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Hey everyone,
The goal in school was always finishing books. Get to the end! Get up and tell us about it! But reading like this often prevents further reading. I prefer: Quit more to read more. Stop reading any book you aren’t enjoying and swap it for something that gets you going. Your reading rate will skyrocket. And, when it slows? Quit more to read more again. No book shame, no book guilt, and never any pressure to finish. Just keep moving.
Also, some news: I get emails all the time asking for signed copies of my books. And now I’m pleased to share that my local independent bookstore TYPE in Toronto is now stocking signed copies of You Are Awesome, The Happiness Equation, and Two-Minute Mornings. They're happy to mail them to you anywhere in the world. Just click those links for the title you'd like.
Books are the single greatest form of compressed wisdom we’ve ever created. They take us places otherwise inaccessible and offer us springboards into wider emotions, deeper wisdom, and more intentional lives.
Let’s keep turning the page together.
Here are my book recos this month,
Neil
1. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemptionby Bryan Stevenson. (L/I/A) When I launched 3 Books back in 2018 I got the phone number 1-833-READ-A-LOT and asked listeners to call me. Ask a question, share a formative book, request a guest, leave a comment, whatever! It’s been a wonderful way to hear from you and I play a voicemail at the end of every podcast (and if I play yours I sign and send you a book, too!). Now a couple years ago I got a voicemail from Austin Wong who suggested I read Just Mercy and interview Bryan Stevenson. I’d never heard of it. I didn’t understand what the title meant. But now I can’t stop thinking about it. And talking about it. And telling everyone about it. Just Mercy tells the incredible life story of Bryan Stevenson, the (now) 62-year-old Harvard law school grad who began difficult and often dangerous work defending Death Row prisoners in Alabama. Often wrongfully convicted. Often children condemned to die in prison when they were just 13 or 14. The book’s structure is mesmerizing itself: Bryan’s story braided with shorter cases, longer cases, chapters on US racial and mental health history, and even poems from prisoners. It’s gripping, entrancing, hold-your-breath reading. Every chapter swerves a different way. The book came out in 2014 and the paperback I bought a few months ago says “43rd printing” inside. (That explains the 144,991 five-star reviews on Goodreads.) This book will both deeply inform your understanding of US racial, legal, and criminal history while also move you to tears with edge-of-your-seat courtroom drama and a biography of a guy multiple blurbers on the inside cover call "America's Mandela." Thank you, Austin, for turning me onto Bryan’s work. My interview with Bryan will come out next month, too. Highly recommended.
2.The Carbon Almanac. Foreword by Seth Godin. (L/I/A) “I’m interested in scaling trust,” Seth Godin told us back in Chapter 3 of 3 Books. This book feels like an ultimate manifestation of the trust he’s built for decades. Seth is a giver. I’ve heard him called an ubermensch by multiple people, multiple times. With this incredible offering Seth managed to coalesce a team of over 300 global volunteers – purpose over profit! – to research, write, and shape an almanac about carbon. What’s an almanac? Think of it like a giant flip-to-any-page treasury of ruthlessly fact-checked information about climate change presented in a way that’s both meaty and accessible. Informationally rich micro-chapters like “What Is Carbon?”, “ “The 5 Scenarios Outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” and “Countries Leading Climate Change Action” are interspersed with sections like “The Climate Cost of Gas-Powered Leaf Blowers” (never buy a leaf blower!), “The Exxon Climate Memo from 1982”, and “How Roundabouts Help Lower Emissions” (a single roundabout in a city of 100,000 people saves 75,708 liters of gas a year!). Plus a liberal buttering of quotes and cartoons. Every section is indexed with a 3-digit number with an invitation to check their work and sources by plugging the number into their website. It helped me color in much of my vague perceptions about climate change with a lot more actual knowledge. I hope it becomes a fixture in classrooms and coffee tables to provoke conversation and action. An amazing job by Seth and his team. Visit www.thecarbonalmanac.org to learn more or get a copy.
