Book Club

Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - October 2024

Hey everyone,

“Books are in a very good place!”

That was the first thing James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and ​Daunt Books​ said to me when ​we recently sat down​ (​Apple​/​Spotify​). He should know! James has been bookselling for 35 years and today is the largest bookseller in the world overseeing nearly 1000 bookstores. “Bookstores are inherently democratic,” he says and he told me authors like ​Sarah J. Maas​ and ​Rebecca Yaros​ are driving a passion for reading he "hasn’t seen since Harry Potter.”

You know how soothing it feels when that ​dull, incessant noise in the background suddenly stops​? I feel like that’s the offer with books these days. Quiet the noise! Step away from the screaming screens. And step into peace, tranquility, and imagination.

Neil

P.S. Know someone who wants to read more? They can join us ​here​!


1. Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art by James Nestor. This book is changing my sleep, my energy, my mood. I get up to go pee in the middle of the night. Sometimes twice. Sometimes three times. Have for years. Premature old man, I guess. But then I read this book. And now I’ve seemingly stopped. I learned in Chapter 3 that overnight mouth breathers—nearly half of us!—lose 40% more water than nose breathers. You know you’re one of us if you sometimes wake up with your mouth like sandpaper in the Sahara. I’d incorrectly assumed overnight dry-mouth wake-ups might contribute to less overnight peeing—like you’d want to keep the water in—but turns out the opposite is true. Nestor writes: “During the deepest, most restful stages of sleep, the pituitary gland, a pea-size ball at the base of the brain, secretes hormones that control the release of adrenaline, endorphins, growth hormone, and other substances, including vasopressin, which communicates with cells to store more water. This is how animals can sleep through the night without feeling thirsty or needing to relieve themselves.” Vass-oh-press-in? I kept reading and discovered that “90% of children have acquired some degree of deformity in their mouths and noses,” 45% of adults snore (not good!), and a whopping 25% of us even CHOKE OURSELVES AWAKE because of sleep apnea—which has a ridiculous undiagnosed case rate of 80%. What helps? Nose breathing. Keeps you hydrated. Prevents snoring. Gets that vasopressin flowing. And (maybe!) keeps you from getting up to go pee. We have so many breathing issues today. Partly it's the old “big evolving brain in a jam-packed skull” problem but we’ve also seemingly lost a lot of ancient human know-how and wisdom. The 2500-year old ​opening epigraph​ alone is a power punch. Then he goes on to share how Native American tribes foster nose breathing in babies by “carefully closing the baby’s lips with their fingers after each feeding. At night, they’d stand over sleeping infants and gently pinch mouths shut if they opened.” He quotes an 1800s book by a Missourian who goes to live with ​Pawnee​, ​Omaha​, ​Cheyenne​, and ​Blackfeet​ tribes and writes that “The Native Americans explained to Catlin that breath inhaled through the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress and disease.” Btw, we’re only in Chapter 2 here. By the time you’re done you’ll be looking for your uvula in the mirror to assess your susceptibility for sleep apnea (“the Friedman tongue position scale”), maybe buying mouth tape to tape over your lips at night (Nester recommends ​3M Nexcare Durapore​—I used it last night and recommend, too!), looking for tougher foods to chew, or practicing some of the breathholding exercises mentioned later in the book or in a wonderfully detailed Appendix. I highlighted and dog-eared so much of this book and put some of my favorite pages ​here​. Highly recommended.

2. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. A fascinating book by Chilean writer ​Roberto Bolaño​ (1953-2003) that offers endless mood and texture with an odd-angled semi-plot. I came to it in a weird way. A friend was visiting me a decade ago when he pulled this book out of his backpack, said he’d just bought it, tore through it, and wanted me to read it. Then he moved. I never read the book. I never gave it back. Soaked into the ​anti-library​! But then, in researching ​James Daunt​, I was fascinated to learn he organized his ​Daunt Books​ indie bookstore chain by … place. Place? Yeah, not by the genre, not by Dewey Decimal System, but by place. All novels, all history, all culture—there it is! Under Indonesia! Well, I have a trip to Mexico City coming so I looked up “novels taking place in Mexico City” and, wouldn’t you know it, this popped up. I cracked it open and read the first 139 pages—1 of 3 parts the book is split into and titled “Mexicans Lost In Mexico (1975)”—and found myself in a series of first-person diary entries from a 17-year-old literary poet wannabe that … maybe is Bolaño? It’s great. Earnest and eager and raunchy and rich. But then it ends with a dramatic runaway chase scene with our main character, two poets he looks up to, and a prostitute … racing away from her former pimp. And then you turn the page and you’re in Part 2 titled “The Savage Detectives (1976-1996)” and, if you’re me, you’re completely lost. We are now hearing from a cast of dozens of different voices, ‘Lincoln In The Bardo’-style (​4/2018​), as they tell a sideways-angled tale of … those two poets our protagonist was aspiring to be like/interested in in the first half. THIS GOES ON FOR 400 PAGES! Then suddenly, on Page 591, we’re thrust into Part 3 (“The Sonora Desert (1976)”) and we are suddenly…. back to the first scene! In the car! Racing from the pimp! Cue the wild Breaking Bad-toned finale. Weird book. Wild book! I felt nostalgic, dizzy, confused, disgusted, engaged, lost … but I kept reading. It’s written in such casual language but so abstract in structure and form. Like some kind of weird uncle to ‘Infinite Jest.’ A helluva trip.

3. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevédo. When I launched 3 Books six years ago I got a phone number—​1-833-READ-A-LOT​—which lets me collect voicemails from listeners. I play one at the end of every ​Chapter​. Nadia, an educator from the Mojave Desert, called at the end of ​Chapter 140 with Amy Einhorn​ to share her reflections on ​Chapter 105 with Nancy The Librarian​—in particular our discussion on getting into audiobooks. “Neil, I’d love to recommend ‘The Poet X’ by Elizabeth Acevédo,” she said. “It’s a book in verse, a novel in verse, and it’s just almost meant to be read out loud. And she reads it herself.” I picked up (i.e., ​downloaded​​ from Libro.FM​, the audiobook company which supports your local indie bookstore, which just fyi I have no formal affiliation with) this 2018 coming-of-age YA book about a Dominican teen girl in Harlem falling in love, losing and finding God, navigating relationships at home and school, and discovering her poetic voice. It really does have a slam-poetry type of flow with Acevédo’s beautiful voice running smooth: “Walking home from the train I can’t help but think Aman’s made a junkie out of me—begging for that hit, eyes wide with hunger, blood on fire, licking the flesh, waiting for the refresh of his mouth. Fiend, begging for an inhale, whatever the price, just so long as it’s real nice—real, real nice—blood on ice, ice, waiting for that warmth, that heat, that fire. He’s turned me into a fiend, waiting for his next word, hanging on his last breath, always waiting for the next next time.” Not every sentence sings like that but a lot do: “We watch YouTube highlights of the winter games, I help Aman fry eggs and sweet plantains.” It’s a short, somewhat paint-by-numbers plot that helped me fill a lot of buzzing airport time with melody.

4. National Audubon Society Pocket Guide: Familiar Mushrooms. We went on a couple long family hikes last weekend. The trails were covered in so many different kinds of mushrooms. Those oyster-shaped ones on the sides of dead logs. Giant, dented-coconut shaped ones on the side of big trees. Bright red ones straight out of Mario World. I could see my kids considered them like I did: They’re probably poisonous! Don’t touch them! But the truth is, I know shit-all about mushrooms. So I grabbed this fantastic pocket-sized 190-page field guide from my grandparents-in-law’s bookshelf and flipped through it. Small enough to fit in your pocket and easy to quickly flip open and use the top-left silhouette legend to find the approximate shape of your mushroom in a few seconds. Then you fine-pick through the detailed color two-page spreads. Right side: Full color unmistakable photo of your mushroom. Left: Details like a short summary and then Identification (field marks), Edibility, Similar Species, Habitat, and Range. There are a lot of poisonous and “deadly poisonous” mushrooms in here! And a whole bunch that are delicious and could save you if/when you’re lost in the woods. Highly recommended.

5. Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How To Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis, Ph.D. Average lifespan right now in Japan is 84, Canada 83, England 81, US 77, China 77, India 72. Can we call it 80 roundabouts? That means the second half of your life begins while blowing out the candles on your 40th birthday. Cue mid-life crisis! Buy the convertible, get the lipo, start dating someone 20 years younger! Not so fast. Here comes poetically erudite Jungian analyst James Hollis to save you from that. Giant-minded with an in-the-clouds-and-on-the-street tone this is a masterful, inspiring, deeply soulful book I know I’ll be revisiting over and over. Hollis opens the book with a full page of questions and the headline “Your Life Is Addressing These Questions To You” with some examples being: “What gods, what forces, what family, what social environment, has framed your reality, perhaps supported, perhaps constricted it?” and “Why do you believe that you have to hide so much, from others, from yourself?” and “Why is the life you are living too small for the soul’s desire?” Biggies! His lengthy but worthwhile Intro quotes Nobel Prize nominee Andre Malraux: “The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.” Chapter 1 opens quickly with the title: “Expensive Ghosts: How Did We Get To This Point?” where Hollis makes the argument that “In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.” Dude goes deep. We’re in Chapter 1 here. I can’t tell you how many times I hit a rich paragraph that stunned me into stopping. Once I typed up a whole paragraph, emailed it to Leslie, and now we have it stuck up on our kitchen wall. That one comes in Chapter 6 (“The Family During The Second Half Of Life”) where Hollis writes: “What would happen to our lives, our world, if the parent could unconditionally affirm the child, saying in so many words: ‘You are precious to us; you will always have our love and support; you are here to be who you are; try never to hurt another, but never stop trying to become yourself as fully as you can; when you fall and fail, you are still loved by us and welcomed to us, but you are also here to leave us, and to go onward toward your own destiny without having to worry about pleasing us.’ How history would change!” Magnificent, deep, soul-touching with a type of density that required (for me, anyway) many small bites. But if you can handle the occasional phrase like “psychodynamic stratagems” and quite a lot of Carl Jung quotes then I suggest picking this up. (Btw: This is one of Oliver Burkeman’s 3 most formative books. Oliver’s new book ‘​Meditations For Mortals​’ just dropped and is getting ​rave reviews​. My chat with Oliver will drop on the full moon! Join us on ​Spotify​, ​Apple​, or ​YT​.)

6. The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert S. Boynton. I’m a sucker for writers interviewing writers about writing. This 21-year-old book from NYU journalism professor Robert Boynton labels that fun, jumpy, immersive style of Tom Wolfe journalism “new journalism” and then calls the 19 writers interviewed here “new new journalists.” But no matter! It’s just a great batch of dense interviews with folks like Michael Lewis, ​Susan Orlean​, and Jon Krakauer. Where do they get their ideas? How do they make connections in interviews? What does an ideal writing day look like? The book’s a bit longwinded (pot, kettle, I know) but it’s perfect for dipping and slipping in and out.

7. Good Birders Don’t Wear White: 50 Tips from North America’s Top Birders edited by Lisa White. This was another book from this community and I had to go digging on ​Thriftbooks​ to find a copy but it was worth it. There is the title advice—“trading the white birding festival T-shirt for a camo jump suit and face paint is a little extreme, but selecting clothing in neutral colors that blend with the environment can reduce the impact of birding on birds and other wildlife”—but a lot more. I learned how to “Choose a Birding Tour Carefully,” “Go Birding At Night,” “Shush and Pish," and “Use A Storm to Your Advantage,” amongst others. The book is field-guide-small and the tone is light, fun, and easy to read. Everything from feeding birds to cleaning binoculars to even drawing birds (from David Sibley himself!) is covered. A nice gift for the birder in your life.

8. Alfie Gets In First by Shirley Hughes. This is our favorite of the wonderful series of picture books created by the incredible Shirley Hughes (1927-2002) of West Kirby, England. Her bibliography includes over 50 books that have sold over 10 million copies. I still remember when Leslie and I met a wonderful children’s librarian in Toronto named Joanne who thrust this book into our hands and, since then, all of our kids have loved reading ​Alfie’s tales​ when they’re around 3 or 4. In this story the toddler Alfie does indeed get into the house before his mom and little sister and then the door latches behind him which causes a flurry of neighborhood friends to come over to try to help him out. Gentle tension, vivid drawings, and the warmth of family and community come through—as they do in all the Alfie books. Perfect before bed. Highly recommended.

9. There is no 9! Just our regular lootbag of links. ​Tim Urban​ offers a wonderful dose of awe in his Free Press article “​Why I Brought My Toddler to Watch SpaceX’s Flying Skyscraper​.” Bryan Johnson helps us ​fix our posture​. Fascinating little graphic on ​how couples met​ from 1930 to 2024. Marc Andreessen says “​trust in every major incumbent organization is on its way to zero​.” ​Shane Parrish​ has re-released his wonderful collection of ​“Great Mental Models” books​. Do your kids ​imitate​ the way you walk? Eerie poetry from Gen Z: ​“It was the damn phone.”​ What a 15-foot hurricane storm surge ​looks like​. Elizabeth Kolbert reporting on ​melting glaciers​ in Greenland. And Eric Barker shares ​5 rituals to make you a more awesome parent​.


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - September 2024

Hey everyone,

Hope you’ve had a wonderful September.

Here in Toronto orange and yellow leaves are covering the roads and the evenings are getting chillier.

I shared my ​annual birthday advice​ a couple weeks ago and the algorithms liked this one with over 700,000 people reading or sharing it online now. Other members of our community of optimists have started compiling their own like ​this list​ from Australian mum-of-three Ness Quayle. Here's an excerpt and a pic she sent me and you can click to read the whole thing:

 
 

I just got another great list from ​Sera Ertan​ for her 30th birthday. She includes advice like “Explore dating outside of your type,” “Sun and sea might be enough to cure your depression," and “Learn one new skill every year.” I'll post the whole thing at ​Neil.blog​. Do you have a list of things you’ve (almost) learned? Or want to write one? Feel free to share it back with me so we can keep inspiring each other.

Thank you for hanging out with me each month and if you know others who’d like to join us just send them ​here​.

Happy reading,

Neil


1. Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman. From 2006 until 2020 Oliver Burkeman wrote one of my favorite newspaper columns—the wonderfully titled “​This Column Will Change Your Life​” in The Guardian. In a lot of ways: It did. Oliver created a wonderful real-time exploration of the self-help universe from the perspective of a particularly compassionate, tart, naval-gazey Brit. After the column finished Oliver wrote ​‘Four Thousand Weeks​,’ a truly masterful offering that kind of zoomed up and over the self-help canon—bang!—and which I threw in “​The Very Best Books I Read In 2021​.” The title of that book is a reminder of the average number of weeks in a human lifetime. (4000 weeks is 76.7 years and US lifespan is ​currently​ 77.5.) Oliver has a unique perspective and he shares it in the Intro to this follow-up which comes out in 11 days and can be ordered ​right here​: “It starts from the position that you’ll never feel fully confident about the future, or fully understand what makes other people tick — and that there will always be too much to do,” he writes. Why? Not because “you’re an ill-disciplined loser, or because you haven’t read the right bestseller revealing ‘the surprising science’ of productivity, leadership, parenting, or anything else. It’s because being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends … It just means you’ll always be vulnerable to unforeseen disasters or distressing emotions, and that you’ll never have more than partial influence over how your time unfolds, no matter what YouTubers in their early twenties with no kids might have to say about the ideal morning routine.” Snap! Part poet, part diss rapper, Oliver always keeps it real. I feel like this book was like a bowl of leftover cake and whipped cream I just found in the fridge. It’s not as long or as layered as the ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ meal that preceded it. But it hits the spot! At 162 pages versus 304 the book is broken into 28 short essays meant to be read once a day over four weeks. Oliver invites us to approach the book “as a return, on a roughly daily basis, to a metaphorical sanctuary in a quiet corner of your brain, where you can allow new thinking to take shape without needing to press pause on the rest of your life, but which remains there in the background as you go through the day.” I read 6 the first chunk, then none for three weeks, then picked it back up and suddenly had gobbled 8 more. So, you know, you do you and all. The four weeks have themes—‘Being Finite,’ ‘Taking Action,’ ‘Letting Go,’ and ‘Showing Up’—and each ‘day’ has a curiosity-sparking title before a 3-5 page writeup: “Against productivity debt: On the power of a ‘done’ list,” “Develop a taste for problems: On never reaching the trouble-free phase,” and “Don’t stand in generosity’s way: On the futility of ‘becoming a better person.’” He stirs eloquent thoughts, precise quotes, and, uh, surprise cacao nibs of philosophy into something delicious. For me the size, shape, and incisive wisdom of the book recalls ‘The Art of Living’ by Epictetus (​12/2016​). A work of mastery that comes with a side-benefit of reducing anxiety about everything. Highly recommended.

2. Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement by Jane McAlevey. What will jobs look like in the future? What roles will AI displace? What industries will emerge? What roles will remain for us outnumbered humans? Makes sense things are brewing in labor. You’ve probably heard about Chris Smalls and a group of Amazon workers on Staten Island forming ​the first Amazon Workers Union​ (which, two years later,​ the company is still fighting​). Or news that after many staunchly anti-union years, ​Starbucks may be willing​ to negotiate with representatives of its 400+ unionized stores. There’s a bill on California governor ​Gavin Newsom’s desk​ this month seeking to ban employer-led anti-union meetings at work. Yet despite the bubbling: There is a ​record low​ percentage of American workers in a union today. Why? Are unions becoming ineffective? Have gig roles and freelance jobs taken over? Are turnover rates too high to organize? Have laws tilted from pro-labor to pro-corporation? There were a lot of lines about unions at the Democratic National Convention: “As President, I will bring together labor and workers…” said Kamala Harris. “We need to pass the ​PRO Act​ so that workers can organize a union and gain the decent pay and benefits they deserve,” said Bernie Sanders. This fiery, spirited, slightly disorganized 2012 book by recently deceased union organizer and Berkeley policy fellow ​Jane McAlevey​ offers an insider’s from-the-ground view of the passion, resolve, and fight necessary to organize workers in a system largely oriented to disorganize them. The book opens with a gripping tale of Florida during the ​butterfly ballot​ Bush v. Gore election crisis then veers into dramatic fighting, and infighting, over the years. There is a militant pulse in the book and also messiness, ugly politics, and sadness. A good peek into an issue gaining momentum as disparities widen around the world.

3. The Quentin Blake Book by Jenny Uglow. One of ​our values​ on reading is that “Librarians are doctors of the mind.” I can’t tell you how many books Sarah Ramsey of Book City gave me that twisted my heart the right way at the right time. (I talk to her about this ​here​.) So I was delighted to see a massive “Staff Picks” wall at the down-the-ramp front entrance of the ​High Park branch of the Toronto Public Library​. It was like a wall of vitamins! My eyes were drawn to the pink sticky note saying “Rebeca’s Pick I loved learning about this artist whose work is known often by his partnership with Roald Dahl.” Quentin Blake! Yes! Right! Kevin the Bookseller threw that particular vitamin down my throat back in ​Chapter 44​ at the Indigo bookstore he runs at Mount Sinai hospital. Rebeca is right, though. Who else still has this image lodged somewhere in the back of their brain?

But now when you see it you learn on page 90 that “By contrast… The Twits, a darker, brutal story, asked for black and white for its prison-like world, and a hard nib to give the mood (and to show Mr Twit’s beard, ‘which had to look like a lavatory brush’). The expressions speak volumes, as the couple play their cruel practical jokes—witness Mrs Twist’s alarm as she is stretched beneath gas-filled balloons, and Mr Twit’s glee as he prepared to tie another one.” Incredible, right? This book is the stories behind the drawings behind the stories. And the Dahl stuff is just one chapter! The book expands and colors in the now-91-years of genius that is Quentin Blake. From his early Punch magazine covers to nude sketches and self-portraits to giant hospital walls and darker illustrations he did to support the migrant refugee crisis. His humanitarian work was completely unknown to me and it’s beautiful. A couple years ago I stumbled on a dog-chewed dark brown hardcover first edition of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ (​8/2024​) at ​The Monkey’s Paw​ (a must-visit bookstore if you’re in Toronto, which features the world’s first Biblio-Mat!) Incredible find, right? But when I flipped through it I realized I could never love it. It didn’t have Quentin Blake’s drawings. Seriously: What’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory without this:

This book is a succulent and engaging deep-dive into the life and work of an unstoppable artistic master. Highly recommended. (P.S. Quentin is 91 today and still drawing. If you want to experience delight I suggest you check out the ​gallery​ on his website. I wish I had a nursery to decorate with ​this one!​)

4. The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green. I love John Green but I admit I resisted this book for a couple years. “I want edgy-gushy- earnest YA! Not serious-sounding essays about … climate change?” But this is a great book. A fun book! A fast book! A book of reviews! John Green is good at reviewing things and he shares that one of his first jobs was writing endless 175-word reviews for Booklist. He also points out the review has become the communication form of our time. “The medication I take to treat my obsessive-compulsive disorder has more than 1,100 ratings at Drugs.com, with an average score of 3.8. A scene in the movie adaptation of my book ‘The Fault In Our Stars’ was filmed on a bench in Amsterdam; that bench now has hundreds of Google reviews,” he writes in the Introduction. One day he told his brother he wanted to write a review of Canada Geese and the idea for this book (and the ​podcast series that preceded it​) struck: “The Anthropocene … REVIEWED,” Hank Green said. So what follows are a series of seemingly disjoint reviews of things like Halley’s Comet, Diet Dr Pepper, Sunsets, and, yes, Canada Geese, where John tells us how the bird used to be rare but is perfectly adapted to our increasingly steamrolled golf-course-covered planet. (“Thank you for paving paradise and putting up parking lots—honnnnnk, honk, honk, honk, honk.”) What emerges is a fascinating mind jumpily exploring secret histories while contemplating the status and fate of our species and planet in a fun and near-lighthearted way. In his review of ‘Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Stickers’ he takes us back into his childhood classroom, then wonderfully opines that “Humans, meanwhile, smell like the exhalations of the bacteria that colonize us, a fact we go to extraordinary lengths to conceal…”, then takes us into the 1960s-developed microencapsulation process the stickers use, borrowed from banking carbon paper, where scratching actually cracks open microcapsules of essential oils, and then he wonders how the nature of smells has changed over time. In his review of ‘The Internet’ he writes: “What does it say that I can’t imagine my life or my work without the internet? What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me?” Of course every review ends in a rating. Canada Geese, you may understand, get 2 stars, the internet gets 3 stars, and scratch ‘n’ sniff stickers get a rare 3 and a ½. Part silly, part serious, as a rare combination of ‘thoughtful short form,’ we hereby officially add this to our ​Enlightened Bathroom Reading​ collection. Highly recommended.

5. Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Carrying around this book this month was like carrying around a six foot sub on a seven foot wooden plank. I used to drive around and deliver these things 20 years ago and it was so fun. Here I am! With this giant sandwich! Big, beautiful, tasty, delicious. Of course, like the big sandwich, you can only take a couple bites at a time. Even the audiobook is 41 hours and 32 minutes and it’s not the kind of thing you can listen to at 2x. So I bit off the meat and veggies hanging out the sides first—the 16 pages of Epigraph, Contents, Introductions, and Maps followed by the 40 pages of Epilogue, Acknowledgements, Abbreviations, and Index. (I skipped the 121 pages of Notes.) THEN I took a big bite from both sides: the first chapter ‘Four Men Waiting’ and the last chapter ‘The Final Weeks’ before slowly working my way into the middle—mostly by audio jump-around on ​Libro.FM​. There are no rules to reading! (​You have the right to skip, the right to dip...​) When the story gets going you've slid down a time-traveling slide to Springfield, Illinois 164 years ago with its “multiple saloons and restaurants, seven newspapers, three billiard halls, dozens of retail stores, three military armories, and two railroad depots.” You're a fly on multiple walls meeting 51-year-old Abe as he nervously awaits news on the Republican nomination for President. The writing is wonderfully detailed. You can just picture it when Goodwin tells us Lincoln was “a familiar figure to almost everyone in Springfield, as was his singular way of walking, which gave the impression that his long, gaunt frame needed oiling. He plodded forward in an awkward manner, hands hanging at his sides or folded behind his back … He lifted his whole foot at once rather than lifting from the toes and then thrust the whole foot down on the ground rather than landing on his heel.” You like detail? Here are 757 pages of detail. The high-level story is well known: about Lincoln’s growth through poverty (“moving from one dirt farm to another”) and the establishment and challenge of practicing deep and wide-ranging leadership skills (including, of course, bringing his “team of rivals” into his cabinet) all towards helping a fractured country on many brinks. The first-ever Republican president of the US and (arguably) ​the best​. A massive, monstrous plank of deliciousness that can be feasted on for a long, long time.

6. The Field by Dave Lapp. How do you revisit, explore, and process the uglier and more painful moments of childhood? This graphic novel manages the feat of bullseye-ing in on that particular gnawing stomach stress feeling of being socially excluded as a kid. Dave Lapp doesn’t fire any darts off the board, either. The opening six-page comic in this 540-page coming-of-age graphic memoir gave me a stomach flip: our narrator David and his troublemaking pal Edward draw dirty pictures in their first or second grade class and, at Ed’s insistence, hide them on the board. When the teacher finds them—“Who hid these dirty drawings on my vocabulary board?!”—Edward immediately outs David, who gets marched to the front of the class and has the drawings pinned to his shirt, along with a letter to his mom. “Dear Mrs. Lapp, David drew these dirty pictures and showed them to the whole class, Ms. Lewis.” He starts crying, he bows his head, the teacher provokes him a bit (“DO NOT TAKE IT OFF OR I WILL KNOW!”), and when he’s finally given permission to sit back on the carpet the final scene is Edward … shuffling away from him. What a punch! That’s the vibe here. Spare drawings, accurate pain, a lot of “no, no, no, don’t do thats!”, all ultimately adding up to a slightly harrowing reconnection with the sharper emotional side of growing up.

7,8,9, and 10. Catwings, Catwings Return, Wonderful Alexander, and Jane On Her Own by Ursula K. Le Guin. I first heard about Ursula K. Le Guin back in 2020 when ​David Mitchell​ (‘Cloud Atlas,’ ​6/2019​) picked ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ (​8/2020​) as one of his 3 most formative books. That “young adult” book felt anything but to me—creepy, cryptic, eerie. There was a wet, dark, skeletal feeling in that book that felt haunting when I read it and feels haunting when I think about it now. (Incidentally I recommend this wonderful ​eight-year-old essay​ David wrote about the series.) So that backdrop is, I suppose, partly what makes the super-slim 4x40-page box set of ‘Catwings’ so surprising. This isn’t dark! It’s a story about a bunch of cats … with wings … who escape alleys, get attacked by owls, suffer rat trauma, find lost siblings, and get trapped by greedy owners with dollar signs in their eyes. Why do the cats have wings? “Mrs. Jane Tabby could not explain why all four of her children had wings. ‘I suppose their father was a fly-by-night,’ a neighbor said, and laughed unpleasantly, sneaking round the dumpster.” Those are the first two sentences of the first book. These are smoother, simpler, more straightforward stories than ‘Earthsea’ that are perfect read-a-louds with kids as young as four or five. There are a few suspenseful scenes but you’re safe in the tight embrace of an ink-flicking master and everything is gorgeously wrapped in detailed illustrations by S.D. Schindler. Looks like Ursula wrote these books throughout her sixties from the late 80s to the late 90s and they are (for good reason!) still in print today.

11. There is no 11! Just our regular look bag of links. I enjoyed cutting out and ticking off the books I’ve read and want to read in The New York Times ‘​100 Best Books of the 20th Century​.’ I am a bit of a list nut, I admit, and, btw, I’ve only read 12 of them! Thanks to Karen W for telling me about this activism ​in the world of Little Free Libraries​! I loved Ryan Holiday’s ​essay about swimming​. I want to jump in a pool right now. Listen to my now-ancient chat with Ryan at his house in Austin right ​here​. I was ​interviewed in Forbes last month about top happiness habits. ​Amy Einhorn​, superstar editor of ‘The Help,’ ‘Big Little Lies,’ ‘Let’s Pretend This Never Happened,’ ‘A Higher Loyalty,’ and, yes, ‘​The Book of Awesome​,’ joined me ​on 3 Books. Adam Grant shared a ​new study​ on the danger of heavy screen use in young children. A ​nice collection​ of Kevin Kelly wisdom. I ​agree​ with Myrium Gurba. ​The real tax​ of US political season. Casey Neistat’s ​advice​ to people in their 20s. And have most major sports been ‘​figured out​’?


Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - August 2024

Hey everyone,

Wow, it’s suddenly September tomorrow.

Who else is feeling a little prickly-anxious about the start of school and the resulting slow grind of new routines working their way into some kind of smooth flow?

I feel that way. I just did an ​interview with Forbes you can check out for a bit of a happiness habit refresh. And have a ​new article on CNBC​ about doing Rose Rose Thorn Bud at night. Our new journal based on the practice ‘​Two Minute Evenings​’ sold out the first day! Took a while but new copies are now back in stock on ​Chronicle​ or ​Amazon​.

This month I loved jumping ten millenniums in the future in the bubbling, rainbow-colored wowshow of ‘​Moonbound​’ by Robin Sloan. I finished a couple bedtime read-a-louds with my kids. And in the midst of US election overwhelm I was reminded about some of what’s at stake through the masterpiece ‘​Stasiland​,’ which is a wonderfully woven “kitchen table conversation” style of journalism from behind the Berlin Wall. Plus a lot more!

Let’s keep focused on reading amidst the endless beeps and boops.

And now let’s get to the books…

Neil

PS. If you know someone who wants to read more they can join us ​here​!


1. The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. I’ll tell you how I ended up reading this book and then tell you what I thought. 15 years ago my nascent seven-month-old blog ‘​1000 Awesome Things​’ was nominated for ‘Best Blog’ in the world from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. I was immediately approached by a bunch of literary agents including Erin Malone, who represented Christian Lander, a fellow Torontonian who wrote a blog I loved called ‘​Stuff White People Like​’ (featuring ​#9 “Making you feel bad for not going outside”​ and ​#85 “The Wire”​). I signed with Erin and she told me she wanted to auction my blog to publishers … next week. Suddenly I was in the foreign position of interviewing editors who were somehow clamoring to publish my book. I signed with Amy Einhorn, a woman I’d never heard of, who just started an eponymous imprint I’d never heard of, within Putnam Publishing, which I’d also never heard of. But I was magnetically attracted to her vision for the book, which was different than everybody else’s. I learned everything about editing from Amy in our passionate late-night diatribe-y emails to each other, our hot-potato-ing of 300-page Word docs back and forth with 100s of comments in red down the sides, and arguing—good arguing!—about every single element along the way. I’d sit in her New York office and she’d have a variety of ‘cases’ laid out on her desk. “What do you think of 5” by 7”?” she’d say. “Too precious? Too cute?” (We went with a 5.5" by 7.5" for the record.) Or she’d say, “Neil, ‘Blowing your nose in the shower’ is out. Too frat boy! It’s a hardcover. It’s a gift book. It’s for moms.” I absolutely loved working with her. By some accounts Amy Einhorn is ​the most successful editor in the world today​ with the highest percentage of books edited that hit the New York Times bestseller list. She has a knack for sniffing out voice, for knowing what will work and what won’t and, as you can imagine, I’ve been begging her to come on ​my podcast​ for six years to ask her about her secrets. She finally acquiesced and I fly down to New York City next week. (She’s now running Fiction at Crown.) Of course, I get the 3 formative books in advance and this one—‘The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing’—was tops on her list. ‘The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing’? Uh ... yeah. I will say up front if you asked me if I wanted to read a coming-of-age romantic and sexual awakening first-person narrative from a snappy, turbo-charged Jersey-girl-turned-New Yorker through the 80s and 90s I would have potentially said “Pass!” But I loved it. This is an absolutely stunning read with strong ‘​When Harry Met Sally​’ vibes throughout. Fast, funny, twisting, turning. The title of the book makes zero sense till you get to last chapter and they even took the bold publishing step of not even printing “A Novel” on the cover to help us out—just a tiny small caps FICTION in the lower left corner. After a mildly annoying ten page flips you hit the book’s first sentence where, without any context, you’re thrust into the mind’s eye of a teen girl looking out the front window of her house: “My brother’s first serious girlfriend was eight years older—twenty-eight to his twenty.” Melissa Bank writes with a magical Claire Keegan (‘Foster,’ ​9/2023​) brand of writing I’d call “vivid sparsity.” The story is told through seven short stories that leapfrog through Jane Rosenal’s life with a wild unpredictability that feels like real life. It starts with Jane as a teen trying to understand sex and love: “My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn’t exactly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex anyway. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen almost against their will. Then the sex that you had would be about love.” (page 21) Trying to understand drugs: “There was a keg, but when someone asked if we’d like a beer, Linda said, ‘I wish we could.’ I didn’t find out what she’d meant until a joint was passed to her and she handed it right off to me, saying, ‘Remember the three Ds from detox: don’t, don’t, don’t.’ I passed the joint, as though exerting heroic self-control. She said, ‘You still get flashbacks?’ ‘I think I always will,’ I said.” (page 25). There are highs. There are lows. In her mid-30s: “But I just said, ‘Yeah.’ And ‘Yeah,’ again. Even to myself, I sounded like somebody who smoked cigarettes in front of the drug store all day.” (page 171) There is death, like after a funeral: “I walked through the meadow. I sat at the picnic table. I looked hard at everything, so I wouldn’t forget. Then I picked an apple from the tree for the ride home.” (page 199). And there are endless LOLs, too: “It occurs to me that I may not be the only butterfly whose wings flutter in the presence of his stamen. After she glides off, Robert tells me that she composes music for movies and has been nominated for an Oscar. I think of my only award, an honorable mention in the under-twelve contest to draw Mr. Bubble.” (page 235). The vignettes gave me the feeling of watching a high-school volleyball game in a cramped gym. Lot of bumps, some sets, and a variety of fastballs-off-the-back-wall, just-missed-its, and a few hard, deep spikes. This is an astounding life portrait told with speed, precision, zingers, and a rare three-dimensionalization. What a stunning voice! Thank you, Amy, yet again. Highly recommended.

