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Hey everyone,
Are you vaxxed? Are you double vaxxed? Are you triple vaxxed? We’re always socially distanced in this Monthly Book Club anyway.
Leslie and I just got double vaxxed up here and I’m starting to get excited to see some of you in person. So far I have trips to Nashville, Des Moines, San Diego, and Palm Springs on the horizon. Do you have a suggestion for a 3 Books guest I should interview live from any of those places?
If you aren't on the 3 Books podcast train yet, I invite you to hop aboard. We're having fun geeking out about books and the lives we’re building on top of books. I'm keeping the show 100% ad, sponsor, and commercial free (like my newsletters and blogs) so it's a place to hide from the overwhelm. Upcoming guests include Lori Gottlieb, my two-year-old son, and Quentin Tarantino. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Hope you’re hanging in there and let's get to the books,
Neil
1. The Master and Margaritaby Mikhail Bulgakov. Have you read any Russian literature? Have you read a lot? Have you read none? I had read none until 2020. Without ever flipping open a page I always considered books like War and Peace and Anna Karenina to be laughably long and assumed the writing would be thorny and impenetrable. Turns out I have made an ass out of you and me. Last June, I recommended The Duel by Chekov to you and wrote, “if you haven’t read much classic Russian literature (ditto) then this isn’t a bad way in ... it has a slowly building crescendo that will keep you flipping if you can make it through the opening dizziness." David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) gave us that suggestion back in Chapter 58 before I asked him to give us a newbie guide to navigating the Russians. He protested at first ("My knowledge is as deep as a piece of paper”) but went on to say The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov is a wonderful stepping stone into the nineteenth century Russians. Well, I bought the book right away and let it simmer and cool on my bedside table for six months. A few weeks ago I started reading it and found the first two chapters … thorny. It opens with a provocative scene in a public park in 1930s Moscow but then skips back two thousand years earlier in Chapter 2 where you're suddenly privy to the judge deciding the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. I was … thrown. When the novel settles back into Moscow it gets into its groove it starts flying. The plot summary is something like: The devil shows up and all hell breaks loose. I recommend reading the plot summary first here.
2. Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hookedby Adam Alter. Are you addicted to the Internet? Maybe a little? Maybe a lot? There is an Internet Addiction Test early on in this book which is very similar to this free one online. I scored a “Mild Addiction”. I may only be mild because I bought and read this book when it came out and heeded its call. (As an example, Leslie has hidden my cell phone, at my request, for the past week. One of many ways I try to stay off the drug.) I think we need to ratchet up our collective awareness of the zillion invisible attention hooks being stabbed into our brain by our phones all day. If you liked books like Influence by Robert Cialdini, I think you’ll like this. This was my second time through so I pulled my favorite pages and will be posting them on Instagram. (I just did this for Steal Like An Artist and The Art of Living). George Saunders told me “I feel like a circus monkey writing for social media.” He ended up deleting his accounts. I am apparently still a circus monkey which is ironic considering the book itself. Need to get that Mild Addiction down a couple more notches.
3. Tell Me About Sex, Grandmaby Anastasia Higginbotham. Gloria Steinem has a blurb on the back of this book which reads “I love that it’s Grandma giving advice. Some Native Americans say the very young and the very old understand each other best, because each is closest to the unknown.” I feel the truth in that. This non-fiction “sex ed” style book is written as an innocent, curious cut-and-paste conversation between a child (of presumably purposefully unclear age and gender) and their grandmother. Consent, sex positivity, and body curiosity are themes explored with the undercurrent motto that ‘each person’s sexuality is their very own to discover, explore, and share if they choose.” This book hit me in the gut and I think many adults will find the same. I agree with the Kirkus reviewer who wrote: “If I were independently wealthy, I’d buy a small plane, fly across the country, and drop off copies of this book to every elementary-school health and sex educator out there.” Good pairing book with C is for Consent by Eleanor Morrison or How Mamas Love Their Babies by Juniper Fitzgerald.
4. Return the National Parks to the Tribesby David Treuer. My thought process when I picked up this latest issue of The Atlantic and read the cover: “Wow, that’s a provocative story” and then “Or it’s probably that I think it’s provocative because I don’t know anything about the real issues” and then, as I started reading, “Wait, this is the history of American National Parks?” and then, once again, “I know so little about so many things” and on and on and on. I get to that place a lot. (I love that Rich Gibbons quote from Chapter 14 along the lines of "The more I know, the more I know I know nothing.") A wonderful article going deep into the bloody history and background of American National Parks to help crack open an important discussion. Right now in Canada we are having our own deep reckoning with the discovery of even more unmarked indigenous graves last week (after another discovery last month). Do you have an indigenous / first nations / first people book you suggest I read? I haven’t read much but enjoyed (and highly recommend) Halfbreed, Heart Berries, and There, There.
5. Innocent Eréndira and Other Storiesby Gabriel García Márquez. I loved this tiny, vulgar, powerful, magically real 1972 novella whose full title is The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother. (That makes up a big chunk of the book and is all I read – the rest is a bunch of his early short stories.) The magically real Yuyi Morales was assigned this book to read around age thirteen at her high school in Xalapa, Mexico. And, she perhaps shouldn’t have been? I mean, the plot deals with a heartless grandmother pimping out her twelve-year-old granddaughter to repay a debt and it doesn’t really let up. And yet: it is magical. People do things in their sleep. Oranges picked off trees reveal jewels inside. And many strange connections are made. This is the book that got Yuyi into the world of books. Just ... maybe read the plot summary first.