3. Bad Vibes Only: Essaysby Nora McInerny. (L/I/A) A warm embracing glow emanates from Nora McInerny, the big-brained, every-feeling-under-the-sun creative wonder who independently puts out the stunningly produced story-driven mental-health exploring podcast Terrible, Thanks For Asking, while also giving speeches (like the 5,034,176-viewed TED Talk “We don’t "move on" from grief. We forward with it), while also writing deeply accessible and funny books exploring knottier issues in life for the millennial-leaning set, while also, you know, raising a big family of kids and animals down in Arizona. If you feel your attention fracturing, spend a lot of your life online, and find yourself navigating mental health challenges – who doesn’t? – then these short, tight, fast-paced essays are just perfect. On an essay about finding a therapist she writes: “The website for Psychology Today functions just like Match.com, letting you sort by geographic range, specialties, and accepted insurance. For the shallower among us, you can just choose according to headshots, the way nature intended.” On navigating moral goodness in a complex world she writes: “My hybrid saves hundreds of gallons of fossil fuels every year while also reassuring me that I’m a Good Person. However, the batteries are toxic to dispose of and are created with rare earth metals that are obtained either through dangerous mining practices, warfare, or maybe just scraping the bottom of our ocean? I was served an ad for a service that uses artificial intelligence…. to write advertisements. This makes me want to curl up in a ball and die, but what if it also makes comprehensible copywriting available to small businesses…? My Shih Tzu is on anti-depressants that have helped her come out from under the bed and actually interact with us… and some actual human people can’t afford access to mental healthcare.” A heart open, wide-armed navigation of anxiety, depression, and our endless cultural gray with warmth, humor, and love. Reading this book is like having coffee with a smart, chatty, funny friend. (PS. You can also listen to me on Nora’s podcast or Nora on mine.)
4. The Serious Gooseby Jimmy Kimmel. (L/I/A) And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick. Over to my lovely wife: “Nothing feels better than a good laugh, other than maybe hearing your kids have a good laugh. The Serious Goose pretty much guarantees it. I picked this book up with our four-year-old a few weeks ago and it has instantly become a family favourite. Appeals to kids as young as two and makes everyone laugh out loud. There’s a bit of a weird ending about their attorneys coming after you for making the goose laugh but we just skip that and celebrate that we turned the serious goose into a silly goose. A great extension is to play a game we now call The Serious Goose by sternly saying to your kids, “Now, just remember, there are only serious gooses allowed in this house. No silly gooses whatsoever! No laughing, no smiling, no having fun allowed! No exceptions!” Your kids will undoubtedly start smiling and laughing and you can dramatically chase them around and roughhouse with them saying, “Oh no!!! You just turned into a silly goose! I thought this house only had serious gooses in it!! What is going on!! I told you not to laugh!!”! Between the book and the game, you and your kids are bound to have some good laughs with this one!”
5. Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Controlby Ryan Holiday. (L/I/A) According to The American Time-Use Survey, 57% of Americans read zero books last year. Zero! That’s the highest the number’s ever been. What do we need? Reading evangelists. People who speak to digital worlds about the richness, depth, and wisdom offered in the printed world. Ryan Holiday is a Book Evangelist: he has a monthly book club, he owns indie bookshop The Painted Porch in Bastrop, Texas, and he seems to write a new book every year. Sometimes even two a year! Discipline is Destiny is his newest and it contains a deep slap of wisdom even in the Table Of Contents alone. Each opens into a short few pages that weaves together parables of people ranging from Stoic philosophers to athletes like Lou Gehrig to writers like Joyce Carol Oates. I wish the book had hyperlinks built in because there were so many people or stories I immediately wanted to read about in more detail. The emphasis on discipline is wonderful if you need a kick but if you’re already revving in fifth gear too much (*cough*) you might find it a bit stressful. So for me this is a great book to shake into the soup when I’m struggling to get going and a book to keep on the spice rack when I’m looking to chill or wind down. If you’re new to Ryan’s writing this is a great start. I’d put it up there with The Daily Stoic, which is my favorite of his. (Here are links – ping!ping! -- to getting both of those signed from his own bookstore.) If you want an entry into his writing, I recommend the advice articles he writes on his birthday like this one or this one.