2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. Illustrated by Quentin Blake. I hated ​Beavers​. I cried to my mom every Wednesday night on our walk home from the gym at Sunset Heights Public School. I was around six years old and would be wearing blue and brown hat and blue and brown vest after spending a couple hours getting pegged repeatedly in dodge ball and failing to properly stitch badges onto felt. Needless to say I never made it to Cubs. And Boy Scouts sounded like a nightmare! But I’ll never forget my last night in my last (and first!) year at Beavers. We were led from the gym to the library where we were sat down on the pebble-filled carpet amongst the three-foot-high shelves of crinkly wrapped picture books in front a TV / VCR rack. Someone pulled out the long orange extension cord while another cracked open the plastic video case of “​Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory​” (1971) starring Gene Wilder and (thankfully!) written by Roald Dahl. I fell in love with the movie and then picked up the book and read it so many times throughout my life. (It’s definitely one of my answers to the question: “​What’s one book you read as a kid that’s still on your shelf today?​”) A couple weeks ago I read it again with my five-year-old in a unique way. I read him the first three chapters (“Here Comes Charlie,” “Mr. Willy Wonka’s Factory,” and “Mr. Wonka and the Indian Prince”). They’re fast and easy—15 pages in 14-point font with 7 drawings from the inimitable Quentin Blake mixed in—and are a perfect little gateway into the book. My son got to meet Charlie (“How d’you do? And how d’you do? And how d’you do again? He is pleased to meet you.”), hear about the fabled factory, and get the bizarre sideways subplot (understandably struck from the film!) about Indian mogul “Prince Pondicherry” who has Mr. Wonka build a Taj Mahal-type joint out of chocolate but after taking a nap during a “very hot day with a boiling sun… woke up to find himself swimming around in a huge brown sticky lake…” So that got my 5-year-old into it. Then Leslie and I had to stuff the Odyssey for a three-hour-long drive so we downloaded the 2013 wonderfully one-man-acted by Douglas Hodge audiobook and noticed it was … 3 hours and 18 minutes. Perfect! How many audio books are that short? Dahl is such a wizard of economy. So we listened the whole way and it entranced us all. I was in the Sunset Heights library again—seeing the factory with a new perspective, new glint, new peek through the window. Then when we arrived at our rental place on a lake in smalltown Ontario with three chapters left. Which was perfect for me to read to him before bed. Btw: Since being tipped off by ​Latanya and Jerry​ on the ​Bronx Bound Books Bus​ I always recommend ​Libro.FM​ for audio books. (​Here’s the link to Charlie​.) I don’t have any affiliation with the company but I love that they have all the same audiobooks but give their profits to the indie bookstore of your choosing. Right now I’m supporting my friends at ​Mable’s Fables​, a wonderful children’s bookstore in Toronto. This is a story I can read again and again and again. Highly recommended.

3. Why Are People Into That? A Cultural Investigation of Kink by Tina Horn. “Kink-positive, for sure,” Sarah said. “That’s like my first or second thing.” She was behind the counter of her coffee shop in an otherwise-treacly patch of Little Italy. It was a couple years ago and we were talking about criteria we were looking for in a therapist. I hadn’t heard the phrase again until I saw this book sitting on the front table of the new ​Indigo Rideau Centre​ in Ottawa. I browsed the Table of Contents, could feel internal aversions and curiosities, and knew I should probably pick it up to learn more. There are nine chapters and all of them go 20-pages deep on the philosophy, history, personal history, and what-I-think-might-be-happening-heres of a specific fetish like ‘Feet,’ ‘Spanking,’ ‘Consensual Nonconsent,’ ‘Cash,’ ‘Orgies,’ and ‘Bimbofication,’ which I learned is “a fetish activity in which a person of any gender is transformed into a bubbly, insatiably-horny, empty-headed, smooth-brained, fun-loving, hyperfeminine creature.” She shares how in cartoons on the topic “breasts explode out of blouses, cappuccinos become frappucinos, white lab coats give way to cinched corsets, and brows once furrowed in thought are smoothed.” There is … a lot here. And I love how it all opens: with Tina flashing back 15 years to the 2000s to her hometown of Oakland when she runs smack into her high school boyfriend outside the movie theater—the guy she’d “first had orgasms with” when they weren’t at “swimming practice, watching Fight Club, or smoking cloves outside the nearest city’s midnight movie festivals”—and then proceeds to tell him that she’s now a professional dominatrix. To which he replies: “I always knew you’d *get into* that stuff.” Tina Horn is a ​#1 Apple Podcast host​ and ​Lambda Literary​ fellow who writes with a fearless and breezy-intellectual blogging tone that calls to mind ​Mark Manson​. She says, “This book grew out of the project that began with my podcast, inviting readers far and wide to join a sociocultural investigation in which kink is the artifact in question, the text being analyzed—a deep dive into all manner of erotic fantasies and activities, blending pop culture, history, and personal narrative.” In Chapter 1 on feet she wonderfully tilts the mirror onto how kinks and fetishes are viewed by our culture today. She talks about a ‘Sex and the City’ episode with Miranda having a relationship with a shoe salesman who, by the end of the episode, “bites his tie, breathes heavily, and seems to comically orgasm in his pants from merely placing shoes on her bare feet.” She also recounts a 2019 “smirking like he can barely contain himself” Jimmy Kimmel teasing Margaret Qually on his show about how her feet are featured by presumed-weirdo-fetishist ​Quentin Tarantino​ in ‘​Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood​.’ The book reads as a manifesto and call-to-arms seeking to rally people towards “a new code of sexual ethics based on imagination, curiosity, and communication. An ethic that abolishes the thought-policing (along with the long history of literal policing) of erotic ideas, fantasies, and tastes.” As Tina writes: “Every person reading this has, at some point in their lives, felt a longing for an embodied experience of pleasure or particular configuration of companionship that was roundly suppressed by their inner cop.” Explore the limits of your inner cop with this brave, challenging, insightful, researched-based, story-driven exploration.

4. All Fours by Miranda July. There was a funny scene in our house last month where two shipments arrived the same day, from the same place (​Indigo​!), with the same book. I heard there was a new Miranda July book and since reading her mind-bending ‘No One Belongs Here More Than You’ (​3/2022)​ I’d been a fan. (That was one of the 3 most formative books from ​Daniels​, filmmakers behind ‘​Everything, Everywhere All At Once.​’) I didn’t know who Miranda was or what else she wrote but that name—Miranda July!— was just attached to a delicious meal my brain had eaten. ​Leslie​ read it first and it was fun watching her emotional ups and downs with the book over the past couple weeks. Here comes her Leslie’s Pick now: “When I saw ‘All Fours’ by Miranda July recommended in The Cap, a newsletter I subscribe to and appreciate for its thought-provoking and compassion-growing take on parenting teens, as a great summer read on motherhood and intimacy, I ordered it right away. The story follows a 45-year-old woman trying to find her next big work project, craving space away from her mundane life with her child and husband right at the same time that she aches for the beauty of it, struggling to hear her own desires for intimacy and pleasure, and then acting on her desires. It definitely captured all my attention while I read it in how brutally honest, candid, and racy it was. Some parts I found deeply resonant and poignant about what it’s like to be a mother and an almost middle-aged woman in today’s society, reminding me of the wonderful ‘Wild and Sleepless Nights’ (​1/2024​). Other parts were much more shocking and radical and peppered the book with surprising twists and at times laugh-out-loud absurdity. However, it makes sense to me that in the acknowledgments July explains that she conducted several conversations with women to inform the book and its theme of what it’s like to be a woman in perimenopause, because the common humanity, common bittersweetness, of being a 40-something-year-old woman rings through throughout.”

5. Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. I mentioned Amy Einhorn in my first review this month and this is another of her formative books. The entire time I was reading this book—my third-ever Philip Roth after ‘The Human Stain’ (​6/2017​) and ‘American Pastoral’ (​8/2017​)—I kept thinking: “This was written in 1959? Seriously?” It is Roth’s first book and in a sparse 136 pages he tells a little small-but-feels-big romantic summer love affair between a Jersey college boy and the snobby Radcliffe girl from a posh family who he meets at the club’s swimming pool. (First sentence: “The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.”) There is 1950s phone-call flirting, 1950s house-dates with siblings, and yes, as per the cover, some fuzzy-scene pool sex (“Then, in a moment, it was the sun who kissed us both, and we were out of the water, too pleased with each other to smile. Brenda shook the wetness of her hair onto my face and with the drops that touched me I felt she had made a promise to me about the summer, and, I hoped, beyond.”) I love the blurb about Philip Roth on the back cover from Saul Bellow: “Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently.” We see this all over the book like on page 19: “We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them—at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away.” Not bad, right? Oh, anyone else need to look up ​dithyramb​? That would be: “a usually short poem in an inspired wild irregular strain.” I loved the book and it was also wonderful reading something with a first-person narrator named Neil! Even spelled the same way! Know any other Neil-books? I don’t! I’ll take it! PS to writers: If you feel like being intimated check out the first sentence of Roth’s biography from the inside flap: “In the 1990s Philip Roth won America’s four major literary awards in success: the National Book Critics Circle Award for ‘Patrimony’ (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for ‘Operation Shylock’ (1993), the National Book Award for ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ (1995), and the Pulitzer Price in fiction for ‘American Pastoral’ (1997).” Not a bad six years, Phil! Great, quick, powerful read. I’m also adding this to our list of ​Great Books Under 150 Pages​.

6. Moonbound by Robin Sloan. This is the book I spent the most time with this month and it felt like riding a rainbow-speckled rocketship. I had heard great things about Robin Sloan’s ‘​Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore​’ and subscribe to ​his wonderful email list​, which he publishes every 29-and-a-half days, and which I just ​reprinted​ a little excerpt from last month. Then I got a text from reader-extraordinaire ​Michael Bungay-Stanier​ (‘​The Coaching Habit​’) who said “Have you read Robin Sloan’s new book? Mate, it’s so good. He’d be a great guest for 3 Books.” The feeling of this book is like the front cover image above twisting into a kaleidoscope of images again and again and again. I fell into this book like almost nothing else and I simultaneously had no idea what was going on and couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. There are talking beavers. Talking swords! Strange video games. And ever-expanding worlds with wizards, who maybe aren’t really wizards, and oh—the entire book is narrated by a microscopic AI-type chronicler, who’s been in many different lives across the millenniums, but who now sits in our protagonist’s left shoulder. This book is—delightful. Mesmerizing. Far, far away. A kind of jacked up ‘Star Wars’ meets ‘Cloud Atlas’ featuring Willy Wonka and Mad Hatter types with occasional moments of poignancy and reflection that let you see, and see around, our endlessly twisting lives together. A big, loud, cymbal crash of a book. Highly recommended.

7. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. For me this book went from great to slow to upsetting. I’d heard of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ for years but it wasn’t till ​Gretchen Rubin​ tipped me off to the prequel ‘Little House In the Big Woods’ (​4/2024​) that I cracked the series. That Big Woods has become a mandatory read-a-loud in our house for kids around age five. It’s the perfect visual tableau of a not-that-long-ago yesteryear that gently introduces conversations around things like guns, living off the land, getting attacked by cougars, and, of course, playing catch with pig bladders. My 5-year-old wanted to read the second of the seven book series next and I went hunting for a used copy that was illustrated by Garth Williams. (Note: If you’re buying ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ or ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ make sure you get the ones illustrated by Garth Williams. They really bring it to life!) This 1935 book opens strong: “A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.” It gave me some ​Aldo Leopold​-like experience of observing nature and I felt like was right there in front of the crisp fires, raging rivers, or getting scolded by ​Blue Jays​ for taking berries from the bush. But as the book goes on there is more tension with Indians and characters are introduced and views espoused that sound ghastly. I’m against censoring old books but geez—the views are so racist and ugly. Indians are depicted as characters who create trouble, walk into your home, and steal whatever they want. Characters swing by their little house on the prairie and offer wisdom like “Land knows, they’d never do anything with this country themselves. All they do is roam around over it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that’ll farm it. That’s only common sense and justice.” (page 211) When Laura asks Pa what’s happening he explains: “When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move these Indians farther west, anytime now. That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Now do you understand?” (page 237) No, don’t understand. In fact I was so horrified I stopped reading my son the book and we moved on to ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’ What books do you recommend—for me, or my kids—that better illuminate the American indigenous experience? Definitely don’t suggest this one.

8. Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall by Anna Funder. A fascinating book I would never have read if it wasn’t suggested to me by Oliver Burkeman (author of ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ (​8/2021​) and the great newsletter The Imperfectionist). After World War II Germany was broken up by the ​Berlin Declaration​ and four years later, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was formed, better known as East Germany. The Orwellian communist country existed for forty years until the fall of the Berlin Wall. And who ran the GDR? The Stasi, the “internal army by which the government kept control” and whose job was to “know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around.” Sound a bit like Google? But this wasn’t electronic surveillance and tracking everyone’s phone. It was 90,000 people officially working for the secret police along with 170,000 (!) unofficial full-time collaborators. Somebody worked for the Stasi at every pub, factory, and hall you walked into. What did they do? Many things. Wild things! They had jars and jars of thousands of people’s underwear, as one example. They collected ‘smell samples’ of people (different than the underwear collections) and used them to implicate them in crimes. Anna interviews a woman who tried to climb the Berlin wall on New Year’s Eve at age 16 and gets thrown in a horrifying prison for a year and a half. And she even interviews ex-members of the Stasi themselves. A vivid and frightening tale of the devastating potential of totalitarianism. I put this book up there with the wonderful ‘Nothing To Envy’ by Barbara Demick which casts a glowing spotlight onto North Korea today.

9. There is no nine! Just our regular loot bag of links. I mentioned it at the top but I have new pieces up on Forbes—​Part 1!​ ​Part 2!​—and ​CNBC​. And my new journal ‘​Two Minute Evenings​’ is back in stock on ​Chronicle​, ​Amazon.com​, and ​Amazon.ca​. If you grabbed a copy, leave a review! Maria Popova blew me away with her 40th birthday post on The Marginalian: ‘​An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days​.’ (She ​even created amazing cards​ of them... I got a pack and love them!) I love ​Lenore Skenazy​ and her ​Let Grow Movement​ and Leslie and I loved her new piece on ​Jonathan Haidt​’s After Babel Substack called ‘​How Phones Are Making Parents The Anxious Generation​.’ Read it! Share it! I found ​this Twitter string​ interesting from a product manager who used to work on Google Maps responding to someone suggesting “Google Maps needs a feature for the nicest way not the fastest way.” An ancient ​Microsoft X-Box ad​ that still sits in my brain. Dan Go gives us ​11 great microworkouts​ on those days you’re too busy to get a full workout in. (And check out his great ​newsletter​ if you don’t get it!). I really enjoyed ​this conversation between Scott Galloway and Rich Roll​. And, finally, I like this fun helping-you-find-books site ​Shepherd​ and just pasted ​a few of my favorites​ on there, too. Did you make it all the way down here? This book club is 4459 words so I say kudos! Thanks for a great chat about books! And remember to email anytime to let me know what you've loved reading lately...


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - July 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Hope you’re having a great July.

Big news: Leslie and I have ​a new book​ out next week! A journal from Chronicle Books called ‘​Two Minute Evenings​’ which follows up ‘​Two Minute Mornings​’ with our nighttime ritual of playing “Rose Rose Thorn Bud.” I first wrote about RRTB seven years ago in The Star and then ​shared it on the TV​. I put a longer review below and you can order it at ​Chronicle​, ​Bookshop​, or ​Amazon​.

But before the reviews! I've been thinking about something else. A few days ago I drove my 8-year-old over the border to Lewiston, New York to see my favorite band: The Flaming Lips! We got all dressed up and raced to the front and sang and pumped our fists the whole time. With 5000 people outside on the grass ​under giant pink robots and exploding cannons of confetti​ I felt a deep sense of what Emile Durkheim called ‘collective effervescence’—that shared harmony we feel when we’re actually physically together and our energy is lining up.

We need so much more of this! So much more. Places to connect, feel each other, *fuel* each other—it’s what life’s all about. And, sure: Hard these days! So hard. We've been pulling away. Books like ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt (​04/2024​ + my fave pages ​here​) and ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff (​05/2023​) are warning us of the perils of our spiking modern tech-driven loneliness—which 1 in 2 American adults suffer from and which is ​worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day​!—while books like ‘Dancing In The Streets’ by Barbara Ehrenreich (​6/2023​ + my fave pages ​here​) and Brené Brown’s new podcast series (more below!) are helping us slowly find our way back.

Years ago I put '1 weird project / 1 new experience’ ​in my monthly dashboard​ and this month my fifth Lips show, and first-ever concert with my son, definitely counted. ​Wayne Coyne​ always generates deep awe, gratitude, and love in the crowd. But next month? I need to find some 'collective effervescence' elsewhere.

And, if it’s helpful, I’ll challenge you to do the same.

Now ... let’s get to the books!

Neil

PS. If you know someone who wants to read a bit more they can join us by signing up ​right here​!


1. Two Minute Evenings by Neil Pasricha and Leslie Richardson. I grew up feeling anxious a lot. Can you tell? I still feel those feelings, but I’ve worked through a good deal. For me a big part of the working through it has been putting in place a set of ruthlessly simple practices to stay more connected, positive, and happier. You know most: ​I read books​. ​I avoid news​. ​I get outside​. ​I call friends​. ​I write a daily awesome thing​. ​I dress up in blonde wigs and go to concerts​. ​I lock my phone downstairs​ before I go to bed. I do ​two-minute mornings​ when I wake up. And Leslie and I do a two-minute ​Rose Rose Thorn Bud​ practice at dinner with our kids—or, later, while flossing, or before turning out the lights. I by no means invented these practices but have come to shape and rely on them. '​Two Minute Mornings​' is simply answering “I will let go of…”, “I am grateful for…”, and “I will focus on…” before getting up and looking at my phone. ‘Two Minute Evenings’ is us taking a question Leslie grew up connecting over with her family: “What’s your Rose, Thorn, and Bud today?” We added another Rose to force our minds to playback two highlights, then make space to share and listen to each other’s moment of stress, and finish with a bud—or something we’re looking *forward* to. ‘Two Minute Evenings’ comes out next week and we wrote an Introduction ​here​, discuss the science and research ​here​, and posted our own filled-out pages of the journal ​here​. Chronicle created stunning packaging—a really ​thick​, ​fancy​ ​navy blue hardcover​ with ​ribbon bookmark​—and by turning the practice into “something that sits on your shelf” we hope it becomes a reminder to, you know, actually do it. To focus on the good and let go of the hard at the end of the day. For you, your family, or as a gift for someone you love. Here’s our ​website for the book​ and you can order from ​Chronicle​, ​Bookshop​, or ​Amazon​.

2. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. We will spew more planet-altering carbon into our atmosphere this year than any other year in history. Same as last year. Same as the year before. Even though we see what's happening: ​species going extinct​, ​countries going underwater​, ​insane heat waves everywhere​. I recently read ‘Reason In A Dark Time’ by Dale Jamieson (​02/2024​) and that wonderful and wonderfully dense 2014 Oxford University Press book explained in great detail the last 50 years of our climate fuckuppery. It was a perfect backgrounder to this book which crystal balls the next 50 through a blunt thought experiment: “What would happen to the planet if humans simply disappeared?” Well-researched, deeply scientific, long-range answers are helpfully told in a simple, witty, and sometimes dark story by Alan Weisman. Want a couple high level takeaways? Sure, let's start with good news: we have successfully delayed Earth’s next ice age—which should be happening any day now!—by at least 15,000 years. Bad news? We did this by heating up the atmosphere to levels that will wipe out most plants and animals—potentially including us. The chapter on birds had me weeping. (Don’t get me started on cats!) It’s impossible to read this book and not start making changes. Time listed this book as their #1 Non-Fiction Book of 2007. Big thanks to Toronto muralist ​Nick Sweetman​ for tipping me off to this one. Highly recommended.

3. Point Your Face At This by Demetri Martin. A man lays on his back on the floor under a piano with his right arm reaching up to play the keys and his left arm disappearing underneath it—the caption reads: “Accordion player tries piano.” A set of three flags is drawn with the half-mast flag labelled "someone died," the full-mast flag labelled "no one died," and the blank flagless pole labelled "flagpole operator died." A Venn diagram is shown with two circles labelled "candy" and "maracas" with a small overlapping shaded area labeled "Tic Tacs." These are just a few of the hundreds of single-panel screw-eyed modern Far Side strips produced by comic genius Demetri Martin. I first read this book years ago (​1/2018​) and loved revisiting it after laugh-hooting on a flight watching Demetri’s wonderful new Netflix special ‘​Demetri Deconstructed.​’ (If you haven’t seen his 2018 Netflix special ‘​The Overthinker,​’ I might start with that first.) Add this one to our ​Enlightened Bathroom Reader collection​, too. Highly recommended.

4. Same As Ever: A Guide To What Never Changes by Morgan Housel. Most things today suffer from zoom-in mentality. We are looking so up-close, so minute-by-minute, that grander zoom-outs feel impossible. How often does the top headline change on CNN or The New York Times? Five times a day? Never mind the endless “for you” scrolls of social media that successfully mine our attention by feeding us an ever-titillating version of now. Enter this grandly visioned book of 23 stories by investor and award-winning writer Morgan Housel (​‘The Psychology of Money’​). He details what partly inspired him to write it in ​this 2017 blog post​ which discusses Jeff Bezos talking years ago about Amazon focusing on lower prices and faster shipping because those things won’t change over the long run. What else won’t change? A few gems from the book include: “We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises—which tend to be all that matter,” “The world is driven by forces that cannot be measured,” “Stories are always more powerful than statistics.” Morgan’s writing is a such a pleasure to read—simple stories, short chapters, counterintuitive takeaways. Morgan is a giant mind and his ability to distill into simple is ​Tim Urban​-like. This book goes down smooth. I need to keep revisiting it to avoid getting sucked back into the abyss of now.

5. Little Shrew by Akiko Miyakoshi. Did you read the ‘Frog and Toad’ books growing up? My kids love them. This 70-page book is structured similarly as a series of everyday vignettes in the life of an animal who lives like a human. This book has more of a grown-up vibe—nothing dramatic happens but its celebration of the melancholic beauty of the simple, the ordinary, is transfixing. A deep understanding of the nothingness and everythingness of life comes through. Little Shrew takes the subway to work. Little Shrew buys a bun on the way home. Little Shrew finds a poster by a dumpster. Little Shrew decorates his apartment before his friends visit. A beautiful, quiet, tranquil existence is depicted through mesmerizingly detailed pencil, charcoal, and acrylic art from the talented Akiko Miyakoshi who “lives, writes, draws, and dreams at the foot of beautiful mountains in Japan.”

6. The Idea of You by Robinne Lee. And now it’s time for this month Leslie’s Pick: "Let’s be real: sometimes you just need an indulgently juicy summer read that keeps you up too late and lying in the sun longer than you usually would. What really sold me on picking up this book was the 'Soon to be a major motion picture' sticker on the front! No book guilt, no book shame is, after all, the ​first value listed on ​​3 Books. As my Mom believed when she handed me ​Baby-Sitters Club​ after Baby-Sitters Club to devour the summer I was 10, if you’re reading, you’re reading! Well, let me tell you, I was DEFINITELY reading, faster than I’ve read any book since 'The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo' (​8/2023​), with all the romantic escapades and hot and steamy sex scenes in 'The Idea of You' by Robinne Lee. This is the story of a 40-year-old mom who gets picked up by her daughter’s favorite pop star and then an indulgently delicious secret love affair unfolds. Definitely not acclaimed literature but so hit the spot for me!"

7. Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe. On page 65 of this ​autofiction​ literary debut by Sean Thor Conroe, the main character, also named Sean Thor Conroe, says “Dude, I don’t give a shit about MFA programs. I’m not interested in writing for people who already read. Who consider themselves ‘literary.’ More ‘literature’ means more insulated, masturbatory bullshit completely irrelevant to the culture. I’m tryna write for people who don’t read. Who don’t give a shit about books.” Wow. That’s a tough book to write and yet—he seems to pull it off? A bookseller at the Junction location of ​Type Books​ handed me this after I told him I was looking for a fast-paced novel in the vein of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’ (​2/2023​) or ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ (​4/2018)​. And it was fast-paced. Sometimes I wanted to toss it, sometimes I couldn’t put it down. The book is written as some kind of frenetic, pulsing lucid dream as the main character wrestles with poverty, illness, drug use, relationships, and … writing this book. The whole thing is a bit meta but the language, voice, and tone are seductive right from the opening sentence: “Got into a thing with the Fresh Grocer lady over coffee filters.” Takes place in the fringes of Philadelphia in 2017, and while not a ton *happens* the style and pace endlessly delivers. The closest book I can compare it to in tone is ‘A Million Little Pieces’ by ​James Frey​ (​9/2017​). Footnote: While researching the book afterwards I see that there’s been a bit of a literary dustup between Conroe and an author named Sam Pink. You can read their blog posts back and forth ​here​ and ​here​. A real get-out-of-your-brain book and a truly original piece of art.

8. The Orange and Other Poems by Wendy Cope. “The day he moved out was terrible / That evening she went through hell / His absence wasn’t a problem / But the corkscrew had gone as well.” A tiny book full of tiny poems that carry bits of whimsy. A great gateway drug to poetry, if you find it can be a bit daunting. This is about as un-daunting as poetry gets. In the title track ‘The Orange’ she writes: “At lunchtime I bought a huge orange— / The size of it made us all laugh. / I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave— / They got quarters and I had a half. / And that orange, it made me so happy, / As ordinary things often do / Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park. / This is peace and contentment. It’s new. / The rest of the day was quite easy. / I did all the jobs on my list / And enjoyed them and had some time over. / I love you I’m glad I exist.”

9. Nine! There is no nine. But I did want to shine a spotlight on what Brené Brown is up to right now. First it seemed like she disappeared! Last year she was suddenly off all social media—just ... gone. La disparue! Which wouldn't be a big deal if she wasn't such a strong, positive, galvanizing force for millions of people amidst the social media cesspool for so long. But then at the beginning of this year she put out ​this incredible essay​ sharing why. It begins: "My mom died on Christmas morning." She's ​relaunched her site​ and began an incredible ​podcast series​ (​Spotify​, ​Apple​) about "living beyond human scale." On the drive home from The Flaming Lips concert last week, I binged the first couple episodes with ​Esther ("Es-tare") Perel​ and ​Dr. William Brady.​ Brené and Esther talk about the 'collective effervescence' phenomenon, too. She's doing this wonderfully challenging and deep swerve exploring the costs and challenges of living as we're living—this fast-paced, relentless, everything-everywhere-all-at-once moment. Do check it out. I admit I still find myself still thinking about ​wisdom she gave Leslie and me​ when we sat down with her a few years ago—you ​can listen on YouTube here​. And if after listening to Brené you want to keep hanging out auditorily—you know I love our long drives and nature walks together—check out our recent conversations with ​Jonathan Franzen​ and, just a few days ago, ​Maria Popova​. Maria’s site The Marginalian has given me joy for nearly two decades and I find her such a one-woman force of beauty against the endless spew of bad news. Join 3 Bookers around the world right here on ​Apple​, ​Spotify​, or ​YouTube​.


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - June 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Hope you’ve had a wonderful June.

Yesterday was the ​last day of school​ here in Toronto.

I’ve been encouraged by school boards like ​Greenwood​ and ​Los Angeles​ coming out with cell phone bans in the wake of books like ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt (my review ​here​, my favorite pages ​here​ and ​here​).

If you’re looking for more encouragement to run from screens to pages check out my new deep dive chat with ​Jonathan Franzen​ on ​Apple​, ​Spotify​, or ​YouTube​.

Up here we're getting set for lots of family time—which means lots of reading time—and I’m packing a giant duffle bag full of books. Heavy! Back-jabby! But nothing beats setting up a little bookshelf wherever you land.

Thanks for landing here with me this month.

Now let’s get to the books…

Neil


1. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie. “Dad, is that fiction or non-fiction?” my son asked while staring at the freaky 3D blade popping out the cover of this book as it lay on the floor beside my bed. “Uh, non-fiction…”, “But it says attempted murder?”, “Yeah…”, “As in somebody tried to kill him?”, “Yeah…”, “What did he do?”, “Uh….well….” I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t really know the details. So I looked into it. Salman Rushdie was born 1947 in Bombay to an Indian ​Kashmiri Muslim​ family. At 17 he moved to England for boarding school before getting a degree at Cambridge and starting to write novels in his 20s. Wild novels! Magic realism on steroids. The plot of ​his first book​ is about “a young Native American man who receives the gift of immortality by drinking a magic fluid who then wanders the earth for 777 years 7 months and 7 days searching for his immortal sister and exploring identities…” Not exactly light reading! Rushdie says he was influenced by books like Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and the Margarita' (​6/2021​). But it was his fourth novel, ‘The Satanic Verses,’ published in 1988, that prompted the ​fatwa he is likely​ most famous for. It’s about two Indian Muslim actors flying to England on a plane that gets hijacked by Sikh separatists. The plane explodes! But the two are—magical realism style—miraculously saved before being turned into other beings who then, for the rest of the book, alternate between real life and dream sequences. In one of the dream sequences the prophet Muhammed is depicted and the so-called "​satanic verses​" from the Quran play a role in the plot. The book was hailed by literary critics as a masterpiece and simultaneously considered blasphemy. 10,000 people in Pakistan gathered to burn the book. The Indian Prime Minister banned it. Six months after the book came out the Ayatollah of Iran issued a “fatwa” on Salman Rushdie. “I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill him without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah willing.” He offered a $6 million prize. Margaret Thatcher’s British government put Rushdie into hiding. The Italian and Japanese translators of ‘The Satanic Verses’ were both stabbed—​one to death​. A wild and near-unbelievable story that died down through the 90s and 2000s, allowing Rushdie to leave hiding and live a more normalish life. But then, decades later, as he puts it in the opening sentence of this book: “At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keep writers safe from harm.” So begins this harrowing, absorbing 209-page memoir that reflects on the incident, the attacker, the state of politics and free speech in the world, and often just feels like a wild conversation between you and an exceptional man lucky to be alive. Rushdie talks about “experiencing the best and worst of human nature simultaneously,” talks about what losses around privacy and dignity feel like, discusses the importance of art and free speech and religious freedom. Honest and captivating. Highly recommended. (P.S. I just took pictures and posted my favorite pages from ​the book right here​.)

2. Owl Babies written by Martin Waddell and illustrated by Patrick Benson. We share a fear of abandonment. Being left alone without care—I’m sure it’s one of the root emotions from that pre-memory space of moving from being fully enclosed by our parent to being unenclosed in a suddenly brighter, colder, louder place. This 1992 picture book is essentially a captivating poem with deep-feeling illustrations that scratch and eventually soothe that ancient scab. Three baby owls awaken in a dark forest to find Owl Mother is GONE. (“Where’s Mummy?” asked Sarah. “Oh my goodness!” said Percy. “I want my mummy!” said Bill.) In vivid, dark “from the nest” illustrations the owls get curious, introspective, and brave on the branch together, before anxiety sets in. (“Suppose she got lost,” said Sarah. “Or a fox got her!” said Percy. “I want my mummy!” said Bill.) And then, in a dramatic two-page spread, just before the story finishes, when the tension is at max boil she—well, I don’t want to spoil the ending. But if you must know, you can have the whole book ​read to you on YouTube​. Please curl up on a carpet before hitting play. The publisher says it’s for Ages 2-4 but, as usual, I’m 40 years older and loved it. Highly recommended.

3. Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. Trevor Noah was 32 when he put out this 2016 memoir telling the fast-paced story of his remarkable childhood. This book is refreshingly free of anything recent—no behind the scenes at the Daily Show stories!—but rather a deep zoom into South Africa in the 80s and 90s from the perspective of a mixed-race kid with a hustling single mom. The book’s 'epigraph' is the 1927 South African Immorality Act which was created “To prohibit illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives and other acts in relation thereto” and then Trevor chiming in about it: “Where most children are proof of their parents’ love, I was the proof of their criminality.” He grows up in marathon church crawl Sundays, is thrown out of moving vehicles by his mom to escape gangsters, and is “five or six” when ​Nelson Mandela is released from prison​ and violence erupts around him. “The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets.” Mesmerizing and charming book told in long, sweeping stories that have a The Moth-like mix of real, strange, and profound mixed into a wonderfully sweet-and-sour slurp. Highly recommended.

4. The Women by Kristen Hannah. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book read and recommended by the woman I’m lucky to be married to: “One of my favorite books of all time is '​The Nightingale​' by Kristen Hannah, so when my book club picked her new book for our June read I ordered it before even reading anything about it. Equally captivating, similarly a 'her-story of a major historical event,’ speckled with romance, and braided with themes of female resistance, strength, and determination amidst war, trauma, mental health challenges, and family drama, this book definitely delivers! The epic story follows Frankie as she enlists for Vietnam as a naive and hopeful nurse and dives into the graphic traumas of soldiers dying in her arms, dressing amputations and chest wounds amidst nearby explosions, and tending to innocent women and children injured by the war. She evolves into an incredible skilled front line worker and the story then follows her into her post-war challenges and beyond for a hopeful finish."

5. The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been by Jake Berman. “Nobody’s gonna drive this lousy freeway when they can take the Red Car for a nickel.” That’s the wonderful epigraph of this book from Eddie Valiant in ‘​Who Framed Roger Rabbit​.’ Sadly, Eddie was dead wrong, as Jake Berman tells us in his Introduction when he says “I had assumed that cars in Los Angeles where just a fact of life, like beaches, palm trees, and tacos. But that wasn’t case at all. Gridlock was a choice that the people of Los Angeles had made.” A fascinating and fascinatingly obsessive book about the dream of mass transit to clear traffic and move people around futuristic metropolises and how that dream was chucked in the waste bin after World War II so we could all sit in cars in traffic jams instead. Jake zooms in on 23 North American cities and tells us stories like “a short history of a never used subway” (Cincinnati), “the mob takeover of twin city rapid transit” (Minneapolis-St. Paul), “the only city to open a subway and then close it” (Rochester), and “the subway as political football” (my hometown of Toronto). There are no winners here! Every city gets their own 10ish page red-faced history of the highs and (mostly) lows of their subway system—racist votes, illegal campaigns and all—complete with endless colorful pages of beautiful subway maps and old posters. Ultimately about what might have been, the book does an incredible job of filling in a history too few people know about.

