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Hey everyone,
I’m writing this from an airplane for the first time in a year and a half.
When I launched this monthly book club back in October 2016 I was doing most of my reading and writing on planes. Giving like fifty or sixty speeches a year meant lots of time in the skies.
As the pandemic fogs start lifting I know I’ll never go back to that level of airplane time again. Why? Well, the adages are true: Time is irreplaceable. Kids never grow younger. We are what we do. And our days really are our lives.
And yet here I am. Back on a plane. And, to just suddenly pop out the other side of the hedge here, there do seem to be aspects of traveling that are just so precious … and maybe even irreplaceable? Like a deep five hours of being lost in a good book before landing somewhere with palm trees. The way I could completely tear apart a chapter of a book and put it all back together again under a lonely dim light with a hundred people sleeping around me. And the endless natural zoomout that comes from looking out little windows and reflecting on the endless beauty of the world around us.
Thank you deeply for another chat across time and space. Wherever you are, wherever you may be, I’m excited as always to hang out at the end of the month and chat about books. This is a real joy and I always love your responses with comments or suggestions anytime.
Lots of love to you and yours,
Neil
1. Frankensteinby Mary Shelley. Somewhere near the beginning of the pandemic David Mitchell reminded us: “If a book is in print a hundred years later there is a very good reason.” How many books over a hundred years old do you read? Vast swaths of our cultural history all annexed into stories with the same fears and dreams and struggles and hopes we’re all still wrestling through today. The sheer number of ways this two-hundred-year-old book touched me is impossible to count. The story is well known: The well-educated Victor Frankenstein spends years away at college passionately building what becomes a monster who escapes and haunts him to his final days. Simple, right? But this book is broken into three and... that’s just book one and three, really. Book two hits something like The Empire Strikes Back with the entire book a 1700s gilded British gentry type monologue from ‘the daemon’ (who isn't named the entire book) to Victor himself when they meet in one of the most incredibly vivid scenes I’ve ever read – on any icy summit high up in the Alps. That flips all the overtrodden narratives about Frankenstein on its head and buries the final book under an infinitely complicated tapestry of emotionally wrenching scenes, moral questions, and scarring moments that hit deep. This book is what fiction is all about. I can’t recommend it enough. After reading the book I read up on Mary Shelley a bit. Wow, she suffered immense loss in her life. Her mother (also a writer!) died giving birth to her in 1797. In 1815, she gave birth to her first daughter who died two weeks later. That daughter was never named. In fact, it was a dream she had where the baby was simply warmed by the fire and came to life before being snatched away by a hideous demon which -- yes, seriously -- inspired this book. To say there is real pain baked into the pages would be an understatement. Mary's pain kept going and she gave birth to four more children ... all of whom died before the age of three. Many relatives also perished from suicide. And a brain tumor took Mary's own life in her early 50s. Heartbreaking. Heartmelting. Heartwrenching. And beautiful. (One fyi: I just accidentally ended up with the 1818 first edition. That's where the link above goes to on Project Gutenberg. Here's the more popular and well-known 1831 third edition. And here's a list of the differences.) Add this to your bucket list! A must-read feast for the senses.
2.Hell Yeah Or Noby Derek Sivers. Nobody beats to their own drum more than Derek Sivers. Tim Ferriss calls him a ‘philosopher-operator and poet-recluse of the highest order.’ He lives all over the world with his nine-year-old son. He journals hundreds of pages and distills them down into 100-word bits of poignancy … and absolutely brilliant 3-minute TED Talks. (I used “the first follower” in my Walmart leadership development classes!) What’s his secret? Well, he says in that glib-but-honest Derek-Sivers-way, “It helps making a million dollars first.” He started CD Baby in that little blink after people started buying stuff online but before Napster and mp3 takeovers. (Anyone else have a favorite Winamp skin?) Since then? He’s sold the company and essentially dedicates his time to being a full-time … learner and giver. That’s it! And we are all greater for it. He reads so much, posts honest reviews, shares wonderfully accessible essays, writes and sells his own books at cost (from only his own website, to only his readers.) He’s very Dave Eggers when he says he doesn’t really even believe in .. apps! Or games! Or social media! He’s simultaneously extremely off-grid but yet his Web 1.0 online offering has that Berkshire-Hathaway-Annual-Report-feel of being just absolutely teeming with wisdom, written on a piece of paper by an eight year old. This book’s title is one of Derek’s most famous principles: Hell Yeah or No! For every offer you get in life make sure it’s a “Hell Yeah!” or else? Automatic no. (I wrote about it, too.) A wonderful compact collection of wisdom. I am very happy to share Derek gave 3 Books a “Hell Yeah!” and will be our next guest on the upcoming new moon. For release date? Look up to the sky. Ow-ow-owooooooooo!
3. Miss Nelson Is Missingby James Marshall. Okay, those were two pretty long reviews to kick this thing off so let me just say that this was one of my absolute favorite books as a kid and I want to say thank you to downtown Toronto indie bookstore Queen Books for putting it in their front window and giving me a huge nostalgia jolt. I ran inside, bought a few copies, and it filled me with delight. Click here to order from Queen Books yourself or click here to have Mrs. Wrightsman, a first grade teacher, read you the book right now on Youtube. Lie on your stomach on a dirty green carpet for full effects.
