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Hey everyone,
I’ve got something big simmering and I am so pumped to send you an exciting note soon. In the mean time I hope you’re enjoying the end of your summer (or winter, for my many Falkland Island readers) and you’re making time for books always.
Friends and lovers come and go.
Books are here for you always.
Here are my recos this month,
Neil
1. Lessby Andrew Sean Greer. My friend Alec told me to read this book. I said I would. Then I didn’t. The next time I saw him he asked if I read this book. I told him no but I would. Then I didn’t. The next time I saw him he had actually bought me a copy, put it into my hand, and said again, with cold penetrating eyes, “Read this book.” Perseverance. I like that! To be honest I was a bit intimidated by the Pulitzer Prize sticker on the front. But I finally cracked it open and fell into it like a big warm pond. What a story! When writer Arthur Less gets an invitation to his ex-boyfriend’s wedding he decides to accept a slew of half-baked authorly invitations around the world rather than shamefacedly attend the wedding as the awkward dateless former lover. What follows is an incredibly hilarious and woven tale through distant countries. I absolutely loved it. First off, it feels like you are visiting everywhere he goes. How does he pull this off so well? You’re in Morocco, you’re in India, you’re in Japan. You’re traveling. You’re right there. Second, it’s hilarious. Laugh-out-loud funny. If you liked books like Barney’s Version or A Fraction of the Whole or Catch-22 I think you’ll love this. And, finally, the finishing move: the entire book is written by an eloquent first-person-floating-over-the-scene narrator whose identity isn’t revealed until the final pages. Best novel I’ve read all year. Highly recommended!
2. Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Questby Hanif Abdurraqib. Last year I went on and on about They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib, a collection of essays on music and life and politics and justice and what it’s like growing up black in the US today. I loved that book! And here is his follow-up. It came out from a small university publisher and immediately smacked onto The New York Times bestseller list. I think a lot of people feel like Hanif Abdurraqib is becoming one of the most exciting writers around. Now, if you know anything about A Tribe Called Quest, great, but if you don’t, well, great as well. Once again you get exquisite writing featuring hip-hop history and culture woven into reflections on race, family, and politics. A loving portrait.
3. Art Mattersby Neil Gaiman. A nice zippy illustrated collection of four Neil Gaiman essays on art including his famous Make Good Art commencement speech. The other three essays are Credo, Making A Chair, and On Libraries. A nice little push for the aspiring artists in your life… or the aspiring artist inside you.
4. The Algebra of Happinessby Scott Galloway. The original working title for my book The Happiness Equation was actually Truly Rich. I wrote the book as a letter to my unborn child and was hoping to redefine rich into this more all-encompassing term. But then we made the eleventh hour decision to change the title to The Happiness Equation because there was an underlying formula in the book (Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything) as well as a ton of sort of mathy equations and scribbles. After I released it in 2016 I’ve found a couple great books on this same theme of distilling happiness into simpler language. One is Solve For Happy by Mo Gawdat. The other is this book. Both veer much more into personal memoir and both offer unique nuggets on happiness. Scott is a professor at NYU and his YouTube videos are super popular if you want to check him out there. (Sidenote: I discovered this book through this video by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, where he discusses it as well as The Happiness Equation.)
5. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized Worldby David Epstein. I think one of the ugliest things in the world today is the polished resume. Polished everything! Too much polish. I am not a fan of LinkedIn. It is full of polished resumes. Everyone sounds perfect! I like blemishes. Blemishes are interesting. Weird jobs, strange hobbies, gap years. Have you read Jordan Peterson’s bio? Regardless of what you think of the dude, talk about an interesting resume. When I interviewed candidates at Walmart I was always most interested in those gaps and rough edges and the stuff painted outside the lines. Because that’s where the person had come from, how they grew, how they had developed. The crucible moments where their character was forged. I think the increasing specialization of our world, at younger and younger ages, results in far too much fragility. Being really great at one thing often means you’re pretty bad at lots of things. But the jack of all trades is the next king of the world. This book is a powerful refutation of the famed 10,000 hour rule (and was originally spawned when David Epstein was asked to debate Malcolm Gladwell over that exact point). A powerful book for those feeling wobbly in their career, wondering what’s next, or for anyone thinking all the tiny things they’ve done don’t amount to much. Actually, they amount to a lot. And this powerful book shows you why.
