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Hey everyone,
Happy end-of-September!
Leslie and I are getting ready for our 5-year-old's birthday bash tomorrow. Did you have a giant 5-year-old birthday party? I still remember my sister (always the popular one) inviting her entire class over and the image of kids yanking each other down our brown-carpeted stairs by their pink stockings before wolverining into a massive slab of bright green mint-chocolate ice cream cake is firmly etched in my mind. Me, I usually had one friend over for the big day. Two on a big year!
This year I felt like I shared it with a lot of you. I started an annual tradition of writing birthday advice and, in case you missed it, here are the '44 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 44.' Thanks for all your well-wishes.
1. Fosterby Claire Keegan. Economy! Tight, fast, shrink-wrapped writing that doesn't waste the reader's time. George Saunders talks a lot about this in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain (my favorite book on writing) (06/2021) and Story Club (my favorite Substack on anything). You want economy? Here's a 92-page Irish epic sharing the story of a young girl moving in with foster parents for a year. And I do mean epic. Who says epics have to be long? Ben-Hur? No, they just have to be broad! Vast! Sweeping! Before I went to Costa Rica I stopped by to ask Kyle at Type Books if he could recommend short books. Slip-in-that-useless-front-pocket-of-the-suitcase books. This was the first he grabbed. Check out the first page: "Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexword towards the coast where my mother's people came from. It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh where my father lost our red Shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew where the man who won the heifer sold her shortly afterwards. My father throws his hat on the passenger seat, winds down the window, and smokes. I shake — " and then you just have to turn the page. Because who's talking? Where are they going? And that vivid detail painted with so few words continues throughout. Even the title's economical! Foster could easily have been, you know, That Wild And Magical Year I Spent With My Irish Foster Parents. I admire David Mitchell's economical cover blurb too: "As good as Chekhov." A get-you-back-into-reading book. Highly recommended.
2. How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirksby Robin Dunbar. Have you heard of Dunbar's Number? It's 148, more casually rounded to 150, and is the "suggested cognitive limit for the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships." The number came up in Chapter 101 with Daniels, during our discussion of Sex at Dawn (04/2022) and afterwards I fell into a rabbit hole looking into Dunbar's Number which led me to this wonderful book. Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford and he has that rare Feynmanny gift of being smarter than everybody else but still speaking like you're sitting beside him on the train. "We share a history, you and I," he begins in Chapter 1. "A history in which our respective stories snake back through time, edging ever closer to each other until finally they meet up in a common ancestor. Perhaps our lineages meet up only a few generations back, or maybe it was a thousand years ago. Perhaps it was so long ago that it predates history — though even that could not have been more than two hundred thousand years ago, a mere twinkle in Earth time. For we modern humans all descended from a common ancestor who roamed the plains of Africa a mere ten thousand generations ago, ten thousand mothers giving birth to ten thousand daughters ... no more than would fit in a town of very modest size today." From this underpinning he goes on to discuss the 'expensiveness' of our giant brains, how they're unbelievably good at coordinating social relationships and connections — but only up to a point. Then we start talking about Dunbar's Number. Robin Dunbar says one good definition for Dunbar's Number is the number of people who would feel an obligation to you and would turn up for you. (He shares how it's no coincidence that data on average wedding size shows that — for years and years — it's been 150.) But 150 is just one in a series of numbers. He uses a metaphor of a stone being thrown into a lake that causes a set of ripples — as the ripples go out they get bigger but the amplitude, the height of the wave, gets gradually smaller. 5 are really intense relationships closest to you ("shoulders to cry on" friends), 15 are "best friends," 150 are friends, 500 are acquaintances (maybe coworkers, maybe people who send happy birthday messages on Facebook), and then, finally, there's a 5000-person layer which is the total number of faces you can recognize. Beyond 5000? Strangers. Despite the fact that we have very recently decided to live in teeming cities of 10s of millions of people our brains haven't changed — and neither has the size of our friendship circles. The book is full of endless anthropological trivia — why gossip is good for you, the benefits of nepotism as it relates to connection, how 200 million men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, and on and on. The book is much more conversational ("good-meandering") than you might expect but a detailed Table of Contents and Index can help you skip around. A particularly fascinating chapter near the end called "Be smart... live longer" shares lines like how there's "a direct link between IQ at age eleven and your chances of celebrating your eighty-fifth birthday" and how "beautiful people are, on average, more intelligent." I've just skimmed a few of the juicier arguments he puts forward in this fascinating book. Highly recommended. (PS. Who else suddenly wants a 'number' named after them so they can be cool like Dunbar, Avagadro, or Planck? I'm going to hereby declare Pasricha's Number to be the number of pages you have to read in order to say you read the book. For fiction, it's every page [minus any front or back matter] and for non-fiction, it's all the front and back matter [plus at least one chapter inside.])
