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Hey everyone,
Hope you're hanging in during the dog days.
I am deep into writing my new book now. I won't say much other than it's the most difficult book I have ever written and much, much different than my past books. Excited to share more next year.
And now, let's pull down the shades and escape our world for a little bit...
Here are my July 2020 book recommendations,
Neil
1.Utopia Avenueby David Mitchell. “Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.” Have you heard this Gustave Flaubert quote or one of its variations? I thought about it a lot before interviewing David Mitchell this month for 3 Books. I was beyond nervous. I have read all his novels since picking up his best known book Cloud Atlasback in 2012 (after learning of it through the criminally underrated Wachowski siblings film -- just read the comments on that trailer!). Five of David's past six books have been nominated for The Booker Prize, TIME declared him one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People, and Esquire called him "a genre leaping, mind bending, world-traveling, puzzle-making, literary magician." Well, both David himself and his brand new book Utopia Avenue do not disappoint. The book is a deeply woven tale of a psychedelic folk band emerging from the British music scene in the 1960s layered with vivid characters, twisting backstories, and an accelerating plot that crescendos onto a different plane by the end. And, amazing, fits with a snap into the evolving Mitchell Multiverse. I highly recommend it. And for my 3 Books conversation with the literary magician himself, click here. PS. To David Mitchell fans, I think this the longest interview with David available anywhere as well as his first podcast in five years. Nerd giggle.
2. The Twits by Roald Dahl. Have you ever had a palate cleanser? You know, some snooty waiter in tails with a pencil moustache brings you a frozen spoon of lemon sorbet to rinse out your mouth after the gooey pasta and before the oozing dessert? It's a real thing! And also: What a great idea! I feel like we need the same for books. After you finish some twisting, emotionally entangled epic you a have a Palate Cleanser Book. You can’t read another big book yet! No way. Too rich, too dense, too much. What you need is something like the 75-page The Twits by Roald Dahl. A dark, tightly coiled comic masterpiece with an average of 1 page of pictures for every 1 page of text. I have read this book probably three or four times and still can't figure out how Roald Dahl pulls off so much in so little. If you know Kevin The Bookseller, this was one of his 3 books.
3. Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot. Okay, palate cleansed? Then you’re ready for your mind to be stretched out again like taffy. Heart Berries is a memoir from self-identified Canadian-American Indian Terese Marie Mailhot which doubles as a letter written from a mental institution to her on-again-off-again boyfriend and father of the child she’s currently carrying. The writing will pull and swish you around like a river. Trigger warnings: emotional and physical abuse as well as the trauma of losing a child. (No spoilers, that's all in the first few pages.) It all adds up to an enlightening portrait of the indigenous experience. Pairs well with There, There by Tommy Orange, who Therese also lists in the Acknowledgements.
4. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligenceby Esther Perel. A couple years ago I was sitting in one of those football-field sized conference rooms at a hotel in downtown LA with Esther Perel speaking from a circle stage in the center like a rock star. I couldn’t believe it but Esther built enough trust with the audience that people were getting up to the mic and, in front of a thousand strangers, asking deeply personal questions about their sex lives. I mean, I guess it was LA, but still. I was also surprised at the answers from the stage: equal parts compassionate, sassy, and full of a-has. There was a mass scribbling of quotes. It took me a few years but I finally followed up that speech by poking into her first book. A well-researched exploration of what she refers to as the paradox of lust and domesticity.
5. What Makes A Baby by Cory Silverberg. A friend of mine had a surrogate. She had health issues. They used her egg and her partner’s sperm. They now have two beautiful children. Another friend has a child. Her wife carried the baby. They didn’t know the entire pregnancy whether the baby was from her egg or her partner’s egg. Another friend and her husband have two children. The first is from an egg donor and sperm donor. The second is from an egg donor and the husband’s sperm. What’s my point? My point is we all have stories like this. More today than yesterday, too. Yet how are we teaching kids about how babies are made? Most have moved past the way I learned it in the 80s. “When a man and a woman love each other very much…” But I doubt most of us are as articulate and enlightened as the snappy Cory Silverberg. Cory was raised by a children’s librarian and a sex therapist (great combo) and so, today, he is a children's librarian sex therapist. No, just kidding, he identifies as a queer sex educator. This picture book tells the story of how babies are made at the microscopic level, with smiling purple sperms and eggs, and using the wonderful metaphor of them working together to collect and share stories. Here's a video that shows you inside.
