As always the book titles click over to link splitters that take you to links to the library, indie bookstores, and, of course, Barnes & Noble, Indigo, and Amazon. I get zero commissions from any of them. Buy from wherever you like!
20.ADHD IS Awesome: A Guide To (Mostly) Thriving With ADHD by Penn and Kim Holderness. I just read this book last month and can’t shut up about it. A collection of everything we know about ADHD, written by an ADHD brain, for an ADHD brain. Penn writes that “a typical person with ADHD will have challenges with listening, completing tasks, and keeping track of time (and possessions). They’ll be restless, always ‘on the go’, talkative, and impatient.” Sound like anyone you know? The new ADHD classic.
Perfect for: anyone who thinks they might have ADHD, anyone who loves someone with ADHD, neuroscience and neurodiversity fans…
19. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. By far the most sensory book I read this year. I read it in January and can still smell its smells. The book takes place in France in 1738 when “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 endlessly does this: olfactory yanks you right into a scene. Tells the astounding story of poverty-stricken, nasally-gifted, slumdog-orphan Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from his birth in 1738 to his death in 1766. A zero-to-hero-to-zero-to-I-won't-ruin-the-ending tale that will amaze, disturb, and awe. Goodbooks rattle from the inside. This is a rattler. Sold over 25 million copies before its author became a recluse. (Feel free to skim “the back of the book” via the Plot Summary on Wikipedia first.)
Perfect for: people who like challenging fiction, nonjudgemental dopamine seekers, anybody who wants to time travel to 1700s France…
PS. Celine Song, filmmaker of ‘Past Lives,’ said this was one of her 3 most formative books. Listen to us discuss the book and how she uses sensory deprivation to create chemistry on YT/Spotify/Apple.
18. Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman. The perfect “New Year, New You” book for 2025. Oliver reminds us time is finite (“…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) and reminds us that’s okay—that’s normal! that’s right!—because “being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends”. He shares 28 short 3-5 page essays meant to be read once a day over four weeks and 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.”
Perfect for: people into healthy cognitive fitness, anyone looking to reduce self-criticism, fans of pithy eloquent wisdom in the vein of ‘The Art of Living’ by Epictetus (12/2016)…
17. The Long Walk by Stephen King. This is ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy (2/2017) meets ‘The Hunger Games’ by Suzanne Collins, except written decades before either of those. This book is to those like The Pixiesare to Nirvanaor Nirvanais to Weezer. It’s a newly reprinted original Richard Bachman from 1979. King wrote it when he was 30. The book takes place in a slightly dystopian near future where 100 sixteen-year-old boys from across the US apply each year to be selected to begin “the long walk” which starts on foot in Maine and ends when there is only 1 boy left. Anybody who stops longer than a couple long pauses is immediately shot and killed and dragged off the road. The whole book is the by turns simple, vulgar, and entrancing conversation between the boys during the walk, all told in a seductive first-person-y third-person following Ray Garraty, pride of Maine, who leaves his girlfriend and gets dropped off by his mom as the book opens. Nothing grotesque in the book! Nothing gruesome, nothing jumping out of the forest. It’s more thrilling than scary.
Perfect for: anyone looking for a beach read, anybody looking to get back into reading, general Stephen King fans or any Stephen King fans who haven’t read the Richard Bachman stuff…
16. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevédo. A 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. Slam-poetry flow with Acevédo’s beautiful voice: “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.”
Perfect for: fans of YA, fans of Nicola Yoon or John Green, and anybody looking to sprinkle a bit of melody into their life…
15. Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs. The New York Times called Jane Jacobs a “writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet…” and she may be most famous for her 1961 classic ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities.’ This book was written much later—when Jane was 88 in 2006, the last year of her life—and in it she speaks with wisdom about all cultures hitting Dark Ages—from the Roman Empire in the fifth century, to the Islamic Empire in the fifteenth, to 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? Dark age. New political party halts voyages, dismantles shipyards—skills are lost over generations. She has a powerful refrain: we can’t assume what we have won’t slip away and we need to actively strive to make things better. The five sections are “Families Rigged To Fail,” “Credentialing Versus Educating,” “Science Abandoned,” “Dumbed-Down Taxes,” and “Self-Policing Subverted.”
