Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
It’s getting harder and harder to take a pause, take a breath, and just take inventory of where to point our attention these days.
I’ve felt my own reading slipping as streams and algorithms get louder. But that’s why I value this conversation – a book sharing club – to keep us focused on improving our reading habits.
Also: Big thanks for ten straight weeks of Our Book of Awesome clocking in on international and national bestseller lists. Our little dollop of awesome in the angry frying pan. If you don’t have a copy yet just click here.
If you know someone who wants to read more books just forward them this note so they can sign up right here.
Now let’s hit the books,
Neil
1. Breathe In, Breathe Out: Restore Your Health, Reset Your Mind and Find Happiness Through Breathworkby Stuart Sandeman. (L/I/A) Growing up I’d sometimes wake up early and head downstairs to discover a thin bright light under the closed basement door in the dark hallway. I’d tiptoe downstairs to discover my dad, on his shins, pumping his fists into his stomach, while snorting like a horse. “What the … ?” My adolescent brain was, of course, not open to his always-at-the-ready tutelage in the ways of pranayama – the ancient yoga practice of breathwork. (“Prana” means “vital life force” and yama means “to gain control.”) Of course, as often happens, we circle back to wisdom from our parents later. My dad is 77 now and I’m 43 and, well, guess who’s the weird dad doing breathing exercises in the basement before sunrise now? Two things have been helpful for me recently: this extremely accessible book and the Othership breathwork app. The book has already paid for itself many times over but the most life-changing two pages for me were 102-103 where Stuart outlines a 10-second “nose unblocking technique” I wish I knew decades ago. If you’re a “one nostril plugged all day” person like me this is massive. Basically: 1) Take a normal breath in through your nose and out through your nose, 2) Gently pinch your nose while now holding your breath, 3) Tilt your head slowly all four directions – left, right, forwards, backwards, 4) Get back to looking straight and unplug your nose before breathing in a gentle breath. Did it work? If not, do it again. This has, no joke, completely unblocked my nostrils every single time I’ve done it. Stuart, where have you been all my life? Written in incredibly accessible “blog-posty” style prose this is a wonderful come hither to the land of breathwork. Highly recommended.
2. Demianby Herman Hesse. (L/I/A) I was in Boston last year for my school reunion and went out for breakfast with my friend Erik to Trident Books and Café. Both? Yes! You come in, you sit down for some huevos rancheros, you browse books – all in one place. I love how small bookstores force incredible curation, too. 200 million books in the world! Now pick 1000 to sell! Tough job but Trident did it masterfully. Erik and I played the game of “I buy you one of my favorites, you buy me one of your favorites.” I think I got him East of Eden by John Steinbeck – my favorite book of 2017! – and he bought me this and added the inscription “Enjoy opening this window.” I was excited as I hadn’t read anything by Herman Hesse except Siddhartha (which I loved). This book opened with a heart-pounding scene of ten-year-old Sinclair getting into trouble with the local tough and it builds into an atmospheric “bildungsroman” (fancy phrase for “coming of age” story) tracing the life of Emil Sinclair as he navigates adolescence and attempts to figure himself out. The pacing got slower and slower which made it (to me) a nice before-bed read – but I also struggled to catch all the symbols and allusions flying around. Solid overall but thinking maybe it’s time I get to Steppenwolf. PS. If you’re into bildungsromans, or think you might be, here’s a great list on Goodreads ranking some of the best. How many of the first 25 have you read? I’ve read 11. Lots to go!