4. Foreverby Judy Blume. I am getting addicted to outdoor podcasts. I love that aural tapestry that comes from skateboarders rolling past, birdcalls in the background (anyone remember this post I wrote on 1KAT???), and strangers walking right up to ask questions. Last month I chatted with Zafar the Hamburger Man on a street bench outside his burger joint and pulled up metal chairs in Bryant Park in Manhattan with Mel Robbins on her pub day. One of Mel’s three most formative books is Forever by Judy Blume. When she was in middle-school the girls kept a contraband copy on top of the circle sink in the bathroom and told each other which passages to read with the steamiest sex scenes. It became the book that introduced her to sex. Our kids should be so lucky! Sure, the book has vivid sex scenes. Sure, some of them are ... strange. (They name his penis ‘Ralph’ and Mel said she thought all guys called their penis Ralph for a long time). But we need to teach sex – the feelings and emotions of sex -- through reading. Do we not? Or am I just a father of boys who is very afraid of the Internet? Do you have a sex-scene-filled book that you might actually pass along to your kids? Reply and let me know. I’d love to share a few over the years. As Judy Blume told us way back in Chapter 6, "Bring back sex scenes in books!"
5. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdomby Jonathan Haidt. The subtitle is a lot more accurate than the title here. It’s not really about happiness! And, actually, there’s not that much “finding”, either. More exploring. Exploring modern truths through ancient wisdom. Who would buy that, though? This is one of Jonathan Haidt’s earliest books -- published fifteen years ago -- but it holds up incredibly well. A great place to start hanging out with him. Fifteen years ago, Jonathan was a guy with a slew of degrees teaching an intro psych course at the University of Virginia. And he was a big reading nerd who had spent years seeking wisdom through deep readings of the Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Old and New Testaments, the Koran, Carnegie, Tolstoy, Proust, and thousands of others. To me this book feels like one of the world’s big thinkers issuing himself a throwdown: Could he ferment and codify some of his own thinking based on all the classics he’d read while making sure it all braided together into the modern research he was doing? “What should I do, how should I live, and whom should I become?” That’s actually the book’s first line. And what follows are not “easy answers”– no clever 2x2s or pithy one-liners – but rather a very deep introspective dinner conversation about life’s biggest truths and how we might explore them today. Adversity! Divinity! Love! Virtue! You will leave with more questions than answers but it’s such a privilege and joy to consider them. If the world serves you too much stock, simple, and shallow, this is a wonderfully philosophical door that opens straight into the deep.
6. The Look of the Bookby Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth. Zoom in on the picture of this book at the top of this email. There are little snippets from 14 different book covers. How many do you recognize? I think I got maybe seven or eight. This book doesn’t even pretend to denounce the phrase “You can’t judge a book by its cover” – it just glorifies that the opposite is true, takes us on a vivid and wonderful history of book covers, and lets us mentally explore the specific power that book jackets provide. Especially in this new day and age of icons-and-one-inch-avatars-for-everything. (Do not get me started on Memojis.) Veers a bit too fiction-only for my tastes and the organization is scattered like a messy desk. But if you like messy desks and want to stroke your inner book nerd, you will find great joy in this book.
7. Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition: A Theory of Judgmentby Howard Margolis.Thinking about thinking really has become a huge trend. The original popularity of “life hacking” or “lifestyle design” blogs. The rise in psychedelics and consciousness exploration. The somewhat originally-meta-but-now-commonplace-podcast-trope of asking people how they’re thinking about everything they’re thinking about. WE SURE ARE DOING A LOT OF THINKING THESE DAYS. But, uh, how do we actually think? Like ... what even is thinking? How do our brains, you know, work? I recommend this dense, academic University of Chicago publication which offers an extremely articulate and well-argued answer: patterns. That’s it! Now you know. We think in patterns. We don’t think like computers. Even though that’s what most people believe. Inputs, outputs, dusty hard drives, all out of RAM when we’re looking for the remote. No! The first chapter shows a number of mental models that seem simple on the surface but stump our pattern-based brains. From there the book gets perhaps a bit too heavy – okay, definitely too heavy – but it hammers home this wonderful point that helps you see things like ‘the stories you tell yourself’ or ‘the tribes you’re part of’ or ‘the cultures you believe in’ or ‘the habits that mould your identity’ as much, much more malleable than they appear on the surface.
8. Skunk and Badgerby Amy Timberlake and Jon Klassen. My friend Michael Bungay-Stanier, author of the million-copy (!) bestseller The Coaching Habit, gave me this book for my birthday. I am glad he did. I thought it was a kids book! It looks like a kids book! It’s marketed as a kids book! But it is not a kids book. Badger lives alone in his distant aunt’s row house when the doorbell rings and Skunk informs him she’s given him permission to live there, too. What follows is a complex portrait of friendship which pulls off The Little Prince-like acrobatics of smacking you in the head with sentences that seem simple on the surface but reveal much deeper truths. Jon Klassen is the atmospheric award-winning artist behind popular picture books like This is Not My Hat and his work – featured in full color shiny illustration-only pages!!! – really brings the story to life. Last thing: when I say this book isn’t for kids I don’t mean kids can’t read it. There’s nothing objectionable. I just thought it was written at a pretty advanced level and the themes went really deep. Or maybe I’m just dumb! One of the two.
