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Hey everyone,
This is the four year anniversary of this newsletter!
For the past 48 months I’ve sent you book recommendations and I plan (hope!) to keep doing it for 48 (480!) more. I send all these emails from my personal account and read every note you send back. No tech giants between us algorithming us to death. The emails are one of my favorite things. Thank you so much for your love. You have my word they will remain free and advertising free forever. If you have friends who may enjoy them, they can sign up right here.
Now, are you in frozen wintery lockdown like me or somehow frolicking on beaches south of the equator as the weather warms? We are feeling this pandemic a million different ways right now. I have been pretty stressed about it lately. What’s been helping? Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud at family dinners. The life changing magic of five-hour walks. Starting my day with two-minute mornings. Posting one #pandemicawesome thing every single day. And, of course, losing myself into good books.
Before we get to the books, I'll quickly mention Roxane Gay, Roger Martin, and Cheryl Strayed will be closing out 2020 on my podcast 3 Books. As always, new chapters drop on the exact minute of every new moon and full moon. (I don’t trust the Gregorian calendar.) Please subscribe on Apple or Spotify. And, if you're in a festive mood, please leave me a review. I read them all. Yes, even the two-star ones.
And now let's hit the books...
Hang in there everyone,
Neil
1. Voicing Changeby Rich Roll & Guests. Put simply: This is the best self-help book I have read all year. I love Rich Roll and The Rich Roll Podcast and was lucky enough to have Rich on 3 Books where we recorded live from sunny Calabasas, California. This book hits another high bar in his string of endless high-quality art. Rich has somehow distilled the collective wisdom from nearly a decade interviewing the who’s who of global guides, mentors, and visionaries down into a very tight 300ish pages. Not sure you have time to listen to seven or eight years worth of the best self-improvement podcast around? But want to? Then get this. Most “pod to books” feel like somebody from a freelance farm copied and pasted a bunch of transcripts into Microsoft Word and sent it to the printers. This is the opposite. Rich’s thoughtful, articulate essays scratch and introduce a major theme on intentional living before you then flip and find the guest’s lengthy thoughts from the show worked down into a couple pages of first person wisdom. Surprising meringue peaks throughout including a whizbanger essay from Russell Brand, a guided meditation fromLight Watkins, and two poems from IN-Q that will take your breath away. The book's not perfect. Some guests are on pedestals a bit too lofty and I would have liked a lot more diversity but, having said that, what’s most evident here is a deeply yearning soul trying, within every ounce of his ability, to create a piece of art to help illuminate the path forward. He absolutely pulls it off. This is an absolutely wonderful book. A great gift for the seekers in your life.
2. The Lives of Girls and Womenby Alice Munro. There was a media circus in Canada fifteen years ago when native daughter Sarah Polley released the incredible film Away From Her. (94% RT!) At the time I read an interview with Sarah where she said the film was based on a short story in The New Yorker by Alice Munro. “What?” I remember thinking. “How can you make a full length movie from a short story? And who is this Alice Munro?” Well, I found the short story (here it is) and read it and was just like “Oh.” It reads like a giant epic somehow reduced down into twenty pages. I fell in love with Alice Munro after that and have several of her short story collections on my shelf. The Lives of Girls and Women was new to me and I learned it was published in 1973 and is Alice Munro’s only novel ever. So it's not as tight as her later writing but the spaciousness has a unique charm to it. The characters really live, slowly, pacefully, and the stories are told in a slow tableau. The book is a midcentury Bildungsroman (always wanted to use that word) sharing stories of the emotionally hyper-intelligent Del as she navigates life from small town Northern Ontario. Wonderful to read during this time of rising anxiety and faster paced everything. I recommend it highly.
3. Mario de Janeiro Testinoby Mario Testino. I figured out a new way to travel! Find the most lush, sensuous, and immersive photo book of a place you want to visit (or revisit) and leave it on your coffee table for a few weeks. I did that with this incredible photo book about Rio de Janeiro which pulls off a three-way cross between Rio’s jaw-dropping natural beauty, its iconic arts and culture, and its deep sexual energy. The forward by Gisel Bündchen is skippable (sorry Gisel) but if you’ve been to Rio and felt the electricity of the beaches and nightlife then this book will send you back. I miss going… anywhere. Giant, immersive photo books are the new plane tickets! (Do you have a giant, immersive photo book you recommend? Please hit reply and let me know.)
4. Lord of the Fliesby William Golding. I was forced to read this book by the state at age fifteen. Looking back, I was too young to absorb all the lessons on leadership, lack of leadership, and how precariously our thin little doily of civilization really is resting over the fires and chaos below. A gripping tale of a group of shipwrecked British boys and their slow descent into anarchy. PS. Did you know William Golding wrote seventeen books and this was his first? His first!? Yes, really. And it won the Pulitzer Prize. Talk about a tough act to follow. PPS. What would you add to this Twitter string of books you read…WAY too young? I saw some people said Lord of the Flies. Mine was The Dark Half by Stephen King in sixth or seventh grade. I can still feel now how scared I was then. Big mistake.