6. Is This ‘One Of Those Days,’ Daddy? by Lynn Johnston. For 29 years from 1979 to 2008 Lynn Johnston created a cartoon strip unlike any other with the contemporary vaguely suburban, vaguely Canadian family of Ellie, John, Michael, and Elizabeth Patterson growing up in real-time alongside readers. The strip was read in thousands of papers, meaning it had one of those pre-social media followings in the millions. If you grew up with “For Better Or For Worse” you know how special it was—with simple strips complemented by weightier issues like midlife crises, divorces, bullying, and the coming out of Lawrence, Michael’s best friend, in 1992—more than a decade before Spain became the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage. (Even today ​only 20% of the world’s population lives somewhere gay marriage is legal​.) The strip isn’t all heavy though! Far from it. It’s both an artistic gem, with characters feeling lifelike as they invisibly grow from children to adults with children over the years, and a light-sided reflection of home life mirroring the values of the time. On Page 52 Ellie says no to her son Michael nagging her for treats in the grocery store for six panels before caving in and then concluding in a thought-bubble in the last panel with wide-open eyes of regret “Sometimes it’s a toss-up between being consistent or remaining sane.” Like Bill Watterson, Lynn Johnston elevates what a comic strip can do—in this case I feel like her greatest strength is constantly contrasting private thoughts to illuminate greater empathy towards everybody. A sample from page 99 when Michael is thinking in the first panel “I bet it’s neat being a grown-up” and then in the second panel “They can do what they want, an’ go where they want… they’re free!” before the scene opens into the third panel where Ellie and John’s silhouettes are now colored in with stressed expressions and thought bubbles reading “Bills! Bills! Cook! Clean! Organize!” and Michael concluding in the last panel “Boy … sure must be nice.” Many of the collections are out of print so it’s worth rummaging around second hand bookstores or at online shops like ​SecondSale​ or ​AbeBooks​. I love this copy I found of her second collection from ​Doug Miller Books​ complete with a December 25, 1982 inscription in cursive blue pen reading “Dearest Dad, Love + Best Wishes, Janice and Phil.”

7. Letters To His Daughter by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Maria Popova has read more ‘letters’ and ‘diaries’ than anyone I know. Perhaps more than anyone—period. (She’s talks about diaries a bit in her ​wonderful conversation with Krista Tippett​ from 2015.) Check out her posts on The Marginalian featuring the letters of ​Mary Wollstonecraft​, ​Bruce Lee​, and ​W.E.B. Dubois​. Since the only diaries I’ve ever read are from ​Anne Frank​ and ​Adrian Mole, Age 13 ¾​, I decided I needed to go a bit deeper. First I came across this wonderful ​'Letter To His 11-Year-Old Daughter In Camp'​ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and then I went ahead and ordered the whole book! It’s out of print so I ordered a used copy online. It’s stamped “Chesterfield-Marlboro Technical Education Center Library” and I can see from the borrower card at the back that it was signed out by Barbara Brewer on March 1, 1972, Joyce Miles on March 31, 1983, and seven times in between. Written mostly to his then 17-19 year old daughter Frances—who he calls “Pie,” Darlin’,” “Darling,” “Dearest,” “Scottina,” and “Scottie”—while she was at Vassar, all the way up till he died of a heart attack at age 44 just weeks before she graduated. In the flap copy the publishers say Fitzgerald was “trying to maintain his integrity and hope as a writer to be both father and mother, mainly by long distance, to his only child.” Writing from MGM Studios in Hollywood on November 25, 1938 he writes “I never blame failure—there are too many complicated situations in life—but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.” There’s a wonderfully erudite 1930s father-daughter tone throughout like when he writes “Your letter was a masterpiece of polite evasion” or cautions her about working too hard at the school play: “Amateur work is fun but the price for it is just simply tremendous. In the end you get ‘Thank you’ and that’s all.” But the best letter in the lot might be from his daughter! She writes the 'Introduction' and begins by saying “In my next incarnation, I may not choose again to be the daughter of a Famous Author. The pay is good, and there are fringe benefits, but the working conditions are too hazardous. People who live entirely by the fertility of their imaginations are fascinating, brilliant, and often charming, but they should be sat next to at dinner parties, not lived with.” She drops melancholic-twinged observations. “Good writers are essentially muckrackers, exposing the scandalous condition of the human soul.” And “I was an imaginary daughter, as fictional as one of his early heroines.” But eventually, generously, concluding: “Listen carefully to my father, now. Because what he offers is good advice, and I’m sure if he hadn’t been my own father that I loved and ‘hated’ simultaneously, I would have profited by it and be the best educated, most attractive, most successful, most faultless woman on earth today.—Scottie Lanahan” She sounds pretty faultless to me! Published in 1963 with Scottie’s intro added in 1965. A wonderful peek into a fascinating private relationship.

8. There is no 8! Just our regular loot bag of links. Surgeon General ​Vivek Murthy​ calls for ​health warnings on social media​. I really like this simple but powerful Icelandic ​anti-drunk driving ad​. Who's going to ​start this dating site​? John Green is figuring out ​what to share online​ after 20 years of self-promotion. A cerebral, vulnerable, slightly navel-gazey but genuinely fascinating ​chat​ between Amy Poehler and Dax Shepard. Anti-aging obsessive Bryan Johnson is ​selling snake oil​. Brad Stuhlberg wants us to invest in ​relationships and community​. And Tomas Peuyo issues a ​state of AI update​ that asks, "What would you do if you had 8 years left to live?"


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - May 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

It's hot and drippy in Toronto and I've been thinking again about what it means to live intentionally and at a more human pace. I just wrote a new post ​about escaping the algorithm​ and revisited the wonderful 'Team Human' by Douglas Rushkoff as you'll see in the reviews below.

I also spent time this month with wonderful souls in new places. One goal we've had for 3 Books since we started six years ago was tapping into street smarts—street wisdom!—from everyday people like ​bartenders​, ​variety store owners​, ​Uber drivers​, and ​nurses​.

In that spirit I just released a This American Life-ish conversation on ​'bullets, bruises, and babies'​ with three people I met driving around St. Louis and also spoke this week to a room of 6500 ICU and ER nurses in Denver. Stretched to the brink in a broken system I heard tales of heartbreak, overwork, and overwhelm on the front lines. It feels more important than ever we keep talking to each other—through books, in-person chats, and any rich veins of conversation we discover on our own journeys.

I hope this monthly book club—coming to you the last Saturday morning of the month for 90 months in a row now—can be a rich vein for you as it has been for me. Reply anytime to let me know what rich veins you're trusting and relying on in your own life these days.

And now—let's get to the books!

Neil


1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. See if the opening paragraph of this debut novel by Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar grabs you like it did for me: “Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over. Clarification. Lying on his mattress that smelled like piss and Febreze, Cyrus stared up at the room’s single light bulb, willing it to blink again, willing God to confirm that the bulb’s flicker had been a divine action and not just the old apartment’s trashy wiring.” The first third of the book flew by for me in a wonderfully told story of a wannabe-writer in Indianapolis whose mom died in a senseless military-trial-gone-wrong type of plane explosion over the Persian Gulf and whose dad skirted by in America killing chickens on a factory farm. What happens after the first third? The book got … heavy. Akbar started weaving in all kinds of chapters from new perspectives: Cyrus’s mom’s lesbian encounters in the 80s, dream sequences with Rumi, and little bits of Cyrus’s novel-in-progress throughout. Still, I recommend this book for the sentences. So many glorious sentences. Akbar clearly chipped away at it for a long time as it has a Steve Toltz 'A Fraction of the Whole' (​2/2023​) style of wordy acrobatics. And, I will add without giving anything away, the book does 'pay off' nicely in the end.

2. Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff. I’m in a Douglas Rushkoff mood lately. I just ​wrote about him​ in a new blog post and revisited our conversation in ​Chapter 83 of 3 Books before pulling his wonderful 2019 manifesto ‘Team Human’ off my shelf. This book has the force of a train. A fiery, breathless, culture-shifting manifesto told in 100 tight, short essays, which I learned he modeled after the wonderful ‘Finite and Infinite Games’ (​8/2022​). It all ultimately adds up to a takedown of “the antihuman agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions" and, for me, is a reminder to "find the others" and seek out deep human connection in the face of an increasingly anti-human world. We need Douglas’s voice right now. Check out his podcast Team Human, his eponymous ​Substack​ and, of course, this wonderful book. Highly recommended.

3. Figuring by Maria Popova. “How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?” That’s a question that comes up early in this book and it sort of umbrellas over everything Maria Popova puts out—from this book to her live sciencey-poetry ​Universe in Verse events​ to her wonderfully 18-year-running, flowering-in-all-directions site The Marginalian (formerly called Brainpickings). In this book she zooms up a level and tells a fascinating history of arts and science told through deeply engaging and endlessly braided tales of the artists and scientists themselves. They’re not linear stories, though, because as she writes: “Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of ‘biography’ but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams.” So we get many-sided diagrams of figures like Johannes Kepler, Maria Mitchell, Rachel Carson, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, told with an entrancing spell of Maria’s particular brand of poetic narrative with endless snips and clips of letters, speeches, and writings weaved in. I love the posture of this book. It's like Maria herself: fiercely intelligent, deeply humanist, very… macro-orthogonal. Maria has often called literature “the original Internet” and her ability to dive deeper and wider than anyone else is on full display here. The book gave me wonder, perspective and, like everything Maria, a great deal of heart.

4. Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Ted Floyd. I have a lot of field guides “to the birds.” My favorites are my hyper-regional 'Birds of Ontario' (​6/2020​) and the completist masterpiece 'Sibley Birds East' (​3/2021​). But I have a lot of others: guides for places I want to visit ('A Guide to the Birds of India, Pakistan, and Nepal'), guides I’ve received as gifts, and even a wonderfully water-stained copy of Roger Peterson's ‘​A Field Guide To The Birds​’ which ​Leslie’s grandmother​ left me. (Side note: I recently learned Peterson is credited with starting “field identification,” like as a thing, with the original 1934 ‘A Field Guide To the Birds.’) If you’re new to birding, you need a field guide. If you’re new to field guides, it’s easy to take ​J. Drew Lanham’s​ advice and grab one at a second hand shop. The birds don’t change—​even if their names may soon​! So what is it about this field guide that I love? Photos! That's it. This one has photos. Every single other field guide I have has drawings or paintings, but this has over 2000 photos of all 730 North American species! A must-add to the field guide collection.

5. It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health by Robie H. Harris and illustrated by Michael Emberley. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick! Over to Leslie: “What I would give for a landline in the kitchen and cable TV in the living room over this technologically-charged-matrix our kids are growing up in!! One area we're trying hardest to protect our kids from an ‘internet education’ is sexual education. I remember learning so much about how my body, hormones, emotions, and relationships were changing from books my Mom got me and so I’m trying to do the same for our kids. This book is geared to children 10 and up and gives details about both male and female puberty, how to understand strong feelings and sexual desires, why it’s important to talk to your doctor about sexually transmitted diseases, laws around abortion and the importance about talking about sexual abuse. It even dives into how to get information AND stay safe on the internet. If you’re thinking these topics feel too advanced to discuss with your 10-year-old, as someone who teaches health to elementary school students, I’m here to tell you they’re not. My best advice is to start the sex conversations early and just keep them short and sweet. Many tiny honest questions grow into bigger conversations and help keep the doors open. From the same authors, there is ‘​It’s Not The Stork​’ (for 4 and up) and ‘​It's So Amazing​’ (for 7 and up). If you need inspiration on what to talk about when, check out this ​resource​. If we wait until the teen years it’ll be harder and more awkward for everyone and our kids will likely look somewhere else like (ugh) unsafe corners of the internet. So, if you have a 10 to 14-year-old and want to dive into giving a sex education at home, reading this together is a great place to start.”

6. ‘What A Major Solar Storm Could Do To Our Planet’ by Kathryn Schulz. A few weeks ago a friend of mine who lives in suburban Ontario sent our grouptext pictures of the Northern Lights…from his backyard. He’d never seen them from his place before but it was the same day as that news report surfaced warning people of a “solar storm.” What’s a solar storm? Exactly! What is a solar storm? I had no idea till I waded into this epic 8200-word New Yorker feature from Kathryn Schulz which helps explain. Basically, five years ago FEMA made a list of possible disasters and found that only two could simultaneously affect the entire nation. One is pandemics (they nailed that one!) and the other is a severe solar storm. Schulz reminds us that “the sun is an enormous thermonuclear bomb that has been exploding continuously for four and a half billion years” and whose inner workings we’re only figuring out now. She tells a compelling history of notable solar storms throughout history (all before our now-susceptible power and satellite grids were in place) through the profile of the “space-weather forecaster” Ken Tegnell. A great primer on an issue that feels soon-to-be-frequently-discussed.

7. Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads by Gary Greenberg and Jeannie Hayden. Before we had kids Leslie read a pile of parenting books. Me, I read … just this one. Somebody passed it along and the opening spread made me laugh. (Click the pic ​on this page​ to see it.) On the left: “What Your Newborn Won’t Look Like,” with a drawing of a cuddly, giggling 3-month old baby and, on the right, “What Your Newborn Will Look Like,” with a dark, crying newborn with labels like “cone-shaped head from squeezing through the womb,” “lanugo—fuzzy hair on face, back, and shoulders. This will eventually disappear,” and “skinny, structurally unsound legs.” I have bought so many copies of this book and passed it along to any dad-to-be. It’s so eminently readable and has a lot of tidbits and advice I used for months and years after. The book divides up the the first year of baby and 0-3 months includes topics like “Coping with Crying,” which explains how to tell between six different types of cries, “Wrestling The Breast Pump,” and “A Guy’s Guide to Strollers.” By the time you get to 10-12 months there are advanced topics like “Babies and Restaurants,” “Advanced Changing” and, my favorite, “The Decoy Drawer.” Greenberg writes: “Somehow the baby senses the power your electronic gear possesses and will take every opportunity to seize and/or destroy them. You decide to buy the baby colorful plastic versions of their own but, of course, the baby immediately throws aside the imposters and goes back to the genuine articles. That’s why you need to create a decoy drawer full of old phones, remotes, wallets, keys, and credit cards. The drawer should be at a good baby height and all items need to be real but non-functioning. That way when baby opens the drawer they think they found the mother lode.” Surprisingly rich with a light and funny tone throughout.

8. City Parks: A stroll around the world’s most beautiful public spaces by Christopher Beanland. Have you heard of ‘​The Crane Index​’? It’s a construction industry-produced metric to track the number of active cranes in 14 major cities across North America. Guess what city is number one and has been for years? My hometown! Toronto’s skyline is ​currently dotted with 221 operating cranes​. To put that in perspective numbers 2, 3, and 4 on the list are LA with 50, Seattle with 38, and Calgary with 20. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” sang Joni Mitchell in ‘​Big Yellow Taxi​,’ and sometimes walking around Toronto these days you can almost feel the grass screaming. It was in that spirit I picked up this gorgeous visual escape into the greatest, grandest, grassiest city parks around the world. Organized by continent, the book gives lush 2-4 page spreads of each park along with a quick view of each from strong voiced globe-trotting park lover Christopher Beanland. When I first cracked open the book I checked my home country for credibility. There are precisely two Canadian parks in the book: Stanley Park in Vancouver and Mount Royal in Montreal. Biggies! Not a single park from Toronto but maybe that’s just how high the bar is here. ​Central Park​ in New York, ​Millennium Park​ in Chicago, ​Griffith Park​ in LA, that’s the scope of things. Here’s a snip of Beanland writing about ​Peace Memorial Park​ in Hiroshima, Japan, one of the few in the book I’ve actually visited: “Cemeteries are the most obvious examples of parks dedicated to death, but many memorial and peace parks dot the world too. Hiroshima’s brings together a collection of formal landscapes and tranquil gardens to memorialize that which was the opposite of both of those things: horror and slaughter on a previously unimaginable scale. But the language is telling: this is a Peace Park where the catastrophe of the atomic explosion of 1945 is seen as a warning to future generations, that the way and weapons of mass destruction must be avoided. Contains modernism museums and sculptures surrounded by lawns and trees. A mound at the centre contains the ashes of tens of thousands, peace bells toll to remind us, and the miraculously surviving A-Bomb Dome stands as a kind of monument to a human spirit that could not be crushed.” A wonderful coffee-table book to zoom us out of concrete jungles.

9. There is no 9! Just a little loot bag of links. Adam Grant reports on a study showing ​'banning smartphones in schools is good for learning and well-being.'​ We have to keep the pressure on to pull back from the tipping point. I didn't realize US birth rates are at the ​lowest level ever recorded​. I've been thinking on a parenting blog post Book Clubber Debbie S sent me called '​Pirates and Kings​' and enjoyed escaping this month listening to '​Living Proof​' by The War on Drugs and watching Jerry Seinfeld's funny and wise ​commencement speech to Duke University grads​.


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - April 2024

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Hey everyone,

Happy April!

The world is tilting away from social media. Can you feel it? It feels good. It feels so good.

Let’s get to the books!

Neil

PS. If you’re new to book club, sign up right here.


1. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt. Do you remember when nobody had cell phones? You’d spend half an hour at dinner trying to ​remember the name of that guy​ from that movie. You had to actually whistle at the corner of the street to get a ride home. And, my favorite, you just never knew where anyone was—pretty much ever. Pre-tracking, pre-surveilling, pre-obsessing-over-your-kids-whereabouts. Then twang! Culture snapped backwards. Partly because of the well-catalogued rise in the 1980s of 24/7 news and fear-based child abduction stories to hook us to the screens. Ensuing protectionism was accelerated by smartphones, then a pandemic, and now: we got issues. Higher than ever ​anxiety​, higher than ever ​depression​, higher than ever ​loneliness​. If we’re not careful we’ll end up like ​that scene in WALL-E​, riding our fat ships, sipping soylent, while being endlessly titillated by ​total entertainment forever​. But once in a while, once in a moment, a culture-defining book shows up at a culture-defining time to pull us back from the brink. To pull us back from fully hard-wiring ourselves into the matrix. That book is the wonderful ‘The Anxious Generation’ by NYU professor and brilliant thinker Jonathan Haidt (pronounced "height"). Yes, I said as I read this book, yes, yes, yes, yes. This is it! A deeply clear, deeply researched, deeply, dare I say, obvious clarion call for no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, entirely-phone-free schools, and a callback to open play for our kids instead of programmed safe-robot childhoods. (Jon even does a three-page photo spread on the value of ​old, dangerous playground equipment​. His rant on rusty merry-go-rounds was speaking my ​looooooove language​.) I love this book. I think you should buy it. By the dozen! By the skid! I am writing right now at my local coffee shop with the book sitting beside me and so far three people have come up asking me about the book. It’s hitting the zeitgeist hard—bang!—right when we need it most. Two people have just flipped through the book reading some of my highlights and I’d love to invite you to do the same. Here is ​part one of my highlights​. Here is ​part two​. I might post another. The whole book will be yellow soon! I just love Jon’s thoughts in here and, TBH, I think they could be stronger. I think a smartphone—like, access to the entire unfiltered world of anything and everything—should be age 16 not 14, so I’m arguing for eleventh grade not ninth grade as he is proposing. (Cal Newport ​agrees​, btw.) But let’s start somewhere! This book delivers many things including a much-needed slap to the face of tech companies who inadvertently, then advertently, began messing up our kids. Started innocently! On page 3 Jon writes: “… in 2008 my two-year-old son mastered the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone. Many parents were relieved to find that a smartphone or tablet could keep a child happily engaged and quiet for hours. Was this safe? Nobody knew, but because everyone else was doing it, everyone just assumed that it must be okay.” But then, looking back from years later: “Companies that strive to maximize ‘engagement’ by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. They hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation. This included social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys.” Wait, did they know what they were doing? They did! On page 227 Sean Parker, first president of Facebook, says “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” and then goes on to share how he, Zuckerberg, Systrom et al “understood this consciously. And we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our children’s brains.” On page 230 Jon shows us Zuckerberg’s market-based approach. He writes: “In August 2019, I had a video call with Mark Zuckerberg… I told him that when my children started middle school, they each said that most of the kids in their class (who were 10 or 11 at the start of sixth grade) had Instagram accounts. I asked Zuckerberg what he planned to do about that. He said, ‘But we don’t allow anyone under 13 to open an account.’ I told him that before our call I had created a fake account for a fictional 13-year-old girl and I encountered no attempt to verify my age claim. He said, ‘We’re working on that.’ While writing this chapter (in August 2023), I effortlessly created another fake account. There is still no age verification, even though age verification techniques have gotten much better in the last four years, nor is there any disincentive for preteens to lie about their age.” Go get ’em, Jon! Get ready to smash your router with a hammer and take your kids to the park after reading how our social interactions have, for millions of years, been embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, with a high bar for entry or exit. Whereas now we have slathered ourselves so deeply digital that social relationships have become disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, with a low bar for entry and exit. No wonder we are lonely! (Which is, no biggie, ​worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day​, according to this report from Surgeon General ​Vivek Murthy​.) Paraphrasing Esther Perel: ​'We got a thousand friends online but nobody to feed our cat.'​ Tightly written, endlessly punctuated with charts, with every chapter nicely summarized with a perfect bullet-point one-pager, this book is designed for max skimmability. You could honestly just flip past the 100 graphs and get the story. This is a rallying cry and anti-tech manifesto which offers new ways of living that look an awful lot like old ways of living. I am continuing to work with my school and public school board to ​get cell phones out of schools​. I am asking my city councillor for more ‘loose parts’ playgrounds instead of neon-red Safe-T-Shapes that no one likes. I am sending ​the wonderful work from the Let Grow movement to my public school board's Director of Education​ while also working hard with Leslie to give my kids longer and longer ranges so they can grow up untethered and antifragile. I have a long way to go but this book is nitro to get there. As Jon says in the very last three sentences of the book: “The Great Rewiring of Childhood, from play-based to phone-based, has been a catastrophic failure. It’s time to end the experiment. Let’s bring our children home.” Amen. Listen to my 2022 chat with Jon in his kitchen, over his wife’s delicious Korean food, ​right here​. Read my favorite pages from the book ​here​ and ​here​. Tell your neighbors about the book. Tell your friends! Tell your principals! Let’s keep the movement building. This book has been at the top of The New York Times bestseller list every single week since it came out a month ago and is currently #1 overall non-fiction book in the world on Amazon. WE HAVE LIFTOFF! Get a copy from your local indie bookstore, from the ​library​, from Jon's site ​directly​, from my ​non-commission-link-splitter​. Just get it! Highly recommended.

2. Goodbye, Galleria by Shari Kasman. I’ve been feeling mall-nostalgic lately. They’re bashing them down all around me. The people demand luxury condo skyscrapers! The $3 million dollar condo crowd simply will not rest till they get brand-name sinks on the 37th story! So malls are going. Fare thee well. Headed the way of the ​Passenger Pigeon​. Mall loss makes me sad. Not just for nostalgia! For community. Malls fostered and made deeply inclusive space for warmth, rest, and connection across society. The malls I grew up with were always strata-slicing not disparity-amplifying. They weren’t for rich people. They weren’t for poor people. They were for people. When we were little my sister and I would be led by our parents through Eaton’s or The Bay, past the perfume-sprayers, out onto the embossed-brown-circles-on-brown-vinyl long ramp up and into a world of Fabriclands, Grand&Toys, and Coles Bookstores, before getting Manhattan Fries in a paper box with a tiny wooden fork or, sometimes, sitting on Santa’s lap. I miss the Rave Rave Rave in the Five Points Mall, the dark and long Oshawa Centre, and the forever-sandy floors at the Whitby Mall. We’d walk past old men with hairy shoulders in white tank tops on wooden benches outside the barber shop while moms with their hair in buns and open-buttoned winter jackets swerved strollers with big plastic bags hanging off the ends. This evocative photo journal by Shari Kasman gave me rushing wistfulness, blurry memories, and bittersweet nostalgia as she catalogues a two-year Halcyon Day period in the life of the Galleria Mall, which opened at the corner of Dufferin and Dupont in downtown Toronto in 1972. She writes: “Arcade games, rides, and candy dispensers that once lined the corridors are gone, and sheets of paper cover store-front windows formerly inhabited by fashionable mannequins. The food counter has vanished, and parts of the ceiling have been torn down, revealing the mall’s guts: wiring and ductwork. Even the iconic brown floor tiles have started to disappear.” There are shots of faded Zellers signs and we cruise past stores with names like Smoker’s Choice, Vic’s Fashion Jewelry, Health Food, and !nk Smart. The book is a twinge mocking but the tone wasn’t strong enough to negatively affect my read-feel. I know I’ll keep picking it up for the rest of my life whenever I suddenly feel like walking through a mall of my childhood. Thank you for this gift, Shari. And thank you to new downtown Toronto indie bookstore ​Flying Books​ for displaying it at the cash. Highly recommended.

3. Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin. I walked over to visit my friend ​Michael Bungay-Stanier​ (The Coaching Habit) the other night and got there early. There was a ​Little Free Library​ across the street so I snapped open the magnet-attached door and found a pristine copy of this book inside. I have never seen a Jerry Seinfeld blurb on a book before and this one jumped out: “One of the best books about comedy and being a comedian ever written,” says the comedy king. So I picked it up! What is the book? A 17-year-old memoir by then-62-year-old Steve Martin, entirely written with a comic’s keen eye for economy. Short, tight sentences from The School of Cormac McCarthy. Steve tells a straight-faced, occasionally funny, always honest story of what might seem like a relatively benign life ordering magic tricks out of the back of a magazine and getting a job at the joke shop and, later, having panic attacks on weed and reconnecting with his family. But nothing sounds benign through Steve Martin’s lens. And what helps make the book special are endlessly weaved in morsels of from-my-later-years wisdom. He sounds a bit like the invisible narrator of ‘​The Wonder Years​’ and always comes across as humble and open-hearted. On page 27: “… my mother grew more and more submissive to my father in order to avoid his temper. Timid and secretive, she whispered her thoughts to me with the caveat ‘Now, don’t tell anyone I said that,’ filling me with a belief, which took years to correct, that it was dangerous to express one’s true opinion.” He shares his values. On page 34, after getting the job at the joke shop: “I harbored a secret sense of superiority over my teenage peers who had suntans, because I knew it meant they weren’t working.” He shares regrets. Page 46, after hitting the road as a struggling weird-magician playing to near-empty rooms: “When I moved out of the house at eighteen, I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn’t know I was supposed to.” He shares thoughts on comedy: “All entertainment is or is about to become old-fashioned,” and, “The more physically uncomfortable the audience, the bigger the laughs.” He talks about non-obvious ingredients to success: “Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.” And his later chapters on wrestling with fame are spectacular and must-read for anyone navigating dynamics of public attention. Tightly squeezed, highly concentrated, and double-spaced with lots of photos so the 204 pages feel breezy. Sometimes when you’re walking across town to your buddy’s place and completely mistime it you are lucky enough to discover a wonderful book. Highly recommended.

4. Five Little Indians by Michelle Good. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book personally chosen and recommended by my wife. Over to you, Les! “Five Little Indians is a heartbreaking, hope-filled, empathy-expanding book about five survivors of Canada’s ​residential schools​. The story follows Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie’s lives as they are released from their detainment and struggle, with great determination, to find safety and some way forward. Their lives weave and interconnect through themes of resilience, the dire impacts of childhood trauma, healing, and perseverance. Since I closed the book I haven’t stopped thinking about each of them and how their stories represent so many other people whose childhoods were stolen from them, so many others who are struggling today because of how they were mistreated as children, and how incredibly damning childhood trauma is. This book should be required reading for every Canadian as we work to come to terms with the horrors that happened here in Canada and somehow use the lessons of the past to work toward protecting children around the world from violence, control, and mistreatment.”

5. Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sacher. I remember being 8 years old thinking I didn’t like books. I remember I used to! But suddenly I didn’t like reading anymore. My librarian at Sunset Heights Public School, Mrs. Farrell, had shocks of wild maroon and black hair and thick glasses, and she said “Neil, you just haven’t found the right book.” She guided me through the metallic wire bookshelves full of crinkly laminated paperbacks and picked up ‘Sideways Stories from Wayside School’ and handed it to me. The book blew my mind! Funny, absurd, transgressive, a bit deranged, it represented a way I was coming to see the world. I loved it right from the four sentences on the back cover: “There’d been a terrible mistake. Wayside School was supposed to be built with thirty classrooms all next to each other in a row. Instead, they build the classrooms one on top of each other … thirty stories tall! (The builder said he was very sorry.)” One important note: If you get the book I recommend the version illustrated by Julie Brinkloe. Each of the 30 chapters, for each of the 30 students on the 30th story of Wayside School, is opened with a cherubic, Fox Trotty-style cartoon from Julie that (to me) perfectly matches the tone of the book. The book was written in 1978 and the Brinkloe art was commissioned by Avon Books for this 1985 edition. Later editions make the art too abstract and surreal. So I say find Sideways Stories from your local used bookstore—or from online used seller Abe Books! Btw, I put Louis Sacher and this book in the Acknowledgements for The Book of Awesome in 2010 and was lucky enough to meet him in 2020 when we sat down for a 3 Books interview​. (Turns out a lot of his absurdism was inspired by ‘Nine Stories’ by J.D. Salinger! (​6/2020​))

6. Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti. This is not a book. It is a piece of modern art…wrapped in a book. Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour and Motherhood, has pulled off an incredible feat: She typed up 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals in Microsoft Excel, kept them all in their original ‘sentence form’ but ignored all paragraphs and dates, and then—poof, magic!—sorted all the sentences … alphabetically. “How much I enjoy pleasure. How much pleasure there is in just sitting around, writing, eating and reading. How nice it is to contemplate new things for a change, and how good it would be to do that every day, just as last night we contemplated the stars, another day it could be a tree; how many experiences are available to us in the nearest vicinity that we do not grasp hold of, let alone all those experiences at a further distance. How nice it is to have all these lovers, whatever happens with them. How nice it would be if one could actually rely on them. How random life is!” Um…wow, Sheila, you keep good diary. Flip this magic trick open to any page and you are met with a twisted sour-sweet combination of banality, wisdom, sultriness, and little confessions or ideas towards ever-so-slightly better living. Everything is mixed together and shared unflinchingly through the cloak provided by the alphabetization. Here are the book’s opening 3 sentences: “A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections.” There are 25 chapters in the book because she didn’t start a single sentence in 10 years with the letter X. Here’s how ‘chapter’ B starts: “Back at his place, he showed me pictures of his ex-girlfriend, and I talked to him about Lars. Back home, I just lay in my room alone and masturbated, content with my mediocrity. Bad metaphor, humans as machines.” Now while it may sound like putting together this book was a simple task it was clearly lonnnnnng-simmered—boiled down, down, down for years, years, years. By my count this book is around 50,000 words which means 90% of the diary was thoughtfully chiseled away to leave the glittering silhouettey-statue that remains. Brave, daring, vulnerable, tender, funny, sexy and always a little wonderfully askew, this is a deeply insightful, Instagram-fracturing diary of a novelist thoughtfully coming of age downtown in the 2010s. Highly recommended.

7. The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck. This is one of the most wonderful and wonderfully unusual books I have ever read. First up, Steinbeck! You know Johnny Steinbeck. Pulitzer-Prize winning author of 'East of Eden' (​03/2017​), '​Of Mice and Men​', and '​The Grapes of Wrath​'. But did you know that in 1940, after controversy erupted around The Grapes of Wrath (“Communist! Labor-sympathizer! Socialist!”), Johnny decided to say eff y’all and ship out. Literally. He and his pal Edward F. Ricketts (the basis of the character ‘Doc’ in ‘​Cannery Row​’ five years later) hailed a little sardine boat called the Western Flyer, together with its hilarious never-working-properly side boat, and then went on a slightly bizarre, world-connecting, animal-collecting, pattern-seeing, often meditative, and occasionally brain-burstingly philosophical 4000 mile voyage around the Baja peninsula (aka the big long pinky-finger down the left side of Mexico), into the Gulf of California which, I learned, is also known as The Sea of Cortez. The book is arranged in a series of vivid diary entries through March and April 1940. There are so many wonderful pull-quotes I want to share with you that I turned them into an ​entirely separate blog post and posted it right here​. Steinbeck’s thoughts on pelicans, sea lions, the military complex, the turning tides of time, teleology (which was our ​Word of the Chapter with Cal Newport​!), and much, much more. The book is coated in all kinds of intros, outros, and appendices, none of which I read. But the journal entries—wow, they take you right there. If you want to sail a boat around Baja eighty years ago, this is the book for you. Highly recommended.

8. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I first came to this book via Gretchen Rubin, who called it one of her 3 most formative books way, way back in the ​Paleolithic era of the podcast​. I’ve since found it to be the perfect chapter book to read aloud with burgeoning brains. I just read it with my five-year-old who was enraptured throughout. It begins: “Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house of logs. The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were more trees. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them.” Sounds like not much goes down! But ah, that’s where you’re wrong. Panther attacks and smoking fish in trees and playing catch with pig bladders—it all goes down in the very first volume of the nine-book “Little House” series which begins with this 1932 classic. Make sure you get the version illustrated by Garth Williams! We just made that mistake with the sequel ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ which we’re reading now. Had to exchange our tiny, fine-print edition for 18-point font version with good ol' Garth’s drawings. (Who, I just learned, did ‘Charlotte's Web’ (​2/2020​) and ‘Stuart Little,’ too!). Anyway, back to 'Little House in the Big Woods': A vivid, highly detailed, unforgettable photo tableau of life in Wisconsin in the 1800s. Highly recommended.

9. There is no 9! Just our regular loot bag of links. First up, I just released a long-form chat with Cal Newport and it’s one of my ​early experiments on YouTube​. (You can listen on ​Apple​ or ​Spotify​, if you prefer.) An interesting way to look at ‘2000 years of economic history ​in one chart​.’ 'Nature' writes a ​critical review of Jon Haidt's book​ and he ​responds on Twitter​. A few smart things Morgan Housel ​has read lately​. 10 hidden Mac features ​you didn’t know existed​. One more shoutout to check out the ​Let Grow movement​ and, of course, ​‘The Anxious Generation.’​ I am getting more into street art and street love and am enjoying the ​Toronto Sign Reimagination Unit​, the wandering exploits of Toronto-based street artist ​Lewis Mallard​ (who dresses up like a duck and quacks across the city), and the incredible street murals created by fellow bird aficionado ​Nick Sweetman​ (I mean, ​come on​!).

Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - March 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Are you finding any time to read these days?

If yes, kudos! You're a reader. You're ahead of the pack! If not, you came to the right place. You're already reading this. The cultural push against social media and cell phone addiction is growing into a fierce tidal wave. The solution to much of what ails us? Getting outside, hanging IRL with friends, and, of course, getting back into reading books.

I read 5 books a year, tops, before I started this book club. This is one of 8 habits I use to keep pushing against our endlessly-cajoling algorithmic overlords.

You help me read more.

I help you read more.

It's a simple trade.

Let's keep at it!

Neil

PS. If you have a friend who wants to read more they can join us right here.


1. Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying The Birds In Your Own Backyard by Joan E. Strassmann. I went to St. Louis for the first time ever a couple weeks ago. I made sure to see the Eurasian Tree Sparrow (a St. Louis species!), the 630-foot-tall and 630-foot-wide Gateway Arch, and, of course, the famous Left Bank Books. Founded in 1969, it’s an incredible bookstore with the mission to ‘spark public conversation by curating an intelligent, relevant, culturally diverse selection of books.’ That they do! When you walk in there’s a giant Book Club Wall with an immaculate grid of front-facing ‘Current Reads' from a host of store-sponsored + local book clubs. They host a Gay Men’s Book Club, a Lesbian Book Club, and a Well-Read Black Girl Book Club, among many others. They have a wonderful Used / Rare Books basement with a (potentially used / definitely rare) POS system! And there is (of course) the loveable bookstore black puffy cat Orleans, who curls up in a basket under the front table. Oh! And no joke: they host over 300 free public events a year! Those are Books&Books-sized numbers. Since you are not allowed to leave a bookstore without buying a book, I wandered and browsed and asked for some uniquely local books. I ended up with ‘The Twenty-Seventh City’ by Jonathan Franzen (with the Gateway Arch on the cover!) as well as this autographed copy of a wonderful book by St. Louis author Joan Strassman, a professor at 1853-founded (!) St. Louis-based Washington University. What’s the thesis? “If you tie in the biological stories that go with the birds, they will be much more rewarding to watch.” Amen! She splits the book into chapters focusing on 'backyard birds' — Blue Jay, European Starling, Cooper's Hawk, etc. — and then goes wonderfully and meditatively deep on each one, taking us through important research that have helped us learn about their behavior (Cooper’s Hawks in BC have bigger feet than in the Midwest because in BC their diet is mostly caught in mid-air whereas in the Midwest it's more off-the-ground), showing how the birds fit into our culture (“Did blue as a color of law enforcement first come from Blue Jays?”), and then giving us tips to become better ‘slow birders’ for each species (like how to use feather color to guess the age of Starlings). A book to deepen the love of backyard birds and to perhaps help take J. Drew Lanham’s advice to us to wean ourselves off compulsive listing.

2. Wild About Books by Judy Sierra. This is one of the very best books I know to get a kid excited about reading. “It started in the summer of 2002, When Springfield librarian Molly McGrew, By mistake drove her bookmobile into the zoo.” What follows? The animals go wild, simply wild, for books, of course. “Giraffes wanted tall books and crickets craved small books, While geckos could only read stick-to-the-wall books. … She even found waterproof books for the otter, Who never went swimming without ‘Harry Potter.’” Marc Brown of ‘Arthur’ fame does the art and Judy channels her PhD in Folklore (!) into a Seussian-inspired passion for fast-paced rhymes in this delightfully energizing and reading-reaffirming romp through the wide world of books. I noticed online this book has sold over 500,000 copies. That's zillions in the contemporary kids book category! (My kids book sold 50,000.) 20 years later this book is still incredibly popular for good, good reason. Highly recommended.

3. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport. Cal feels like a bit of a kindred spirit. He was editor of his campus comedy paper. I was editor of my campus comedy paper. He has no social media apps on his phone. I have no social media apps on my phone. He writes about deep work. I write about untouchable days. He makes books and podcasts. I make books and podcasts. Are we both banging the same drum? Perhaps merging identities? Maybe! So what is ‘slow productivity’? Cal said he first tested the phrase in a February 2022 episode of The Tim Ferriss Show and noticed it had strong resonance with the fractured-attention set. Basically, it boils down to three principles: 1) Do fewer things, 2) Work at a natural pace, 3) Obsess over quality. Sounds simple, right? Trite, even! But that’s when you raise your head and realize the world is conspiring against you doing any of these. I mean, capitalism (or perhaps what Cal coins 'pseudo productivity') tends to reward ... doing more things, working at an unnatural pace, and obsessing over quantity. This is a slim read and it’s full of lengthy deep dives on people like Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, which will hopefully help charge you up to live a slowly productive life. I will add that while I’m not perfect at this I am completely into it and have been for a while. I don’t have any employees — no big team, no big office — and yet in the past 15 years I’ve put out 10+ books, 100+ podcasts, 500+ speeches, and have 4 newsletters, including the daily awesome thing I’ve written since 2008. What are tradeoffs? Lots! Small ones and big ones. On the smaller side: no social media apps, no video games, no Netflix, no ... uh, relaxing? At least it's something I've struggled with. And then, on the bigger side, at least in my experience, by not managing a team, I also, in some sense, trade impact. Scaling, growth, changing a billion lives — yeah, uh, not sure I'll get there. This book did that thing that great books do: It made me think. Helped me wonder and self-examine. Cal is swinging hard here. He's saying: "I've thought a lot about this. I'm idiosyncratic. Now lemme tell you all my ideas." I think with his growing profile as a New Yorker writer and the fact he's only 41 years old we are inching closer and closer to Peak Cal. I highly recommend his podcast Deep Questions and exploring the treasure trove of his bibliography — including long-ago written gems such as 'How To Be A High School Superstar.' Be sure to check out this wonderful book.

4. Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs. I first ‘met’ Jane Jacobs through her 2006 obituary. Now almost twenty years later I find myself increasingly drawn to her voice. In obits The Economist called Jane an “anatomiser of cities” and The New York Times said she was a “writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet…” She is perhaps most famous for helping thwart Robert Moses’ plans to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have carved up SoHo, Little Italy, and Chinatown, and then she followed that Finishing Move by moving to Toronto and … doing it again! Thwarting the Spadina Expressway which would have shredded our downtown. Jane The Double-Thwarter! When we sat down with Jeff Speck, author of ‘Walkable City’ (3/2020), we fell into a rabbit hole of Jane Jacobs quotes including one of my favorites: “By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” Well, I recently found a used copy of this book — written at age 88, one year before she died — and found it gripping. In Chapter 1 she writes that “the purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off ….” She speaks with giant scope and discusses cultures all hitting Dark Ages, including the Roman Empire which crumbled in the fifth century, the Islamic Empire of the eighth to fifteenth centuries, and ancient Chinese Empires that (I learned) ruled the seas 500 years ago — sending 400-foot long ships holding up to 28,000 (!) sailors to Africa decades before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. “Centuries before the British Royal Navy learned to combat scurvy with rations of lime juice on long sea voyages,” she writes, “the Chinese had solved that problem by supplying ships with ordinary dried beans, which were moistened as needed to make bean sprouts, a rich source of Vitamin C.” But then what? You guessed it: Dark age. A new political party comes in and halts voyages and dismantles shipyards. Skills are lost over a couple generations. She goes through that refrain again and again: how we can’t assume that what we have won’t slip away and how we need to actively strive to make things better. This book carries deep wisdom from your activist elder as you learn about the five key pillars of culture, and how they’re currently showing signs of decay. “Families Rigged To Fail,” “Credentialing Versus Educating,” “Science Abandoned,” “Dumbed-Down Taxes,” and “Self-Policing Subverted.” It’s dark territory, and occasionally too micro, but you can feel Jane striving, at the end of her life, to close things out with a positive finish. Clear, punchy, and with a delightful air of Marisa Tomei-on-the-witness-stand-in-‘My Cousin Vinny’ throughout. Highly recommended.

5. The One And Only Bob by Katherine Applegate. Here comes this month's Leslie's Pick! Over to you, Les: "'The One and Only Bob' has just as much emotion and humor as the first book in the series, 'The One and Only Ivan,' (8/2021) and as our 9 year old said, "I think it was a bit better because it had more adventure and less animal cruelty.” I personally preferred 'The One and Only Ivan' (bit more into rooting for a gorilla to escape captivity in a mall than rooting for a dog to find his long-lost sister in a hurricane) but this is still a wonderful book to read aloud with kids who are otherwise reading chapter books independently. There is such strong voice, subtleties that are powerful to pause and discuss, and some more mature themes, but not the even more mature ones like being an orphan, living through war, major bullying, racism, and mental health that I find riddle most chapter books for the 8-12 age group and (to me) seem more appropriate for 12-15 year olds. My favorite part of this book is that we are just both so excited to read it every night. After many nights of him preferring to read alone, I will gladly read aloud any book he wants for the time together, to have our bodies close to each other, have heart-forward discussions, and connect before bedtime. I recommend reading this with your school-age independent reader, too. Can’t wait to read 'The One and Only Ruby' next!"

6. The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Do you wish there was a giant plug we could yank out of the wall one day a week to shut everything down? Dmmmmmmmmm. Remote control buttons don’t do anything. Payment systems go offline. Screens all black. Maybe you hear birds chirping out your window a bit more. Sun on your skin. Look round at your family. Chat with the neighbors. Would it be that different from a few decades ago when essentially nothing opened Sundays? I grew up in the Toronto suburbs in the 1980s and it was agreed: Sunday was family day, rest day, church day, reflection day. “Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly man must fight for inner liberty,” writes Abraham Heschel in this slim, 73-year-old interpretation and explanation of the Sabbath, the traditional Jewish day of rest from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. I like the idea. I say bring it back! “Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people.” Yes! The book is slim — 100 pages on the nose — but it’s got a thick, dense, unfurling feeling like some kind of deep-in-the-jungle fern. Heschel came to America in 1940, mastered English, and wrote this book 11 years later as a way to expand and introduce the Sabbath to a wider audience. Why? Simple: “The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence from it.”

6. Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams At The Edge of Death Valley by Brent Underwood. I first met Brent Underwood about eight years ago when he was running a hostel in Austin, Texas. He had a strong marketing mind, sharpened from years of working with Ryan Holiday, but a calm, easy spirit — sitting in a swinging chair on a porch, pasting Polaroids on the wall, kind of daydreamy way of looking at the world. Maybe that’s why four years ago he mortgaged everything he had to suddenly … uh, buy a ghost town? In the middle of nowhere? And then proceed to get trapped there at the start of the pandemic?? And then become a big-name YouTube star? Didn’t see that coming! But I love what it’s done for Brent and the now millions of people who have followed his pilgrimage and steep personal growth curve to find and connect his place in the world with all that’s come before. I guess hanging out 900 feet below ground — where he, no joke, recorded the audio book to this memoir — will have that effect on a person. The ideas in here aren’t revolutionary but they are earnest and speak to a generation trying to find their way. Pairing personal risk, hard lessons, and online stardom may be the story of our time. A great book for millennials and Gen Zs searching, seeking, trying to find their way. In other words: lots of us! Read the Preface of the book right here.

7. The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe and Salva Rubio. This is a true and inspiring read-it-in-an-hour graphic-novel distillation of the 433-page book of the same name. Dita Kraus is the 94-year-old Holocaust survivor who, as a young girl, remarkably functioned as a stealthy underground librarian in a Nazi death camp. What do you grasp at, reach for, cling to, when someone is trying to … exterminate your culture? A horrifying question. One answer gently offered here is … books. Stories. To quietly and compassionately (and desperately) pass around ideas and wisdom, despite the circumstances, in spite of the circumstances. This book rings hard today. I was thinking about what little I truly know or understand about what’s happening in the Middle East right now. In the past five months over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed. 30,000!? (Source) The UNICEF executive director just said “We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world.” (Source) Horrifying to contemplate, even despite the circumstances that led to these atrocities. How many stories are being lost? How many will never be told? The authors and illustrators have done a wonderful job balancing many interlacing storylines while being extremely compassionate, careful, and sensitive with the complex material. Highly recommended.

9. There is no 9! Just an update. I've been working with the TDSB for years on cell phone policies. TDSB is the Toronto District School Board, the largest school board in Canada and the fourth largest school board in North America with 238,000 students. After speaking with them in 2018 I recommended a Zones, Modeling, and Fasting idea to address the growing pervasiveness of problematic cell phone use. I was then asked by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) to speak to the country on national TV about what I considered 'the biggest problem facing Canadians.' What did I talk about it? You guessed it: Cell phone addiction. Then I was invited back to speak to all Principals and Vice-Principals again last summer and before I spoke I was told "We aren't contemplating a policy change at this time." It's hard to think about policy changes at that level! There are so many variables and so much pushback and policing. But, I'm lucky, I was ... external. So I went onstage and ... called for policy change! I asked Principals and Vice-Principals, for the sake of their students (and my kids who go to TDSB!) to ban cell phones from schools. Many Principals did it on their own in the absence of a higher-level policy. Grassroots! Bottoms up! Then I began working with the Chair and Director on a blanket policy for the board. We were largely drawing on the excellent work by Jon Haidt who has been publishing incredible stuff on his After Babel Substack for the past couple years. (Here's me hanging out in Jon's kitchen talking about this and formative books.) Now, the latest is I'm reading Jon's brand new ‘The Anxious Generation’ which just came out Tuesday (and is #4 overall on all of Amazon ... though I got my copy from my local indie Type Books) and the TDSB has just announced a $4.5 billion lawsuit against Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat. The tide is shifting! We know cell phones are dangerous. Let's raise the social media age to 16! Let's ban cell phones from classrooms! Let's avoid smartphones before high schools! Brains only get one change to develop. Let's keep pushing ...


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - February 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Hope you’ve had a great February.

I got so many generous replies to my ​recent blog post on death​. Thank you for your love, poems, thoughts.

On the podcast, I feel like we’re in a wonderful flow. Today's the full moon — this minute actually, look up! — so I'll send a letter about it to those of you on my 3 Books email list​ after lunch with details. Upcoming guests include Celine Song, Susan Orlean, Jonathan Franzen, Maria Popova. As always, if you have a guest suggestion, just give me a shout at ​1-833-READ-A-LOT​. (Yes, this is my phone number.)

And now, as we’ve done every month since October 2016, here is every single book I read this month along with my honest review. Few were tough to write this month. I don't love trashing Harry Potter. But, as always, nobody can buy their way onto my book club and nobody can buy their way off.

Know someone who'd like to join our reading or hopeful-to-read-more tribe? Just forward them this email. Howdy, newcomer! Great to be with you and you ​can sign up right here​.

Now let’s hit the books…

Neil


1. The Trial by Franz Kafka. “No one’s got Kafka these days,” Patrick told me recently, petting his cat behind the counter at the underground used bookstore mecca Seekers. “Can’t keep him in stock. Nobody can. Hits too close to home these days.” Could that be true? No used bookstore in all of Toronto has anything written by the 1883-born Franz Kafka? This is a guy who instructed his buddy Max to burn all his unpublished books after he died. Max, sharp dude, did the opposite. I went hunting in a few used bookstores – gotta buy Kafka used, I figured! – but eventually caved in and went online to ​AbeBooks​ to find the 1954 edition of the 1925 publication of the 1914 written book that sounds like a 100-year-in-the-future prophecy of our ​low-trust​ ​surveillance state​. First sentence sets the scene: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Why? “We are not authorized to tell you that,” say the cops, who are mercilessly beaten in a closet later on. This is a slowly-closing-in-on-all-sides tale of foreboding. Can you imagine being arrested by a remote, inaccessible authority, without your crime being revealed to you? Maybe doesn't seem as farfetched as it should! There's a reason ​kafkaesque​ became a word, after all. Max stitched the chapters together from Franz’s handwritten scraps so chapters do feel occasionally ... stitched together. But it does all add up to a highly engrossing, wonderfully paced, increasingly bleak book that gave me skin-crawling anxiety. Yet there is art in the bleakness! Reflection and thundering thematic resonance across space and time. Highly recommended.

2. 150 Bookstores You Need to Visit Before You Die by Elizabeth Stamp. Lots to like about this book! Lots to not like, too. But let’s start with the positive: It's a beautiful, colorful collection of some of the world’s most stunning bookstores, paired with a 200-ish word writeup mentioning what makes each unique – from the “Winnie Mandela mural” (​Cheche Books​, Nairobi, Kenya), Pacific Northwest section (​Arundel Books​, Seattle, Washington), or unique, store-made stationary (​Podpisnie Izdaniya​, St. Petersburg, Russia). Cliffside bookstores! Main Street Mississippi bookstores! Glass boxes in the middle of Chinese jungle bookstores! Everything’s here! Or: so it seems. Then you look closer. And realize it's not. So that’s my quibble. The book just isn’t in any way … authoritative. Like here in Toronto, for instance. We’ve got one bookstore featured from the city. Great! But, no offense to ​Queen Books​, they picked the wrong one. ​Type Books​, which Queen Books is clearly based on, is not featured – but Type is superior. More history, more events, more weird genres (“Plotless Fiction” becoming so culty they’ve ​stamped it on T-shirts now​.) Or what about the four-story baby-blue behemoth ​BMV​? Way more of a standout on the Toronto bookstore scene, with its entirely-graphic-novel attic, basement full of vintage 70s pinup mags, and lock-and-key rare book glass shelves featuring $700 dictionaries. And no ​Monkey’s Paw​? Come on. There’s a reason Monkey’s Paw is ​featured in Atlas Obscura​. The place sells “Old and Unusual Printed Matter” and has the world’s only Biblio-Mat – an ​incredible book vending machine​! How do you skip any of those for newbie Queen Books? Or ​Parnassus Books​ in Nashville, or ​The Painted Porch​ in Bastrop, or ​Nowhere Bookshop​ in San Antonio? How do you miss them? By… uh, not visiting. Yes, upon closer inspection, the book is written by Elizabeth Stamp, about whom we get 0 biographical info. Is she a bookseller? Book tourist? Book anything? Where does ... she live? Nobody knows! (I googled her and the answer is none of the above.) Stamp just picked, according to the intro, “bookstores I’d want to visit.” Ohhhhh. Want to visit. That’s why the Photo Credits at the back have a slew of iStockPhotos. Booooooooo! I give credit to Belgium-based Lannoo Publishing. They’ve figured something out. I know this book will look pretty on coffee tables but we need someone to fly around the world for a few years to put together something better. Who’s up for the job?

3. Great Plains by Ian Frazier. On the inside flap of this journalistic masterpiece are two faded-orange maps. The one on the left shows the “Great Plains c. 1850” with Coronado’s 1541 trail, Lewis and Clark’s 1804-1806 trail, and Parkman’s 1846 trail curling through Blackfeet, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche country. The one on the right shows the “Great Plains Today”, with the same geography now labeled top-to-bottom with Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. And, instead of Lewis and Clark, we get “Frazier’s Route”, with the New Yorker humorist’s black-lined 25,000-mile routemap circling these states top to bottom, around and through, as he drove through them in the 80s. ​Booktuber Ariel Bissett​ once told us that books are places – taking you somewhere you’ve never been and leaving you with a satisfying sense of visiting afterwards. In this book, a local helps you through barbed wire fences, a radio announcer comes on and says “… if there’s anything you don’t want blown away, you better tie it down”, laundromat signs scream “Do Not Wash Rig Clothes Here”, and “a spider as big as a hand crosses the pavement.” Part travelogue, part David Sedaris diary (​3/2022​), this is a wondrous, mind-everywhere book that feels like a long road trip. You’ll feel the sun, you’ll feel the wind, and you’ll never want to run out of gas. Highly recommended.

4. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen. Between his monumental 2001 National Book Award-winning '​The Corrections​' and his monumental 2010 Oprah-and-Obama-praising '​Freedom​', Jonathan Franzen quietly released a slim sub-200-page memoir told in six essays. I recommend this for anybody who’s gorged on Franzen’s fiction and wonders about the inner life that’s conjuring up his magic shows. Ultimately, the life story is kind of, you know, normal. Geeky kid grows up in St. Louis suburbs, with a couple older brothers, plays pranks in school with his buddies, falls in love with birds. But the magic here is in his frankness, bluntness, honesty, and poetic, dark asides, like this paragraph about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer: “Fabulous to be a defense contractor, shitty to be a reservist, excellent to have tenure at Princeton, grueling to be an adjunct at Queens College; outstanding to manage a pension fund, lousy to rely on one; better than ever to be bestselling, harder than ever to be mid-list; phenomenal to win a Texas Hold ‘Em tournament, a drag to be a video-poker addict.” Franzen’s keen eye turned inwards for the superfans.

5. Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis. According to the Chronicles of Narnia '​Reading Order​’, this is the second book to read in the 7-book Narnia series. Start with ‘The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe’! (​3/2018​) First one, big one! That book came out in 1950, takes place in 1940 (Earth time), and 1000 (Narnia time). This book, ‘Prince Caspian’, came out in 1951, takes place in 1941 (Earth time), and 2303 (Narnia time). Bit of a bummer for the four Pevensie siblings to discover when they get back to Narnia the kingdom they once ruled (after defeating the White Witch in book one) has fallen into disarray. Animals hiding! Land dark! But, luckily, Prince Caspian escapes his evil stepfather, finds the talking animals, and then they all team up with the Pevensies to stage an epic battle to rule the kingdom. Not as good as the first book, I have to say. Maybe it only felt paint-by-numbers to me because it was the paint for so many fantasy series to follow. But I came away missing the rolling, swelling, poetic writing in ‘The Hobbit’, and ultimately this book helped me steel myself to finally tackle ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ Are you on Team CS or Team JRR? Kevin the Bookseller sold us hard on Lord of the Rings in that wild bouncing-around-a-bookstore chat we had back in ​Chapter 44​. I do feel my allegiances growing to Team JRR. One series to rule them all, one series to find them...

6. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future by Dale Jamieson. You got a great brain. Me too, if I do say so myself. We all own one of these extremely handy objects that are good at so many things! Unfortunately, solving climate change just isn’t one of them. “Evolution built us to respond to rapid movements of middle-sized objects,” writes Dale Jamieson, “not to the slow buildup of insensible gasses in the atmosphere.” Indeed. Climate change was international news 75 years ago! There was momentum. Summits! Pledges! Signatures from heads of state saying yes, yes, yes, we’ll reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. What’s happened since? The … exact opposite. The earth is heating up fast. Rising sea levels are soaking coastal cities. Climate migration is spiking. Weather patterns are in disarray. We didn’t even get snow this winter in Toronto! Why? Well, “climate change poses the world’s largest collective action problem. Each of us acting on our own desires contributes to an outcome we neither desire nor intend.” This is a necessary, detailed, devastating story of our increased awareness of human-created climate change, our failed attempts to do anything about it, and what happens next. It’s not simple! After opening with “The Nature of the Problem” and “Obstacles to Action” (which are worth the buy alone, just for the clear history presented that these days gets washed away in the slipstream of screaming on socials) the book gets into headier topics of morality and philosophy that try and pull apart the problem in the many ways we think about it. One memorable section shows the increasing abstraction that climate change plays on our minds from, you know, Jack stealing Jill’s bicycle is wrong, all the way up to “Acting independently, Jack and a large number of unacquainted people set in motion a chain of events that causes a large number of future people who will live in another part of the world from ever having bicycles.” Which is sort of what’s happening. Over 80% of global carbon emissions come from 10 countries. Who is it? That would be … us. Or people who, you know, drive, fly, buy stuff that comes from the other side of the world. Complexities of global economics and neverending disagreements on how to measure these things prevent the plastic bouncy ball bought from the dollar store and tossed in the birthday party loot bag from coming anywhere close to being properly priced. So what do we do? Jamieson closes with seven priorities: “integrate adaptation with development” (tie together the math on climate change with our goals on reducing poverty), “protect, encourage, and increase terrestrial carbon sinks” (stop cutting down rainforests and plant new ones), “full-cost energy accounting” (bouncy balls at dollar stores costing more than a buck), “raising the price of emitting greenhouse gasses” (black billowing smoke into the sky isn’t free), “force technology adoption” (like ditching coal-burning plants in favor of newer tech), and then making “substantial increases in research”, and, finally, to “plan for the Anthropocene.” We’re there, he’s saying, so let’s work on that. This is the kind of book most people will run away from. Or think the understandable “I’m just one person and I can’t possibly change things.” But we can take small acts: biking instead of driving, avoiding disposable junk, carbon offsetting flights. And, you know, at minimum, for the future of our species, being informed about what’s happened, what’s happening, and what we can help happen. Jamieson spent 25 years on this book – “I began writing when I turned 40 and handed in the manuscript when I turned 65” – and the detail, of thoughts, ideas, and research shows. It’s not an easy read. I alternated chapters on audio. (David Sedaris gave us that tip for ‘hard books’ back in ​Chapter 18​.) But it’s a necessary read. Sure, I feel depressed, but in a much stronger, much more aware place, to at least understand what’s happening, why it happened, and then guide myself, and ideally my politicians, to keep the pressure on making change and, finally, ultimately, adapting. Highly recommended.

7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) by J. K. Rowling. Like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) (​8/2023​), I read this right when it came out. Like ten minutes after it came out. I waited in line at Chapters Rideau in Ottawa, Canada for midnight copies and was lying in bed at age 31 till the wee hours excitedly thinking “I am one of the first people in the world to be here right now!” That was 2007. But my 17-years-later self kind of withered from the few hundred extra pages of aimless Horcrux hunting in this final installment. The deep, long, somewhat pointless sidebar into Dumbledore’s sister and mom. I don’t mean to be snide. I love Harry Potter! And, I should say, that’s not all that happens. There is also the senseless murder of a major character every 50 pages. Yes, we do get the epic 100-page fight scene of Harry and Lord V circling each other in the Hogwarts atrium dispensing plot reveals (“You touched the elder wand last!”, “No, you touched the elder wand last!”). And I will always love the book for what it is, what it was to me, what it will be to my kids I’m sure: A gateway drug to reading. A ticket to the world of “books as rock stars”. I mean, J. K. Rowling did a ​reading of Harry Potter in the Skydome. 20,264 people (seriously) listening to an author? That’s great! That’s gold. But ultimately, I’m just sort of torn up about the revisiting. No reader steps through the same river twice, I suppose. I did enjoy watching characters like Neville in their slow-building arc and, you know, I cried half a dozen times on the pillow next to my son. You know the scenes. But I have mixed emotions. Partly surfacing, maybe, from also ​just watching the first Harry Potter movie​. Did we ever really feel sparks between Ron and Hermione? Did we really need that ‘19 Years Later’ chapter at the end? Ultimately, Book 7 wasn’t as good as Book 6, which wasn’t as good as Book 5, which wasn’t as good as Book 4, which wasn’t as good as Book 3. OK, it was better than the first couple. I’ll give it that. Azkaban, baby! Tentpole of the series! Thanks for the trip, J. K. It was a helluva ride and I’m sure I’ll be back with my next kid.

8. Begin Again: How We Got Here, and Where We Might Go – Our Human Story. So Far. by Oliver Jeffers. This isn’t a children’s book but a long visual essay that stirs a Sapiens-like species history into a disaffected artist’s worldview with a spirited hopefulness for the future. What’s Jeffers's recipe for our post-“cogs in the machine”, ​Total Entertainment Forever​-type present? He says we get there “By slowing down. By creating better stories. Bigger ones where we all fit inside the same powerful plot. In which we think beyond our own lifetimes.” I’m not sure what children Harper Collins Children’s Books had in mind here with this massive, thick, thirty-dollar hardcover. Feels more geared to high school art students. It’s stunning to look at – evocative neon pinks and splashy purple watercolors with cavemen walking out of oceans and inventing rocket ships. But, ultimately, a one-and-done read that’s heavy on moralizing without adding much to the conversation. I’d skip this for Oliver’s earlier books like ‘​How to Catch a Star​’, ‘​Lost and Found​’, and ‘​The Way Back Home​’ and even, in this newer, more zooming-up-and-out political spirit, his 2017 “​Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth​.”

9. There is no 9! You hit our regular loot bag of links. First up, I was stunned by this New York Times piece on ​"A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men."​ I was brainstorming a ​'what if we got a million signatures on a petition to increase the social media age'​ ... but maybe that's not the right approach. What do you think? At least the UK is ​putting an end to phones in classrooms​ — Rishi Sunak nailed it with this launch video. Brené Brown shared ​a blog post​ with the first line 'My mom died on Christmas morning.' Jason Fried reminds us to '​never delegate your word​'. In an era of bots, we trust brains! Have you forgotten how trippy ​'Be Our Guest'​ is? Bryan Johnson was on the Rich Roll podcast and it kind of blew me away — ​here are my pop-out quotes​ to see if you're up for the 3-hour trip. Oh! And, for those who've read 'The Happiness Equation', I invented a follow-up to The Saturday Morning Test called ​The Sunday Night Suffix​. Finally! Remember it's the full moon so Chapter 133 is live right ... ​now​.


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - January 2024

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Hey everyone,

How was your January?

We’ve been desperate for snow in Toronto. Everything is gray, slushy, twig-silhouettey.

So much in the air these days – love, fear, connection, disconnection. And I feel this growing sense of loneliness. Research says 1 in 2 American adults feel “lonely” now – which is worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I know the feeling! Felt it for years. In and out of relationships. Many / most of us have!

Wondering about loneliness, and eager to learn more about what creates healthy connection and community, made me reach out to 76-year-old Oxford Professor Robin Dunbar, most famous for coining ‘Dunbar’s Number.’

I had my mind blown by the gleeful, quick-of-tongue, anthropologist-evolutionary-psychologist who offered so much context, history, and advice on how we live rich, full, connected lives. I just dropped the chat as my first-ever video podcast.

Also, I’ve been working with a few folks at the Toronto District School Board to think about how to ban cell phones from classrooms. After I spoke to principals a sixth-grade teacher told me “Phones ring all through class. They know there’s no ban. And, trust me, it’s always the parents calling.” Does your school board ban cell phones – or have some policy? (Let me know what’s working!) Btw: I think the best researcher on this topic today is NYU professor Jonathan Haidt who is publishing wonderful work and whose new book "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Ilness" drops March 26, 2024. (I pre-ordered my copy from my local indie but I see Jon just tweeted it's on sale at Barnes&Noble)

Anyway! What do we do when things feel like a lot?

READ! MORE! BOOKS!

Scroll down for reviews of the books I read this month...

Neil

PS. Oh, and every January I remind you this Book Club is one of four email lists I have. You can also get my midnight awesome thing, bi-weekly blog post, and/or full-moon podcasts. Adjust your dosage right here.


1. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman. A prophetic 30-year-old manifesto about the dangers of pervasive technology by NYU professor Neil Postman, who died in 2003 at age 72. A book that illuminates the algorithm and AI conversations we’re having today. I first heard of this book while reading “It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly” in The New Yorker by Cal Newport (excited for his, too!) where he calls this book Postman’s “masterwork”. It’s not nearly as famous as "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (picked by Mitchell Kaplan in Chapter 16!) but it sure is a sloshy bucket of ice-water to the face. The book opens by saying, yes, of course, technology gives us great riches, unfathomable riches, but that it also takes something away. (He excerpts a fascinating couple of 95-year-old paragraphs from Freud.) Postman then says “once a technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is – that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do it with eyes wide open.” Yes! I think of the mere 5000 days we've had with social media and the seeming eye-opening we're going through now. There's so much Technology Archaeology here with Postman endlessly pulling out sandy shards from 500, 1000, or 2000 years ago. The book was written in 1992 (I love 1992!) but honestly feels like it was written tomorrow. Casts that wide a timescale. Sample sentence from Page 10: “In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred-year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word.” Everything is backed up with a fat Notes, Bibliography, and Index, making this book much shorter than it seems when you pick it up (199 pages!). And Postman's an artist, too. I love when he references fiction like: “As described by Farley Mowat in "The People of the Deer", the replacement of bows and arrows with rifles is one of the most chilling tales on record of a technological attack on a tool-using culture. The result in this case was not the modification of a culture but its eradication.” He quotes poetry, he quotes the Bible, he quotes C.S. Lewis. It's a spellbinding magic trick of an enormous mind. And the result is a bubbling manifesto cautioning us against the “technopoly”. Which is? “… a state of culture [and] a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” Hmmm, OK. And what permitted this so-called “technopoly” to flourish in America first? Many things! Including “American distrust of constraints”, “the genius and audacity of early American capitalists”, and “the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americans with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance so obvious and promising that there seemed no reason to look for any other sources of fulfillment or creativity or purpose.” If this sounds meaty, we’re only on Chapter 4, and get ready because Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Watson, and Einstein are all quoted in the next paragraph. Meaty, my friends. Probably need to read it five times to understand it. And I disagree with some, for sure. But that’s what makes it great. Illuminating, relevant, flying-through-time-portrait of our historical relationship with technology and potential implications for our cultures, communities, and relationships as we alllll fly together right now in warp speed. Highly recommended.

2. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. Oscar nominations just came out! I was thrilled to see ‘Past Lives’ nominated for Best Picture. Leslie and I loved it so much we went back to theaters to see it again. And then I reached out to Celine Song, writer, director, genius (debut!) filmmaker, and she kindly agreed to chat about her 3 most formative books. And, of course, as is the case with almost every book to almost every person, I hadn’t heard of any of them. Her first two formative books, Bohumil Hrabal’s "Too Loud a Solitude" (11/2023) and Stefan Zweig’s "Chess Story" (11/2023), were good. Not must-reads, but, you know, good, solid books. But this! Her third formative book is on another plane. Celine calls it “sumptuous.” Sumptuous, yeah. Rich. Decadent. Overwhelming, in some ways. For one thing, Süskind has the world’s greatest ability to create “smell-portraits”. On Page 1 he’s describing the stench of France in 1738: “The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.” He does this over and over: olfactorily yanking us into a scene. “People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.” Yet, somehow, it’s a speedy plot, too. The book tells the life story of poverty-stricken, nasally-gifted, slumdog-orphan Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from his birth in the “most putrid spot in the whole kingdom” on July 17, 1738 through his zero-to-hero-to-zero-to-I-won't-ruin-the-ending arc as a perfumer to a “hot day, the hottest of the year” in Paris on June 25, 1766. This 28-year span is told with a scene-creating vividness that reminds me of David Mitchell ("Cloud Atlas" [06/2019], "Black Swan Green" [11/2016]). I found myself amazed, disturbed, and awed by this book. It had a tug. A pulling. It did that thing novels do, which is to offer a range of emotions unlike almost anything else. Books rattle from the inside. This book is a rattler. Read the Plot Summary if you want. Written in 1985 in German (as ‘Das Parfum’) it has been on Der Spiegel's bestseller list for decades and sold over 20 million (!) copies. Yet: The author, now-76-year-old Patrick Süskind, is a ... recluse. No one knows where he lives. No one knows what he looks like. Heard of him? I hadn’t! And yet: 20 million copies make it one of the top-selling books of the past century. Mysterious! Adding this to my TBRA as it surely deserves To Be Read Again. Next time I may try audio. If you want to go audio, try Libro or Libby. Highly recommended.

3. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. This is the 1966 back-of-the-bus New Journalism view of one of the birthplaces of the hippie movement. What birthplace? The one where "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" author Ken Kesey races headfirst into the not-yet-illegal world of LSD with his revolving band of 10-14 friends (aka the “Merry Pranksters”, who included Neal Cassady and future members of The Grateful Dead) as they drain six figures of Kesey’s book royalty payments to fund a just-purchased-just-spraypainted school bus drive across America to share their newfound light-bright awareness with the world. Uh, seems to have worked!? From Steve Jobs to Elon Musk to Tim Ferriss, it feels like LSD has penetrated the culture. It’s extremely wild to hear, really hear, what’s coming out of the mouths of people trying it over 50 years ago. Now, I found the first 100 pages of this book the best 100. That’s the bus trip coming together and the actual drive. Rest is what happens after. But the trip! Geez, what a trip. You’ll feel like you’re right there …. right there getting into an argument with a Texan gas station attendant when a dozen of your unwashed stoned friends suddenly line up outside the gas station bathroom … right there in the humbling cold-shower moment your wild rambunctiousness hits the ceremonial seriousness of “the-other-LSDers”, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (pre-Ram Dass) … right there setting up banners and painted road signs to invite the Hell’s Angels to your house to introduce them to LSD. This book is a vibe and most of my life I would have chucked it before finishing the first fifty chaotic pages. But I loved, loved, loved "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (08/2018) and "A Man in Full" (04/2019) and felt I owed it to Tom Wolfe to keep going. And then at some point, I finally realized: Ohhhhh. This is ... how it was. He’s writing it this way to make you feel ... like it felt. What a magic trick! (I later found an Author’s Note on Page 415 where Wolfe writes: “I have tried not only to tell what the Pranksters did but to recreate the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it.”) No kidding, Tommy! Maybe tell us before next time. Anyway, the net result is an unbelievably-inside inside view of the culturally shifting mid-60s where you get to play Ken Kesey or, more realistically, the only sober one at Ken Kesey’s house. Non-fiction journalism fused with avante-garde poetry. And the whole time, I cannot say this enough, you feel right there … right there with friends getting insomnia saying insane things … right there with friends stripping down and jumping in ponds … right there careening down steep mountains hills on the roof – the roof! – of the bus. Cop teasing! DMT experiments! It’s all here! And it comes wrapped in the general late-night party feel of both excitement … and exhaustion. A helluva book.

4. Going Up! by Sherry J. Lee. Illustrated by Charlene Chua. You are a happy, smiling young Black girl in a gray sweater and checkerboard plaid skirt baking cookies with your dad before heading up to the 10th-floor Party Room for a birthday party in your downtown apartment building. Going up! Next floor pop in happy, smiling Santucci brothers – white redhead bikers in shredded skull tank tops and arms full of tattoos. Going up! Next floor pop in a happy, smiling, birthday-balloon-toting lesbian mixed-race couple with their giant sweatered dog. Going up! Next floor pop in happy, smiling Mr. and Mrs. Habib, in a sari and kurta pyjama with happy, smiling grandkids Yasmin and Jamal holding a bowl of gulab jamun. And the book keeps going up! Lots more floors after that. A raucous celebration of community, diversity, and apartment-building love. I adored this book. Get it read aloud to you on YouTube right here.

5. My Wild and Sleepless Nights: A Mother’s Story by Clover Stroud. We haven’t done a Leslie’s Pick in a few months! Time to bring it back. Enter Leslie: “My dear friend Kelly sent me this book in a package from London with a handwritten card that said ‘You have to read this. When you’re done, pass it on to Heather.’ Unfortunately, I couldn’t pass it on to Heather, because I folded down too many pages, underlined too many sections, and already can’t wait to read it again. (I did send her a fresh copy!) Clover attempts to answer the question, ‘What does motherhood feel like?’ I have never read such a poignant, detailed, accurate, beautiful, staggering, vulnerable account of motherhood (the only other book that does this, about the first year of motherhood, is 'Brave New Mama' by Vicki Rivard). She talks about the pain of breastfeeding, sex as a mom, the judgment she feels over having a fifth child, how she craves giving birth as a way to touch where life and death collide, how messy her house really gets, and the grief she experiences as her eldest becomes a teen. This book took my breath away and made me feel connected to mothers around the world and through time. I kept on turning to Neil saying, ‘Please, can I read you another paragraph? Just one more!’ because Clover put into words experiences and feelings I haven’t been able to articulate. An absolute must-read for anyone who knows, deep in their heart, what motherhood feels like but can’t quite put it into words, and for anyone who is curious about the deep emotional soul of motherhood.”

6. Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier by Terry Laughlin with John Delves. I learned how to swim in my 30s. Bit late to the game! A childhood full of ear infections and tubes left me starting swimming lessons when I was a decade older than all the other kids in the three-foot pool. I sputtered, sank, and swerved my life the other way. Now in my 40s, after a few "Adult Learn To Swim" classes, in a story I sometimes share in keynote speeches, I can stay afloat and do the front crawl ... but not much more. Enter this book! My friend Frank Warren sent it to me and it’s like having a swimming coach in your pocket. Simple things, like “reshaping the vessel”, help teach swimming with less effort. How? By consciously pushing your airbaggy chest down so your legs come up – helping to avoid the log-floating-in-a-pond posture I typically use! What else? Learning that “what you do between strokes is more important than how you take the stroke.” Uh, what you do between strokes? Right! Lengthen your body! Less drag. And it goes on and on. I actually took this book with me to the public pool a few times, got my courage going by reading a few pages or a chapter, and then jumped in to try. Did the book turn me into an Olympian? No. It did not. But it gives me new things to try and I can feel my Swimming Confidence nudging up and up.

7. The Complete Elfquest by Wendy Pini and Richard Pini. At the end of Chapter 35 of 3 Books with Jen Agg, I played a 1-833-READ-A-LOT voicemail from 3 Booker Gavin from Longmont, Colorado who shared how Elfquest, a comic that ran over 40 years starting in the 70s, was formative to him. He then recently wrote me, four years later, to see if I ever read it. Well, I hadn’t, but I thought 'This sounds like a great gift' and bought it for my oldest son. He opened it Christmas morning and … we didn’t see him much over the next few days. He fell into the transportive, visually dense 720-page (!) odyssey of Elfquest. I just asked him what he thought and he says: “It’s good, dad. Really good. So basically, it’s about these elves, who live in a forest, and there are humans they fight against, and one day the humans use fire to burn down the woods, and then the elves go down to the troll caves to survive, but then the trolls betray them and lead them to a desert, and they can barely survive there, and then they meet another tribe of elves, and first they fight with them, but then they start working together, and then the leader of the elf tribe who lived in the woods leaves to look for more elves, and they find the high ones, which are their leaders.” For fans of adventures and quests. Think Percy Jackson! Big thanks to Gavin for the tip-off. (If you have a formative book you’d be willing to suggest or share with me, just give me a ring at 1-833-READ-A-LOT. It’s a real phone number! I listen to every message and for six years I’ve played a voicemail at the end of every Chapter of 3 Books. If I play yours I will sign and personalize and mail you a book – anywhere in the world. I love analog, phone call, crinkly envelope communities.)

8. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen. There is nothing like a Jonathan Franzen novel. Nothing like it! Pulsing, messy, scabrous, erotic, reflective, breath-holdy, shocking, punchy, illuminating. Plot twists! Pitch-perfect dialogue! ‘Okay, okay, but what are they even about?’ Leslie asked me as, once again, we found ourselves struggling to zip a suitcase with a 600-page hardcover on top. ‘A family drama, basically,’ I said, ‘With the first 400-ish pages in this book taking place over literally one day, on December 23, 1971. Then the final 200-ish pages are the following few months.’ And what a family drama! We follow the Hildebrandts – father Russ, mother Marion, and four kids ranging from college-age Clem to high school social queen Becky to drug-dealing tenth grader Perry to little, almost invisible Judson – as they navigate complex inner-outer lives around their church in the fictional small town New Prospect, Illinois. Every chapter gives each character’s unique perspective and backstory – alternating in that ‘Babysitter’s Club Super Special’-style – until the slow-pounding 200-page fireworks display at the end. Every private, embarrassing, scandalous thought – it’s there. The characters might be dark – but there’s a humanity, a beauty, an inner-inner life, that Franzen exposes like almost nobody else writing today. Perry resolves to quit smoking weed! Clem feels morally compelled to sign up for Vietnam! Becky sets her sights on the churchgoing folk singer! Secretly-psychiatric-seeking Marion struggles to make sense of her past in a remarkably lifelike appointment with her therapist aka “the fat dumpling.” And Russ! I don’t know where to begin. He’s churchy, nerdy, horny, and has an almost “violent pacifism.” This book is a trip. You’ll walk across “unrecent tire tracks”, feel the stare of “that glower of his”, and watch “resinous knots of juniper explode in orange sparks.” 10/10 on character, 10/10 on plot, this is a twisting acrobatic plunge into the deep pool of literature. I might suggest starting with "The Corrections" and then "Freedom", but if you’ve read those, and even if you haven’t, "Crossroads" will take you far, far away. A book to help us stare slack-jawed at something in ourselves while adding some taffy and fillings to the human experience. Let it plug in a few holes, and chip a few others away, while we collectively race across this endlessly fleeting blur called existence. Highly recommended.

9. There is no 9! Just our usual jumble of lootbag links. Let's start with a string of wonderful quotes from Robin Dunbar. Oh, and I just challenged myself to list my Top 25 Movies Of All-Time. I was super-thrilled after interviewing Susan Orlean but my kids were not impressed. I like this personal lunar calendar app. A short article by Derek Sivers about a "walk and talk" – a great way of getting together with people you admire. "The proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures." My 7-year-old's zen koan jokes. Super Bowl quarterback Kurt Warner reminds us about context. I just learned 'fishes' is a real word! (Now can we go back to octopi?) Brad Stulberg reminds us we are mirrors. Why we should get offline and talk to strangers IRL more. And the movie Leslie and I saw on our last date night! Thanks for reading all the way to the very end. 3521 words later and you made it!


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - November 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

How you holding up?

Our place has been full of midnight fevers, junkyard dog coughs, and screams from the basement. "More tissues! More tissues!" Poor Leslie has gone down with the ship. Been the ship, really. She was, however, in top form on her first-ever feature podcast. We just dropped it as a Bookmark called "Tips to Be a More Peaceful Parent."

I also released a longform "live from New York" conversation with human rocket ship Sahil Bloom. And on the next full moon (Monday!) I'll be dropping a chat with Ralph Nader. Still fiery! Btw: If you're new to the pod start with David Sedaris, Brené Brown, or Quentin Tarantino.

Last thing! Our Book Of Awesome – the first awesome book in a decade, written collectively with all of you! – drops in paperback on Tuesday. It's got a new HOT PINK cover and I put a review in below. Grab a copy for you or someone you love right here.

The world does not want us to read books! Every screen seduces us farther away from the deeper, richer world of compressed wisdom waiting for us in the pages. I love our reading rebellion. If you know someone who'd like to join us send them here.

Here are my book recommendations this month!

Neil

1. It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders. I remember reading a New York Times Op-Ed by Bernie Sanders a few years ago called "The Foundations of American Society Are Failing Us" and being struck by the clarity, concision, and power. Apex communicator! (He just wrote another Op-Ed four days ago called "Justice for the Palestinians and Security for Israel.") Do you see what I mean? The world is just so messy, blurry, and overwhelming and we need penetrating voices – master distillers! – to offer us clear views. Bernie is one 82-year-old elder doing just that. This book contains ten passionate, rallying-cry chapters that smartly fold together stories, research, and reminders about big laws that were headline news for a few weeks a few decades ago but have disappeared as news. The result is some kind of slow, almost grotesque, pan shot of the state of the US. Chapter sub-heads include phrases like "Health care is a human right, not a privilege", "Children should be taught to think – not educated to be cogs in the machine", and "Political reform requires alternatives to a for-profit media system that dumbs down and diminishes debate in America." Each chapter is its own manifesto and I found my heart beating faster and faster while reading. "If someone were to offer a senator $100 to vote for or against a piece of legislation," he writes on Page 116, "it would, by any court of law, be considered a 'bribe.' Taking that bribe could land that person offering it – and the senator taking it – in jail. If that same person were to put $100 million into a super-PAC for that senator, their spending would be considered perfectly legal. It would also, if successful, win the donor a very close and grateful relationship with a very powerful elected official." We know truths like this, but Bernie has a way of spelling them out in arresting ways. "Made you look", he always seems to be saying. "Our struggle is against a system where the top twenty-five hedge fund managers in the United States pocket more money than 350,000 kindergarten teachers." Exactly. Or how about on Page 124 when he shows how the US spends more than double, per capita, on health care than the UK, Canada, France, or Germany, and yet ranks at the bottom on longevity, accessibility, and coverage. "In other words, we are getting a terrible return on our huge expenditure on health care." You can skip around the book. I flipped past some rehashes of election campaigns or specific bills but loved the more elevated macro-level ideas he borrows from countries around the world such as the zoom-in on learning from Finland's education system. (Spoiler alert: elevate teaching standards through pay and trust, reject standardized testing, ban for-profit private schools, etc.) The book shares how the US got where it is – and what can be done to unwind a lot of the damage. Do I agree with everything? Of course not. Books aren't brains – they're views. But there aren't many views more pointed, sharp, and passionate than this one. Highly recommended.

2. Chess Story by Stefan Zweig. A hundred years ago Stefan Zweig was one of the highest selling and most translated writers in the world. This is the first book I've read by him and I can safely add: For good reason! He had a tumultuous life. In 1934 he fled Austria for England as Hitler was gaining power but then, years later, ended up listed in the 'Black Book', which convinced him to flee further to Brazil. I imagine him writing this tight, gripping 84-page "one long boat trip across the Atlantic" novella on his … long boat trip across the Atlantic. It tells the story of a group of people who encounter the chess world champion on their boat! They challenge him to a game! He soundly defeats them! But then … another challenger emerges with a haunting past and the story swerves wildly. A short book to help you get back on the reading train. Vivid, welcoming, and a pace that accelerates as the story goes on. This is Zweig's last book and was submitted to his publisher just two days before he and his wife died by suicide in Rio.

3. Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. Do you know the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas? I thought I did! But I think I really just knew that one line – "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light" – from like a dozen different movies. I never ingested it, you know? Fanned it in slowly like perfume. Because that's what it deserves. It's a stunning bit of writing. I suggest reading it here and then listening to Dylan Thomas reciting it here. If you feel something there I think you'll love the high-flying literary acrobatics in this much longer 1954 BBC radio play transcript that Dylan wrote just before his death at age 39. This is truly one of the most wild things I've ever read. I found it hard to take in more than a fraction of what was going on -- but the words, you'll see, they just keep pulling. Under Milk Wood is a 95-page fast-paced "day in the inner lives" of a small Welsh town. That's it! But the wordplay, the twisting – it's got a vibe like Lincoln in the Bardo (04/2018). Here, take a look, this is two pages near the beginning, featuring an inner conversation between Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard and her two dead (though still alive in her mind!) husbands, Mr. Ogmore and Mr. Pritchard:

Mr Ogmore: I must blow my nose.
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard: In a piece of tissue-paper which I afterwards burn.
Mr Pritchard: I must take my salts which are nature's friend.
Mr Ogmore: I must boil the drinking water because of germs.
Mr Pritchard: I must take my herb tea which is free from tannin.
Mr Ogmore: And have a charcoal biscuit which is good for me.
Mr Pritchard: I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture.
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard: In the woodshed, if you please.
Mr Pritchard: And dust the parlour and spray the canary.
Mr Ogmore: I must put on rubber gloves and search the peke for fleas.
Mr Pritchard: I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard: And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.

There's a lot of moving parts here and it adds up to something insightful, absurd, and genius.

4. Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. If you're living under a stable government, thank your lucky stars. The Czech Republic wasn't so lucky in the twentieth century as they went, in order: monarchy, republic, parliamentary democracy, Nazi invasion, communist state, Soviet invasion, and then, in 1989, revolution. Bohumil Hrabal lived through most of that over his 83 years from 1914 to 1997. No wonder in the 1950s he joined an underground literary collective before his right and ability to publish was fully banned. Yet his writings lived on a samizdat – a word I just learned combining sam ("by myself") + izdat ("publishing house") – that was a form of dissident activity where censored books were hand-copied and hand-handed-out. This fiftyish-year-old book was a fascinating read on a few levels. Slim, dense, first-person narrative of an old man near the end of his 35 years working as a paper crusher who secretly finds and stashes rare books he comes across … taking them home and sleeping among them. There is a unique, scattered, mentally anguished, psychologically overwhelmed feeling throughout that I found both addictive and sometimes too much. The "living under an oppressive regime" vibes come through. Yet it adds up to a wonderfully unique read. "I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain" writes Hantá, the narrator, "I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books…" Indeed! The New York Times boasts in a cover blurb that this is a "remarkable story about the indestructibility of books and knowledge". Sure. But there's also a lot of pain. A book for forever-reading readers who want to take a dim, literary trail less traveled down one fascinating little string of our infinite pasts. "When I read," says Hantá, "I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel." If you relate to that you'll find a lot of sentences to love in here.

5. Our Book of Awesome: A Celebration of the Small Joys That Bring Us Together by Neil Pasricha. Time flies! It was a year ago that Our Book of Awesome came out and you know what that means: Paperback time! And for the first time ever my publisher decided to dramatically change the paperback cover, too. Hot pink! Why? Well, my fault: I pushed for the original "rainbow on black" motif that was successful for The Book of Awesome thirteen years ago. Only problem? People thought it was that book not, uh, an entirely new collection. The book spent a few months on bestseller lists but I'm told it didn't hit with the walk-by, what-is-this, lemme-take-a-look crowd. So bring on the pink! I'm really proud of the book and I think you'll love it – it's my highest-rated book on Goodreads – and imagine it on bedside tables, backs of the toilet, or as gifts for a great teacher. The book is ultimately about community with the awesome things as a unifying force in the face of all the pressures and overwhelm in the world. I wrote about 80% of the writeups (maybe 300 new awesome things) and the rest are curated from over 10,000 awesome things submitted by all of you from around the world. I also sifted in comments, entries, and letters to try and give it a "we're all hanging out together" vibe. So it's over 400 pages full of awesome things like: Completely nailing the timing on that avocado, When you're getting a package delivered when you're on an important call and the dog doesn't bark, Showing old people how to do something on their phone, Discovering a shortcut the GPS doesn't know about, and Sending a private message during the video conference and then seeing your coworker look down and silently smirk. Here's the tweet string I wrote sharing where the book came from. And some sexy press when the book came out includes NPR's Here & Now, CBC's The Current with Matt Galloway, Maria Shriver's Sunday Paper, and The Rich Roll Podcast.

6. Smart Sex: How To Boost Your Sex IQ And Own Your Pleasure by Dr. Emily Morse. Dr. Emily takes readers on a beginner's A-Z course to pleasure and intimacy. She starts off pretty far back from the starting line: talking about how masturbation won't give you hairy palms, for example. But the road steepens when she gives lists of "Sexual Bucket Lists" (a long laundry list of sexual acts for you and your partner to privately mark off "yes", "no", or "maybe" to and then share back) as well as exercises that include lists of questions to ask to open conversation you may not have had. ("Which celebrities turn you on?", "What is the freest sexual thing you have ever done?", "How do you feel about getting drunk or high for sex?", etc). Her tone is sort of People magazine-y: light, loose, educational, sometimes awkward. (Page 223: "Anyone with an anus can enjoy pegging.") I think this is a good book for anyone learning about sex – filling in gaps in the sex-ed curriculum, with material presented thoughtfully and engaging – but overall a bit of a skimmer.

7. Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance by Katherine Johnson Martinko. I was speaking to a sixth-grade public teacher last week. "It's getting bad," she told me. "A few years ago maybe one kid in my class had a phone. Now half do. They're texting in class. I ask them to put their phones away and we can still hear them all ringing. I sometimes go answer them from the coat cupboard and it's always the parents!" Hmmm. I asked a principal what percent of principals he thought might support a cell phone ban in schools. "I'm not sure," he said. "At least 90%." Sometimes when everyone has an addiction it looks like nobody has an addiction. Smartphones are still a new technology but before they completely enshroud and cajole our behavior, often with devastating consequences, it's healthy to take pause, read books like this, and then figure out our way forward. Pair this with Jonathan Haidt's recent articles "Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health" and "Social Media Is A Major Cause Of The Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here's the Evidence."

8. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. "Marley was dead: to begin with." Definitely on my top 10 list of Best Opening Lines! This is a must-read if you, like me, never took the time to wade into the story beyond the culture-penetrating Disney knockoffs. George Saunders made this one of his three most formative books and I love finding different versions of it in used bookstores and falling back into it again and again. The book is short! Less than 100 pages usually. It's a big gulp. Or just read two pages a day and you'll be done in no time. This 1984 edition I just found is 122 pages with a lot of full-page paintings by Greg Hildebrant. Much shorter than Dickens other classics and perfectly timed for the holidays. Plus, given it's 180 years old (!), you can grab it out of copyright on Project Gutenberg.

9. You made it to 9! But there is no 9, my friends. Just some random salty bag fries at the bottom: I really love Nick Cave's Red Hand Files -- especially his recent advice to "Sing, Eugeno, sing." I put together a list of 7 books I recommend reading before bed (instead of the news). A cozy Canadian painting. A cartoon that haunts me. The original trailer for 'Our Book of Awesome'. And, lastly, I really enjoyed the first three episodes of the new podcast from Mark Manson.


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - October 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Happy end-of-October.

Right now Toronto sidewalks are deliciously crunchy. We've got sheet-ghosts hanging from branches and Leslie and the kids wrapped almost everything on our porch in cobwebs. We have a ninja, werewolf, The Flash, and golden retriever going out this year.

I missed the decorating because I was on the road last week. Recording a podcast and sharing our messages on living intentionally with good people in Orlando, Chicago, Catalina Island, Irvine, Dallas, and then Chicago again. You know the messages: delete social media, get the phone out of the bedroom, practice morning journaling, get outside, read a book, phone a friend, hug your family.

Hypocritically, I was largely in airports and very far away from my family while saying this. Sure, Leslie and I still keep a family contract, and yes, video-calling helps—but nothing replaces time. The ultimate tension. The biggest countdown. We really do only get 30,000 days here. And that's if we're lucky, of course.

I was thinking about time a lot this month while reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships by Robin Dunbar. I think you'll like both—and reviews are below, along with a few others.

How we spend our time is how we spend our lives, of course.

Thanks for a bit of time together this month,

Neil

PS. I just switched email servers so if anything looks different or this email landed somewhere strange—that's likely why. It's still me!

1. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This book had me at the jump. The very first sentence had a magnetic, pulling "WTF-I-want-to-know-more" effect. Pretty sure I actually moved my head closer to the page. See if it does the same for you: "Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur – a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds – and for most of his youth, he was Sam, S.A.M. on the hall of fame of his grandfather's Donkey Kong machine, but mainly Sam." The curtain lifts! And suddenly we have identity and growth and change and ego and 80s video games and maybe that oh-the-camera-is-about-to-pull-back feeling. That's what I got, anyway. There is a lot to chew on here—a lot of movement, a lot happening—but Gabrielle Zevin, or her omniscient occasionally-clacky-tongued narrator, I should say—really holds us tightly. She describes scenes in high-def, folds characters in that shock and surprise, and keeps the plot jumping. The story pinballs between decades, characters deepen, and every door opened up is graciously closed. I think if you liked that opening scene of The Social Network—with Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a bad date and both characters fast-talking in a frenetic, snappy back and forth—then you'll probably like this book. Similar brainy-Cambridge core, lots of screen time, and characters who sidle up and occasionally chafe. (Page 257: "It was easy to dislike the man; it was harder to dislike the little boy who existed just below the surface…") So what's it about? A multi-decade back-and-forth story of Sam and Sadie, who evolve from childhood friends who meet playing Super Mario Bros on NES in a hospital common room in LA to eventual video-game creating partners to … well, I'm not going to blow things. I will say I found myself surprise-crying at many emotions surfacing from the past … coming-of-age anxieties, social disconnections, self-judgment and raw jealousy, and unrequited love, just to name a few. Fast-paced, warm-hearted, and a wonderful belly poke for your inner 90s gamer, too. A book to fall into. A joy to read. Highly recommended.

2. Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships by Robin Dunbar. First off, I was very confused by this book's cover. What are all these blue-black words? It took me a moment to realize the title and subtitle are down there at the bottom. But forget the cover! I'm sorry I brought it up. Let's move inside. Where there be gold! Solid gold. Robin Dunbar is such a cheery brain to hang out with. He starts off quickly: "Perhaps the most surprising finding to emerge from the medical literature over the past two decades has been the evidence that the more friends we have, the less likely we are to fall prey to diseases, and the longer we will live." Sound bunk? He thought you might say that so he casually dips you into the research covering, no big deal, 300,000 people across 148 studies. And it's not "fill out your mood on a scale of one to five" that these studies measure, either. It's lifespan. "Hard-nosed", Robin calls it. And so, okay, when you look at this giant body of research what does it ultimately all boil down to? In maybe the most powerful point in the book he writes "… it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that you can eat as much as you like, drink as much alcohol as you want, slob about as much as you fancy, fail to do your exercises and live in as polluted an atmosphere as you can find, and you will barely notice the difference. But having no friends or not being involved in community activities will dramatically affect how long you live." Heeeeeeeeeeeeads up. Time to reinvest in your connections with those close to you. Call your parents. Call your siblings. Be active and generous in your fantasy football group text. And sidenote: What is a 'friend'? They are relationships "all about a sense of obligation and the exchange of favors—the people you wouldn't feel embarrassed about asking for a favor and whom you wouldn't think twice about helping out." To color the definition in he also says "being on a Christmas card list is a marker." Is your list smaller than it used to be? Mine too. And it doesn't help that we spend more and more time alone as we get older. So what do we do? Unplug. Get offline. Meet in person. Sign up for live events. Plan holiday dinners. Laugh together. Cook together. Walk together. Exercise together. Go to concerts together. Be aware of the rising disconnection in our increasingly connected world and invest in two-way friendships that will pay massive dividends as we age.

3. Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki. How many Japanese novels over a hundred years old have you read? None? Me too! Until now, that is. I stumbled on this classic while wandering in a bookstore—the power of bookstores!—and was originally captivated on my flip-through by the format: 110 chapters all a page-and-a-half long. Turns out the book was serialized in the Asahi newspaper back in 1912. I imagine it like some kind of slow-moving textual soap opera that satisfies just by introducing you to characters that slowly grow to feel like people in your life. The novel tells the story of a boy's relationship with an old man he meets and calls Sensei. The story doesn't feel profound—although occasional bits of wisdom are sprinkled throughout—but I found the book a slow burn and easy mental wind down before bed. Slumber-inducing! I've been going on a lot of "two pages of fiction" rants lately and this book is seemingly written to satisfy that goal. Translator Meredith McKinney writes how the book is a true reflection of the time and read by every Japanese school child today with themes of "isolation, alienation, egotism, and profound dislocation from its cultural and moral inheritance." A transporting journey into Japanese life at the end of the Meiji Period—the 44-year-long "coming out" era beginning in the late 19th century that pulled Japan from the isolationist, feudal 250-year-long Shogunate onto the global stage.

​4. Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parrish. Somewhere near the first day of Shane Parrish's MBA program at the University of British Columbia a student he'd just met got into a loud argument with the professor. He became so incensed he quit! Like he actually stormed out of the classroom and drove off with tires screeching type thing. Shane told me he asked the storming-out guy why he was leaving and he yelled some parting words to Shane along the lines of "They aren't teaching us anything important here. You want to know what's important? Read Charlie Munger!" Then the guy literally drives right out of Shane's life. But he leaves behind … that clue! An impactful one. Shane looks up Charlie Munger and discovers he's co-head honcho, alongside Warren Buffet, of mega-conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. And, like Buffett, Munger has left piles of essays, speeches, and wisdom on all things investing and life. (Much of it collected in Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit & Wisdom of Charles T. Munger [04/2020]) Shane begins parsing and distilling Charlie's wisdom onto a covert blog he titles with a series of numbers based on the zip code of Berkshire Hathaway's address in Omaha, Nebraska. He finishes his MBA, works for a time as a Canadian spy, and then makes his blog public. He calls it Farnam Street, one Berkshire-Hathaway-address-field less granular than the zip code, and the blog grows to fan and feed Shane's appetite for all things wisdom, knowledge, and penetrating truths. Alongside his popular The Knowledge Project podcast (I was a guest in 2019 and 2022) and his massive Sunday morning Brain Food email list, Shane has become an expert on all things "thinking about thinking." With the endlessly overwhelming nature of the world, I have long appreciated Shane's ability to "separate signal from noise", and now comes his first major book release since that ride began. It's different from the blog but a fun and easy read that combines anecdotes, personal stories, and research in short and (yes) clear chapters. He begins in a Talebesque way by sharing the "enemies of clear thinking": The Emotion Default, The Ego Default, The Social Default, The Inertia Default. Then he tells us how to build strength: Self-Accountability, Self-Knowledge, Self-Control, Self-Confidence, etc. And then he gets into "clear thinking in action" which includes defining the problem, exploring possible solutions, evaluating options, etc. A valuable and generous book I know I'll revisit again and again.

5. I'm Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid. I remember when I got obsessed with Charlie Kauffman: sitting in the tiny art cinema The Screening Room in Kingston, Ontario twenty-five years ago with my first girlfriend. We were blown away by Being John Malkovich and while watching the credits roll I saw "Written by Charlie Kauffman" and was hooked. What does Kauffman represent? Some kind of gonzo-creative, elegantly-twisted type of writing. (His next two movies were Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). So when I saw Charlie's blurb on the cover of this book—"An ingeniously twisted nightmare road trip through the fragile psyches of two young lovers. My kind of fun!"—I was like, okay, I must read this. Am I glad I did? Yes and no. It's a psychological thriller with short chapters and sparse, flying prose, nearly all taking place as mental self-talk of a young, slightly disturbed woman riding shotgun on a dark drive to meet the parents of this new guy she just started dating. Bit of a Get Out vibe. But, of course, how well does she really know him? And why does her phone keep ringing? And what's up with these strange voicemails? If you liked books like The Girl on the Train or Dark Matter (12/2016), you'll probably like the book. It's a little less tied together and climactic than the opening suggests. But a fast, fun, and, yes, "twisted" read.

6 and 7. The Little Book of Woodland Bird Songs and The Little Book of Backyard Bird Songs. I started birding during the pandemic. How cliché! I remember my "spark bird" fondly—that Rose-Breated Grosbeak I saw sitting on a power wire out my window while setting up a makeshift virtual office. (This was back in the "Sure, go ahead and take a bedroom" phase of the pandemic—just a few months before the "Get your loud meetings to the basement" stage.) Why do I love birding? It helps me slow down. Take a pause. Gain some perspective. It helps me move, see, connect—with the land, the air, the water, this whole place we're living in. I love thinking about species beyond our species and life beyond our life. I love the majesty of birds, the trivia of birds, the painted plumages, the wild mating calls. I love bird podcasts. I love life lists. I love "What's This Bird?" and meeting new friends on the (ad-free and spam-free!) community on eBird. So say you're with me. You're bird-curious, at least. Now how do you get kids into it? First up, buy kids binoculars! (Adult binoculars are too heavy for my little ones.) Next, grab these two books. Both introduce kids to birds in a big, bright, simple way—with bird calls on the side for endless entertainment. (No, it's not easy to take the batteries out on long car rides but maybe you'll find yourself singing and hooting along.) The Little Book of Backyard Bird Songs features the House Wren, American Goldfinch, Red-Winged Blackbird, Killdeer, House Finch, Great-Horned Owl, Blue Jay, American Robin, Northern Cardinal, Mourning Dove, Song Sparrow, and American Crow. And The Little Book of Woodland Bird Songs has the Red Crossbill, Hermit Thrush, Black-Capped Chickadee, Common Loon, Red-Eyed Vireo, Sharp-Shinned Hawk, Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher, Purple Finch, Barred Owl, Wild Turkey, and Downy Woodpecker. Twenty birds—and bird calls!—to inspire all the birders or birders-to-be in your life.

​8. There is no 8! Just a loot bag of links. First up, Leslie and I just wrote a new article for CNBC and it's been algorithmically declared successful. Also! The moon is full at precisely 4:24 PM EST this afternoon and that's when I'll be dropping a chat with Sahil Bloom on topics like Parkinson's Law, cold plunges, phone-free walks, 5am writing blocks, opportunity versus energy, and so much more. I flew to New York to interview Sahil and there's a pile of powerful prescriptions in this one. Join us on Apple or Spotify. I enjoyed the first 30-45 minutes of Sam Altman on Joe Rogan (got a bit rambly after that) and it's nice to see Sarah Silverman starting her podcast up again after many months. If you missed it I thought her conversation with Tim Ferriss last year was wonderful. Susan Cain wrote a really powerful piece for her wonderful Kindred Letters email list called "Some thoughts on the horrors we face". Tim Urban pointed me to this video of a snow leopard mom pretending to be scared to help teach her kids. I posted a little string on the biggest ingredient for long-term happiness as well as this fascinating billboard I walked by in LA. Thanks for reading all the way to the very, very end! Have a wonderful month and I'll talk to you soon. Oh, and if someone forwarded you this you can sign up to join us righhhhhhhhhhhhhhht here.


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - September 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Happy end-of-September! 

Leslie and I are getting ready for our 5-year-old's birthday bash tomorrow. Did you have a giant 5-year-old birthday party? I still remember my sister (always the popular one) inviting her entire class over and the image of kids yanking each other down our brown-carpeted stairs by their pink stockings before wolverining into a massive slab of bright green mint-chocolate ice cream cake is firmly etched in my mind. Me, I usually had one friend over for the big day. Two on a big year!

This year I felt like I shared it with a lot of you. I started an annual tradition of writing birthday advice and, in case you missed it, here are the '44 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 44.' Thanks for all your well-wishes. 

And now let's get to the books... 

Neil

PS. If you have a friend who'd like to read more books they can sign up to join us right here... 

1. Foster by Claire Keegan. Economy! Tight, fast, shrink-wrapped writing that doesn't waste the reader's time. George Saunders talks a lot about this in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain (my favorite book on writing) (06/2021) and Story Club (my favorite Substack on anything). You want economy? Here's a 92-page Irish epic sharing the story of a young girl moving in with foster parents for a year. And I do mean epic. Who says epics have to be long? Ben-Hur? No, they just have to be broad! Vast! Sweeping! Before I went to Costa Rica I stopped by to ask Kyle at Type Books if he could recommend short books. Slip-in-that-useless-front-pocket-of-the-suitcase books. This was the first he grabbed. Check out the first page: "Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexword towards the coast where my mother's people came from. It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh where my father lost our red Shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew where the man who won the heifer sold her shortly afterwards. My father throws his hat on the passenger seat, winds down the window, and smokes. I shake — " and then you just have to turn the page. Because who's talking? Where are they going? And that vivid detail painted with so few words continues throughout. Even the title's economical! Foster could easily have been, you know, That Wild And Magical Year I Spent With My Irish Foster Parents. I admire David Mitchell's economical cover blurb too: "As good as Chekhov." A get-you-back-into-reading book. Highly recommended.

