then I realized: Wait, this entire experience is a metaphor for his book. How do you know what you don’t know? How do you examine your opinions and shoehorn yourself out of deep mental grooves? Enter Think Again by Adam Grant. As Brené Brown says on the back: “THIS. This is the book for right now.”