5.False Laborby Lena Dunham. Are you obsessed with the Harpers Index like I am? It’s an incredible curated brain scramble of facts and trivia arranged to make you go “Seriously!?” over and over again. I generally flip straight there but this month the cover blared Lena Dunham’s name so on the three second walk from the mailbox to the messy pile of papers on the front table, I flipped to the article and read the first sentence. Then the second. Then the third. And I did that thing where you stand completely frozen, barely breathing, for about twenty minutes just gobbling up an incredible piece of writing. False Labor is a brave, hilarious, and vulnerable essay describing Lena's battle with infertility. All salted so perfectly with her uniquely off-kilter wit. Click here to read the full piece.
6. Love You Foreverby Robert Munsch. Children's books are so regional. Books or series that sell millions in one country are often unheard of in others. Why? Do we raise kids differently, hold different values close to the chest, or something simply lost in the translation? I would love to find a list of the single bestselling children's book in every country around the world. Love You Forever definitely tops the list in Canada with over 30 million sold. A few years ago on Canada's 150th birthday, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) even tracked down the 150 bestselling books of the past ten years. The Book of Awesomecame in at #6 andThe Book Of (Even More) Awesomecame in at #95 (woot!) but both of those actually came out the previous decade. Love You Forever clocked in firmly at #1 overall despite coming out in ... 1986. A mom rocks her son to bed every night with a lullaby, "I'll love you forever / I'll like you for always / As long as I'm living / My baby you'll be." She does when he's a baby, a toddler, a teenager, and even rigs up a ladder to crawl into his bedroom across town when he's a grown man. And in the end when she's old and frail and dying? He drives across down, picks her up, and sings the song back to her. A tearjerker that never gets old. (PS. I know a lot of you live across Europe, Asia, South America, and whatever the continent with the non-island Australia in it is called. If you know the top selling children's book in your country, please reply and let me know! I'd love to order a few.)
7.Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedomby bell hooks. Gloria Jean Watkins was born in a family of six kids in segregated Kentucky in 1952. Her father was a custodian. Her mother was a homemaker. Schools began segregated but became integrated when she was in elementary school. As she writes, under the pen name bell hooks: “School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings, that had characterized teachers and theirpedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority.” This 'before and after' view of what education was and what it could be informs this slim but powerful pedagogical guide to education as a practice of freedom. A must read for any teacher or leader seeking to help classrooms or teams transgress against racial, sexual, and class boundaries. (Spoiler Alert: This is one of Brené Brown’s three most formative books. Leslie and I just sat down with Brené and our chat will kick off 3 Books in 2021. Do you like how I’m trying to just drop that in there as a casual aside and pretend I wasn’t totally freaking out about interviewing her for like a year before it happened?)
8.The Gifts of Imperfectionby Brené Brown. Speak of the devil! In my mind Brené Brown is perfect and therefore her book about imperfection is also perfect. Seriously though, this is one of Brené’s earliest books and it’s a power-packed 124 (!) pages introducing her ‘wholehearted living’ concept and 10 guideposts to getting there. Like for instance ‘Guidepost #4 Cultivating Gratitude and Joy: Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark’ or ‘Guidepost #7 Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol as Self-Worth’. The book was published in 2010 by Hazelden Publishing, a small publisher specializing in books about addiction recovery. Leslie had it on her bookshelf for years but I hadn’t read it until now. While her voice perhaps isn't quite as strong as her later books I found it to be a wonderful introduction to her work. I think I'll begin recommending it before her others. (She seems to agree.) It just came out in a new edition, too. Also, right over here you can find a free poster of her 10 Guideposts and her incredible Wholehearted Parenting Manifesto which Leslie printed out for our house long ago. We love it. I can’t quite say we live by it because parenting is always a work in progress, but it’s a bit of a north star for us.
9.The Trumpet of the Swanby E.B. White. As far as I can tell, over the course of celebrated author E.B. White’s life from 1899 to 1985, he wrote precisely three children’s books. Two are good. One is bad. This is the bad one. Stuart Little and especially Charlotte’s Web had charm, verve, and a certain je ne sais quoi. Didn’t they? I mean, who doesn’t love Charlotte’s Web? Unequivocally un-unloveable! But this book, written when White was in his 70s, decades after the other two, was just an incredibly syrupy slog. My oldest son and I somehow kept flipping pages despite the meandering story, occasional preachiness, and gaping plot holes. The long lost unrequited love of the protagonist swan literally falls out of the sky at one point. I say skip it and go back to Charlotte’s Web which is, if I haven't mentioned it already, un-unloveable.