2. How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar. Have you heard of Dunbar's Number? It's 148, more casually rounded to 150, and is the "suggested cognitive limit for the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships." The number came up in Chapter 101 with Daniels, during our discussion of Sex at Dawn (04/2022) and afterwards I fell into a rabbit hole looking into Dunbar's Number which led me to this wonderful book. Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford and he has that rare Feynmanny gift of being smarter than everybody else but still speaking like you're sitting beside him on the train. "We share a history, you and I," he begins in Chapter 1. "A history in which our respective stories snake back through time, edging ever closer to each other until finally they meet up in a common ancestor. Perhaps our lineages meet up only a few generations back, or maybe it was a thousand years ago. Perhaps it was so long ago that it predates history — though even that could not have been more than two hundred thousand years ago, a mere twinkle in Earth time. For we modern humans all descended from a common ancestor who roamed the plains of Africa a mere ten thousand generations ago, ten thousand mothers giving birth to ten thousand daughters ... no more than would fit in a town of very modest size today." From this underpinning he goes on to discuss the 'expensiveness' of our giant brains, how they're unbelievably good at coordinating social relationships and connections — but only up to a point. Then we start talking about Dunbar's Number. Robin Dunbar says one good definition for Dunbar's Number is the number of people who would feel an obligation to you and would turn up for you. (He shares how it's no coincidence that data on average wedding size shows that — for years and years — it's been 150.) But 150 is just one in a series of numbers. He uses a metaphor of a stone being thrown into a lake that causes a set of ripples — as the ripples go out they get bigger but the amplitude, the height of the wave, gets gradually smaller. 5 are really intense relationships closest to you ("shoulders to cry on" friends), 15 are "best friends," 150 are friends, 500 are acquaintances (maybe coworkers, maybe people who send happy birthday messages on Facebook), and then, finally, there's a 5000-person layer which is the total number of faces you can recognize. Beyond 5000? Strangers. Despite the fact that we have very recently decided to live in teeming cities of 10s of millions of people our brains haven't changed — and neither has the size of our friendship circles. The book is full of endless anthropological trivia — why gossip is good for you, the benefits of nepotism as it relates to connection, how 200 million men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, and on and on. The book is much more conversational ("good-meandering") than you might expect but a detailed Table of Contents and Index can help you skip around. A particularly fascinating chapter near the end called "Be smart... live longer" shares lines like how there's "a direct link between IQ at age eleven and your chances of celebrating your eighty-fifth birthday" and how "beautiful people are, on average, more intelligent." I've just skimmed a few of the juicier arguments he puts forward in this fascinating book. Highly recommended. (PS. Who else suddenly wants a 'number' named after them so they can be cool like Dunbar, Avagadro, or Planck? I'm going to hereby declare Pasricha's Number to be the number of pages you have to read in order to say you read the book. For fiction, it's every page [minus any front or back matter] and for non-fiction, it's all the front and back matter [plus at least one chapter inside.])

3. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. First Joan Didion anything I have ever read. I remember when she died December 2021 there was this massive outpouring. I read her New York Times obit, a post on Instagram from Kelly Oxford, and remembered Lori Gottlieb had chosen The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan's Pulitzer-prize winning 2005 memoir of mourning after her husband's death — as one of her 3 most formative books. But who was Joan Didion? And where exactly do you start with a writer who's won every award but also has 77 (!) unique titles listed on Goodreads? Filter by reviews to see what's popular? Suuuure, but even then you get seven books with over 10,000 reviews. Maybe just wait a year or two for something to call your name? That works! This novel, written in 1970 and repackaged in a striking 2005 FSG Classics edition, grabbed my eyeballs when I was down at Type Books. Picked it up, started reading, and was met by something distinctively ... harsh. This book has sharp teeth. And yet, it's not really about... anything. Or anyone. I used to think books could be separated on a spectrum with "plot" on one side and "character" on the other. Well, Play It As It Lays picks up and drop-shatters that brittle idea by instead being almost entirely about tone. You can feel the California sideways sun setting against the 60s modernist homes with designer furniture inside the whole time. Did you see The Virgin Suicides? Not really about character or plot. But you remember the tone, right? The opening paragraph on the back cover kind of tells you this: "A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, plumbing the emptiness and ennui of a seemingly bankrupt society in spare sentences that scour and disturb." I'd never heard of sentences scouring. ("To rub hard, especially with a rough material...", says Merriam Webster.) Yet that's what they do. I have no notes from this book. No quotes pulled. No pages folded. It looks like I didn't read it. Yet I read every word. Because of that tone. Hypnotic, ruthless, sometimes I hated the book. Sometimes I didn't understand it. But I found myself always picking it back up, pushing through a confusing chapter or two, and then hitting another scene that stunned me. Sort of reminded me of Nine Stories by JD Salinger (06/2020) that way. Here, I'll flip the book to three random pages right now and pick a sentence out to show you. Here goes: "She lay on the couch, her eyes fixed on a bowl of dead roses, until four o'clock in the afternoon." (Page 182), "All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children." (Page 73), and "When they finally did it they were on the bed and at the moment before he came he reached under the pillow and pulled out an amyl nitrate popper and broke it under his nose, breathed in rapidly, and closed his eyes." (Page 153). Joan Didion, I still don't know you. And it might take a bit of time before I grab another one of your books. But you hooked me. And we'll talk again.

4. The Birds Of Costa Rica: A Field Guide by Richard Garrigues and Robert Dean. I met Scott Broad when I was 9 years old. My sister and I were moving to the town next door that fall and my parents had the idea to sign us up for day camp at our new school before the year began. On the first day, a counsellor got up and said "Okay, lot of lost and found stuff in this box from last week. Please come grab your stuff. Let's see, we got three tennis balls ... bunch of hats ... a pair of boy's underwear ... a pair of girl's underwear." And that's when Scott leaned over and whispered "Wonder what they were doing?" I liked him right away. Flash forward thirty years and I became a birder in the pandemic. Surprise, surprise, he did, too. We downloaded Merlin and eBird and started comparing "life lists." I turned into a "walking around the downtown park" type birder and he ended up building a giant floating 'hide' and trekking down to muddy lakes before sunrise to take endless photos (like this one or this one or this one). Last month, for the first time in our lives, we went on a trip together. A birding trip! Both firsts. We picked a country with a lot of birds and a direct flight: Costa Rica. We had four days to bird from sunrise to sunset (with a little owling after dark.) And before going we bought copies of this guide to all 903 birds ever seen in Costa Rica. We circled our "Dream 100" and flew down with a couple pairs of binoculars, one big fat camera, and some far-too-serious camo shirts. Every day we went looking for birds from sunrise to sunset and then returned to our hotel rooms to peel off our sweaty socks and open this book to check off, circle, and make notes of everything we'd seen. The guide is superb — calling out the 90 or so endemic birds and (importantly) giving us the specific field marks that, with Scott's pictures, helped us distinguish the birds from their nearest lookalikes. We ended up seeing 226 species including the Resplendent Quetzal, Red-capped Manakin, Long-tailed Silky Flycatcher, and Lesser Violetear. If you're going birding in Costa Rica — and by golly, you should! — then this is the guide for you. Pura Vida! 

5. 
Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade. We all want to be happy! And this is a famous 2005 fifteen-page research paper that pulls the big topic apart. The link goes to the direct download and it's a wonderful read. The paper opens by discussing the "enduring U.S. obsession with how to be happy" with research (always research) showing that the majority of U.S. residents "think about happiness at least once every day." For good reason! Happy people, after all, experience "larger social rewards (higher odds of marriage and lower odds of divorce, more friends, stronger social support, and richer social interactions), superior work outcomes (greater creativity, increased productivity, higher quality of work, and higher income), and more activity, energy, and flow." That all? No! They also are "more likely to evidence greater self-control and self-regulatory and coping abilities, have a bolstered immune system, and even live a longer life." No wonder we all want this! Are happy people just self-oriented though? Is this a narcissistic aim? No, turns out happy people are "more cooperative, prosocial, charitable, and 'other-centered'." The paper discusses pessimism, defines happiness ("frequent positive affect, high life satisfaction, and infrequent negative affect"), shares that famous model of what determines happiness ("50% genetic set point, 10% circumstances, 40% intentional activity") and then goes deep into some of these activities. Like "practicing gratitude and forgiveness", "thoughtful self-reflection", "the successful pursuit of life goals that are intrinsic in content", "the inclination to avoid social comparisons", "exercising regularly", "being kind to others", "pausing to count one's blessings", and "devoting effort to meaningful causes." And much more. It's an academic paper, yes — but a dense and fruitful read to help reflect and recenter us on what matters. 

6. 
Sicker In The Head: More Conversations About Life And Comedy by Judd Apatow. I've loved Judd Apatow since August 2001 when I saw my first episode of 'Freaks and Geeks' in my Lower East Side apartment in Manhattan where I was living to work for a comedy-writing startup in Brooklyn. (I share a longer version of that story here.) There was a certain nerve he was twanging that I hadn't felt twanged before and when you see how deep he's plumbed the art and science of comedy, it kind of makes sense. So here comes the follow-up to his 2015 interview collection Sick In The Head and, sure nuff, it's another dense collection of longform interviews between Judd and comedians like Sacha Baron Cohen, Samantha Bee, Ramy Youssef, Will Ferrell, and Pete Holmes. You hear the genius below the comedy like Sacha Baron Cohen on Page 372 saying "... there are two things, and they're not necessarily connected: There's the product, and then there's the ability to sell that product. There's a difference between whether the product is good and whether the marketing campaign is good." Amen. Unlike the first book where the interviews were conducted over decades, these ones are all largely of the "since the pandemic" variety and, as a result, there's a bit of a post-success tone here. More "two winners talking" versus the "one artist sharing their secrets to a young Judd with a clipboard who banged on their door in 1982" tone in the original. A lot of Judd here — his stories, his experiences, a giant glossy photo spread with him with a bunch of famous people. In the first book he was a student so the vibe was more classroom than coffee shop. I preferred that. But hey, longform interviews with George Saunders, Neal Brennan, and Lin-Manuel Miranda don't come round often so this gem slips nicely on the shelf between Sick In The Head and Poking A Dead Frog by Mike Sacks (08/2017). (PS. Very cool that Judd's donating all profits from the book to the Dave Eggers-created tutoring and literacy organization 826 National.)

7. Tough Boris by Mem Fox. What do you get a 5-year-old for his birthday? I went down and asked Doug Miller of Doug Miller Books for a suggestion and he handed me this gem. "Once upon a time, there lived a pirate named Boris von der Borch", it begins, with grizzled, beady-eyed, fierce-looking Boris looking at a treasure map on a sandy beach. "He was tough," it continues, with Boris leering over a group of pirates pulling a chest out of the sand. "All pirates are tough." "He was massive," it continues with Boris laughing and holding his parrot onboard the ship deck. "All pirates are massive." Momentum builds: "He was greedy", "All pirates are greedy", "He was fearless", "All pirates are fearless", "He was scary", "All pirates are scary" — and then the screeching halt: "But when his parrot died, he cried and cried." A suddenly emotional scene of tough Boris crying over his dead bird before sadly placing it into a fiddle-case casket and throwing it into the ocean. Before closing with "All pirates cry." and, finally, "And so do I." A heart-stirring tale somehow told with only 71 words. Complete picture book mastery. Highly recommended.

8. There is no 8! Just our usual pile of loot-bag links. 3 Books guest one moon ago, Lenore Skenazy, dropped a big New York Times Op-Ed "This Simple Fix Could Help Anxious Kids." (If you're paywalled out try here.) Also, have you heard of Nick Cave's 'Red Hand Files'? It's one of the most arresting emails I subscribe to — basically, just Nick answering a question about once a month. Check out a sample post here from a 20-year-old disillusioned with our "bizarre and temporary world." My wife Leslie emailed me Dr. Becky Kennedy's TED Talk "The Single Most Important Parenting Strategy" and it's wonderful. Read the transcript if you're in a hurry! Ugh: In the past 20 years fentanyl and suicide have overtaken car accidents to become the #1 cause of death for people aged 18-44. The Guardian lists 33 great Substack newsletters (via Austin Kleon who's got a great one!) I had a good time seeing Dr. Andrew Huberman live in Toronto with a crew from Othership — never been in a room before where 2000 people scream when "deliberate cold exposure" or "Peter Attia" are mentioned. I am somewhat repulsed by how fear-oriented Apple's new brand introduction video is and yet ... they have so perfectly figured out how to dial and push our emotional buttons that now I want to buy everyone an Apple Watch. I've admired Surgeon General Vivek Murthy for a long time and it was great listening to him sit down with master interviewer Rich Roll on an urgent deep dive into loneliness and the perils of social media.


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - August 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Thank you for being here.

I started this email list in 2009 when things started heating up on my blog 1000 Awesome Things. I sent a monthly "friends n' family update" to my mom, dad, sister, and, well, everyone I knew. Like a hundred people? I wasn't doing well at the time -- and was excited for a bit of light.

After that I started getting asked to give talks and I would always take a blank piece of printer paper and write "Keep in touch with Neil!" at the top in pen. I wanted friends. Ten or twenty of you at a time gave me your name for so many years. Thank you for being here.

In 2016 I started sending this monthly book club and today you're here with 33,722 others. (This is the largest of my four newsletters.) It’s been largely word of mouth, too. Never paid a cent to "drive traffic" or "grow subs" or anything. No ads paid, no ads displayed. I write every single word here — always have, always will. And I think of it as a note between friends. 

A lot of you have popped emails back over the years. I've met some of you in person. I've said things I regret to others. And, you know, I've just been thinking how everyone reading this is alive (93% of us are not!) so I want to make sure I tell you how much it means to me that you're here. This relationship means a lot to me and I am very grateful for it.

So, yeah, just — thank you for being here.

Now let's hit the books...

Neil

1. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. “We had a great conversation,” my Uber driver Afzaal said to me, on the wet and dark black street in front of my house at nearly two in the morning on a Thursday. “Through that ... amazing book.” With his permission I’d clicked on the backseat light and read us both the final chapter on the drive home from the Toronto airport. I had found the book seven hours earlier at Warwick’s airport bookstore in San Diego after speaking at Brian Buffini’s Mastermind Summit . Travel was bumpy – turbulence, delayed flights, an eleven-minute connection through terminals at O’Hare that required my best Forrest Gumping, but … I wasn’t really there, anyway. I was in 1930s and 40s Arkansas, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Mexico, and San Francisco, following the childhood of Margarite Johnson – “Mya sister”, as brother Bailey coins her early – in a poetic, accelerating retelling of her life from age 3 to 16 where she goes “from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware.” A thirteen year period that starts with her taking a train cross-country with only Bailey (who was 4!), away from her parents' “calamitous marriage”, helping their grandmother run a store in the black neighborhood of Stamps, Arkansas, and then yo-yoing between caregivers and traumatic events. There are hard scenes a-plenty – hiding her uncle from the Klan under a pile of produce, sexual abuse at age 8, learning to drive in Mexico down the side of a mountain with her dad on a 12-hour bender away from his girlfriend, living alone for a month in a junkyard where the kids all enter dance competitions to get money for their rusty automobile commune, to bashing through sticky racial ceilings and becoming the first San Francisco trolly conductor of color … and on and on. I found the book started slow: a kind of elongated still-shot of a small dusty hardscrabble southern town standing in the long shadow of slavery. I skimmed a couple chapters in the first half. But then it started picking up halfway through and never stopped. Fight scenes and sex scenes and “looking up vulva in the dictionary” scenes and … so much more. Told with an unflinching honesty and a turn-of-phrase that gets more and more poetic by the page. I learned this is the first of seven books in Maya Angelou's extensive autobiography which she wrote publicly from 1969 (this book) all the way up to 2013. She died at age 86 the following year. Highly recommended. 

2. Never Lose An Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention by Joey Coleman. When I worked at Walmart it was almost laughable how much more money we paid to hire “the next great exec” – some swooping superhero from Home Depot or whatever – rather than spend even a third or half that developing our own superheroes within. I worked there ten years and my last job was Director of Leadership Development. I made the boardroom presentation a handful of times. When internal leaders are brought in well – and brought into the fold well – they last longer, perform better, and are, bonus, cheaper. This book doesn’t make that case. It’s not pretending to be a big-idea “why” book – but wow is it ever a really, really good “how.” You want great people? Wan to bring them in well? Set them up for success? Joey Coleman has written my new favorite book on the topic. I’ll be recommending it to any leader -- small business or big! -- who tells me onboarding or retention or turnover are issues for them. The book is holistic – aimed at organizational cables and pulleys versus ‘you, the intrepid leader of people’. Joey organizes the book well and every section is full of his “it’s so obvious but I’m telling you with a giant gobsmacked smile so you don’t have to feel bad” tone with many fascinating (and snackable) business case studies throughout. (And I see Joey has posted the first three chapters on his website right here if you want to take a peek.) A wonderful guidebook for HR folks and leaders of large teams who want to invest in more trusting relationships with their people. Highly recommended.

3. The Call Of The Wild by Jack London. “He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed." This paragraph comes late in this 120-year-old classic by Jack London but, to me, it's a kind of long subtitle on the book’s central thesis. Quick backstory: Leslie and I did our customary Library Pit Stop on our way out of town last month and we met Shaka (pronounced like "Boom-Shaka-Laka") -- an entrancing, twirling, gushing librarian who practically sashayed around the kids section filling us all up with energy and excitement for books. My kids were all left smiling huge smiles holding crinkly piles of sticky hardcovers in front of their faces. And I remember when he added this book to the pile, too: “Oh, and you must get ‘Call of the Wild’... it's a Canadian classic!” It was meant for my oldest son -- though Common Sense says 12 and above. -- but he was buried in Percy Jackson. I cracked it open and took Jean Craighead Jones's advice in the first sentence of her 2002 Foreword to “Open this book to chapter one and start reading." What a great line. I skipped the rest of the Foreword. And she was right: I was quickly sucked into the story of Buck, the "tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair" who lived "at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley." Things were looking good there for about a page till he gets dog-napped and sold into roped-in servitude on a mushing dogsled in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. The second chapter where Buck is "broken" is extremely violent and made me wonder if the book was too old for my kid. But the story is entrancing – and it's only 199 pages in like 20-point font. A quick read that exposes people of all ages to the wild -- and it’s call. To the call of the wild. See if you're howling with Buck by the end like I was. (Oh, and if you want a fascinating 15-minute bio -- check out Jack London on Wikipedia.)  

4. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Once every year or so I see my wife Leslie just fall into a book and everything else falls away. That happened this month with her Leslie’s Pick: “If you’re like me and sometimes slip out of reading into binge-watching shows for a couple months (real talk over here) then this book is just what you need. Juicy, delicious, a touching commentary on power, love, fame, and being a woman -- but not overly profound. Kept me up late for a few nights and I'm still sad it’s over.”

5. Hike by Pete Oswald. I counted only 52 words total in this glorious, evocative, soul-transporting picture book about a father and son driving up the mountains for a day-long hike -- birds! tracks! snow! -- that doubles as an ode to a generational tradition. And now I've spent 52 words telling you to read it. (See inside here.)

6. Paradais by Fernanda Melchor. This is the closest book I have come to censoring from my own Book Club. Not for any political reason – but because the extended final scene is so horrifically lurid and violent that I can’t stop remembering it and I’m not sure I want to encourage you to remember it, too. Feel like I’m handing a Stephen King to a 10-year-old. Which somebody did to me, btw. I get why – by the end, I loved the book and loved reading in a way I just hadn’t before. But also: I replayed scenes from 'The Dark Half' for years. (Sidebar: What Stephen King book would you recommend somebody start with? At what age?) But ... I’m not censoring it. Because this is the most well-paced, three-dimensional, raw emotional spasm of a book I have ever read -- and I found it completely gripping. REWIND! I first picked up ‘This Is Not Miami’ (04/2023), the collection of gritty non-fictionish short stories taking place around Veracruz from emerging Mexican author Fernanda Melchor. It blew me away and looked her up and found out Fernanda had also written two novels in her 30s. Two! And both were, no joke, long- or short-listed for the Booker. Just, you know, the prize that went to ‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salmon Rushdie, ‘The God Of Small Things’ by Arundhati Roy, ‘Lincoln In The Bardo’ by George Saunders. NO BIGGIE! Who was this caped literary crusader? I had to know. So I raced over to Type Bookstore on Queen Street West – where we had Our Book Of Awesome's launch! – to see what the fuss was about. They were sold out of ‘Hurricane Season’ so I picked up ‘Paradais’, this 112-page novel with a jarring red cover of a ... blue apple? And wow it hit me like a riptide. Surprising, pulling, tornado-twisting from-the-ground view as a half-serious-half-not plot slowly hatches by two desperate teen boys. Entire novel told in a single breathless rant. Really! Like, even though the book is skinny I was originally put off on The Bookstore Fan Flip by the sight of many, many full pages without a single line break. Plus no table of contents, no chapter names, no chapter numbers. But I couldn't stop reading. Polo is the gardener at the luxury Mexican housing complex Paradais and an omniscient Polo-shadowing narrator tells the story of his relationship with Fatboy, with “eyes vacant and bloodshot from alcohol and fingers sticky with cheesy powder.” Fatboy’s parents are nowhere, his grandparents have their eye off the plot, and he’s in carnal-teen love with Señora Marián, a resident at the complex, who is married to a Mexican TV host. On the first page, Fatboy’s “gelatinous body wobbled in a crude pantomime of coitus” and the book’s endless twisting phrases are just beginning. (Read the entire first page here.) Yet this book, amazing given how short it is, doesn’t just dwell in the present. There are two deep backstory asides told with a suspenseful visual clarity that brings to mind the final episodes of Breaking Bad. 112 pages that will leave you feeling 112 emotions. Highly recommended. 

7. “Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets” and “Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Princeby J.K. Rowling. I am simultaneously reading the second and sixth Harry Potters to two of my kids these days. (I don’t always do it but I enjoy having a “read-a-loud” on the go with each kid – just think of keeping "the bridge of reading" as an open-for-business place for us to meet and hang out on.) I'm not sure if I've ever said this here but I ... loved Harry Potter growing up. Loved it. I had a Harry Potter bedspread... at university. Waited in line at midnight for the last few. I remember being 25 years old reading The Half-Blood Prince at four in the morning on July 16, 2005 thinking “I am reading this with the first people in the entire world -- the truest of the true!” (Who else was right there with me? "Half-Blood Prince" sold 7 million copies in the first 24 hours -- a record shattered only by "Deathly Hallows" which sold 11 million and, yes, holds the Guinness.) Interesting revisiting them nearly 20 years later. Stories hold up! That's the big thing. Characters, too. Hagrid is much bigger in the book. Snape Snapier. Dumbledore has a real twinkle the movies washed away. I have enacted a controversial rule in my house that my kids can't watch the movies until reading all the books. (Agree or disagree?) As I cracked them back open I was debating whether I should read Hermione as “Hermy-onee” as I mentally did till I saw the movies but, ultimately, I decided to Trebek it and really go all-in on voices. The adverbs are just killing me this go round -- “Hermione said, impishly”, “Harry said, feverishly”, “Ron said, imploringly" -- and it's almost like JK was in a secret game with herself to also shatter the Guinness record for Most Adverbs. Which she most assuredly did. "The road to hell is paved with adverbs", said Stephen King, and these books might make you believe it. The important thing, though, is that I am still mesmerized by the way she unrolls the map as the story expands. Book Two opens up with Harry at Number Four, Privett Drive, where his uncle is cautioning him not to ruin his big business dinner downstairs. Book Six opens up with the Prime Minister of England hearing a sniffing behind him and it's Cornelius Fudge who just shot down the chimney to tell him that that devilish Tommy Riddle was behind the suspension bridge disaster and all the other terrible recent headlines. (According to her own blog on March 16, 2006 -- thanks Wayback Machine! -- JK tried opening Books 1, 3, and 5 with this same scene but it only worked in Book 6 after "thirteen years in the brewing.") Masterful storytelling in both -- just so much grander, vaster, deeper as the series progresses. Now, given that 500 million Harry Potter books have sold -- and people share, but it's a series -- I'm guessing 7 billion people have not read them. If that's you: Consider this a push. Do it! Read them! Borrow them! Buy them! Once you push past the first two the last five books offer storytelling at its most powerful.

8. There is no 8! Just some loot-bag links down here. How about: "Tom Hanks thinks he's only made four 'pretty good' movies" in The Guardian (happy to see Cloud Atlas is one), "Aw shit, this is not my car!", Tim Urban offers a great relationship mental model on being a "Loving Teammate versus Angry Parent", I like Jack Dorsey announcing he's deleted Instagram and Brad Montague's note on his relationship with Rainn Wilson. Also! You may know August is the only month this year with two full moons. So bonus 3 Books chapter! "Live in the spa” interview with hip-hop legend Jully Black on the first one -- artistic longevity, forgiving ourselves, navigating the death of our parents -- and a conversation with free-range kid evangelist Lenore Skenazy coming on the exact minute of the next one. Closing question: If you were speaking to a room of 750 public school principals in 3 days and could only tell them one thing … what would it be?


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - July 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Happy end of July! 

Toronto public schools ended right on the buzzer of Friday, June 30th so Leslie, me, and our kids started the month feeling a bit fried.

We leaned deep into family time and I ditched my phone for a few weeks. I find handing Leslie my phone and asking her to hide it pretty anxiety-provoking ... but it eventually blossoms into liberating. I find it helpful to tell myself: “You're not as important as you think.” (Maybe we all need to force vacation a bit more?)

Felt grateful for lots of time this month swimming, hiking, birding, and, of course, reading. I kept a giant canvas bag of books with me wherever we went and decided to just pull out and read whatever I felt, whenever I felt. I read maybe an hour a day – before bed, mostly – and enjoyed this “follow the energy” approach. Did I finish every book? No! But finishing is overrated. (And one of our values!) Beware clogger books and do what you need to do to keep turning the page. 

Over on 3 Books, I’m experimenting with a new format called Pages. Since a lot of our 125 (!) Chapters clock in at 2-3 hours, I’ve created Pages to be little wisdom snippets under 333 seconds each. The show remains 100% ad-free with no sponsors, promotions, commercials, or interruptions of any kind. Come join us on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube

Also, finally got all Book Club Back Issues posted on Neil.blog. Of course, every issue is delivered warm and freshly pressed to inboxes first. If you know someone who likes reading, they can join us right here

Now let’s hit the books! 

Neil

1. Fire Weather: The Making of A Beast by John Vaillant. Did you see the photos of New York City masked in smoke from fires burning thousands of miles away? Who else’s kids were asking if today’s air quality index means recess is getting cancelled again? The scene reminds me of that post-apocalyptic Sigur Rós music video (track 1 from ( )).  Right now in Canada, there are over 900 wildfires raging with more land burning by July this year than any other full year since they’ve been tracking in the early 80s. It’s time to get up, up, up, and over this story to see a much fuller picture than headlines provide and this is the book to help us understand what’s happening and why. John Vaillant takes the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire – which led to the largest mass evacuation in North American history and incinerated thousands of homes down to piles of nails – and uses that disaster as a crowbar to pry open an astonishing treasure chest containing our bigger relationship to … fire. Pure and simple. Fire! What it actually is, how it actually behaves, what our relationship has been – and ties it all into what’s happening now. You might scoff when he asks early in the book if fire is a living thing – but you won’t be laughing as you keep reading. If you’ve read any of Vaillant’s previous non-fiction, like The Golden Spruce or The Tiger, you know he has a stunning ability to write cinematic non-fiction, painting endlessly vertiginous, large-scale, centuries- or millennium-long histories, on everything from energy, industry, climate, and how it all works and doesn’t work today. Highly recommended. 

2. 
The Library Book by Susan Orlean. I got a reply to last month’s book club (06/2023) from longtime 3 Booker Bo Boswell. Bo said he was browsing r/suggestmeabook when he came across the enticingly-titled thread “What’s your field or study (hobbyist or professional) and what’s a cornerstone beginners book for that topic/field?" The 164-time-upvoted top reply by Caleb_Trask19 says: "Librarian here, Susan Orlean’s Library Book is at first glance a true crime book about tracking the arsonist who set fire and burned down the main library in Los Angeles, but it also gives a comprehensive glimpse into contemporary libraries and their issues, especially updating a view of them if you haven’t been inside one since you were a kid." Bo then added his recommendation – saying "the amount of research and bizarre detail Orlean puts into her work is so engrossing" -- and this all gave me the push to finally crack it open. I am here today to tell you that, yes, The Library Book really is as good as everyone says. It’s some kind of breezy magic trick, too. Reading it really feels like wandering shelves of a library -- falling down tunnels, following curiosity trails. Sure, the book kind of centers on that massive 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library but it flares wildly from there. Every chapter feels exciting because you don’t know which way fiery Orlean will flicker. On Page 61 she writes about the library shipping department: “When I first learned that the library had a shipping department, I didn’t know quite what that meant, because I couldn’t think of anything a library needed to ship.” Right. Fair enough. But then she goes on to explain that thirty-two thousand books are shipped around L.A. five days a week and then poetically slips in “It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.” There’s a simultaneously inspiring and comic chapter where she shadows the city’s head librarian as he tries to make landscaping decisions on distant, uh, branches. She interviews the family of the (deceased) man accused of the fire and paints a sun-starched portrait of his troubled life. There is an entire chapter on library fires through history (you may weep) and another on eccentric Charles Lummis, a guy who walked 3507 miles to Los Angeles from Cincinnati in 1884 to take over the library in a massive controversy after the previous head librarian was fired for not being a man. She shares the history of the US library system: how it used to be country-clubbish – charging for library cards and appealing to elites -- to fresh challenges it faces today as pillars of progressiveness. (“Libraries?,” scoffs Haley Dunphy in an old episode of Modern Family, “I thought that was a bathroom for homeless people?”) A big, overstuffed jack-in-the-box of a book with multiple threadlines braided beautifully together with Susan’s own story – which’ll likely remind you of yours. (It did for me.)  Guaranteed to deepen your reverence of books, libraries, and reading and increase your love for community, connection, and the way we have all shared and will need to share wisdom through the ages. Through the pages. Highly recommended. 

3. Crow by Amy Spurway. I spent an hour in the wonderful independent bookstore Armchair Books high up in Whistler last month and stumbled on this bright yellow novel on display near the front. Is it about birds? I thought so but no! It’s a funny, big-voiced, debut novel from Cape Bretonor Amy Spurway. (With Ducks on 03/2023 I’m suddenly on a Cape Breton roll.) Crow is the spicy, depressive protagonist – a woman in her mid-30s who gets jilted from her engagement in Toronto, discovers she has a terminal illness, and then moves home to live with her mom in rural, you guessed it, Cape Breton. Crow’s voice is loud – crass, vulgar, sarcastic, speedy -- and it’s what kept me going through a seemingly endless parade of tough-to-love characters and a plot that feels a bit bloated. Still, it’s worth reading for the voice and its accompanying cozy-home feeling of living in Crow’s impoverished community of eccentrics on an island in the Atlantic Ocean where everybody knows everybody and nobody’s business stays private for long. 

4. A Sand County Almanac: With Essays On Conservation From Round River by Aldo Leopold. The pandemic pushed us farther indoors and online where we were fed digital pellets that titillated, rewarded, and, ultimately, cajoled. Join Threads! A bastion of free speech! A vibrant global town hall! Sure, uh, the business model is stealing all your data to sell you more stuff. But that’s the price of being connected these days, right? Wrong! Being connected, really connected, is often about unplugging. Stepping outside. Getting into nature. Sparrows, foxes, streams, trees – listening to what they’re saying and connecting, reconnecting, with the vaster worlds around us. Am I tweaked from concurrently reading Fire Weather by John Vaillant? Maybe. But more and more I believe attuning, reattuning, ourselves to the natural world is a critical life skill that’s fast falling away as we step deeper into the matrix. On average, we only spend 7% of our days outside right now – the lowest level ever in recorded history. Do we think there’s no downside to chopping our access to things just because we can’t measure them? Spending a couple of hours a week in nature is associated with better health and well-being. And Dr. Qing Li's research on 'forest bathing' shows deep time in nature lowers blood pressure, lowers stress hormones, lowers anxiety, lowers anger, and improves sleep. Maybe trees just have bad advertising? Nobody boosts Instagram posts that say “Turn this thing off and go for a hike, dummy!” But we should. Good use of tax dollars. Because when we ground and reconnect ourselves to the broader energies of the world we reduce stress while feeling a deeper connection with all living things. If you resonate with this then I have a seventy-five-year-old billboard for you: this collection of passionate and inviting essays by renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold. Aldo died fighting a forest fire in 1948 while also working as a conservation advisor to the United Nations. This after years with the US Forest Service and Wilderness Society. Gone too soon but in his life’s wake he left us this astounding collection of essays on the natural world. The book opens with a 98-page “nature diary” broken into the months of the year that truly make you feel like you’re living on a Wisconsin farm in the 1920s. (Pairs well with Little House In The Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, reviewed 02/2018.) Endless astute and poetic observations of the relationship between mice and owls or the mating displays of American Woodcock deepen awareness to the natural world. Reminded me heavily of Thoreau’s diaries (09/2022). From that opening piece, you can jump between essays for the next few hundred pages – mostly republished from notable bird or wildlife magazines. This is a good book to read in a hammock with a strip of birch bark as your bookmark for when you fall asleep. Aldo's essays squeeze out bits of wisdom sap, too. On Page 181 he writes “The man who cannot enjoy his leisure is ignorant, though his degrees exhaust the alphabet, and the man who does enjoy his leisure is to some extent educated, though he has never seen the inside of a school.” And on Page 212 he says “Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.” Thank you, Aldo, for the gift. And thank you, J. Drew Lanham, for pointing me to it. 

5. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. For a 93-year-old book, this book sure has a modern structure: Fifteen different characters offering short, first-person viewpoints of the dramatic couple weeks during which family matriarch Addie Bundren dies and then has her body carried by her husband and children over Mississippi backcountry to be buried. I loved the voices – a potentially problematic poorboy pidgin – but couldn’t figure out what was going on. So I decided to take the advice Ryan Holiday gave us back in Chapter 38 and just unapologetically take a time-out to read the full Plot Summary on Wikipedia before diving back in. No book guilt, no book shame. Did I love it? No, not really. I felt a bit like I might be watching Citizen Kane without realizing how many things it did differently because they don’t seem that different anymore. I like that it was crazy modernist for the 1930s but if you want fresher modernism I might suggest If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Colvino, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, or Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders. (What would you add to that list? Just reply and let me know…) 

6. That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means: The 150 Most Commonly Misused Words And Their Tangled Histories by Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras. It’s been a while since we’ve added a book to our Enlightened Bathroom Reading series. This one makes the porcelain mantle. Lemme ask: Do you know the difference between imply and infer? Barter and haggle? Podium and lectern? Don’t worry! Neither does The New York Times, The Washington Post, or Barack Obama! Each of these 150 little (bathroom-sized) essays opens with a headline or speech excerpt by someone using the word wrong before a slightly-acidic-but-ultimately-empathetic explanation of the difference. So, for example, they’ve got a sliver of Obama’s eulogy for Senator Ted Kennedy where he says “We can still hear his voice bellowing through the Senate chamber, face reddened, fist pounding the podium…” and then chime in to say that, actually, “a podium is a raised platform where a speaker stands to deliver a speech, so Obama’s vivid image of a red-faced Ted Kennedy in a Senate speech pounding the podium makes for a surprisingly gymnastic congressional session.” Meanwhile, a lectern is the “raised, slanted stand where a speaker places notes for a speech.” Some writeups will illuminate, some you could write yourself, and others may trigger that “Oh, yeah, right, of course, of course" reflex. Petras and Petras (a high-flying brother-sister publishing business, I learned) do a good job of weaving everything together and they helpfully close each essay with the bolded dictionary definition – if you need to skim because your sister is banging on the door to use the shower, etc. Btw: “When you imply, you’re the speaker. When you infer, you’re the listener” and “When you’re bargaining over the price of a rug, you’re haggling… whereas bartering is trading, exchanging goods or services without using money.” No need to haggle over the price of this one. Fun vocabulary tuneup. 

7.
My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop. Poll: Is owning your own bookstore the a) best business in the world? or b) worst business in the world? For fun let’s say you must pick one. No in-betweeners! Okay, hands up if you think that owning your own bookstore is ... the best business in the world. Okay, yeah – some hands, lots of hands. Great, hands down, hands down. Now: hands up if you think owning your own bookstore is ... the worst business in the world? Some hands, now lots of hands. Bit of a tossup. Maybe it is the worst business? Could it be? After all, your inventory turns maybe once a year, you spend evenings and weekends lifting heavy boxes of heavy things, and, you know, whenever you actually sell a book you take home a few dollars which, after rent and staff, leaves you with what? A nickel? Or, wait, that’s way too harsh. Best business in the world people: Could you be right? I hope you’re right. Maybe truly nothing is better than swathing yourself and your community in an invisible, invaluable blanket of collective wisdom from our forever-shared past. You basically live in a room at the furthest possible progressive place of our neverending cultural conversation. And by being right there – picking books, suggesting books, talking about books – you participate and further that conversation. You’re at the intersection of all the things we know so far and all the things we’re learning. What could be more important than that? I voted a) in the poll. Least that’s the headspace I got to after flipping through 80-something luminaries – Ann Patchett, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Dave Eggers – sharing a little essay celebrating their favorite bookstore. Not as good as visiting Fiction Addiction in Greenville, Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, Powell’s in Portland, Munro’s in Victoria, or Books&Books in Coral Gables, but hey – it was the next best thing.

8. The Best Nest by P.D. Eastman. My sister-in-law gave me this book last year with the inscription “Neil! Happy birthday to you … someone who models contentment, loving what you’ve got, and taking good, good care of your nest! To you + the birds!” Beautiful sentiment from a beautiful person, but, just being honest, contentment might be the opposite of what I’ve felt most of my life. (Not sure a content person would spend the past five years writing 3 books, recording 100 podcasts, giving 300 keynote speeches, writing 1000 awesome things...) Contentment is a bit of a north star to me. Somewhere I'm heading even if it’s somewhere I never fully reach. (I was a bit of a robot when Leslie and I met.) So, I appreciate the gift, I’m glad I’m putting out some contentment vibes, and this little inner conversation is all probably why this colorful 1968 picture book by P.D. Eastman (most famous for Go, Dog! Go, one of Douglas Rushkoff's 3 most formative books) hit me hard. Just instead of the “husband bird in blue paperboy cap” being content or the “wife bird in the pink bonnet”, I felt like, you know, both. I’m Mr. Bird who sings on the first page “I love my house. I love my nest. In all the world my nest is best!” and also Mrs. Bird who screams on the next “I’m tired of this old place. I hate it. Let’s look for a new place right now!” Place being a perfect metaphor for everything, of course. In the book what follows is a fairly predictable series of unfortunate looking-for-a-new-home situations before the birds ultimately find each other back at the first nest. Still, it’s the opening two pages that stick with me. “I love my house. I love my nest. In all the world, my nest is best.” Maybe the book leaves us with a trite but helpful gratitude-forcing mantra to sing to ourselves whenever we’re eying the next ... anything. “I love my house. I love my nest. In all the world, my nest is best.” 

9.
There is no 9! You read all the way to the bottom so it’s time for a little loot bag of links. I enjoyed J.R. Moehringer’s behind-the-scenes-of-a-ghostwriter piece in The New Yorker. I got text-flooded when my recent CNBC piece got sprayed all over Apple News. I know a chunk of you are getting this email because you heard me on The Rich Roll Podcast – hello! – and I'm currently listening to Rich with Judd Apatow and Tim Ferriss. My inner trivia nerd is forever-addicted to the Harper’s Index – here’s the past one, two, three! – and I’ve been introducing more and more people lately to the (relatively) new Sound ID feature on the Merlin ID App. “Shazam for birds,” everyone calls it, and totally free from Cornell. A few of my recent rants: "We're losing our capacity to engage with books”, “How we think about happiness is backwards”, and “How to restart a reading habit". I'm going viral on TikTok! Reminder to grab a kSafe if you’re addicted to your phone like me. Dr. Peter Gray on "Play Deficit as Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Health". George Saunders keeps teaching us all to be better readers and writers (I am a paying member of his Story Club and highly recommend it.) As I mentioned at the jump I'm trying out a new short-form episode format called “Pages”. Call me at 1-833-READ-A-LOT with your thoughts! And, finally, thank you for reading. I am grateful to hang out over the electronic mail. I am grateful to you forwarding and suggesting this email to your friends. (They can sign up here.) As always, please feel free to send me a reply to this note. I read every one and always send a few letters back. 


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - June 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Hope you've had a great June.

I have a new article up on CNBC sharing five little habits I (try to) do every day.

Flew to Texas twice recently for two of the deepest conversations we've had yet on 3 Books. Come hang in a church in Dallas with billionaire entrepreneur Suzy Batiz or in a stump garden in Houston with former NFL player Martellus Bennett.

Now raise the squeaky red curtain as, for the 80th straight month, I'm sharing a review of books I just read and enjoyed...

Neil

1. Dancing In The Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich. Rich Aucoin is a Canadian musician who puts on orgasmic, sweaty, high-energy shows full of dancing, confetti, and … carnival … in the truest sense of the word. We struck up an online friendship after I learned he was using quotes from my book on resilience in his performances. He suggested a while back that I read this book – so I did that thing where you buy it and let it marinate on your bookshelf for a few years. I then got another out-of-nowhere prompt to read it from Jonathan Haidt recently and then I knew: It was time. There’s word of mouth and then there’s word of mouths, right? So, if Sex At Dawn (04/2022) is the long evolutionary history of sex then this book is the long evolutionary history of dancing – or, more generally, “collective effervescence”, as Émile Durkheim calls it, which Barbara Ehrenreich cites, in this thorough, iterative, pace-by-pace introspection of our human compulsion to moooooooooove. From "Dionysus to the Grateful Dead", as the cover blurb says. “Why should humans be rewarded so generously for moving their bodies together in time? We are also pleasurably rewarded for sexual activity, and it’s easy to figure out why", she says on Page 26. But ... dancing? Why do we feel the need to dance? To share in collective body-moving joy? In the “She Don’t Use Jelly” encore, in the drumbeats before the playoff game, or even in the galvanizing closing words of a speaker at the end of a supply chain conference. We’re up, we’re crying, we’re cheering, we’re moving, we’re doing all this – why? Well, back to Barbara, “to be ‘outdanced’ is to risk reproductive failure” for the simple reason that for much of our history “early humans probably faced off predatory animals collectively – banding together in a tight group, stamping their feet, shouting, and waving sticks or branches.” Do you buy this? We do still sort of do this. Bear swings by we’re told to exaggerate our height – swing sticks, make ourselves big! "Predators might be tricked by synchronous behavior into thinking that it faced – not a group of individually weak and defenseless humans – but a single, very large animal.” Could today’s dancing be part of yesterday’s evolutionary success story? Yes, says Ehrenreich! And then for much of the book, she goes on to share how the higher-level we – structures we created around church, governments, and civil structure – sought to stamp out “collective effervescence”, because it’s hard to control and helps the masses accomplish massive things, only to have our endlessly dancing ways blow back and back and back again. Ehrenreich shares how “ancient Greek elite did not abandon the old ecstatic rituals but simply took them underground” with sixth-century BCE groupings that “drew on social elites, whose members gathered periodically for secret rites apparently aimed, above all, at engendering collective ecstasy.” From there through the advent of the church to the “riots” of 50s rock-and-roll to the “carnivalization” of professional sports, this is a well-strung-together cultural portrait that feels something like walking down a long wall reading a thoughtful museum exhibit. Down with virtual! Up with live! For the rest of our days may we all seek to organize, participate, and join in-person "collective effervescence." Highly recommended. 

2. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel by Ocean Vuong. A first-person coming-of-age story of a gay Vietnamese boy in Hartford, Connecticut finding and losing love in fleeting glances. Maybe that’s what the one-line movie summary of this book will say in TV Guide. But if they make this into a movie – and it sure feels like they will – then it will lose some of its soul. Because this is really a 240-page poem where “The room is silent as a photograph” and “The bus’s lights make it feel like a dentist’s office gliding through the wet streets” and “A handful of straggling stars were biting through the sky’s milky haze.” I mean, maybe if it's in some Terrence Malick Tree Of Life way – maybe. But it’s a poem. I found it both a fast read – no giant halting words type thing – and a slow read – with at least one sentence per paragraph demanding an instant slow-mo second read. The novel is written with an interesting conceit: as a long confessional letter safely written by the now-slightly-older protagonist to his non-English-reading mother. Telling her everything. About beauty, hardcore sex, horrible overdoses, devastating grief – everything. I’ll just add: The book opens very abstractly and I mention this in case, like me, it takes you a while to push through the first few chapters and start hitting the more chronologically meaty middle. It still jumps around after, and there are some exotically abstract asides, but settles. Get to the settling! Make the push. An absolutely exquisite novel awaits. 

3. The Skull by Jon Klassen. What % of stories you read with kids have happy endings? Or even watch with kids onscreen? Most, right? Some triumphant bugle-blaring before the parade outside the underwater castle maybe or a chubby three-foot king suddenly getting de-hypnotized and allowing the attractive white couple to marry. Jon Klassen (This is Not My Hat) is one of the few artists sitting pretty firmly in the children’s literature genre while also sitting pretty firmly in the “you have no idea where this is going” genre. I love him for that. Few years ago Jon took a trip up to Alaska for a library reading and thumbed through a fifty-year-old book of folktales before he went on stage. A short tale called “The Skull” stuck with him and, after tossing it around his mind for a year, he reached out to the library and asked if they might find the book since he hadn’t written down the title. They did! “Librarians are really good at that,” he writes in the Author's Note. But! When it was sent back to him it was stretched into something different than he remembered. “I like folktales because that is what is supposed to happen to them,” he writes. “If you read a book once and put it back on the shelf, and a year from now someone asks you how this story went, the same thing will happen: your brain will change it.” The result here is a stunningly crafted 10ish minute read (100 pages but like 28-point font) that is unlike almost anything coming out right now for kids. Otilla is running through the woods – away from an unnamed something – when she stumbles upon a “very big, very old house” where, after knocking loudly, “in a window above the door, she saw a skull looking at her.” The skull walks and talks and it gives her a tour of its house, lets her crash for the night, and then, in a dramatic Tarantino-esque climax, is chased by a headless skeleton who Otilla, uh, pushes off the roof before crushing its bones into dust and burning it into ashes and throwing it down a bottomless pit. Dark! But almost … refreshingly so? The drawings are sideways-sunset entrancing and details are so well thought throughout.

4. The Song Of Significance: A New Manifesto For Teams by Seth Godin. Seth turns 63 in a couple of weeks and he’s evolved into a kind of enlightened Yoda of the business set. His conversations with Tim Ferriss are turning into after-the-music-goes-down by-the-fireplace style dinner chats and his blog posts, which he’s written daily without a day off for decades (and I thought 1000 was a lot!), are part siren-song, part orthogonal-made-you-think thoughts, and part dramatic call-to-action. Just before writing this book, he cobbled together a group of volunteers globally to create the wonderful The Carbon Almanac (10/2022), and when I sent him a letter from my city councilor enthusiastically supporting my pitch to ban gas-powered leaf blowers (inspired by Seth!), he wrote back just so positively, so happily. “This is thrilling," he said. "My friend Dan Pink tells me they've already banned them in DC." Changing the world and seeming content while doing it? He's figured something out. Now: What’s the book about? Significance. In the post-AI world we’re going to need significance – meaning – to inspire, engage, collaborate, and perform at our highest level. Gallup reports that 87% of the global workforce is not engaged. “I don’t know where you work,” Jerry Seinfeld once said. “But I know you hate your job.” Seth surveyed 10,000 people in 90 countries to describe the conditions of the best they ever had and the top four results were “I surprised myself with what I could accomplish”, “I could work independently”, “The team built something important”, and “People treated me with respect.” (“I got paid a lot” was #12 on the list, right between “I traveled” and “I got to tell people what to do.”) He then puts forward a 2x2 with four kinds of work: bottom-left quadrant is “Low Stakes, Low Trust” Impersonal (AI, freelance marketplaces, ‘lowest bidder’ mechanical Turk stuff), top-left quadrant is “High Stakes, Low Trust” Surveillance (certification, verification abound), bottom-right quadrant is “Low Stakes, High Trust” Comfort (familiarity, the village, jam jars at the end of the driveway), and the ultimate top-right quadrant is “High Stakes, High Trust” Significance with work that “creates human value as we connect with and respect the individuals who create it.” Like most of Seth’s books, this one appeals to fractured attention spans (like mine) with 144 riffs spread across 187 pages. They read like blog posts enmeshed under a big bright light pointing the way forward for managers, leaders, and coaches of all stripes. A fantastic read.

5. Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick: “The scary dystopian realities of The Handmaids Tale, 1984 and my own nightmares of an even more segregated, AI-infused-post-pandemic-fear-laden society echoed in my mind as I read this book. And great acts of love and courage that characters, based on real events, performed amidst extreme challenge and tragedy in The Underground Railroad, The Book of Negroes, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz swelled in my heart. The world Celeste Ng creates in her most recent novel doesn’t feel so far from our current reality and the way her vivid characters behave in the face of discrimination and inhumane acts where children are separated from parents is believable, heartbreaking, and inspiring. If you, like me, love themes of what connects us, what could pull us apart, us versus them, unbreakable bonds, courage in the face of tragedy, and heroic acts in desperate times, I think you’ll love this book.” 

6. Sparrow Envy: Field Guide To Birds And Lesser Beasts by J. Drew Lanham. Professor J. Drew Lanham of Clemson University defines birds as “Worship-worthy, feather-bearing, winged beings, most of which fly. With abilities to sing in harmony with themselves, move by the millions in murmuration as a single entity and traverse hemispheres guided by stars, they are what humans would be if they could” and then defines birder as “Me.” A slim volume of bird poetry (like the title track Sparrow Envy) and little bits of artistic field guides around birding and nature, more generally. Playful tone throughout including the Appendices “Nine Rules for the Black Birder” (also a YT video) and “New Names for Plural Birds” which opens with “A Hemorrhage of cardinals / red-staining the backyard / A Consideration, Council / or Congress of crows; / call them anything but murderers, please / A Whir of hummingbirds / A Riff (or Mood) of any bird that’s blue”. A great complement to his wonderful memoir The Home Place (04/2023).

7. Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan. Do you remember when Deep Impact and Armageddon hit theaters at the same time and it was kind of hilarious? Same thing with Dante's Peak and Volcano. What’s up with the “two things that kind of look like each other appearing at once” phenomenon? I thought about those movies over the past few months when I noticed that almost every window display suddenly had two new thick books … by music personalities … about creativity … with plain giant circle rings on the cover. I haven’t read Rick Rubin’s yet but this Nick Cave book – it’s a stunner. “This is a book about Nick Cave’s inner life” says the jacket and that’s about as understated as it could be given this thing reads like the ultimately well-crafted podcast. A long, meaty, thoughtful Q&A conducted over many phone calls during the pandemic by expert British journalist Seán O’Hagan, along with Nick Cave, who just has one of the vastest, deepest, tidal-wave minds. I didn’t know much about Nick Cave before reading this book – beyond the fact that I loved “Into My Arms” years ago and occasionally had a “Red Hand File” email from him shared with me – so it was gratifying discovering this book was less memoir (they don’t talk about his upbringing, really) and much more a 65-year steeping philosophy examining our relationship with, amongst other things, creativity, doubt, grief, family, and resilience. Nick has had one of those incredible lives from many perspectives including giant artistic success, deep personal tragedy (including his 15-year-old son falling to his death off a cliff a few years before these conversations), and a truly vast style of living (geographically, relationshippy, religionny, creatively, etc) and, yeah, the way he navigates them is almost … otherworldly? Sort of how George Saunders writes about writing. On the creative impulse: “You have to operate, at least some of the time, in the world of mystery, beneath that great and terrifying cloud of artistic unknowing. The creative impulse to me, is a form of bafflement and often feels dissonant and unsettling. It chips away at your own cherished truths about things and pushes against your own sense of what is acceptable. It’s the guiding force that leads you to where it wants to go.” On certainty: “The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority.” On skepticism: “I think of late I’ve grown increasingly impatient with my own skepticism; it feels obtuse and counter-productive, something that’s simply standing in the way of a better-lived life. I feel it would be good for me to get beyond it. I think I would be happier if I stopped window-shopping and just stepped through the door.” On loss: “We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time – that’s for sure. And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That’s the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief.” To me, the book reads like some kind of cousin to Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny, Beautiful Things (10/2020), with emotional depth, and punctuated by incredible stories throughout too, like this one, about small things that stay with you as you’re grieving. “There’s a vegetarian takeaway place in Brighton called Infinity, where I would eat sometimes. I went there the first time I’d gone out in public after Arthur [his 15-year-old son] had died. There was a woman who worked there and I was always friendly with her, just the normal pleasantries, but I liked her. I was standing in the queue and she asked me what I wanted and it felt a little strange because there was no acknowledgement of anything. She treated me like anyone else, matter-of-factly, professionally. She gave me my food and I gave her the money and – ah, sorry, it’s quite hard to talk about this – as she gave me back my change, she squeezed my hand. Purposefully. It was such a quiet act of kindness. The simplest and most articulate of gestures, but, at the same time, it meant more than all that anybody had tried to tell me – you know, because of the failure of language in the face of catastrophe.” Want to stir up emotions you didn’t even know you had? While exploring and wrestling with your own feelings and thoughts about creativity, grief, religion, and philosophy? Well, my friends, look no further than this mesmerizing and heart-stirring gift. 

8. There is no eight! Loot bag time. Okay, I should tell you I bought a kSafe and lock my phone in it every night. That helps me stay offline -- which is good given social media isn't good for kids -- and, of course, lets me read more. Read what? Well, I just revisited my own summer beach reads list -- give it a comb if you're looking for something to slip between the sandals and sunscreen. Btw, if you have time for an absolutely masterful 3000-word essay about reading I'd suggest A.O. Scott's masterful "Why Are We So Afraid Of Reading?". Reading, reading, reading, reading. But good to have breaks! Some podcast mashups I liked recently include Chris Paul on Rich Roll, Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Pete Holmes, Tim Ferriss on Andrew Huberman. I liked the nostalgia bomb of this string of one software product from every year since 1977. And I wanted to say a big thank you to podmaster Rich Roll for sharing 3 Books with his community recently (hi new friends!). A few of our reels together -- like this, this, and this -- have been going extremely viral online. Ravishing Rich makes the algorithms purrrrrr. Lastly, most importantly, you did it -- you made it! -- you're at the end of this 3000-word essay. So congrats! You win the Corn Pop-dusted, cellophane-wrapped prize at the bottom. Which is a video of baby elephants swinging their trunks like turbine fans.


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - May 2023

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Hey everyone,

Last week Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared that “our children have become unknowning participants in a decades-long experiment” before issuing a report showing how social media use doubles mental health challenges and then blaring the bugle for, amongst other things, “tech-free zones”. What’s the best tech-free zone? We all know the answer. Let’s keep cultivating the skill of reading. As I said to Rich Roll last week: Even two pages counts!


Now let’s get to the books,

Neil

1. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future At The New Frontier Of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. This is the best book I have read this year. First, I have never read a better knockout blow to Google and Facebook – uppercut-off-the-planet-level -- and the grotesque form of mutant capitalism they spawned. Surveillance capitalism is ‘a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.’ Sound big? It is. The book is very wide-arms-around-everything – enticingly, wondrously, intoxicatingly so. As an example, that ‘new economic order’ line is one of eight definitions offered in the opening pages – right between the arresting 14-line epigraph from W.H. Auden and the 2-page Table of Contents – which, btw, is not to be confused with the detailed six-page Table of Contents from Page 536-Page 541. Here’s the thing: You will want to read it all. All! You’ll want to eat it all. The whole book! You will want to soak this book in through every pore on your skin like some kind of healing cream. It’s that good. That entrancing opening is just a slow-arcing bump for the gentle ten-fingered set that follows. A captivating 18-page Introduction awaits where Zuboff lays out starting grounds (‘The digital realm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a chance to ponder and decide’) and then outlines her premise: “… rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it. What does this sea change mean for us, for our children, for our democracies, and for the very possibility of a human future in a digital world? This book aims to answer these questions.’ And then … it is on. She goes deep, fast, but with care, without ego, and with everything revealed in a winking-socratic-professor style that leaves you feeling almost intoxicated by learning. Case studies, news headlines, and philosophical questions are braided together wonderfully. She reminds us “until the last few minutes of human history, each life was foretold in blood and geography, sex and kin, rank and religion. I am my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s son. The sense of the human being as an individual emerged gradually over centuries, clawed from this ancient vise” before pushing to say “The new harms we face entail challenges to the sanctity of the individual… including the right to the future tense and the right to sanctuary” and then concluding that “My aim here is to slow down the action in order to enlarge the space for such debate and unmask the tendencies of these new creations as they amplify inequality, intensify social hierarchy, exacerbate exclusion, usurp rights, and strip personal life of whatever it is that makes it personal for you or me. If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so. We will need to know. We will need to decide. We will need to decide who decides. This is our fight for a human future.” Does it feel like you’ve just read the book? That's just the end of the Introduction! Now you’re on Page 62 and the book is going 20,000 leagues under the sea. But fear not! The murky terrain is covered with a buoyant lightfootedness. The number of doors Zuboff opens – pulling long-kept-in-the-dark documents and tying together loosely-held headlines over decades – is some kind of top-tier detective work. I had a hankering I was going to love the book because I’d heard it referenced by Jenny Odell (How To Do Nothing) and Douglas Rushkoff (Team Human). So I went online and found a used hardcover from an indie bookstore (thank you Biblioasis from Windsor, Ontario!) and then, once I’d spent a couple hours with it and was still breathless, I decided to download it on Libro.FM as well. The size of this book sometimes felt intimidating – I mean, it’s 525 pages and that doesn’t include 166 pages of Notes and Index. But then I’d go on a long late-night walk and fall into an entire chapter on audio – often an hour and forty-five minutes long or something – and could feel like my mind expanding. Zuboff is 71 and a former professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. This is her third book. Her first came out in 1988. Her second in 2002. This one in 2019. She takes fifteen and a half years to write each book. It shows. (By way of comparison, Ryan Holiday has written 11 books since 2010. James Patterson has written 143!) The clarity and power which she navigates our deepening relationship with technology and what technology’s relationship is with us – from eons to centuries to decades ago to today – is sage-like. This is a seeing book – a vital and necessary primer to help us understand where we are and where we go from here. Highly recommended. 

2. Freedom by Sebastian Junger. Let’s say you’re 51 and you just got divorced. You have no kids. You have a brilliant mind – and now it’s spinning a million miles a minute. What do you do? How do you … level set? Take a breath? Reorient yourself in your own life? Well, if you’re Sebastian Junger you spend a year with three friends illegally walking railroad tracks around the States. Doing what? ‘Dodging railroad cops, sleeping under bridges, cooking over fires, and drinking from creeks and rivers…’ says the inside jacket. I was intrigued! I loved Tribe, Junger’s 2016 book that I put on my Covid Reading List. First up, the book is small. Tiny! 145 pages of 14-point font with thick margins. And it opens with this palette-cleansing epigraph: “As for humans, God tests them so they may know they are animals.” Ecclesiastes 3:18 (NIV). Like it? First two sentences are further bait: “The change was immediate. The country opened up west of Harrisburg and suddenly we could drink from streams and build fires without getting caught and sleep pretty much anywhere we wanted.” It takes off quickly from there. There’s a lot to love about this book: the endless tight nerdy digressions on railroad history, the Apache, nomadic culture, and community. I loved geeking out with Junger and almost pictured us smoking in wet clothes on a wet log beside a buggy creek with a slow sun setting behind us. But, ultimately, that highlight is also the lowlight. The digressions kind of are the book. It’s like a handful of journal entries with a buried creek swirling somewhere underground. I guess this makes sense as it’s billed as “a profound rumination on the concept of freedom” so maybe I’m just saying let’s dial back "profound" to "interesting." If you’re new to Sebastian Junger, I’d suggest starting with Tribe. He has a fascinating mind and I’m excited to see where he goes next. 

3.
Excellent Advice For Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly. You know how Spotify sends those end-of-year listening reports that everyone geeks out about for like 12 hours? Well, if I had a report like that for “links you’ve texted” I am pretty sure “1000 True Fans” would be in my top three. Kevin’s ability to distill unwieldy and complex things into tiny sentences places him on a high mantle with Seth Godin and Derek Sivers. That’s why I crushed on the KK.org blog post titled “68 Bits Of Advice” that he released on his birthday in 2020. (I even copied his format exactly for my 43 Things I’ve (Almost) Learned As I Turn 43 last year.) The post has since been taken down but he’s made a video if you want the Old Man On A Rocking Chair version – and the top YT comment has them all listed. After you’ve read them, don’t you just want Kevin to be your dad? Well, he kind of … could be? He’s omnipresent. He’s like an apparating Obi-Wan. He just sort of appears and starts telling you what to do. He did like a hundred more podcast conversations for this book (start with this one or this one!) and he blogs constantly and posts constantly and emails constantly. He writes wonderful books and now he has compressed his birthday compressions into the kind of book every writer wishes they wrote. A few of my favorites: “Make others feel they are important; it will make their day and it will make your day.”, “Buy used books. They have the same words as new ones.”, “Most effective remedy for anger is delay.”, “For best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.”, “Unhappiness comes from wanting what others have. Happiness comes from wanting what you have.”, “The rich have money. The wealthy have time. It is easier to become wealthy than rich.” Highly recommended. 

4.
Free-Range Kids: Second Edition: How Parents And Teachers Can Let Go And Let Grow by Lenore Skenazy. Way back in 2008 an insanely viral article appeared in the The New York Sun called “Why I Let My 9-Year Old Ride The Subway Alone”. It opened with the following lines: “I left my 9-year-old at Bloomingdale’s (the original one) a couple weeks ago. Last seen, he was in first floor handbags as I sashayed out the door. Bye-bye! Have fun! / And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself. / Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn’t strike me as that daring, either. Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.” Who wrote the piece? Lenore Skenazy. Dubbed “America’s Worst Mom” the next day when she was suddenly on the Today Show, Early Show, Fox News, and CNN. Her fame brought acolytes. Her blog Free-Range Kids got big. She met with Jonathan Haidt (NYU professor, author of The Coddling Of The American Mind) and Peter Gray (author of Free to Learn) and started the non-profit Let Grow which is “making it easy, normal, and legal to give kids the independence they need to grow into capable, confident, and happy laws.” So far the organization has helped usher in new laws in six states – dubbed “Reasonable Childhood Independence Law” – which helps spell out allowance for children to be independent outdoors. (Check out their legal work here!) This book reads like a screaming holler from the mountaintops, is written in a fast-casual bloggy style, and is organized into 18 commandments like “Boycott baby knee pads”, “Lock Them Out” and “Trust Strangers.” She writes “At its worst, Free-Range Parenting has been mistaken – deliberately or not – for cavalier bordering on crazy. But at its best, ‘Free Range’ became a rallying cry for all of us eager to believe in our kids, our communities, and our own instincts again.” Lenore concludes each “Commandment” chapter with a ‘baby’, ‘brave’, and ‘leap’ step to practice. Like at the end of Chapter 1 the baby step is “cross the street with your school-age child, without holding hands. Make ‘em look around at the traffic’, brave is ‘Let your little bikers, starting at age six or so, rider around the block a couple times, beyond where you can see them’ and Leap is ‘Drop your third- or fourth-grade child and a friend at an ice cream store with money for sundaes. Pick them up in half an hour.’ Sound easy? Not for me! I’m working on it. And this book is helping.

5.
Hummingbirds: A Celebration of Nature’s Jewels by Glenn Bartley and Andy Swash. Hummingbirds evolved 40 million years ago. They can fly forwards, backwards, and upside down. They have the highest metabolic rate of any animal. They zip across the Gulf of Mexico without a pit stop and burn half their body weight in the process. They are the only birds with umami taste receptors. And there are 350 different species of them – making them the second largest bird family after Flycatchers. And, get this, they exist only in the “new world” – from the tip of Alaska to the tip of Patagonia. They want no part of oceans. And nobody’s smuggled a sack of them to New Zealand. Europeans, Asians, Africans, Australians? You’ll have to visit to witness the stunning beauty of Tufted Coquettes, Green-Tailed Sunbirds, Marvelous Spatutails, Ruby Topazes, or White-necked Jacobins. Or, you know, just buy this book. Highly recommended. (Thank you to Dr. Zogaris on Twitter for the suggestion!)

6.
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang. Last year I was at the wonderful Audrey’s Bookstore on Jasper Street in Edmonton and a bookseller took me straight to this book – filed spine-out somewhere near the back. “Favorite book in the store,” he said with a snap. I looked at it. I was expecting a novel. But here was … a collection of essays … about schizophrenia? What the? I mean, I bought it. You should have seen the look in his eye. A piercingness I still recall. I cracked it this month. And, you know, the first two essays were good – for sure -- but the third really sliced me open. Titled “High Functioning” it origami-folds Esmé’s autobiographical descent into her schizoaffective disorder into a ‘from a new vantage point’ story of her presenting the story. She tells us how she went to Yale and Stanford, her parents are Taiwanese immigrants, and how she was born in the US Midwest and raised in California. This book opened up schizophrenia the same way The Reason I Jump, reviewed in my January 2017 book club, opened up autism for me. A truly captivating from-the-inside-looking-out view. Here’s the first few sentences to see if it captures you: “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy. Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense; we divide the interminable days into years, months, and weeks. We hope for ways to corral and control bad fortune, illness, unhappiness, discomfort, and death – all inevitable outcomes that we pretend are anything but. And still, the fight against entropy seems wildly futile in the faces of schizophrenia, which shirks reality in favor of its own internal logic.” 

7.
Pete’s a Pizza by William Steig. In my April 2023 book club I wrote about Abel’s Island by William Steig and I got this note back from Lisa who said I could share it with you: “I loved Abel's Island as a kid. I have always had a soft spot for little critters (I have pet rats) and they do have emotions just like us. We have had something of a rough patch lately (my husband's car was totaled, I have a kidney stone that finds my ureter too hospitable to leave- I named him Cuthbert for WWII spy Virginia Hall's prosthetic leg because he has been around long enough to need a name and as an attempt at some gallows humor, and we just had to euthanize one of our rats, Rathaniel, earlier this week) so warm feelings of recognition and nostalgia for books past are appreciated.” I’m sorry Lisa. That sounds completely overwhelming. I love how you named your kidney stone. We all need a laugh. A break! A smile! After looking over my own list of, uh, kind of heavy books this month, maybe we should end with another William Steig book. This is a 60-second read – not a chapter book – and my kids just love it.  It’s about a boy who wants to go outside and "play ball with the guys" but then it starts to rain so his dad cheers him up by pretending to make him into a pizza. That’s it! Watch it on YouTube here. Snippy dialogue is pitch-perfect and it makes for a short and quick read before bed. 

8.
There is no eight. Link lootbag time! My conversation with Rich Roll last week, Jonathan Haidt’s leadership on social media continues with “Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health” (just skim the graphs and you’ll ratchet up your kid's cell phone age a few years), check out KS Rhoads doing “nursery rhymes as your favorite band", here’s a captivating video on “Why did kids stop walking to school?”, and a Scientific American article on “Why We Toss And Turn In An Unfamiliar Bed”, too. Oh! And I’m excited for the new Seth Godin book which comes out in three days. 


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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - April 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone, 

How was your April? 

I’ve been sort of wobbling between our accelerating world of techno-enabled everything while also carving deep unplugs with the family – and with nature

As always, books aren’t just an escape, but time-travel machines, sense-making devices, and entire other places to fully inhabit and live inside for a while. 