3. Play It As It Laysby Joan Didion. First Joan Didion anything I have ever read. I remember when she died December 2021 there was this massive outpouring. I read her New York Times obit, a post on Instagram from Kelly Oxford, and remembered Lori Gottlieb had chosen The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan's Pulitzer-prize winning 2005 memoir of mourning after her husband's death — as one of her 3 most formative books. But who was Joan Didion? And where exactly do you start with a writer who's won every award but also has 77 (!) unique titles listed on Goodreads? Filter by reviews to see what's popular? Suuuure, but even then you get seven books with over 10,000 reviews. Maybe just wait a year or two for something to call your name? That works! This novel, written in 1970 and repackaged in a striking 2005 FSG Classics edition, grabbed my eyeballs when I was down at Type Books. Picked it up, started reading, and was met by something distinctively ... harsh. This book has sharp teeth. And yet, it's not really about... anything. Or anyone. I used to think books could be separated on a spectrum with "plot" on one side and "character" on the other. Well, Play It As It Lays picks up and drop-shatters that brittle idea by instead being almost entirely about tone. You can feel the California sideways sun setting against the 60s modernist homes with designer furniture inside the whole time. Did you see The Virgin Suicides? Not really about character or plot. But you remember the tone, right? The opening paragraph on the back cover kind of tells you this: "A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, plumbing the emptiness and ennui of a seemingly bankrupt society in spare sentences that scour and disturb." I'd never heard of sentences scouring. ("To rub hard, especially with a rough material...", says Merriam Webster.) Yet that's what they do. I have no notes from this book. No quotes pulled. No pages folded. It looks like I didn't read it. Yet I read every word. Because of that tone. Hypnotic, ruthless, sometimes I hated the book. Sometimes I didn't understand it. But I found myself always picking it back up, pushing through a confusing chapter or two, and then hitting another scene that stunned me. Sort of reminded me of Nine Stories by JD Salinger (06/2020) that way. Here, I'll flip the book to three random pages right now and pick a sentence out to show you. Here goes: "She lay on the couch, her eyes fixed on a bowl of dead roses, until four o'clock in the afternoon." (Page 182), "All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children." (Page 73), and "When they finally did it they were on the bed and at the moment before he came he reached under the pillow and pulled out an amyl nitrate popper and broke it under his nose, breathed in rapidly, and closed his eyes." (Page 153). Joan Didion, I still don't know you. And it might take a bit of time before I grab another one of your books. But you hooked me. And we'll talk again.
4. The Birds Of Costa Rica: A Field Guideby Richard Garrigues and Robert Dean. I met Scott Broad when I was 9 years old. My sister and I were moving to the town next door that fall and my parents had the idea to sign us up for day camp at our new school before the year began. On the first day, a counsellor got up and said "Okay, lot of lost and found stuff in this box from last week. Please come grab your stuff. Let's see, we got three tennis balls ... bunch of hats ... a pair of boy's underwear ... a pair of girl's underwear." And that's when Scott leaned over and whispered "Wonder what they were doing?" I liked him right away. Flash forward thirty years and I became a birder in the pandemic. Surprise, surprise, he did, too. We downloaded Merlin and eBird and started comparing "life lists." I turned into a "walking around the downtown park" type birder and he ended up building a giant floating 'hide' and trekking down to muddy lakes before sunrise to take endless photos (like this one or this one or this one). Last month, for the first time in our lives, we went on a trip together. A birding trip! Both firsts. We picked a country with a lot of birds and a direct flight: Costa Rica. We had four days to bird from sunrise to sunset (with a little owling after dark.) And before going we bought copies of this guide to all 903 birds ever seen in Costa Rica. We circled our "Dream 100" and flew down with a couple pairs of binoculars, one big fat camera, and some far-too-serious camo shirts. Every day we went looking for birds from sunrise to sunset and then returned to our hotel rooms to peel off our sweaty socks and open this book to check off, circle, and make notes of everything we'd seen. The guide is superb — calling out the 90 or so endemic birds and (importantly) giving us the specific field marks that, with Scott's pictures, helped us distinguish the birds from their nearest lookalikes. We ended up seeing 226 species including the Resplendent Quetzal, Red-capped Manakin, Long-tailed Silky Flycatcher, and Lesser Violetear. If you're going birding in Costa Rica — and by golly, you should! — then this is the guide for you. Pura Vida!
5. Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Changeby Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade. We all want to be happy! And this is a famous 2005 fifteen-page research paper that pulls the big topic apart. The link goes to the direct download and it's a wonderful read. The paper opens by discussing the "enduring U.S. obsession with how to be happy" with research (always research) showing that the majority of U.S. residents "think about happiness at least once every day." For good reason! Happy people, after all, experience "larger social rewards (higher odds of marriage and lower odds of divorce, more friends, stronger social support, and richer social interactions), superior work outcomes (greater creativity, increased productivity, higher quality of work, and higher income), and more activity, energy, and flow." That all? No! They also are "more likely to evidence greater self-control and self-regulatory and coping abilities, have a bolstered immune system, and even live a longer life." No wonder we all want this! Are happy people just self-oriented though? Is this a narcissistic aim? No, turns out happy people are "more cooperative, prosocial, charitable, and 'other-centered'." The paper discusses pessimism, defines happiness ("frequent positive affect, high life satisfaction, and infrequent negative affect"), shares that famous model of what determines happiness ("50% genetic set point, 10% circumstances, 40% intentional activity") and then goes deep into some of these activities. Like "practicing gratitude and forgiveness", "thoughtful self-reflection", "the successful pursuit of life goals that are intrinsic in content", "the inclination to avoid social comparisons", "exercising regularly", "being kind to others", "pausing to count one's blessings", and "devoting effort to meaningful causes." And much more. It's an academic paper, yes — but a dense and fruitful read to help reflect and recenter us on what matters.
6. Sicker In The Head: More Conversations About Life And Comedyby Judd Apatow. I've loved Judd Apatow since August 2001 when I saw my first episode of 'Freaks and Geeks' in my Lower East Side apartment in Manhattan where I was living to work for a comedy-writing startup in Brooklyn. (I share a longer version of that story here.) There was a certain nerve he was twanging that I hadn't felt twanged before and when you see how deep he's plumbed the art and science of comedy, it kind of makes sense. So here comes the follow-up to his 2015 interview collection Sick In The Head and, sure nuff, it's another dense collection of longform interviews between Judd and comedians like Sacha Baron Cohen, Samantha Bee, Ramy Youssef, Will Ferrell, and Pete Holmes. You hear the genius below the comedy like Sacha Baron Cohen on Page 372 saying "... there are two things, and they're not necessarily connected: There's the product, and then there's the ability to sell that product. There's a difference between whether the product is good and whether the marketing campaign is good." Amen. Unlike the first book where the interviews were conducted over decades, these ones are all largely of the "since the pandemic" variety and, as a result, there's a bit of a post-success tone here. More "two winners talking" versus the "one artist sharing their secrets to a young Judd with a clipboard who banged on their door in 1982" tone in the original. A lot of Judd here — his stories, his experiences, a giant glossy photo spread with him with a bunch of famous people. In the first book he was a student so the vibe was more classroom than coffee shop. I preferred that. But hey, longform interviews with George Saunders, Neal Brennan, and Lin-Manuel Miranda don't come round often so this gem slips nicely on the shelf between Sick In The Head and Poking A Dead Frog by Mike Sacks (08/2017). (PS. Very cool that Judd's donating all profits from the book to the Dave Eggers-created tutoring and literacy organization 826 National.)
7. Tough Borisby Mem Fox. What do you get a 5-year-old for his birthday? I went down and asked Doug Miller of Doug Miller Books for a suggestion and he handed me this gem. "Once upon a time, there lived a pirate named Boris von der Borch", it begins, with grizzled, beady-eyed, fierce-looking Boris looking at a treasure map on a sandy beach. "He was tough," it continues, with Boris leering over a group of pirates pulling a chest out of the sand. "All pirates are tough." "He was massive," it continues with Boris laughing and holding his parrot onboard the ship deck. "All pirates are massive." Momentum builds: "He was greedy", "All pirates are greedy", "He was fearless", "All pirates are fearless", "He was scary", "All pirates are scary" — and then the screeching halt: "But when his parrot died, he cried and cried." A suddenly emotional scene of tough Boris crying over his dead bird before sadly placing it into a fiddle-case casket and throwing it into the ocean. Before closing with "All pirates cry." and, finally, "And so do I." A heart-stirring tale somehow told with only 71 words. Complete picture book mastery. Highly recommended.