6. Here Goes Nothing: A Novelby Steve Toltz. (L/I/A) Big statement coming! Here it is: My favorite novel is A Fraction Of The Whole by Steve Toltz. Number one overall! I walked into TYPE Bookstore before my wedding looking for a great book to take on my honeymoon. Kalpna, the wonderful bookseller, spent an hour with me picking books off the shelf and I kept reading the first five pages till I found the winner. A Fraction of the Whole had everything: fast-paced, funny, wild characters, a torpedo-spinning plot, with sprinkles of sideways wisdom throughout. Definitely the fastest 600 page novel I’ve read and I can’t recommend it enough. That 2008 book was the debut novel of Australian polymath Steve Toltz and was Shortlisted for the Man Booker. I hope you read it! Here Goes Nothing is Steve’s third novel. I will say up front the plot doesn’t hold together as well: a possibly-dying man convinces a young couple to rent him a room in exchange for his life savings before murdering the husband, who recounts the whole story from the afterlife. But I will also say: I believe it’s worth reading Steve Toltz for the sentences alone. Shocking, unafraid, and often time-freezing – there are wild scenes with Zen koan-like phrases just lobbed in out of nowhere. Hard to share some so out of context but, well, here goes nothing: “Being called names has never particularly bothered me. I find insults amusing if they aren’t true, and a free life lesson if they are.”, “Is there an activity more satisfying that furiously throwing somebody else’s things into a suitcase?”, or “I disliked when anyone tried to give me knowledge non-consensually; I wanted to protect my ignorance, the most underrated of the human rights.” I find Steve’s voice a true original and I know I’ll be buying every book he writes.
7. Voicing Change: Inspiration and Timeless Wisdom From The Rich Roll Podcastby Rich Roll.Only by engaging in deep and nuanced conversations can we hope to move ourselves and each other into a higher awareness and more generous way of living. I’m not there yet but one of my guides on getting there is Rich Roll. The Rich Roll Podcast is wonderful. I would go so far as to say I think Rich is the best interviewer on the planet. He gently pulls stories and a-has from guests in long threads and offers ‘wisdom divorced from the vicissitudes of the daily news cycle.’ Plus, his almost languid west coast drawl seems to smooth over the piercing intelligence and word-juggling mastery that might otherwise intimidate. Through Rich’s lens Matthew McConaughey is “a Texan on a four-dimensional vision quest, pursuing life in accordance with a homespun code”, Julie Piatt is “a doyenne of all things non-dairy”, Erin Brockovich is “a powerful reminder of the indelible influence of the individual to create positive change and awaken a movement”, and Ross Edgley is “a living, breathing Aquaman with the trident to prove it.” If you don’t have time to listen to a year or two of Rich Roll Podcast episodes then reading these distilled and curated excerpts – each with Rich’s gorgeous table-setting before – is a more than functional alternative. Like everything Rich makes it’s aesthetically on point, too. This self-published book arrives Macbook-style in a perfect rectangular box (though not needlessly dyed and laminated, of course) and opens into a coffee table book for curiosity junkies. Ultimately we’re all learning animals and this is a perfect holiday gift for the seekers in your life.
8. You're at the end! Where else can I point you? Well, my friend Mel Robbins just started a podcast you should check out: The Mel Robbins Podcast. Her ability to connect with listeners in such a intimate way is unbelievable. Subscribe on Apple or Spotify. (You can read what I think of Mel here or listen to us on 3 Bookshere.) I also liked this study "The Pen is Mightier Than The Keyboard" and, if you haven't had enough of me yet, you can hear my Simple Rules for Happiness right here with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project. That should do! But one last reminder: Keep looking for awe.
