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Hey everyone,
Life is not easy right now. I hope you're finding time to get into nature, talk to people you love, and savor simple pleasures. Keep takings days or weeks off the drugs of social media, news media, and the endless brain buffet of attention-grabbing apps, games, and headlines vying for our attention in order to pump us full of ads.
Keep zooming out and focusing on the things that matter,
Neil
1.Good Talk by Mira Jacob. I have seen my books filed in Reference, Humor, Well-Being, Motivation, Self-Help, Miscellaneous, and Books With Blue Covers sections of bookstores. Different bookstores, different sections. I never realized growing up that bookstore sections are completely made up by the bookstore. There are no sections! There is no system! Everyone is just pretending that the giant mental expanses filling books can somehow be filed into neatly cropped sections that purportedly help you, the potential book reader person, find the exact book you want. But nobody knows what they want! I don’t know what I want! We don’t know what we want! And reading too narrow leads to cognitive entrenchment anyway. I am declaring the whole thing a sham! As proof, I often find phenomenal books that just don't really fit ... anywhere. That’s what happened when I found this book by Mira Jacob in with the Cartoons. This is an emotional roller-coastering true memoir that begins when Mira’s half-Indian-half-Jewish six-year-old son begins asking questions about race in America and then traverses back in time to explore deep, almost-never-spoken-about racism, prejudice, and cultural issues seen through the double lens of marriage and raising children, all presented in a hypnotic artistic collage seemingly made by Lance Letscher using some bastardized software combining Industrial Light & Magic and Powerpoint 1.0. This book caught me by surprise, twanged many emotions, and kept me reading deeply into the night. An incredible work of art that cannot be neatly filed but must be neatly read. I absolutely loved it and can't recommend it enough. (PS. If you want keep talking about finding books with elusive genres, check out my conversation with the wild Kevin the Bookseller .)
2.Just Kids by Patti Smith. A poetic portrait of starving artists coming of age in the 60s and 70s. Before Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe reached global fame they lived in poverty and occasional homelessness in the shadows of New York City. This is a book about following and following and following your dreams. Following them after your family tells you not to, following wherever they go, following them when you have nothing else, following them because you simply can’t not. A breathtaking memoir with an incredible musical pulse. I found a few moments of too much detail but the book as a whole was wonderful. (Sidenote: This is one of Brandon Stanton of Humans Of New York’s 3 most formative books. My conversation with Brandon drops on the full moon and his new book comes out next week.)
3.Mrs. Frisby and the Rates of NIMHby Robert C O’Brien. Mrs Frisby is a mouse with problems. She’s a recent widow after her husband was eaten by the cat. Her son Timothy is bedridden with a nasty chest cold. And the farmer is going to plough the field she lives on in two days which will destroy her home. Cue an epic 48-hour adventure involving flying crows, wise owls, dangerous cats, and genius rats. Completely absorbing and beautifully written. And how wonderfully rare is it for a single mother of four to be the star of the show? The back says it’s for ages 8-11 but I think we can easily stretch that up many more decades. I read this book at the suggestion of poet and activist Nikki Giovanni and while reading it I had no idea this book was turned into the movie The Secret of NIMH which I have very foggy memories of watching as a kid.
4.Trick Mirror: Notes on Self-Delusionby Jia Tolentino. This book has been following me around for the past year. Waving from bookstore windows, preening on top of big displays, I finally caved in and bought it after my friend Francesco said he loved it. Jia is a Staff Writer at The New Yorker and has an incredible knack for writing 30-page essays with more layers than baklava. She writes about the pressure to ‘always be optimizing’, about how the internet is deeply messing us all up, and about the fake history of the wedding industry. She comes across like some mix of the Oracle from The Matrix and the enlightened literate stoner ranting on a deck chair beside the pool at 3:00am after everyone else has left the party. Absorbing, entertaining, and highly recommended.
5.Devotions by Mary Oliver. Weird thing happened last month. While researching for my interview with David Mitchell I stumbled upon this great little interview he did in The Globe and Mail where he says “Next time you’re in a bookshop, see if they have any Mary Oliver. ‘Not liking poetry is like not liking ice cream.’ Mary Oliver is superlative ice cream.” I made a mental note to check out Mary Oliver later. And then I get home that same night and what should be lying on our bed? This giant book by Mary Oliver. Turns out my wife Leslie received the same recommendation a few days earlier from her friend Vicki Rivard (author of Brave New Mama). I have never been a poetry regular – finding a lot of what I stumble across too esoteric or abstract – but this book was the opposite. Nearly every poem feels like somebody is pouring clear and cold water on your heart. Simple, striking, literal language wrapped around much larger invisible emotions every time. The book is a compendium of all her best poems and offers deep reverence for nature, beauty, and life itself. A book to ground you when the media and internet swirl has you spinning way too high.
6.MeditationsbyMarcus Aurelius. Translated by Gregory Hays. Who’s translating your books? I bought the Penguin Classics edition of Meditations years ago and thought it was … fine. I know, I know, it’s the collected set of wisdom written by the most powerful person in the world a couple thousand years ago. But, yeah, fine. IT was fine! Well apparently I got the wrong one! Ryan Holiday, a bit of a Marcus Aurelius nut, told me the Gregory Hayes translation is the best. So I finally got it. And read it again. And now I see why. This set of lessons and directives to himself (never intended as a book or for publication) starts as a series of simple advice he’s trying to remember and soon evolves into an incredibly self-aware series of introspections that resonate as if no time has passed. Perfect to pair with On the Shortness of Life by Seneca which I mentioned a while back. Add it to your Enlightened Toilet Reading collection. Just make sure you get the Gregory Hays translation with the cover pictured above!
7.Your Cabin In the Woods by Conrad E. Meinecke. Do you feel like running away from it all? Here’s a perfect book to help. Back in the 1950s Conrad published two short, beautifully written books on how to build your own cabin. The pages are big, the writing is evocative, and you can let your mind fall into your invisible home away from home. Perfect coffee table / daydreaming book. This link shows you what the inside of the book looks like.
8.Hundred: What You Learn In A Lifetimeby Heike Faller & Valerio Vidali. A whimsical page-by-page look at what you learn in a hundred years. I’m sure I bought this as another pandemic escape as it offers a nice zoom out on the good times and bad times. Age 1 1/2 has a painting of a baby in a high chair while her mother crawls under the kitchen table. “Your mother sometimes vanishes. But she always comes back again. This is called trust.” Age 8 has a painting of a girl tightroping on a tall wall. “You get braver with every step you take.” Age 64 an older woman sits on a park bench waving at kids walking by. “Something draws you back to where you came from.” Age 98 has two wrinkled hands holding a caterpillar. “Sometimes you feel like the child you once were.” Scroll to the bottom here for some of the wonderful images inside.
9. How To Shoplift Booksby David Horvitz. A tiny, silly, weird art book listing about a hundred ways to steal books. One on every page. "Hide the book inside a fake rock", "Walk in the store holding a big mirror. The employees will be distracted looking at their own reflection. Hold the book behind the mirror."