These were some of my favorite places to live this month,

Neil

1. What’s Our Problem: A Self-Help Book For Societies by Tim Urban. I first met Tim Urban at a conference in LA six years ago (where he did three different talks). In a simple black T-shirt on a small stage in a stuffy ballroom, he shared an early incantation of this book to a couple hundred tightly packed people. I remember the energy of that standing O afterwards. The kind of energy a room only gets after a speaker touches on something deep and shared. Speaking a million miles a minute it was like Tim became some kind of vessel for the energy of a thousand blinding ideas. Well ... he kept those ideas vesseling for six years and now comes his dizzying, vertiginous, brain-expanding “self-help book for societies” that combines Tim’s ability to compress and distill wisdom (“Human nature plus environment equals behavior”, or his older much-loved “Happiness equals reality minus expectations”) with a lonnng gaze into the soul of our current divisive culture. In Chapter 1 Tim explains the 1000-page book of human history – where each page represents 250 years of our existence. “The Agricultural Revolution starts around page 950 or 960, recorded history gets going at about page 976, and Christianity isn’t born until page 993. Page 1000, which goes from the early 1770s to the early 2020s, contains all of US history.” (Check out this graphic and this astonishing table he created to accompany the idea – two of hundreds in the book that provide constant context and bearings. I agree with Sam Harris who said to Tim on a recent podcast, “You have a way of visually representing information that makes it truly arresting.”) So, if you’re interested in a fresh zoom-out on what’s happening in culture and politics, told in a rare “I-am-well-aware-I’m-walking-on-a-skinny-tightrope” style of objectivity, plus Tim’s sideways-absurd Stinky-Cheese Man-inspired sense of humor, well, this, my friends -- this is the book for you. In Chapter 5 on social justice, Tim asks “What lies at the heart of our rifts? Are they based on fundamental differences or deep misunderstandings? Are people disagreeing about what should be or about what is?” Huge questions! Massive questions! And then he goes and colors them in with images like this one or this one. He wades bravely into prickly pools of cancel culture and social justice fundamentalism and shares what’s happening – and why – from macro-cultural and primitive brain perspectives. And then gets into what happens to societies when people cancel themselves. (Remember Tarantino’s final advice to us: “Don’t censor yourself.”) Tim shows how we’re ideologically training children instead of teaching them critical thinking skills and shows data about how media warps perspectives – forcing us all to think the same. He talks about how “idea supremacy makes society’s big brain dumb” and how “awareness is the gateway to humility.” The book veers more political as it goes on and he goes deep into a graphic he calls The Illiberal Staircase. And, like, I’m summarizing less than two percent of what’s in here. The book is so strong, so nutrient-dense, that it was challenging for me to fit it in my mouth and chew. I printed it out and carried it with me for a couple months – it’s only available in ebook and audio (I know, for shame!) – and I simultaneously listened to entire chapters on Libro.FM … in 0.9x. Yeah, slower than normal speed. No book shame, no book guilt. Plus, it was worth it. Even if you only read half the book, it’s worth it. Even if you only read a chapter or two, it’s worth it. Dizzying, challenging, with lots of small words – and many absolutely massive ideas. This book confirms Tim’s status as the Richard Feynman of our time.

2. The Home Place: Memoir of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham. This book club is such a great community. I got an email from Rumble D. after a recent book club which said “Neil, I have a 3 Books guest suggestion for you. J Drew Lanham is a 2022 MacArthur fellow and an American ornithologist. I loved his book and would love to hear you interview him (maybe while you guys go birding?)” Intrigued, I looked him up and discovered I sort of already knew him – or knew of him, I should say. J. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, he wrote a wonderfully thoughtful and nuanced essay I read last year called "What Do We Do About John James Audubon?", and he starred in a YouTube clip someone sent a while back called "Rules for the Black Birdwatcher". I bought the book immediately and it proceeded to entrance me every night for a week. Sounds like a simple autobiographical-type memoir broken into three parts -- wonderfully named Flock, Fledgling, and Flight -- but the writing, wow, the writing, it's just so vivid, transportive, and meditative. Lanham’s "love affair" with nature is contagious and this book will awaken your inner forest-dweller. Just listen to this paragraph in the opening paragraphs as Drew (J. Drew? Professor Lanham?) describes his home county of Edgefield, South Carolina: “Droughty sands hold onto remnant stands of longleaf pine and stunted turkey oaks in the southern and eastern extremes where the upper coastal plain peters out. In the soggy bottoms of many of the rivers and creeks, rich alluvial soils grow splotchy-barked sycamores and warty hackberries to girths so big that two large men joined hand to hand couldn’t reach around them. A few buttressed bald cypresses draped in Spanish moss sit in tea-stained sloughs. Between the extremes of wet and dry, high and low, even the sticky clay nourishes a surprising variety of hardwoods; slow-growing upland oaks and tight-grained tough-as-nails hickories grow alongside fast-rising tulip poplars and opportunistic sweetgums.” See what I mean? He takes us into his fantastical upbringing on "the home place" with the unforgettable Mamatha, weaves natural lessons into gentle reflections on race and the state of America, and, more than anything, stirs up the rich alluvial soils in the soggy bottoms of our hearts. A masterpiece. 

3. Goodnight, Little Bookstore by Ami Cherrixx, with Illustrations by E.B. Goodale. I remember reading a Monocle ranking of the "Most Liveable Cities" a few years ago and noticing that one of their selection criteria was the number of independent bookstores per person. I love that! And it’s true. Independent bookstores are some kind of ground moss revealing something about the healthy of the local culture and community. And: There aren't enough books recognizing and celebrating this fact. So, for anybody who loves indie bookstores, here's a wonderful visual romp through closing time. I loved all the little things in the drawings -- from the ubiquitous bookstore carts to the ubiquitous bookstore cats. Plus, this sounds weird, but I just love every book I own that in this tall and sturdy "trim size." (I Am A Bunny fans, you know what I'm saying.)

 

4. The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. I flew down to Dallas, Texas recently and sat down with Suzy Batiz for 3 Books. She’s the founder of billion-dollar-valued Poo~Pourri and supernatural, but the endless topline superlatives surrounding her — EY Entrepreneur of the Year! ranked on Forbes Richest Woman list just above Serena Williams! — actually mask the more startling, complex, and inspiring story underneath. Our conversation, which comes out on the exact minute of the next full moon, shares how Suzy navigated a lifetime of poverty, abuse, depression, bankruptcy, and suicide attempts in order to — bit by bit, step by step — manifest a life full of exploration, transformation, and abundance. Books provided key stepping stones on her path. And one of those books was The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. An extremely strong-voiced motivational manifesto to help you – as the cover depicts in the pic above – jump out of the small fishbowl you’re swimming in and into a bigger one. If you’re ready for this book, if you want to make a leap, I have no doubt this book will help. It’s captivating as a magic trick. On the other hand, if you’re content where you are, if you’re feeling good, well, then it might cause some deep itchiness. It did for me. I kept thinking “Yes, yes, I’m ready – time to make the leap!” I became aware of my “upper limit problem” and ready to step into my “zone of genius.” But then, when I’d put the book down, I was like “Wait, no, wait, stop – I’m … good. I’m good. I like my life. I’m happy with the way things are. I don’t want to leap right now. And you can't make me, Gay!" So then I was left to just sort and sift through all those feelings while consciously reflecting and deciding if I am good with where I am. Deeply valuable process. We can all benefit from it. And I’m sure our answers will change many times. I think if you are ready for this voice, for a big leap in your life, well, here it is. Might be consider a cousin book to The War Of Art -- for a slightly more mystical set. Here’s a quick five-minute TV interview with Gay talking about the book to see if it lights you up.

 

5. This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor. Translated by Sophie Hughes. Do you remember a couple years ago when we sat down with award-winning children’s book author Yuyi Morales? She told us about her hometown of Veracruz, Mexico. The culture, the weather, the beaches – I wanted to buy a ticket there the next day. So, uh, good news and bad news? Bad news is after reading this book, you might want to go to Veracruz, uh, much less. But the good news is that Fernanda Melchor’s breathtaking entanglement of true-sounding stories, all taking place in and around Veracruz, is completely captivating. She writes in the Author’s Note “More than ever in these image- and recording-obsessed times we distrust words, which seem at once too loud to echo the silence and too muted to express tumultuous existence.” Wow.  These aren’t classic short stories – more like shards of true stories fuzzed-up just enough that they can’t be called non-fiction exactly. But if you’re a fan of short stories, I know you’ll love them. (And if you’re not and want to be maybe listen to David Sedaris tell us about Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, and Joy Williams.) These tales lead us deep into the Veracruz underbelly – black markets, drug scenes, and wet docks with suddenly appearing groups of “nine men, nine black men, soaked to the bone with their arms and legs covered in welts that look like whip marks” who say, in thick Dominican accents, with their arms in the air, in one of the more heartbreaking scenes of the book “Please, tell us we’re in Miami…” In a piece of dangerous investigative journalism, she takes us into a very small town in the Veracruz outskirts where a lynching took place in the 2000s. The piece is complemented by a song locals sing about it, together with her troubles trying to piece what happened from people who didn't want her asking. In a short story that out-Stephen-Kings Stephen King, she takes us into the first date with her first husband who asked her that night at a party, “What’s the most fucked up thing that’s ever happened to you?” and then proceeds to share his answer in a freaky tale of drunk high school friends breaking into a local abandoned house. Put it this way: It was late when I was reading this and I had to drop the book to the floor until morning. If you’re up for an exquisitely written soup of high-wire suspense scenes under a scorching Veracruz sun you can feel on your neck, I highly recommend this book. I’m now going to work backwards through her impressive Bibliography which includes two International Booker Prize-nominations for her first two full-length books. Time to add Hurricane Season and Paradais to the pile.


6. Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary by Ozan Varol. A broad, sweeping, accessible put-in-your-pocket self-help book that pairs Ozan’s whale-like ability to suck up wisdom plankton from our endless sea of overwhelm together with his rocket-scientist brain’s powerful distillation and organization skills. For those feeling sort of dazed, confused, and meandering, this is a helpful kick in the pants. I loved his “Detox” chapter which opens with the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “There are many things of which a wise man may wish to be ignorant” and then brings us into the obvious-not-obvious wisdom-punishing effects of our social media-addled brains: “The average person spent 145 minutes per day on social media in 2021. The average adult reads 200 to 260 words per minute. The average book is roughly 90,000 words. So if the average adult read books instead of using social media, they would read anywhere from 118 to 153 books a year.” Aspirational, sure, but Ozan is a humble, earnest, and helpful guide who just keeps pulling you forward. In Chapter 4 about becoming “spectacularly you” he asks “What is something that feels like play to you – but work to others?” In Chapter 5 on “discovering your mission” he asks “In your ideal life, what does a Tuesday look like?” and then shares 3 questions to ask when trying life experiments – “What am I testing?”, “What does failure and success look like?”, and “When will the experiment end?” In Chapter 7 he talks about the “power of play” and shares how writers for The Office would work themselves out of ruts by writing plotlines for other popular shows. He weaves all the advice through a field of business nuggety stories and the result is a fun, fast-paced, helpful read. If you liked The Happiness Equation, you’ll like this book. With Ozan’s permission, I’m going to publish the Epilogue from this book in my next Neil.blog email. (If you don’t get that email and want to, sign up here.) 

 

7. On Browsing by Jason Guriel. My friend Doug Miller has trailers full of books. Train trailers. He owns over 300,000 books. He puts a rotating assortment of five to ten thousand of them in his curated mix-mashed brainjam bookstore – Doug Miller Books! -- that everybody in (or visiting!) Toronto should pop in to enjoy. I was browsing Doug’s shop last January when he let me pull out my recorder. What resulted is a real escape-to-the-bookstore chapter of 3 Books that remains one of my favorites. (Join us here.) We talked about how Amazon lets you find what you’re looking for but bookstores help you find what you aren’t looking for. And I think that spirit is why this (very) short pocketbook by Jason Guriel jumped off the shelves to me at Type Books on Queen West (where we had the book launch for Our Book of Awesome.) I had no idea Jason was from Toronto but his detailed portraits of iconic (and iconically dead) stores like Sam the Record Man and Soundscapes brought tears to my eyes. The book was worth it for that alone. A collection of little essays that veer maybe a bit too much into drippy nostalgia-for-cassette-tapes type land but which also articulately brings together reasons for why we love – and should seek to celebrate and maintain – browsing.

8. Brave Irene by William Steig. William Steig is the best children’s book writer most people have never heard of. Children’s literature, really. The man was truly gifted. Yes, he’s probably most famous for writing Shrek! (which the movie was based on) but I think his real gems include Pete’s A Pizza (a quickie must-have for families with kids), Abel’s Island (as good as James and the Giant Peach – and maybe more impressive as Steig does all the drawings himself), and, yes, Brave Irene. You won’t be surprised to hear I was introduced to the book by Doug Miller, 'true-children’s-literature-Jedi', and I can see why he was so proud to sell me this hardcover copy. It’s that good. What's the book about? Well, Irene, 10-or-so-year-old daughter of the duchess's personal dressmaker, braves a winter snowstorm to scramble the duchess's new dress over to her just in time for the swanky par-tay. But the scramble is where the story is -- winds, obstacles, completely submerging herself in snow, wild tobogganing on the dress box, and even losing the dress for a good portion of the story. William Steig wrote books from 1932 - 2003 (not a bad run!) and Brave Irene was his hit of 1986. A classic.
 

9. New Indian Basics: 100 Traditional and Modern Recipes from Arvinda’s Family Kitchen by Arvinda Chauhan and Preena Chauhan. I didn’t grow up with Butter Chicken. Surprising to some! Green daal, yellow daal, aloo gobi, these were the go-to’s from my mom’s kitchen. Special occasions meant rajma chawal, chicken biryani, or maybe aloo roti with homemade chutney on a sunny Sunday morning. Years ago for Christmas, I asked my mom for a cookbook of recipes and the duotanged 8-page book remains one of my most valuable possessions. But, yeah, no Butter Chicken. So that’s where Arvinda and Preena Chauhan come in. The Butter Chicken recipe in here is incredible. And now I'm eager to try more.


10. There is no ten! It’s time for the Link Lootbag. First up, check out this 30-minute talk from Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin which was recorded, let’s see, under 1000 hours ago. Dan Kwan tweeted about it – and I found it gripping, wrote a letter to my federal politicians, and shared it with Leslie -- who shared it with her friends. I know many believe “what technology wants” determines our future and that, when it comes to AI, our best hopes are just to maintain some semblance of steering. But when 50% of AI researchers themselves think there’s a 10% chance AI ends humanity – well, it feels like we have to lean in. Jonathan Haidt shows that social media is a major cause of the mental illness epidemic in teen girls. (Did you see that scary Dove ad?) Rich Roll beautifully teaches us how to Log Off, Turn In, and Tune Up. Sahil Bloom teaches us how to be Time Billionaires. I have loved Brad Montague since the Kid President days and his newsletter "The Enthusiast" is a bit of joy in my inbox. His last one is called “The Theory of Happiness” and he spoke about a great theory from Einstein, The Happiness Equation, and shared this video which is pretty impossible not to smile along to. And, wait ... are you still reading this email more than 3000 words later? You're a raging bibliophile like me. Maybe a raging completist like me! Ragers, either way, me and you. We get each other. Thanks for the hangout and let's geek out about books again next month. Oh, and if you missed last month then here you go...


Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - March 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Hope you've had a good March.

I deleted all social media apps on my phone this month. I asked someone to change my passwords so I couldn’t bust in, either. Fun experiment. I missed some of the social connection – especially while travelling – but felt my fracturing attention, uh, un-fracturing, and I do notice I’m more content with how I’ve spent my time. Which is usually writing, reading, walking, birding, or, you know, watching the wheels with my kids.

If you want a nudge to try something similar check out my recent chat with Johann Hari for inspiration. Johann even drops his phone in a K-Safe every night!

Btw: I have to say a huge congrats to Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for their epic Oscar sweep. What a win for creativity. We put together an Oscar Encore Edit of my 3 Books chat with them right here.

Okay, now let’s hit the books,

Neil

1. Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris. A torridly-paced high-flying business book that reads like an action movie – all told from a fascinating fly-on-the-wall perspective taking you deep into the trenches during the epic battle between the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo. But that’s just the battle. The book zooms out into the long-term war between these two relatively ancient companies and covers ground like Nintendo’s culture of consistency over 100 years, the story of video games taking off with Atari and then flaming out, fascinating risky strategies like Sega opening their first and only Sega store – complete with huge billboards all over town -- right outside the Bentonville, Arkansas Walmart Home Office after Walmart said they wouldn’t carry the Genesis, and the history of the ‘Sega Scream’ at the end of those “Welcome To The Next Level” commercials. We follow along into Nintendo’s monopolistic >90% market share position with the NES (and hear the fascinating Mario Brothers history) and then track Sega’s emergence through edgy marketing, communication, and business strategies Nintendo would never touch. Over the course of the book, Sega goes from less than 5% market share to over 55% when Mortal Kombat came out. Blake did over 200 interviews and the results are obvious – an unmissable case study on business, strategy, and life. Highly recommended.  

2. Ducks: Two Years In The Oil Sands by Kate Beaton. I’ve been on a lot of flights between Edmonton and Toronto full of men (almost always men) working in the oil sands and heading home to the Maritimes. There’s been a national story in Canada for a long time of societies with high unemployment heading westwards to make money in the lucrative but challenging work offered by the oil sands industry. The picture in this 430-page (!) graphic memoir is different – telling the story of a young woman from Cape Breton leaving her small town behind to work largely behind equipment-supplying desks in the oil sands of northern Alberta for two years. A penetrating tunnel of loneliness offers up a portrait of deep cultural sexism and misogyny – so many truly shocking lines throughout – yet, somehow, all told from an empathetic lens. Brave, unflinching, shocking, not-shocking, with little moments of tenderness in between. You will feel like you’re there. Kudos to Kate for the years and years of work that went into creating this artistic masterpiece. 

3. Dear Black Boy by Martellus Bennett. What happens after you finish off a 10-year NFL career as a Super Bowl winning tight end? Well, if you’re Martellus Bennett, you start The Imagination Agency, a ‘multi-platform storytelling studio’ that creates books, apps, toys, and clothes. One of the first books is this 32-page picture book written as a commencement-speech style rallying cry for young black boys to emerge as leaders. “The low-hanging fruit is what the world prefers you to reach for, but we must climb the tree”, “You deserve to dream the wildest dreams and to chase those dreams the same way you chase a loose ball in the fourth quarter, a running back breaking free down the sideline, or a fly ball in the outfield.” A wonderful expectation-busting dose of inspiration for little ones. (For inspiration for college age folks, try this.)
 

4. The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, A Woman, And The Struggle to Save the Redwoods by Julia Butterfly Hill. A first-person true story of a woman who climbed into a thousand year old tree in the late 90s slated for logging … and lived there for two years until the logging company agreed not to chop it down. Despite the trumpet flourish at the end this isn’t an inspiring story – it’s a devastating one. A portrait of a century-old trust-based organization getting bought out by a stealthy junk bondsman who discovered it’s much more profitable to endlessly break laws – such as those against clear-cutting and replacing old growth forests – and just pay the fines which add up to pennies on the dollar of profits. Limp laws, toothless politicians, and corporate intimidation add up to a crucible of growth for Julia – but at an enormous price. Her descriptions of climbing up and living in the tree are so vivid you’ll feel like you’re in Ewok Village with her. A deep connection to nature – flying squirrels, black bears, lightning strikes and more. For me the book gave a nice escape from “today” and a connection to the larger energy I think many of us need to tap into right now. Highly recommended. 

5. Chip Kidd: Book Two by Chip Kidd with Introductions by Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman, and Orhan Pamuk. The most famous book jacket designer in the world is probably Chip Kidd. He did the famous Jurassic Park cover (which turned into the movie poster) as well as lots for authors like David Sedaris, Cormac McCarthy, and Donna Tartt. I didn’t realize this book was a sequel when I bought it and, you know, I don’t like all the covers in here. But I love and respect the thoughtfulness, confidence, and sheer idea-execution that the book walks us through. He shows ideas that flopped, how things were changed, why things were changed. A feast for book nerds. To get a feel for Chip you can check out his TED Talk “Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is” or this interview with the always-on-point Debbie Millman

6. Loving What Is: Four questions that can change your life by Bryon Katie. An easy-to-read book describing a four-question process to help you see what’s bothering you and (hopefully) let it go. The four questions are: 1) Is it true?, 2) Can you absolutely know that it’s true?, 3) How do you react when you believe that thought?, and 4) Who would you be without the thought? It sounds lite – almost trivial – but the questions are brought to life with on-stage dialogues and, I think, when asked of yourself, slowly, with the guidance in the book, it really can be helpful and perspective-creating to separate what’s happening from your interpretation of what’s happening and then seeing your interpretation as something you can own and release. Will it always work? Does it apply in every situation? No. But the model is still useful. Some people call this book a method of "doing CBT on yourself" and if you're interested in exploring more therapy-related work check out my interview with Kate the Therapist here.

7. Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty. Do you feel like there’s always been something different about Phil Jackson? I mean, first off, he won 11 NBA championships. More than anyone else! Perhaps that’s why his journey towards a unique practice of leadership is all the more remarkable. In this book he shares how he grew up under deeply religious preachers (“dad preached in the mornings, mom preached at nights”) and then how, as an NBA player, he began his own seeking quest. This is a graceful, peaceful, open-hearted book sharing how he discovered and developed principles from zen philosophy, the Lakota Sioux, and his own unique stirring-together-of-other-things which helped him to create deep egalitarianism and connection within his teams. “More than anything else, what allowed the Bulls to sustain a high level of excellence was the players’ compassion for each other,” he writes. He tells the story of how he had the team circle around Scottie Pippen after he came back after his father died and shower him with love, how he taught players to meditate to quiet their judging minds, and how he created practices to avoid media following the team so they could create their own bubble. All was in service of creating an unbeatable team mind. A unique lens on leadership. 

8. Rodney was a Tortoise by Nan Forler, illustrated by Yong Ling Kang. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book personally chosen and reviewed by Leslie. “This is the perfect book to begin gentle conversations with children about loss, death and grief. As Bernadette processes the death of her pet tortoise the emotive illustrations and subtle lessons about how grief never goes away but lessens with time, is easier experienced with others than alone, and is a universal part of the human experience, present themselves in a perfect tone. As much as we sometimes wish we never had to explore these themes with our children, we inevitably will and this book will soothe the parent’s aching heart while it comforts the child.” 

9. There is no nine! You read all the way to the bottom. Few loot bag links: "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls" by Jonathan Haidt. George Saunders shares some 'writing worries' in his wonderfully unique Saunders way. Freaky Steve Jobs advice through AI? And I love this photo of Phil Knight watching Lebron James record shot - with his own eyes - while everyone else is on their phone. Oh, and if you're getting at all tempted by my tales of birding lately then download The Merlin Bird ID app.


Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - February 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

It’s getting harder and harder to take a pause, take a breath, and just take inventory of where to point our attention these days.

I’ve felt my own reading slipping as streams and algorithms get louder. But that’s why I value this conversation – a book sharing club – to keep us focused on improving our reading habits.

Also: Big thanks for ten straight weeks of Our Book of Awesome clocking in on international and national bestseller lists. Our little dollop of awesome in the angry frying pan. If you don’t have a copy yet just click here

If you know someone who wants to read more books just forward them this note so they can sign up right here

Now let’s hit the books,

Neil

1. Breathe In, Breathe Out: Restore Your Health, Reset Your Mind and Find Happiness Through Breathwork by Stuart Sandeman. (L/I/A) Growing up I’d sometimes wake up early and head downstairs to discover a thin bright light under the closed basement door in the dark hallway. I’d tiptoe downstairs to discover my dad, on his shins, pumping his fists into his stomach, while snorting like a horse. “What the … ?” My adolescent brain was, of course, not open to his always-at-the-ready tutelage in the ways of pranayama – the ancient yoga practice of breathwork. (“Prana” means “vital life force” and yama means “to gain control.”) Of course, as often happens, we circle back to wisdom from our parents later. My dad is 77 now and I’m 43 and, well, guess who’s the weird dad doing breathing exercises in the basement before sunrise now? Two things have been helpful for me recently: this extremely accessible book and the Othership breathwork app. The book has already paid for itself many times over but the most life-changing two pages for me were 102-103 where Stuart outlines a 10-second “nose unblocking technique” I wish I knew decades ago. If you’re a “one nostril plugged all day” person like me this is massive. Basically: 1) Take a normal breath in through your nose and out through your nose, 2) Gently pinch your nose while now holding your breath, 3) Tilt your head slowly all four directions – left, right, forwards, backwards, 4) Get back to looking straight and unplug your nose before breathing in a gentle breath. Did it work? If not, do it again. This has, no joke, completely unblocked my nostrils every single time I’ve done it. Stuart, where have you been all my life? Written in incredibly accessible “blog-posty” style prose this is a wonderful come hither to the land of breathwork. Highly recommended.

2. Demian by Herman Hesse. (L/I/A) I was in Boston last year for my school reunion and went out for breakfast with my friend Erik to Trident Books and Café. Both? Yes! You come in, you sit down for some huevos rancheros, you browse books – all in one place. I love how small bookstores force incredible curation, too. 200 million books in the world! Now pick 1000 to sell! Tough job but Trident did it masterfully. Erik and I played the game of “I buy you one of my favorites, you buy me one of your favorites.” I think I got him East of Eden by John Steinbeck –  my favorite book of 2017! – and he bought me this and added the inscription “Enjoy opening this window.” I was excited as I hadn’t read anything by Herman Hesse except Siddhartha (which I loved). This book opened with a heart-pounding scene of ten-year-old Sinclair getting into trouble with the local tough and it builds into an atmospheric “bildungsroman” (fancy phrase for “coming of age” story) tracing the life of Emil Sinclair as he navigates adolescence and attempts to figure himself out. The pacing got slower and slower which made it (to me) a nice before-bed read – but I also struggled to catch all the symbols and allusions flying around. Solid overall but thinking maybe it’s time I get to Steppenwolf. PS. If you’re into bildungsromans, or think you might be, here’s a great list on Goodreads ranking some of the best. How many of the first 25 have you read? I’ve read 11. Lots to go! 

3. Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers. (L/I/A) When I was a little kid I read an interview with Bill Gates and he said something like “Whenever I go to a magazine stand I always buy a magazine I’ve never read before. There’s a lot more to learn in those ones.” I’m paraphrasing but the sentiment stuck with me. Algorithms push, cajole, and classify us into 1s and 0s but there’s nothing like browsing a local bookstore (speaking of which, check out Chapter 99 of 3 Books where I interview self-described bibliomaniac Doug Miller in his own bookstore!) and stumbling upon things that would never have been recommended to you. Like, for example, this raw, scratchily-drawn, emotionally braided-together memoir of high intensity essays telling the story of Ebony as she moves from a trailer park into a black neighborhood outside Baltimore – all somehow told through … hair. Well, not just hair! It’s really about life. And about messages and stories we hear growing up. Themes include ‘acting too white’, casual racism, motherhood, drug abuse, and, in an especially painful essay, boundaries and mental health – when, after her little sister’s hair becomes an object of interest to her softball team she begins twisting and pulling it all out. Doctors, psychiatrists, and pills are called in to help and the final page will just break your heart. Published by Drawn & Quarterly, which has to be the best comics and graphic novel publishing house in the world. Highly recommended.

4. Jacob Two-Two Meets The Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler. (L/I/A) When I feel my reading pace turn sluggish or my reading attention starting to fracture I turn to page flippers to lasso myself back in. Graphic novels, young adult, and, recently, middle-grade fiction. I found this classic in a Little Free Library and it had the same pumpkin-orange cover I remembered as a kid. Richler wrote it in 1975 and it’s a triumph of children’s literature and storytelling. It opens: “Once there was a boy called Jacob Two-Two. He was two plus two plus two years old. He had two ears and two eyes and two arms and two feet and two shoes.” Turns out he says everything twice because nobody listens to him the first time. After a run-in with a grocer down the street, he’s sentenced to a horrible prison run by the Hooded Fang. This book gets into the thorny parts of the typical nightmares of young kids and has a wonderfully unique “superkid superhero” tone. Btw: If you don’t know Mordecai Richler I highly recommend Barney’s Version. That one's for adults! One of the funniest and fastest-paced books I’ve ever read.
 
5. A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. (L/I/A) “Funny and fast-paced.” Let’s stick on those four words for a minute. I use them a lot with booksellers. “What kind of book do you like?” “Funny and fast-paced.” I like it as a filter because a) there just aren’t that many books funny and face-paced (and, you know, good), and b) when you hit a good one … well, you can dine out on it for years. To wit: A Fraction Of The Whole. By far the funniest, fastest-paced novel I have ever read. The sprawling, multi-generational, multi-national, multi-layered, multi-structured head trip that is Steve Toltz’s magnificent Booker Prize-nominated 2007 debut. It kind of makes sense that before he wrote it he was a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter. Take a taste test to see if it’s for you with the first four sentences: “You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue. My lesson? I have lost my freedom, and found myself in this strange prison, where the trickiest adjustment, other than getting used to not having anything in my pockets and being treated like a dog that pissed in a sacred temple, is the boredom. I can handle the enthusiastic brutality of the guards, the wasted erections, even the suffocating heat.” I love this book so much. Highly recommended. And here's my recent chat with Steve Toltz on the podcast. PS. If you have a favorite “fast-paced and funny” novel, please reply and let me know! 

6. Around the World in 80 Birds by Mike Unwin. Illustrated by Ryuto Miyake. (L/I/A) I never really had grandparents. I mean, three were gone when I showed up and the one who was alive didn’t speak English and lived across an ocean so I saw her maybe five times. I’ve been really lucky in marriage many ways and one is that I’ve inherited a set of “grandparents in law” who’ve shared so much love and wisdom. My wife’s grandmother Donna and I played Scrabble, watched the Blue Jays, and, yes, talked birds. She gave me this book as a Christmas present just eight weeks ago … and died two weeks ago. I read it thinking of her. Flits and swoops into birds you may have heard of around the world – quetzals, kiwis, flamingos, oh my! – together with little behavioral or historical anecdotes that bring them to life. Plus: honestly the best bird illustrations I’ve ever seen. (Sorry Audobon!) I say: Buy it for the pictures! That’s why I laid the book face down in the picture above. Pinch in! That level of stunning art graces every single page. Ryuto, you nailed it. Great book for birders or birders-to-be. Maybe avoid if you’re already “advanced” as this may seem kind of surface for you. Highly recommended. (PS. Little synchronicity with Herman Hesse book above -- the poem / song Beim Shlafeneghen by Herman Hesse was sung by Donna’s niece at her funeral. Wonderful English lyrics here.) 

7. I Am Brown by Ashok Banker. Illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat. (L/I/A) I found myself crying in the library last week after I started flipping through this book after spotting it on display. A wonderful self-affirming book for brown-skinned kids that I wish I had when I was younger. It opens slow and gentle ("I am brown. I am beautiful. I am friendship."), works its way to food ("I eat noodles, tacos, biryani, jhat muri, steak"), tackles stereotypes ("I am a doctor. I am a lawyer. I am an athlete. I am an electrician."), addresses beliefs ("I pray at... a temple, a church, a synagogue, a gurdwara, nowhere"), and does it all in a joyful, bouncing, inclusive, loving way.

8. The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds – Not Crushes – Your Soul by Brad Stulberg. (L/I/A) Nourishing! That’s my one-word summary for this book. Pretty sure I first heard about Brad on The Rich Roll Podcast and he’s got such a gift for distilling research and wisdom into helping us live intentional lives. In the Introduction he shares feedback from coaching clients on burnout, "heroic individualism", and how a newfound diagnosis of OCD helped him write this book where he shares six thoughtful principles of "groundedness": 1) Accept Where You Are To Get You Where You Want To Go, 2) Be Present So You Can Own Your Attention and Energy, 3) Be Patient And You’ll Get There Faster, 4) Embrace Vulnerability to Develop Genuine Strength and Confidence, 5) Build Deep Community, and 6) Move Your Body To Ground Your Mind. Each chapter blossoms into a deeply evidence-based summary of “everything out there” and Brad’s skills as a "success-synthesizer" are on display as he drip-drip-distills so much, so quickly. For example, in his chapter on community, he opens with a nature metaphor, goes deep on loneliness research, quotes Sebastian Junger's (wonderful) book Tribe, shows how this quote connects with self-determination theory (and explains what that is), ties this into work by Jonathan Haidt, jumps into another research study, and then ties all that into takeaways from a 1941 book from Eric Fromm that hit you hard in the chest -- like "To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration, just as physical starvation leads to death." And this all happened in 6 pages. The whole chapter is 31. If you like your self-help highly thoughtful and concentrated, this book is chock full of wisdom for you.

9. Bronzeville Boys and Girls by Gwendolyn Brooks. Illustrated by Faith Ringgold. (L/I/A) Yet another reason to love independent bookstores? Their ability to arrow-point your attention into the dark-tunneled history of your local community. We’re getting so much more global now. And, you know, there’s the risk of leaving behind where we came from in this forever-two-dimensionalizing mélange. I was wandering around downtown Chicago last year when I stumbled on the after-words independent bookstore on East Illinois Street. Right on the front table was a massive display of this children’s book. “BRONZEVILLE!” It just screamed at me. What’s Bronzeville? Well, it’s a Chicago neighborhood that was (in the early 1900s) called the “Black Metropolis” when it became home to thousands fleeing oppression in the south. A massive amount of cultural history took place here like the Pekin Theater (the first black-owned US theater built in 1905) and the Wabash YMCA (known as the first “Black Y” in the US and built in 1911.) Btw that Y is also where Black History Month comes from. What else? Well, as the title of this book suggests, a lot of boys and girls lived here. And Gwendolyn Brooks – the first black Pulitzer Prize winner ever! – distills their pains and pleasures into these emotionally hard-punching little poems. Like one called Otto which reads: “It’s Christmas Day. I did not get / The presents that I hoped for. Yet, / It is not nice to frown or fret. / To frown or fret would not be fair. / My dad must never know I care / It’s hard enough for him to bear.” Or Rudolph Is Tired Of The City: “These buildings are too close to me. / I’d like to PUSH away. / I’d like to live in the country, / And spread my arms all day. / I’d like to spread my breath out, too -- / As farmers’ sons and daughters do. / I’d tend the cows and chickens. / I’d do the other chores. / Then, all the hours left I’d go / A-SPREADING out-of-doors."

10. There is no ten! It’s time for your “you scrolled all the way to the bottom” loot bag of links! Like this slow-mo video of an Osprey taking off, Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Complicated Truth about The National Enquirer”, and “The Tragic Mystery of Teen Anxiety”. What else? Well, Oprah just picked Susan Cain’s Bittersweet as her next Book Club pick (finally!), here's a wonderful Reading List from Let Grow to help “make the case that today’s children are safer, smarter, and stronger than the culture gives them credit for”. Genius-explainer Tim Urban has just put out his epic book What's Our Problem? (which I'm reading now... review to come!). My string on disabling all Alerts and Notifications on my phone, oh did you know TikTok has stricter rules in China, and ... my Most Heartbreaking Discovery Of The Month … who else never knew The Man in the Yellow Hat was a poacher?? 


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