Perfect for: geography and urban planning folks, anybody looking for a big zoom out from US politics, and fans of perfectly poised writing…
14. A stroll around the world’s most beautiful public spacesby Christopher Beanland. What do I suggest after the dark warnings of our potentially crumbling civilization? A giant coffee table book about parks, of course! “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. If you live somewhere they’re paving over then this book is like a big breath of fresh air. From Central Park in New York to Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, this is a striking book full of love and hope.
3. Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin. This is the 2007 memoir by then-62-year-old Steve Martin. With short, tight, punchy sentences Steve tells an 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. Tightly squeezed, highly concentrated, and double-spaced with lots of photos so the 204 pages feel breezy. Highly recommended.
Perfect for: anyone navigating the inner dynamics of public attention, aspiring stand-up comics, and memoir fans…
12. The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. 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! A slim 100 pages with a thick, dense, unfurling feeling like some kind of deep-in-the-jungle fern. “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.” (Pairs well with ‘The Technopoly’ by Neal Postman, which I mention later.)
Perfect for: self-help fans, someone you love who works too hard, anybody interested in using ancient wisdom and history to help with their lives today…
PS. This is one of Cal Newport's most formative books. You can list to our deep conversation about how he carves out time for rest while still getting things done on YT/Spotify/Apple.
11. Alphabetical Diariesby 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,’ typed up 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals in rows of Microsoft Excel, kept them all in their original ‘sentence form’ but ignored all paragraphs and dates, then sorted all the sentences … alphabetically, and then carefully took out 90% of them. All that remains is the brave, daring, vulnerable, tender, funny, sexy silhouette-y statue of a young, literary, sensual woman growing up in the city.
10. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman. A prophetic 30-year-old manifesto about the dangers of pervasive technology that helps illuminate so many of the algorithm and AI conversations we’re having today. 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.” The book was written in 1992 but 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.” A short 199 pages that serves as a flying-through-time-portrait of our historical relationship with technology and potential implications for our cultures, communities, and relationships as we all fly together at warp speed.
Perfect for: reflective tech users, readers of Cal Newport and Jonathan Haidt (see #1), parents worried about cell phones in classrooms…
9. We The Animals by Justin Torres. My friend Jonathan texted me last week saying “Been getting into fiction this year, whole new world for me.” He told me he was listening to ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ (Best Books of 2023) and asked what to read next. I suggested this. He wrote back a couple days later: “We the Animals just arrived, excited to dive in this week. Quite the list of mega reviews” and then the next day “Read half last night, will finish today. That there is some fierce raw writing.” Fierce! Raw! Yes, those are the two words that come to mind. A silhouette of three young boys Peter Panning across the sky graces the cover of this debut novel by Justin Torres (b. 1980) which contains nineteen short, unnumbered chapters that hit a near-impossible high bar for pace and electricity. It opens frenetically: “We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.” And doesn’t let up. This is the story of three brothers growing up. You are right there with the boys in fistfights, empty fields, cold basements, and inside sleeping bags on dim polished office floors. Exquisite, haunting, enchanting, lyrical, tough, raw, pure.
Perfect for: fans of evocative fiction, anyone with brothers, and people who like their serious fiction in 100-page instead of 1000-page doses…
8. 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 which ultimately zooms up to tell 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.” Many-sided diagrams astound of people 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.
PS. Maria was my guest on 3 Books earlier this year. Listen to our conversation on valuing community over commodification and learn about her 3 most formative books on YT/Spotify/Apple.
7. Moonboundby Robin Sloan. This is the book I spent the most time with this year. It filled me, and continues to fill me, with so much twinkling rainbow wonder. 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. Talking beavers. Talking swords! Video games. Wizards, who aren’t really wizards. And 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. Entrancing as the silence after the cymbal crash. I absolutely loved this book.
