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 Singsby 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 Retentionby 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 Wildby 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 Hugoby 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. Hikeby 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. Paradaisby 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 Prince” by 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.