6. The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers. A few months ago there was a literary uproar around the launch of the brand new Oprah book club pick American Dirt. Did you hear about it? Part of the chatter was around culture appropriation and it was kicked off by an essay by Myriam Gurba titled "Pendeja, You Ain't Steinbeck: My Bronca With Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature." I remember reading it during the firestorm. A month or two later I sent this tweet asking you guys for activists to interview on 3 Books and a number of you recommended Myriam Gurba (@lesbrains). I reached out, we started chatting, and now I'm reading her formative books. This is one of them. And it completely blew me away. Written in 1951, it’s a very sparse, slow boiling novella about a small country town in the south presided over by a hardworking, tough-as-nails woman who had a mysterious 10-day marriage years ago. When her long lost hunchbacked cousin shows up a set of dominos begins tipping over in slow motion. Absolute perfect suspense.
?.Window-Swap.com. Here it is! The surprise question mark entry! Comes about as often as Lightning in Super Mario Kart. My friend Michael Bungay-Stanier shared with me this little website that lets you peek outside somebody else's window on the other side of the world. Perfect for some brief escape. (PS. Give it a minute to load. It's worth it.)
7. Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace. Whenever somebody asks me “What is one of the books you gift most often?” I often mention this one. It’s a posthumously published collection of non-fiction essays that David Foster Wallace wrote for places like The New York Times Magazine and Harper’s. It opens with this spectacular essay on Roger Federer which may give you the vertiginous effect of forever changing how you look tennis. And, it features my favorite essay on creativity called “The Nature of the Fun.” This essay has spawned much of how I think about what to work on and why every book I've written for the past sevenish years -- businessy memoir, self-helpy letter to my unborn son, interactive picture book on meditation, etc -- hasn't been super connected to the last one. I won’t ruin all the twists or turns but if you have experienced any form of commercial success with craft in your life and are thinking about what to do next, then this is mandatory reading. The essay isn’t available online but here’s a Brainpickings.org post with a meaty chunk of it. (PS. How often have you heard the phrase 'posthumously published'? This is a little Wikipedia rabbit hole of posthumously published books.)
8. Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer. Would you like to be screamed at about your terrible grammar for a few hours? If so, have I got the book for you! Benjamin Dreyer is the slightly sneering Copy Chief at Random House and he will chop you to bits ... but you'll laugh the whole time. You can look forward to discovering all the spelling, grammar, and writing mistakes you've been blindly making for years.
9. There’s Treasure Everywhere by Bill Watterson. One gigantic benefit of getting to do what I do is that I often have the feeling of having smart, interesting friends all over the world. Like Bo Boswell from Nashville, Tennesse. He listens to 3 Books, leaves voicemails at 1-833-READ-A-LOT, sends thoughtful feedback on my books, and, most recently, emailed me after listening to “Cultivating calm during coronavirus chaos” to share that he's been finding calm during these times in Calvin & Hobbes. Well, I tried his prescription and now I heartily recommend it. Yes, I feel like there is something about Calvin & Hobbes right now. It was always an enlightenedly cynical / eruditely accessible comic strip, but something about now makes it work on a deeper level. Perhaps it's because the strip touches themes on the importance of free-thinking over herd mentality, the downsides of bathing our brains in endless marketing, the dangers of selling our souls for instant pleasures, and, especially, what really matters in our tiny, short lives. To that last point, this book is called “There’s Treasure Everywhere!” with Calvin holding a worm after digging a hole. Sound like a good quarantine activity? It was followed up by the last collection (tear emoji) called “It’s a Magical World!” with the cover showing Calvin and Hobbes going tobogganing. Beautiful and soul satisfying.
10. The Anxious Child and the Crisis of Modern Parentingby Kate Julian. I have long gone on the record as saying “Cancel newspapers! Cancel magazines! Read books!" But I've just changed my tune. It's been a few years since my Mass Mailbox Cancellation and I'm starting to miss magazines. So I just subscribed to The Atlantic and Harper's (which is worth it for the Harper’s Index alone.) It feels good supporting long form journalism and this cover story was a gripping, freshly researched, parenting-nugget-filled look at how to raise children without the debilitating anxiety so common right now.
