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Hey everyone,
Well, well, welcome to the seventh year of Neil’s Monthly Book Club. Some of you are new here and others have been hanging out with me since insanecommentsthreads back on 1000 Awesome Things.
I am so grateful to hang out with a city of people just talking about books every month. It’s becoming harder to foster digital communities outside social media but I like to think we're successfully pulling it off. Thank you for this relationship.
Also, every January I remind y’all I have four email lists: a daily awesome thing, a lunar podcast drop, a biweekly poem or speech, and this monthly book club.
I hope you are safe, healthy, and, although it’s not easy, practicing positivity.
Let’s make it a wonderful year.
Onto the books!
Neil
1. Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How To Think Deeply Againby Johann Hari. (L/I/A) Back in Chapter 49 of 3 Books I sat down with Dr. Andrea Sereda who is on the front lines of the safe supply movement in the opioid epidemic. (She once flippantly told me: “I give drugs to drug users.”) One of her most formative books was Chasing The Scream by Johann (“Yo-han”) Hari. The book transfixed me, expanded my views on drugs, and I put it in The Very Best Books I Read in 2019. Three years later Johann is back with a very different offering. Like most of us, he noticed his attention fracturing but, unlike most of us, he decided to decamp for Provincetown, Massachusetts without his phone for six weeks to explore the issue. What emerges is a big feast of a story about many things happening at once: rises in speed and switching, increased algorithm manipulation (with an incredible spotlight on the Center for Humane Technology), crippling flow states, and the death of free-range childhoods. This is a battle we are all fighting today. Reading this book to be better equipped in the trenches. Highly recommended.
2.Up In The Treeby Margaret Atwood. (L/I/A) Margaret Atwood’s dad was a forest entomologist and she grew up in the backwoods of northern Quebec. I imagine her wandering under white spruce and jack pines letting her imagination fester. She started writing poems and stories at six years old and didn’t start full-time school until she was twelve. When she arrived at the University of Toronto in the 1950s she had a dozen years of poetry under her belt and started up a serigraph poster-making business. She ran it off a ping-pong table and the business helped her master lettering and drawings. These histories feed all the way into the playful profundity of this whimsical children’s book she wrote, lettered, and illustrated in 1976 – many years before her big hits like The Handmaid’s Tale. “We live in a tree, way UP in a tree. It’s fun in the sun And a pain in the rain, But we both have umbrellas, Way up in the tree.” A magical treat that feels like a lost book but was graciously republished in 2006 by House of Anansi Press in beautiful new hardcover. 32 pages of simple rhymes with deep soul. A trip you'll be glad you took. Publisher says it's for ages 3-6 but I say ignore that. You do you.
3. The Apollo Murdersby Chris Hadfield. (L/I/A) I stepped into astronaut Chris Hadfield’s kitchen last month. His tiny dog New Henry was jumping at my knees and he had a stack of hundreds of Christmas cards on his marble kitchen table. I was nervous and while setting up my microphones I told Chris I was on page 188 of his book but that I’m reading slow because it’s so technical. “Space is technical,” he deadpanned back. This paceful potboiler (and debut novel) made me feel like a kid reading Tom Clancy books like Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Chris is a teacher at his core and this spy thriller doubles as an accessible education of the US and Russian space programs throughout the 50s and 60s. Like Tarantino did in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Chris weaves dozens of real people and real histories into the fiction. As you blast off into a non-existent Apollo 18 mission to the moon half the fun is trying to figure out what really happened and what didn’t. (For my conversation with Chris on 3 Books go to Apple or Spotify.)
4. The Art of Roughhousing: Good Old-Fashioned Horseplay and Why Every Kid Needs Itby Anthony T. DeBenedet. (L/I/A) And now it’s time for the Leslie’s Pick – a book chosen by the woman I’m lucky to be married to: “The kids say I’m not as good at wrestling as Neil, that I’m more of a cuddler. So I’ve been reading up on roughhousing to get them laughing, working out their angst, learning about consent and boundaries, and greasing the gears of our relationship. Full of amazing ideas ranging from simple to complex, for six-month-olds to teenagers, from as easy as ‘lie on the couch and pretend to sleep’ and ‘build a pillow fort around yourself and don’t let your kids touch you’ to full-on gymnastics-inspired physical stunts to do with your child. Warning: Yesterday we shattered a vase! But I’m proud to report the boys are beginning to accept mom as a wrestler.”
5. Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerfulby Darryl Cunningham. (L/I/A) One of the very few mementos I have of my friend Chris Kim is his tattered copy of Maus by Art Spiegelman. He handed me this “graphic novel” about a dozen years ago in his Boston apartment and insisted I read it. I opened to discover a cartoon-drawn cat-and-mouse tale of … the Holocaust? The book is still controversial but it blew me away and I tumbled into the graphic novel hole -- falling in love with works like Persepolis, Summer Blonde, and The Park Bench. I find the format so compelling for communicating twisting stories and detailed histories on a slightly tilted emotional valence. The graphic novel universe continues to expand. Billionaires is marketed as “comics journalism” and reads like a detailed and well-researched biography of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and Jeff Bezos. Cunningham doesn’t just take the simplified position of “billionaires are bad” but rather wades through denser reads like Dark Money by Jane Mayer, The Everything Store by Brad Stone, and Dial M for Murdoch by Tom Watson and sort of shakes out enough provocative facts and stories to stitch together their lives. Not a definitive read in any way but a great catchup on some of the most powerful people of our time.
6. Otto: A Palindramaby Jon Agee. (L/I/A) And the expanding graphic novel universe now also includes what I’m assuming is the first ever … palindrama. That is: an Alice-on-an-acid-trip style story of a little boy named Otto hypnotically falling into his soup. The book is told entirely in palindromes and opens with Otto sitting in his room reading his comic book LOL beside a bookshelf of toys including Mr. Alarm and Tuna Nut. His mom and dad are downstairs tasting the soup they’ve just made (“Mmm”) and then start calling him. He runs down but starts playing catch with his dog Pip and then his dad yells “Not now Otto – wonton!” He looks up from his bowl of soup to encourage Otto to “Nosh, son!” It gets way weirder from here.Instant classic. Highly recommended!
7.Carrying The Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeyby Michael Collins. (L/I/A) Say you were one of three people selected to blast off on Apollo 11, the first ever mission to land on the moon, but then just before you go they bring the three of you into a room and sit you down. “Neil, Buzz, you two will go down to the moon, walk around, plant a flag, give a speech to the world, talk to the President. Michael? Uh, yeah, well, we need someone to stay up on the ship. Sorry!” Michael takes the bummer in stride and seemingly absorbs every aspect of the experience and channels it into this poetic first-person account of the space program. Part of the beauty is that fifty years ago astronauts were a little less … specialized. Michael Collins is a wide-ranging thinker who writes in a wise, literary style. The book came out in 1974 and is still in print today and part of what's magical in here are the seemingly endless forwards and prefaces. Get this: Charles Lindbergh, who flew the first ever solo transatlantic flight in 1927 (a harrowing 33-hour hour trip from New York to Paris!) writes a completely breathtaking introduction that captures the human spirit towards flight. Lindbergh died the year the book came out so the foreword doubles as a baton from our attempted voyages into the air back in the 1800s to the Musk / Bezos space flights of today (which are discussed in the latest foreword written by Collins in his late 80s.) A wonderful book that deserves a spot on your shelf. And speaking of baton-passing, if you want to explore that idea a bit, you can watch my TED Listen from a few years back which has “What is your baton?” as its central theme.
8. Klara and the Sunby Kazuo Ishiguro. (L/I/A)A slow-paced future dystopian spine-tingler told in first person by Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF) available for purchase by parents looking to give their kids a leg-up on the tutoring scene. I thought the first act with Klara’s experience of the world staring out the window of a retail store was just gripping and the smooth, precise world-building is mesmerizing. I had never read anything by Ishiguro before (no book guilt, no book shame) but when I knew he’d won the Pulitzer Prize and the Booker, I was getting my dictionary handy. Turns out you don’t need it! The language is deceptively simple and runs like poetry. I will say the book’s pace really dragged in the wide, wide middle. And I wish I could say there was a huge payoff at the end but … I didn’t feel it. Two or three scenes had electric energy and I found myself going back to reread them but maybe my internet-burnt brain was bogged down by too many long, slow turns. My biggest takeaway it that I’d like to go read one of his older books like Never Let Me Go or TheRemains of the Day.
9. Inhabiting the Negative Spaceby Jenny Odell. (L/I/A) Something happens to my brain after I fall deeply in love with a piece of art from any artist. I tell myself I must soak in their entire body of work in order to, I don’t know, better merge DNA strands or something? That means I’m still listening to new Radiohead albums and I watch every Charlie Kaufman movie. Does the strategy pay off? Well, it’s like panning for gold. For every “King of Limbs” there’s an “In Rainbows”, for every “Synecdoche, New York” there’s an “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." The panning for gold phase of following an artist has lows but also gives some of the richest pleasures as the artist (often) fine-tunes their voice and laser focuses on that one exact specific thing they – not “the market” – want to focus on. So that’s kind of why I picked up this Jenny Odell “book.” Book in quotation marks because it’s just the speech transcript for the Commencement Address Jenny gave virtually during covid to the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. This is only for superfans of How To Do Nothing, which I'd highly recommend starting with first.