6. Lost In Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the Worldby Ella Frances Sanders. Whenever I trip and fall on the sidewalk my wife looks at me with big, empathetic eyes and says “pole” (prounced like 'polay') which is a Swahili word that apparently means “I’m sorry for your pain.” When she told me that I was like “What do you mean we don’t have a word for that? Come on, English! We must have this covered, right?” But, can you think of one? Probably not in one word, anyway. Well, this book is a list of dozens of words like that. The Brazilian word for running your fingers through a lover’s hair, the Italian word for being moved to tears from a story, the Swedish word for a third cup of coffee. It’s less educational and more whimsical and trivia-style but it’s lots of fun regardless. Good reminder of the language prisons we often find ourselves caged up in, too.
7. Notesby Eleanor Coppola. I am always preaching to people the way books help open up the mirror neurons in your brain responsible for empathy, compassion, and understanding. To paraphrase George Saunders – that guy keeps coming up! -- books are “empathy training wheels.” Here's Exhibit A. The book is non-fiction but reads like vivid fiction in its daily diary format. You are Eleanor, the artistic, wealthy, humble yet high society wife of Francis Ford Coppola, as well as mother of three young children, and you are living for a few years in the jungles of the Philippines while your husband shoots a gigantic movie that is stressfully running over time and over budget and which is draining and growing your family in a thousand ways. What’s the movie? Apocalypse Now. A truly formative life experience and we have Eleanor’s diaries to read throughout. I loved this book. It may be out of print but I found a used copy online and I think you can do the same. This is one of Dave Eggers’ three most formative books. (I just released my chat with Dave where we discuss life without smartphones, how to get boys to read, making art in an algorithmic society, and a lot more. Listen on Apple or Spotify.)
8. The WEIRDest People In The World: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperousby Joseph Henrich. I discovered a new type of Book Relationship this month whereby you buy some gigantic, dense, information packed tome that’s just chock full of wild ideas, mind-expanding charts, and (in this case) deep anthropological insight and you … adopt it as a pet. What do I mean? Well, my friend Brian texted me a picture of this book and said “You need to read this!” and I bought it immediately. I trust Brian. He has good book recommendations. And I learned that WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. But then the book arrived and it was the size of a phone book with teeny font and I was just overwhelmed. I knew the chances of me reading the book were small. More likely it would sit on my shelf forever. But, instead of either, I adopted the book as my pet. I put it front-facing on my shelf, I left it on my desk, sometimes it had a nap beside me on my bed, and a few times (no joke) I left it under my desk, by my feet. And what did I do with my pet? Did I read it? Well, not exactly. I … petted it? This metaphor may need work. Basically, I used the giant Index as my guide and kept skimming till I found a word or topic or theme or person I found interesting and then I flipped into the book and read those four or five pages. There is a lot in here about evolutionary biology, how we live, and giant macro trends around community, friendship, and kinship. In total I probably read like 10% of the book but I pulled out so many ideas, notes, and quotes already. 10% doesn’t sound like much! But it’s a lot more than nothing. Good doggie.
9. The Social Life of Forestsby Ferriss Jabr. The sub-headline on this New York Times Magazine cover story caught my eye: “Underground, trees cooperate with one another. What signals are they sending?” Sounds like a movie poster line, right? Something like 800 million years ago life sort of split into plants, animals, and the mushy middleman of mycelium. This article veers deep into the science but helps course correct that false third grade dictum that ‘trees compete with one another for sunlight in the forest.’ Turns out trees actually talk to each other through the underground network of mycelium (commonly but somewhat incorrectly called 'mushrooms') and help each other out. “Hey Big Shade! Hit me with some Vitamin D, brother!” Mycelium takes a cut for playing middleman and then what happens is … and, cut! This review is just the trailer. Read the article. It’s a roller-coaster thrill ride that will leave you on the edge of your seat. Two thumbs up.
10. A Swim In A Pond In The Rain: In Which Four Russians Give A Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Lifeby George Saunders. After a couple cameos we’re going to close out by zooming into a full feature on George Saunders. Can you tell by the picture above I lost the gorgeous, rubbery purple book jacket that this book was wrapped in? How embarrassing. Now, this is the fourth George Saunders book I’ve recommended this year alone. And it’s a doozy. Basically: Are you a writer? Do you want to be a better one? Then you must grab this book. You must! I place it on mantle alongside other writing favorites including: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Ernest Hemingway and Larry W. Philips. George Saunders has been professor of Creative Writing at Syracuse University for 24 years and he’s essentially distilled his course on Russian Masters into this book. The book contains seven short stories by big sluggers like Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol and then after each one is George’s color commentary. He writes in this fast and flippy tone that’s such a rush to read. I might even call it addictive. His MacArthur Genius mind offers such deep love, kindness, and empathy for writers and readers of all stripes. It all adds up to a bit of a bible for writers. I admit I have kept it by my pillow for months now. The New York Times wrote “One of the most accurate and beautiful depictions of what it is like to be inside the mind of a writer that I’ve ever read.” The book has a 4.8 out of 5 on Amazon with 979 out of the 1164 ratings are 5-star. You will notice I didn’t link to Amazon in that previous sentence. Why? Well, I don't link to Amazon so that we can support local and independent bookstore. In my chat with George on 3 Books he said his favorite independent bookstore was Parnassus Books in Nashville, which is run by novelist Ann Patchett. I thought it’d be fun to send Ann and her team a whole whack of orders of this book. Should we have some fun? Can you wait a couple weeks before getting the book? Then click here to buy yourself a copy. Again, click here to buy this book from Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee! Looks like Ann has 10 copies in-stock right now. Let's clear her shelves a few times over.
