Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - November 2019

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Hey everyone,

This month has flowwwwwwwn.

You Are Awesome dropped November 5th and became a #1 international bestseller in its first week and has so far made six bestseller lists in the US and Canada alone. (Thank you!)

A dozen TV and radio interviews, half a dozen podcasts, four bookstore events, and three keynote speeches … between today and Saturday alone. Fun! Beautiful! Amazing! I am not complaining. I know how lucky I am. But it's simultaneously energizing and draining. And I couldn’t be doing any of this without Leslie, my family, and all of your endless support.

I got a couple emails from people saying I am sending too many notes about my new book. So I thought I’d share: The reason I am able to make the decision to avoid putting ads on anything I make – my 3 Books podcast, 1000 Awesome Things, GlobalHappiness.org, Neil.blog, all my email newsletters, this monthly book club, all my social media, etc -- is 100% because of the support you have given me on my books. Every few years I will ask you to buy one! (Buy one!) I hope you feel it’s a fair trade. I appreciate your support a ton. And I will never put ads on my stuff.

Sincerely yours, a burnt out, tired, grateful, and book launch crazy,

Neil

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1. Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Day of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari. Do you think drugs should be illegal? Which ones? Why? What happens when they’re not? What happened when they weren’t? Who made them illegal? Why did they do that? And what happened when they did? It turns out that precisely zero of the answers to these questions are obvious. This is a massively illuminating and mind expanding exploration of our relationship with drugs. Everyone should read it. It is at once a detailed history of the drug war, a buddy-beside-you-on-a-bus account of one man’s obsessive across-the-world multi-year exploration into the abyss of the war on drugs, and a series of hopeful stories full of compassion and love that will honestly surprise you so much you might cry. I did. I absolutely cannot recommend it enough. This could be the best book I have read in 2019. It will definitely be on my Best Of 2019 list which comes out in a couple weeks.

2. The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish. Do you read the Farnam Street blog? You should! Shane Parrish and his team are putting out some of the highest quality content on the internet and it’s all clean, thoughtful prose about how we think. They summarize big books, share mental models, and help people master the best of what other people have already figured out. It’s no wonder The New York Times profiled Shane under the headline “How A Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter.” Shane and his team pick at big issues and this book is a neatly packaged exploration of mental models that can be used to strengthen your thinking again and again. As a sidenote: I also recommended BrainFood in my list of 9 of the world’s best email newsletters.

3. The Vagina Bible by Dr. Jen Gunter. Yes, I have the Vagina Bible on my bookshelf. When gynecologist Dr. Jen Gunter gave birth to preemies a number of years ago she was stunned how difficult it was to sift through the misinformation about learning how to take care of them. So she wrote a book! For herself and others. Called The Preemie Primer. Since then she’s become a medical crusader. People call her Twitter’s OB / GYN because she posts epic takedowns of bizarro natural products with big claims (i.e., jade eggs, anyone?) using deep research and fact-checking. As Jen says: “Medicine has been rooted in mansplaining since the beginning.” Why? Most (all) doctors were men and they couldn’t / wouldn’t do autopsies on female cadavers. So the research has been rapidly playing catchup. Enter Jen and her new book The Vagina Bible which, as the title says, serves as a definitive resource for all things vulva and vagina. Now, can someone please write The Penis Bible? (PS. Jen was my guest on Chapter 41 of 3 Books (listen to her!) and here she is on Twitter Jensplaining, as she puts it.)

4. Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame by Erin Williams. Have you ever spent an afternoon walking around The Strand in NYC? They claim there are 18 miles of books in there so you really can get lost. While wandering around a couple weeks ago I met an incredible bookseller named Sofia who showed me the new “Women in Comics” display she’d put together featuring graphic novels by women. (Sidenote: I love when bookstores have super unique or strange sub-categories. Shoutout to “Plotless Fiction” at Type Books in Toronto!) I picked up this graphic novel from there and it … kind of shocked me. I recommend it but it is a painful read. It is billed as “An intimate, clever, and ultimately gut-wrenching graphic memoir about the daily decision women must make between being sexualized or being invisible.”

5. The best ever indie bookstore bookmark. Not a book! A bookmark. See, I love indie bookstores. Did I mention I love indie bookstores? (#indielove!) I did Chapter 4 and Chapter 21 of 3 Books in indie bookstores. And, I am also a sucker for indie bookstore bookmarks. I love them. They are always unique. Super thin and hard! Super wide and flappy! Covered in nerdy Shakespeare or Tolkien quotes! I leave them in the books I buy from the bookstore forever as a souvenir of the store and my experience there. (This strategy pairs well with my Life Rule to never leave an indie bookstore without buying something. Will you join me in observing it?) Over the past few weeks I’ve got bookmarks from The Strand in NYC, Anderson’s Bookshop in Chicago, Black Bond Books in Vancouver, and Mable’s Fables in Toronto, amongst many others. But one stands out! Check out this epic bookmark from Book City! Read the whole thing. (Link just goes to a pic of the bookmark I tweeted.)

6. Don’t Keep Your Day Job by Cathy Heller. One of the most fun parts about my book launch has been doing podcasts. I feel like I’m always walking into a glorious invisible mental room within some fascinating mind. Some go beautifully all over the place like Sickboy. Some focus deeply on a core issue like parenting like my chat with Jason at mindbodygreen or Anna at Authentic Parenting. Some go deep into the book’s research and takeaways like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Some are great catchups with friends like The Learning Leader Show or The Ziglar Show. Some are super specific premises like answering complex reader questions at Dear HBR. Some are playing with giant minds like The Knowledge Project, Terrible Thanks For Asking, and Chase Jarvis Live (excited to share these when they air). And then some turn into a deep soul connection out of nowhere. Like my chat with Cathy on her great podcast Don’t Keep Your Day Job. I love Cathy! I love the energy she’s putting out into the world. Her community has completely buried me in notes for the past three weeks. But that’s okay! That's all right. Because they are my kind of people. Explorers. Seekers. Artists. This book is full of wisdom from Cathy herself and people she’s chatted with like Gretchen Rubin and Jen Sincero.

7. Molly’s Game by Molly Bloom. Molly grew up in rural Colorado in an extremely super achieving family. Like Harvard surgeon and Olympian athlete type super achieving. After being a top ranked national skier she left to go to LA for brighter pastures and ended up – as one does – running one of the world’s highest stakes poker games with millions getting swapped at the table every night. And then? She was busted by the feds. Don’t worry. Not a spoiler. That’s the opening scene. This is a gripping page-turning memoir which, of course, was turned into the Oscar-nominated film by Aaron Sorkin. If you’re curious what is below this story and what happened after Molly’s Game ends … then listen in to my recent conversation with Molly on 3 Books. (Okay, is it a spoiler if I tell you one of her books is a series written in the second-person...?)

8. The Awesome Music Project Canada: Songs of Hope and Happiness by Terry Stuart and Robert Carli. I have a thing for super gigantic passion projects that are insanely hard to pull off but of course are going to be pulled off because the Jupiter-sized heart of the person leading the thing. Things like the insanely delicious sushi restaurant with the freshest fish in the city who only take one reservation every half hour to serve them well. Things like the bartender who wants you to mix your drink through a detailed examination of your mood. Things like Frank Warren spending over a decade collecting, curating, and publishing a thoughtful examination of the human condition through anonymous postcards every single Sunday. And things like The Awesome Music Project. Terry and Robert spent years assembling personal, heartfelt stories of how music touched people’s lives (including one from me) and sewed them into this beautiful hardcover book with all proceeds going to support music and mental health charities. A gift.

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