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
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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, fancynavy 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 Marginalianhas 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.