3. Hot Combby Ebony Flowers. (L/I/A) When I was a little kid I read an interview with Bill Gates and he said something like “Whenever I go to a magazine stand I always buy a magazine I’ve never read before. There’s a lot more to learn in those ones.” I’m paraphrasing but the sentiment stuck with me. Algorithms push, cajole, and classify us into 1s and 0s but there’s nothing like browsing a local bookstore (speaking of which, check out Chapter 99 of 3 Books where I interview self-described bibliomaniac Doug Miller in his own bookstore!) and stumbling upon things that would never have been recommended to you. Like, for example, this raw, scratchily-drawn, emotionally braided-together memoir of high intensity essays telling the story of Ebony as she moves from a trailer park into a black neighborhood outside Baltimore – all somehow told through … hair. Well, not just hair! It’s really about life. And about messages and stories we hear growing up. Themes include ‘acting too white’, casual racism, motherhood, drug abuse, and, in an especially painful essay, boundaries and mental health – when, after her little sister’s hair becomes an object of interest to her softball team she begins twisting and pulling it all out. Doctors, psychiatrists, and pills are called in to help and the final page will just break your heart. Published by Drawn & Quarterly, which has to be the best comics and graphic novel publishing house in the world. Highly recommended.
4. Jacob Two-Two Meets The Hooded Fangby Mordecai Richler. (L/I/A) When I feel my reading pace turn sluggish or my reading attention starting to fracture I turn to page flippers to lasso myself back in. Graphic novels, young adult, and, recently, middle-grade fiction. I found this classic in a Little Free Library and it had the same pumpkin-orange cover I remembered as a kid. Richler wrote it in 1975 and it’s a triumph of children’s literature and storytelling. It opens: “Once there was a boy called Jacob Two-Two. He was two plus two plus two years old. He had two ears and two eyes and two arms and two feet and two shoes.” Turns out he says everything twice because nobody listens to him the first time. After a run-in with a grocer down the street, he’s sentenced to a horrible prison run by the Hooded Fang. This book gets into the thorny parts of the typical nightmares of young kids and has a wonderfully unique “superkid superhero” tone. Btw: If you don’t know Mordecai Richler I highly recommend Barney’s Version. That one's for adults! One of the funniest and fastest-paced books I’ve ever read.
5. A Fraction of the Wholeby Steve Toltz. (L/I/A) “Funny and fast-paced.” Let’s stick on those four words for a minute. I use them a lot with booksellers. “What kind of book do you like?” “Funny and fast-paced.” I like it as a filter because a) there just aren’t that many books funny and face-paced (and, you know, good), and b) when you hit a good one … well, you can dine out on it for years. To wit: A Fraction Of The Whole. By far the funniest, fastest-paced novel I have ever read. The sprawling, multi-generational, multi-national, multi-layered, multi-structured head trip that is Steve Toltz’s magnificent Booker Prize-nominated 2007 debut. It kind of makes sense that before he wrote it he was a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter. Take a taste test to see if it’s for you with the first four sentences: “You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue. My lesson? I have lost my freedom, and found myself in this strange prison, where the trickiest adjustment, other than getting used to not having anything in my pockets and being treated like a dog that pissed in a sacred temple, is the boredom. I can handle the enthusiastic brutality of the guards, the wasted erections, even the suffocating heat.” I love this book so much. Highly recommended. And here's my recent chat with Steve Toltz on the podcast. PS. If you have a favorite “fast-paced and funny” novel, please reply and let me know!
6. Around the World in 80 Birdsby Mike Unwin. Illustrated by Ryuto Miyake. (L/I/A) I never really had grandparents. I mean, three were gone when I showed up and the one who was alive didn’t speak English and lived across an ocean so I saw her maybe five times. I’ve been really lucky in marriage many ways and one is that I’ve inherited a set of “grandparents in law” who’ve shared so much love and wisdom. My wife’s grandmother Donna and I played Scrabble, watched the Blue Jays, and, yes, talked birds. She gave me this book as a Christmas present just eight weeks ago … and died two weeks ago. I read it thinking of her. Flits and swoops into birds you may have heard of around the world – quetzals, kiwis, flamingos, oh my! – together with little behavioral or historical anecdotes that bring them to life. Plus: honestly the best bird illustrations I’ve ever seen. (Sorry Audobon!) I say: Buy it for the pictures! That’s why I laid the book face down in the picture above. Pinch in! That level of stunning art graces every single page. Ryuto, you nailed it. Great book for birders or birders-to-be. Maybe avoid if you’re already “advanced” as this may seem kind of surface for you. Highly recommended. (PS. Little synchronicity with Herman Hesse book above -- the poem / song Beim Shlafeneghen by Herman Hesse was sung by Donna’s niece at her funeral. Wonderful English lyrics here.)
