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Hey everyone,
The percentage of Americans who read for pleasure is at its lowest level ... ever. There’s a giant study called The American Time Use Survey which looks at 26,000 Americans and they found that over a 15 year period pleasure-reading was down 29-40%. (They call it "29% for women and 40% for men" but it feels archaic to think gender and reading are related.) Gallup also found the number of people who do not read a single book in a year has tripled from the late 70s to the latest data a few years ago -- now a full 57% of Americans don’t read a single book a year. I mean: How could we when we’re spending more than five hours a day on our phones?
I guess I’m just in a bit of a “book activist” mood this month but I wanted to lay that on the line and start talking more about the importance of reading: as community-connector, empathy-builder, and compassion-fountainhead. “Books are magic,” Kevin the Bookseller told us back in Chapter 44. And he’s right. I want to get better at being a book evangelist.
Also, I'll now pause to offer the somewhat-obligatory virtual back-pat to you for taking your education seriously, for planting seeds in your inner garden, and for, you know, hanging out with me each month to talk about books.
What are some ways we can better coalesce, celebrate, and share the joy and rewards of reading? Or: Is there a book-loving community you're a part of that you recommend? Just reply and let me know.
And now, as we’ve done for 68 straight months, let’s get to the books...
Neil
1. Exactly What To Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impactby Phil M. Jones. (L/I/A) I am a bit wary of slim business books with clickbaity titles (says the guy who wrote The Happiness Equation, I know). But this book delivers. I would even say it’s a must-read if your job involves sales of any kind. (Dan Pink would say that would be all of us.) Phil is a master linguist, negotiator, and influencer. Influencer in that original "debate-winner” sense not the current “tanning my oily chiseled abs by the beach drinking a disgusting sugary drink you should all buy so they re-up my contract” sense. He opens the book by saying: “The worst time to think about the thing you are going to say is in the moment you are saying it. This book prepares you for nearly every known eventuality and provides you with a fair advantage in almost every conversation.” Intrigued? He spends 2-4 pages going deep on 23 powerful phrases you can drop into conversation. “I’m not sure if it’s for you”, “I bet you’re a bit like me…”, and even simple-sounding phrase swaps like powerfully shifting “Do you have any questions?” to “What questions do you have?”. If you're one of the 30 million people who read How To Win Friends And Influence People, this book might function as an ultra-concentrated distant cousin. I guess there's a reason for the 10,700 reviews on Audible. Highly recommended.
2. How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asiaby Mohsin Hamid. (L/I/A) I think Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented novelists alive. And his zig-zaggy path to, uh, novelizing is fascinating in and of itself: Born in Pakistan, emigrated to California age 3 so dad could do Stanford PhD, whips back to Pakistan age 9 with a sharp severing of all American friendships, heads back to US at age 18 to attend Princeton (where he takes a formative writing class from Toni Morrison who helped shape his first novel), and then graduates into a 20-year business trajectory (!) at McKinsey followed by executive brand management roles ... all of which he does while writing three massively award-winning novels on the side: Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and How To Get Filthy Rich Is Rising Asia(2013). That doesn't include Exit West (2017) which is probably his most popular. Okay, so let's back up to this book: It's written in second person and tells a gripping tale of you – a poor boy from a poor family in a poor unnamed country – on your rise to riches. I have to put this book in my top ten novels of all time. Here’s Page 1. Let's see if it hooks you like it did for me: “Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books, too. Some might even say it’s true of religion books. But some others might say that those who say that should be pinned to the ground and bled dry with the slow slice of a blade across their throats. So it’s wisest simply to note a divergence of views on that subcategory and move swiftly on. // None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry. // This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. And to do that it has to find you, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot one cold, dewy morning…” Pretty good, right? That's just the first page. Highly recommended.
4.Dinner At The Homesick Restaurantby Anne Tyler. (L/I/A) I have never read a novel quite like this before. Let’s see: It’s about … nothing. In that Seinfeld sense of endlessly twisting plotlines about the minutiae of four people’s lives nothing. Less jazz riffs, less laugh tracks, more melancholy, more heart-scratching. There is a deep sadness between the covers of this book which tells the story of a single mother in Baltimore seventy years ago who simply never tells her children their father left them. What happens to this family from there? Well, that, my friends, is what you pay your ticket for. This is a deeply feeling book with remarkably vivid characters and incredible detail all offered through a how-does-she-do-it style of almost shockingly accessible prose. This book offer a three-dimensional hologram of a family you’ll feel like you are living beside … and I’d be interested to see if you miss them or glad to lose them by the end. Five stars. (Thank you to 3 Booker Cindy Sherrick who phoned me at 1-833-READ-A-LOT to recommend I invite Superhero Librarian Nancy Pearl onto the show. Well, I did, and Nancy asked me to read this first. Conversion drops on the Strawberry Moon.)
