Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - July 2019

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Hey everyone,

Hope you're having a great month.

In somewhat strange news, my journal Two-Minute Mornings has been going crazy lately and ranking in Amazon's Top 100 for a couple weeks. Each page in the journal lists the three simple prompts I fill out to start my day: I will let go of..., I am grateful for..., and I will focus on.... Here's a TV clip where I explain where it came from.

And now, the books!

Neil

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1. Comedy Sex God by Pete Holmes. I try to read across as many genres as I can but one genre that’s been largely missing over the 33 months I've run this Monthly Reading Club is the Celebrity Memoir. It’s not that I don’t like celebrities. It’s not that I don’t like memoirs. It’s just that I don’t like the celebrity memoir. Why? I guess I’m cynical about them. First off, the celebrity generally didn’t write the thing so I get all hoity toity about that. Secondly, they’re often written for the wrong reasons. Like the book feels part of a larger marketing plan cooked up in a Hollywood boardroom. Somebody’s having a moment! And so there’s movie billboards, an 8-episode podcast, a Vanity Fair feature, and, yes, a crappy book. With the celebrity on the cover slipping on a banana peel or something. Why do I go on this rant? Because Pete Holmes (Crashing, Dirty Clean, You Made It Weird) is a celebrity. And this is a memoir. But it’s not a celebrity memoir. It’s an incredibly well-written and hilarious coming-of-age story from a comedian at the top of his game. As Pete has said, “Nobody asked me to write this book.” And that says a lot in Hollywood. This isn’t a prong. No underhand pitch in service of a larger game. This book comes at you fast with a lot of uncomfortable moments and Pete’s unflinching honesty. The book talks about (yes) comedy, sex, and God because everything Pete does feels underpinned by this gigantic gnawing “what is this?” feeling that we should really have about the whole universe. What is the universe? Why is it expanding? Expanding into what? Why are we here? How did we get here? What happens next? These are huge questions most of us put out of our mind to function but Pete keeps touching and tapping and rubbing up against them in this beautiful book. I loved it.

2. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. Back in 1978 Julia Cameron was gaining success in Hollywood but recognized her creativity came only in frenetic spurts after she started drinking and before she got blind drunk. Out of fear of where the path was leading she gave up the booze and began to teach herself a practice to find creativity in a newly sober state. It worked. In the early 80s she began teaching that practice in creativity workshops in New York. The workshops were based on the belief that everybody is creative and they simply need to learn how to unblock, uncover, and channel that creativity. Her workshops developed a little curriculum which she began photocopying and mailing to people. Those photocopies eventually evolved into a self-published book called The Artist’s Way which came out in 1992. And now here we are more than twenty-five years later and its sold millions of copies and spawned a giant movement. This is an incredible book structured around a 12-week program where you write and sign a contract to yourself to commit, perform weekly tasks and assignments, and do little check-ins. It feels like a partner book to The War of Art (replace “the censor” with “resistance”) and an earlier incarnation of other creativity-provoking books like Steal Like An Artist and Wreck This Journal. Julia advocates Morning Pages, or simply blurting all the random and nonsensical ideas in your brain onto paper as soon as you wake up. She advocates Artist Dates (which I call Untouchable Days) to take space from the world and be alone with your artist. It’s a beautifully spiritual book to unleash your creativity … wherever it may be today.

3. Dirty Clean by Pete Holmes. Wait, hold on. I put Dirty Clean in brackets up there like it was just some thing but I think it deserves its own number. This is a Spotify link to Pete’s incredible HBO comedy special "Dirty Clean" from December, 2018. And here’s the trailer for a taste.

4. New York Drawings by Adrian Tomine. A collection of New Yorker covers by graphic novelist Adrian Tomine. Likely just for superfan completists because it’s more of a flipper. If you’re new to Adrian’s incredible work then I’d recommend starting with Killing and Dying (my fave) or Summer Blonde. Check out some samples of his stuff here, here, or here.

5. The World of PostSecret by Frank Warren. Frank is one of my favorite people and he runs the largest ad-free blog in the known universe. Every Sunday he publishes anonymous confessions mailed to him from around the world on artistic postcards. I’ve even mailed one in myself. I keep PostSecret books on my shelf to provoke my thinking, stimulate my artist brain, and reconnect with our larger humanity whenever I feel anxious or too focused on something small. If you want a taste of Frank’s work, check out his blog or his TED Talk. (PS. It was a life highlight for me to share a stage with Frank at SXSW this year.)

6. The Confidence Code for Girls by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. In Chapter 32 of my podcast 3 Books my wife Leslie and I sat down with Cat and Nat who are these incredibly viral moms (of seven kids total) seeking to rid the world of mom guilt and mom shame. They are wild, intense, and beautiful. And this book was one of their three most formative. (Full list of growing Top 1000 most formative books is right here, btw.) I honestly couldn’t put it down. I wish the “for Girls” headline wasn’t there because it didn’t seem to just be for girls. Sure, there are a few chapters on feminism, but for the most part the book was for everyone. Especially high school students. The authors define confidence as the magical ingredient that turns thoughts into actions (simple!) and then show how to go about building it. Examples are things like trying out for a school team, recovering after getting rejected, having a courageous conversation with a friend. We need this book! Anxiety, depression, and loneliness are skyrocketing. Especially amongst young people. (You guys know I blame cell phones for a lot of this.) Yet this book is a balm. Super easy to read with a ton of comics and dialogue peppered throughout.

7. The Night Riders by Matt Furie. This children’s book has zero words in it … and is by far the best children’s book I’ve read to my kids all year. They insist on sleeping with the book they love it so much. What’s it about? Well, uh, okay, so these two friends, a frog and a mouse, wake up in the middle of the night, eat some bug cereal for breakfast, and then walk out of their mushroom house, click open their garage door opener, and then hop on their bikes to go on a wild, fantastical, totally absurd late-night adventure featuring scary-not-scary dragons, a secret underground computer lab, and some dolphin surfing… all before finding a cliff to watch a beautiful sunrise to close it out. Completely provokes the imagination and because there are no words you get to make up all the dialogue and plot details. I can’t recommend it enough! Here are some pics from inside the book if I intrigued you.

8. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. In the mid-80s, near the end of his life, famed professor and mythologist Joseph Campbell (The Hero With A Thousand Faces) sat down at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch to record a six-hour PBS special exploring his ideas on religion, spirituality, symbolism, our connection to the planet, our connection to our past, and our existence in the universe in one superlong conversation with journalist Bill Moyers. This book is a transcript of that conversation. And it reads like pretty much the best podcast episode of all time. Hugely mind-expanding and (I’ve heard, I believe) the most accessible entry point into his work. I absolutely loved this book.

Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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