6. HBR Guide To Your Professional Growth. Okay, I included this book to show the power of this email list. When I started sending you guys book recos a few years ago the most common question you sent back was “How do you read so many books?” So I wrote an article for HBR in response called “8 Ways To Read (A Lot) More Books This Year” which became the Most Popular article on their site for something like six months. Now that very article has been immortalized for eternity in this new HBR book. They mailed me a few copies and I found the whole book pretty good. Good gift for co-workers. (P.S., No, I don’t get royalties. You are feeding into the impoverished Harvard endowment. Please give generously.) (P.P.S., I wrote a follow-up to that article called "8 More Ways To Read (A Lot) More Books" on my blog).
7. Minding The Store: A Big Story About A Small Businessby Julie Gaines. I love graphic novels but so many are something like “one person’s tale of battling awkwardness through high school” or similar. Good story! But a bit of a tired story. Yet the medium is so powerful so I’m always looking for it to explore new territory. That’s why I loved Tetris by Box Brown. It’s why I just bought Amazing Decisions by Dan Ariely. And it’s why I picked up this non-fiction graphic novel about the famous Fishs Edy store in New York City. (Do you know those Manhattan skyline dinner plates? Those came from here.) It’s a fun family and small business told by the store’s co-owner and drawn by her son.
8. Turtles All The Way Downby John Green. Do you like blue cheese? Some do. Many don’t! It’s an acquired taste. Or a never-acquired taste. Smaller market. But those who love it, love it a lot. Well, this is John Green’s blue cheese book. I’m glad he wrote it. He went somewhere new. But it’s definitely an acquired taste. Many characters are not easy to love. The protagonist has mental illness and since it’s told in first person you live inside that brain. I skipped a lot of the pages filled with anxiety-ridden thoughts because they became too much. (I’m sure that’s the point.) Good for John Green superfans or those craving a young adult look inside the many tougher-to-answer questions around mental illness today. Green’s writing remains so confident and thick-globbed and powerful. I’m excited to see what he does next.
9.Where’d You Go, Bernadette? THE MOVIE. What is a movie doing on this book club? Well, Where’d You Go Bernadette was literally #2 overall on my list of The Very Best Books I Read in 2018. #2! I read over 100 books last year and it was #2. So I didn’t want to see the movie and ruin it in my head. I didn’t even want to picture the characters! (That’s why I’ve never watched the Harry Potters and why I am upset Daniel Radcliffe has mentally replaced Harry in the books for me.) Plus, the movie is 48% on RottenTomatoes. 48%? What a death blow! But Leslie and I had a super rare movie night, and she wanted to see it … so we went. I confessed my hesitation to her just before it started and we debated leaving the theater. But we stayed. And were both blown away. There were so many emotional layers in it. I surprise-cried through like three different scenes. If you have any form of “mental illness plus love” in your family I think it will hit you hard. It was true to the book (Maria Semple was an Executive Producer), directed by Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Before Midnight), and Cate Blanchett just nails the title role. I highly, highly recommend the book! This is a book email! Buy the book! Read the book! But then, for the purists out there, trust me that the movie really does hold up.
10. The Floor Is Lava: And 99 More Games for Everyone, Everywhereby Ivan Brett. Did you play that game when you were a kid where you pretended the floor was lava and you had to jump between all the couches and coffee tables to avoid melting into the Earth’s molten core? Well, I never really thought about it but what was most beautiful about that game is that you didn’t need … anything. Nothing! You didn’t need a thing. This book is a collection of games like that. Fun games you can play around a dinner table or on a long car ride. My wife Leslie loves it and we’ve successfully introduced a few good ones to the kids.