5.Glork Patrol Takes a Bathby James Kochalka. (L/I/A) James Kochalka (ka-chall-ka) may be the single greatest cartoonist most people have ... never heard of? He turned 55 this week and has been making indie comics and punk rock since he was a teenager. This book is a wild Being John Malkovich-like head-twisting waterslide of a book for the 4-8 set. It tells the jumpy story of a space-based family that skewers our own sensibilities and values as it celebrates creativity, storytelling, and love. I personally would expand that age range from 4-8 to something more like 2-100. I should give fair warning that Leslie didn’t like this book so I'll offer this screen: If you like, let’s see, three or more of theeeeeese... then you'll like this book: Super Mario Brothers 3, early Coen Brothers movies, Jason Shiga books, The Night Riders (one of my Best of 2019!), Rushmore, or Everything, Everywhere All At Once. Love this book, even. I did. A truly wonderful piece of art.
6. Pereira Maintainsby Antonio Tabucchi. (L/I/A) I would never have heard of this book if Mohsin Hamid hadn’t just picked it as one of his three most formative. We’re working on a 3 Books chapter to release on the Sturgeon Moon and, of course, that means I gotta spend a few moons reading his formative books. (I’ll save the other two as a surprise for the show.) Thin, sparse, slow, with a deeply beating heart, this novel functions as a precise self-consciousness awakening of an elderly Portuguese widow (who talks to a photo of his dead wife every morning) who runs a small irrelevant culture section in a local Lisbon newspaper ... and who eventually learns that he really does have power and really does need to use it if he wants to help challenge the totalitarian regime. Takes place during the 40-year reign of Portuguese dictator António Salazar. Warning: Despite the 150-ish pages, the book is slow. That'll either annoy your or help you catch a vibe that helps you slow down.
7. A Kid's Book About School Shootingsby Crystal Woodman Miller. (L) And now this months Leslie’s Pick, a book personally hand-chosen by my wonderful partner: “This is a book every parent wishes they never had to read to their child. It's available online for free - download here. A Kids Company About is a place to “find books, podcasts, and apps to help spark important conversations” about things like mental health, death, war, poverty, racism, and…school shootings. Written for an adult and child (or teenager) to read together. If your child is asking about the recent school shootings (being young and in Canada ours are not) this book may be helpful. The focus is on validating emotions the child may be having, reassuring them that school shootings are very rare, and explaining that being prepared by having lockdown drills is part of an effort to keep them safe. I would say this book is best for children 8 and up but could be used as young as 5 or 6 if the child is worrying about school shootings. There is room for conversation between the adult and child about the child’s questions and suggestions on what action kids can take but probably not enough explaining why school shootings happen (e.g., that owning a gun is allowed in the United States and that if people are hurting, they are hurting, etc.) If you need inspiration for conversations that go along with this book, I made up the acronym CHATS when having compassionate and courageous conversations with children. C - Child-led - Let the child’s questions guide the conversation, H - Human - You don’t have to say the perfect thing, just be human and real with your child, A - An Invitation - See each small question by your child as an invitation to connect deeply and an opportunity to show them they can come to you about anything, T - Tools - Use books, websites, toys, art, laughter and role play, S - Support - (perhaps most importantly) Get support for YOU so you can be there for them”
8. WHAT IT ISby Lynda Barry. (L/I/A) I was lucky to have lunch with Austin Kleon last week at Mi Madre’s in Austin, Texas. Our server Veronica told us her parents started the restaurant back in 1990 and that they’re slowly making it through the pandemic. Over nachos, guacamole, and enchiladas resting on a teal-painted metal table, with a garden in a claw-foot navy-blue bathtub beside us, while swatting at screechy Great-tailed Grackles, Austin told me how this book shaped his life. Easy to see from this viewpoint! A deeply heart-forward collage artist-slash-memoirist-slash-nearly-unclassifiable artist? Could be either of them! I strongly recommend this book for artists of all stripes – and, maybe especially those seeking to inch their art closer to the drawing, illustration, or visual side of things. An entirely hand-drawn feast that will take time to slip into the rhythm of – this is a penetrating The War Of Art-cousin book for those more visually led.
9.Read Like An Artistby Austin Kleon. Speaking of Austin, he passed me a copy of these limited edition zines he made in support of indie bookstores last month. Thankfully for all of us he’s posted the whole thing online here. I love his bibliomania. His is a deeply book-loving community right there. You can follow that link to sign up for his Substack or newsletter, too.
