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Hey everyone,
Let's get right to the books!
Neil
1. The Color Purpleby Alice Walker. (L/I/A) “Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.” So begins this forty-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that I’ve suddenly been telling all my friends and family to read. Gripping story tackling endless taboos with an incredible (and incredibly flippable) structure of … letters. That’s it. That's the whole book. Letters! (There’s apparently a term for this: Epistolary). The book is letters from from Celie to God, letters from Celie to her sister Nettie, and letters from Nettie back to Celie. Alice Walker’s ability to disappear behind these characters, which grow and change in front of you, is just remarkable. And the fact the book is forty years old and tackles issues like sexuality, abuse, masturbation, incest, domestic violence, and, well… it goes on. A truly searing piece of writing and activism. I see why Bryan Stevenson just named it one of his 3 most formative books in our chat that just dropped. I’m grateful he had me read it to prepare for our interview and now I’ll pay it forward to you. (PS. Bryan’s other two formative books were Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and you can listen to him opening them up on Apple or Spotify. Here’s a bunch of quotes from the show to get you in the mood.)
2.Liberation Day: Storiesby George Saunders. (L/I/A) The opening short story is a punch-you-in-the-nose 67-page first-person tale from a middle-aged man whose memory has been wiped and he’s now (happily?) reprogrammed into a type of wall entertainment in a rich family’s home. And, remarkably, his voice sounds exactly like a reprogrammed-wall-art human should sound. (“Mr. U climbs a stepladder to pop into each of our mouths a lozenge. Jean, the maid, comes in with three water sponges on sticks, with which she moistens our lips, and then it is Dinner, and she Feeds us by attaching our Personal Feed Tubes to the tri-headed Master Feed Tube coming out of her large jar of Dining Mélange.”) George Saunders is a puppeteer. And a master distiller who works sentences down to tight, spare, well-oiled parts. The result is every-word-in-its-right-place stories that jostle and jar. Now, sure, I do find myself thinking “What the hell is going on here?” a half dozen times in the first few pages of every story. But I know I’m in the hands of a master who knows exactly when I’m thinking “What the hell is going on here?”, in fact makes me think “What the hell is going on here?”, and then lures me forward from every single "What the hell is going on here?" moment with precisely the right bread crumb at precisely the right time. Net net: we slalom through together. And it is great fun. Khalid Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, says “Saunders makes you feel like you are reading fiction for the first time.” I absolutely agree. High-wire daredevil writing at its finest. Pulls off that tough combo of literary and accessible. Highly recommended.
3.Guy Stuff: The Body Book For Boysby Cara Natterson. (L/I/A) And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie Pick: “There’s a dated memo to parents that they must look for this perfect moment to have 'the conversation' with their child. I’d like to burn that memo. The new memo is that there are small, little, imperfect moments alllllll the time to talk about bodies, feelings, consent, sex, puberty, gender, relationships (and the list goes on) with your child. Some will randomly present themselves (“Did you see that Auntie Susie is pregnant?” “Time to wash your penis!” “Please ask your sister if she wants you to sit on her lap.”) and others can be brought up through books like this one. I have planted Guy Stuff: The Body Book for Boys on the coffee table for our kids to pick up and flip through. The illustrations show boys going through bodily changes and it provokes questions about everything from shapes and sizes, to underwear, to sports safety, to feelings. I’ve been working hard to be around when they “stumble upon” this book, keeping my affect calm and neutral, asking questions and letting their curiosities direct our conversations. Also available is The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls (one for younger girls and one for older girls). May it start many small conversations between you and your child.”
4. The Future is Analog: How to Create A More Human Worldby David Sax. (L/I/A) Does everybody agree virtual school sucked? You could feel the social bellums of our kids' brains drying and flaking off as they stared into flickering laptops on kitchen tables. These days when I walk by a playground and see kids playing mindless games, inventing new languages, and running around like hyenas – well, I love it. The future, indeed, is analog. We’re human. We’re not getting rid of these brains anytime soon and evolutionary theory says you know what? We need to be around each other. That’s what I think, anyway. Less screens! Less virtual offices! More IRL. But don’t take it from me. David Sax over here is an award-winning journalist who’s interviewed and investigated our ‘digital versus analog’ selves across seven dimensions: Work, School, Commerce, The City, Culture, Conversation, and Soul. He returns with a follow-up manifesto to his wonderful The Revenge Of Analog that truly felt like the fresh air I needed. For a nice overview, he just wrote a feature piece in The Globe and Mail called "All screens, no touch".
6. Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinctionby Elizabeth Gehrman. (L/I/A) Sometimes when I travel I use the eBird app to find local birders to go birding with. I keep a pair of binoculars in my suitcase and add new birds I see to my Life List. (There are about 10,000 bird species in the world which means I only have about 9700 to go!) Shoutout to Dave who drove me around Nevada looking for Burrowing Owls last year, Jodi who I stood on the edge of a muddy lake with in northern Alberta watching thousands of migrating American Avocets, and Graham who just two weeks ago told me the story of the Bermuda Petrel. Graham told me he’s really into pelagic birding. I had no idea what that meant but turns out it just means “getting on a boat and looking for birds that live permanently on the water”. Lot of birds like that! Puffins, for instance. Just use land for nesting and then back to their rolling human-free paradise. The Bermuda Petrel is an interesting nocturnal squawking seabird that ‘haunted’ explorers for hundreds of years. When Europeans finally settled on Bermuda they released a bunch of pigs, stole all the birds eggs, and rendered the entire species extinct…. in like a decade. OR DID THEY!? Three hundred years later, in 1951, on a tiny set of craggy rocks jutting out from the water, 15-year-old David Wingate was in a boat that spotted a few pairs of Bermuda Petrels. Like that was all of them in the entire world. He then spent his life, the next seventy years, nurturing these birds back from the brink. “He was bawling when I went out with him,” said Graham. “We counted 183 of the birds and he’d never seen that many before.” This book gives a deep journalistic portrait of David, the birds, and, higher level, the ability our notoriously steamrolling-everything species to (perhaps) undo some of the damage we’ve done. Great for environmentalists, birders, and, you know, people who love earth.
7. The Penguin Classics Bookby Henry Eliot (and 100s of others). (L/I/A) My family had two bookshelves. One was just the Encyclopedia Brittanica. The other was a three-foot tall shelf in the upstairs hallway with my mom’s health, self-help, and inspirational books – plus some Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steele. That was it. Pretty barren except on library days. When I was nineteen I visited my friend Claire’s house in downtown Toronto. I took the train in from the burbs and still remember walking in her front door and being just staggered by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering every single wall of their front room. And almost all the books were the same color. Orange! Orange everywhere. Penguin Classics had spread like slime. “It is the design of this Library to provide English-speaking readers with new versions of the finest and most enduring of the foreign classics, ancient, medieval and modern,” says the classic opening page of the book – said in a bit of a snooty brunch-on-Fifth kinda voice. But it’s just because they took the job seriously. And it paid off. Chopped into four high-level sections – The Ancient World, The Middle Ages, Early Modern Europe, and The Industrial Age -- the book turns into a history lesson told entirely through books. For example, zooming into Ancient India (one of 19 sub-sections) I learned about the 12th-19th century BCE-published collected “Roots of Yoga” Penguin classic which collects and translates all the Hindu, Tantric, Buddhist, and Jain yoga traditions from original sources. And the collected plays and poems of Kālidāsa, the 5th century BCE writer thought to be the best classical Sanskrit writer of all time. On one hand: This is just a sales catalog to all the Penguin Classics. On another: It’s a booklovers ultimate geek-out that never gets old. On yet another: It takes a ripe swing at trying to annex and index our collected wisdom over the past 5000 years. Worth grabbing for any of those reasons!
8. The Barnabus Projectby The Fan Brothers. (L/I/A) I put The Fan Brothers (Terry Fan and Eric Fan) in the category of “Geniuses More People Should Know About.” Look at their catalog! Transfixing and stunningly emotive work that elevates the entire “Picture Book” category a few notches. The Barnabus Project may be their best. On a Main Street downtown is a pet store called Perfect Pets with fuzzy, big-eyed, “fully trained” pets sitting in boxes ready to be bought. The perfect pets were, of course, created in an underground laboratory – with our typically-invisible global supply chain nicely compressed to just underneath the pet store here – and that basement laboratory has, you know, errors. Mistakes. Weird lab results that have created its own Island Of Misfit Toys. Or Basement of Misfit Toys, I guess. The book tells the story of Barnaby, a bonsai half-mouse-half-elephant living under a glass bell jar on a shelf with other errors – all tended to by ‘Green Rubber Suits’. Pip the Cockroach tells Barnaby about life outside the lab and that cues a dramatic escape that is visually stunning – take a look! – and full of little lessons along the way. A truly stunning piece of art. I also highly recommend their books The Scarecrow, Ocean Meets Sky, and (with astronaut Chris Hadfield), The Darkest Dark. May the world bring us more from The Fan Brothers! Highly recommended.