Perfect for: fans of ‘Cloud Atlas’ (6/2019) by David Mitchell, ‘Star Wars’ supernerds, people with an appetite for Willy Wonka on steroids type imagination…
6. Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How To Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis, Ph.D. Average lifespan right now is around 80 years. That means the second half of your life begins on your 40th birthday. Cue the mid-life crisis! 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 l book I know I’ll be revisiting over and over. Hollis opens with a page of questions like “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?” Biggies! Hollis quickly 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.” Magnificent, deep, and soul-touching.
Perfect for: mid-lifers or anyone going through a transition, people who like to chew on deep questions, your friend who collects journals but never knows what to write about in them…
PS. This is one of Oliver Burkeman's (see #18) most formative books! Listen to Oliver talk about Jungian analysis and how Hollis has influenced him on on YT/Spotify/Apple.
5. The Trial by Franz Kafka. “No one’s got Kafka these days,” Patrick told me a few months back, petting his cat behind the counter at his 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? I figured I had to buy Kafka used but I tried six stores before eventually caving in and going online to AbeBooks. This book is written in 1914 but sounds like a 100-year-in-the-future prophecy of our increasingly low-trustsurveillance state. First sentence: “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, one of whom, much later, is mercilessly beaten in a courtroom closet. 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? Wonderfully paced, increasingly bleak book that has layers beyond layers and is just begging for a reread.
Perfect for: fans of classic literature, people who like movies that give them skin-crawling anxiety, students of writing…
4. Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art by James Nestor. I have had this on my beside for three months now. I can’t stop flipping through it. This book is changing my sleep, my energy, my mood. I can’t recommend it enough for anyone interested in improving their body, their health, their vitality. You’ll be looking for your uvula in the mirror to assess your susceptibility for sleep apnea (“the Friedman tongue position scale”), buying mouth tape to tape over your lips at night (Nester recommends 3M Nexcare Durapore—I’ve been using it for 3 months and love it!), and even looking for tougher foods to chew, while practicing some of the breathholding exercises mentioned later. Read some of my favorite pages here.
Perfect for: people who never feel like they get enough sleep, failed meditators who need a more active practice, lovers of smart popular science books…
3.Crossroadsby Jonathan Franzen. The first 400 pages of this book take place over literally one day. One day! And that day is December 23, 1971. That tells you what kind of detail you can expect here. Pulsing, messy, scabrous, erotic, reflective, breath-holdy, shocking, punchy, illuminating. Plot twists! Perfect dialogue! We follow the Hildebrandts—father Russ, mother Marion, four kids ranging from college-age Clem to high school social queen Becky to drug-dealing teen Perry to little, almost invisible Judson—as they navigate complex inner-outer lives around their church in the fictional small town of New Prospect, Illinois. Every chapter gives each character’s unique perspective and backstory until the slow-pounding 200-page fireworks display at the end. 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. ‘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.
Perfect for: anyone who enjoys family dramas, Franzen fans who liked ‘The Corrections’ or ‘Freedom’ but missed this one, people who like falling into 600-page novels…
2. The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. I never would have guessed at the beginning of 2024 that my favorite novel this year would be 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. But I loved it. A funny, fast-paced, emotionally sumptuous read with strong ‘When Harry Met Sally’ vibes throughout. 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. An astounding life portrait told with speed, precision, zingers, and a rare three-dimensionalization. What a stunning voice!
Perfect for: people who like the fast paced funny-romantic feel of ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ fans who like Amy Einhorn books like ‘The Help’ or ‘Big Little Lies,’ people who want to live a whole life in a few hours…
1.The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt. 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. (There’s even a three-page photo spread on old, dangerous playground equipment which was speaking my love language.) 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.) 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. A rallying cry and anti-tech manifesto which offers new ways of living that look an awful lot like old ways of living. Here is part one of my highlights and here is part two. This book came out March 26, 2024 and in tomorrow’s December 8, 2024 New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list the book is #6 with now 35 straight weeks on the list. In other words: WE HAVE LIFTOFF! Let’s keep pushing the movement forward. There’s a wonderful resource-filled site for the book, a phone-free school kit, a partnership with Dr. Becky to ‘free the anxious generation,’ and you can read up on what you can do as a parent, teacher, legislator, and more.
Perfect for: teachers and principals, parents of teens and pre-teens, and anyone worried about the unprecedented interference of technology…
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