7. I Am Brownby Ashok Banker. Illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat. (L/I/A) I found myself crying in the library last week after I started flipping through this book after spotting it on display. A wonderful self-affirming book for brown-skinned kids that I wish I had when I was younger. It opens slow and gentle ("I am brown. I am beautiful. I am friendship."), works its way to food ("I eat noodles, tacos, biryani, jhat muri, steak"), tackles stereotypes ("I am a doctor. I am a lawyer. I am an athlete. I am an electrician."), addresses beliefs ("I pray at... a temple, a church, a synagogue, a gurdwara, nowhere"), and does it all in a joyful, bouncing, inclusive, loving way.
8. The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds – Not Crushes – Your Soulby Brad Stulberg. (L/I/A) Nourishing! That’s my one-word summary for this book. Pretty sure I first heard about Brad on The Rich Roll Podcast and he’s got such a gift for distilling research and wisdom into helping us live intentional lives. In the Introduction he shares feedback from coaching clients on burnout, "heroic individualism", and how a newfound diagnosis of OCD helped him write this book where he shares six thoughtful principles of "groundedness": 1) Accept Where You Are To Get You Where You Want To Go, 2) Be Present So You Can Own Your Attention and Energy, 3) Be Patient And You’ll Get There Faster, 4) Embrace Vulnerability to Develop Genuine Strength and Confidence, 5) Build Deep Community, and 6) Move Your Body To Ground Your Mind. Each chapter blossoms into a deeply evidence-based summary of “everything out there” and Brad’s skills as a "success-synthesizer" are on display as he drip-drip-distills so much, so quickly. For example, in his chapter on community, he opens with a nature metaphor, goes deep on loneliness research, quotes Sebastian Junger's (wonderful) book Tribe, shows how this quote connects with self-determination theory (and explains what that is), ties this into work by Jonathan Haidt, jumps into another research study, and then ties all that into takeaways from a 1941 book from Eric Fromm that hit you hard in the chest -- like "To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration, just as physical starvation leads to death." And this all happened in 6 pages. The whole chapter is 31. If you like your self-help highly thoughtful and concentrated, this book is chock full of wisdom for you.
9. Bronzeville Boys and Girlsby Gwendolyn Brooks. Illustrated by Faith Ringgold. (L/I/A) Yet another reason to love independent bookstores? Their ability to arrow-point your attention into the dark-tunneled history of your local community. We’re getting so much more global now. And, you know, there’s the risk of leaving behind where we came from in this forever-two-dimensionalizing mélange. I was wandering around downtown Chicago last year when I stumbled on the after-words independent bookstore on East Illinois Street. Right on the front table was a massive display of this children’s book. “BRONZEVILLE!” It just screamed at me. What’s Bronzeville? Well, it’s a Chicago neighborhood that was (in the early 1900s) called the “Black Metropolis” when it became home to thousands fleeing oppression in the south. A massive amount of cultural history took place here like the Pekin Theater (the first black-owned US theater built in 1905) and the Wabash YMCA (known as the first “Black Y” in the US and built in 1911.) Btw that Y is also where Black History Month comes from. What else? Well, as the title of this book suggests, a lot of boys and girls lived here. And Gwendolyn Brooks – the first black Pulitzer Prize winner ever! – distills their pains and pleasures into these emotionally hard-punching little poems. Like one called Otto which reads: “It’s Christmas Day. I did not get / The presents that I hoped for. Yet, / It is not nice to frown or fret. / To frown or fret would not be fair. / My dad must never know I care / It’s hard enough for him to bear.” Or Rudolph Is Tired Of The City: “These buildings are too close to me. / I’d like to PUSH away. / I’d like to live in the country, / And spread my arms all day. / I’d like to spread my breath out, too -- / As farmers’ sons and daughters do. / I’d tend the cows and chickens. / I’d do the other chores. / Then, all the hours left I’d go / A-SPREADING out-of-doors."
