Hey everyone,
This is the 100th issue of my monthly book club.
I emailed you the first issue back in November 2016 and have sent another on the last Saturday of every month since.
The goal remains the same! To inspire us both to read. Books, specifically. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it's hard! Attention remains the battleground. The more extreme, more violent, more shocking—the more it'll be firehosed at our faces. We know what to do—
—but that doesn't mean it's easy. Still: the richest pleasures lie way down in the deep. I talked about that with Lindyman this month. What lasts a long time will last a long time more. Family, friends, togetherness, time in nature, good walks, good food, good books.
This month let's fall into screenless Middle-earth in ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ connect with endangered species leaving us in ‘Last Chance to See,’ and master the ancient art of falconry with Helen Macdonald in ‘H is for Hawk.’ Of course, while reading these books I fell into attention-splintering holes. But the goal is never to be perfect. Just a little better than before.
Let's keep inspiring each other to read—just a little more.
Thank you for your attention.
I value it sacredly.
Neil
P.S. Invite others to join us here.
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973). My first exposure to The Lord of The Rings was through the 2001-2003 Peter Jackson trilogy which I saw down by the lake at Whitby’s fancy new AMC 24 theaters. Then when the movies came out on DVD my friends and I would watch the “Director’s Cut” versions and enjoy the side-plots while reciting some of the lines. (“These men are thirsty—bring them some mead!”). Back then I remember the Shire feeling cozy, the black riders terrifying, and the flying cameras through the mines of Moria thrilling. The first book in the trilogy looked ... thick. It was written in 1954. And since I loved the films I decided to chalk it up as "optional." That changed in 2019 when I spent a wild afternoon hanging out with Kevin The Bookseller in his tiny Indigo bookshop in the lobby of Mount Sinai hospital. Kevin is an incredible bookseller popular with staff and readers. Pinch in on his moustache!
In addition to ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl (7/2020) and ‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg, Kevin decisively declared the entire LOTR trilogy as formative—and told us he was currently reading it to his kids. Well, thanks to Kevin, I spent the past eight months reading this 423-page 5-point font vintage copy of ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ and, uh, it took a while. But now The Shire has expanded from cozy to … mystical, magical, and complicated with so many twisted family histories over so many years. The black riders have grown from terrifying to … mythological, ethereal, ominous, ever-lurking. And the mines of Moria have expanded from thrilling to… dark, dismal, distressing. And the songs! So many songs. Brought to life with poetic and literary flair by Tolkien The Philogist (who once worked for the Oxford English Dictionary on, specifically, the letter W!), from so many characters, from so many backgrounds. I admit at multiple points my son screamed “I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON!”, and I felt the same way—I mean it gets dense—but it just has this floating ferry-ship feeling that rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls and you feel like you're living real-time with grand moments peppered between much longer moments of pause, confusion, or rest. The story is well-known: The Dark Lord created "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them," but oh crap—the ring got chopped off his finger! Then Gollum got it! Then Bilbo—back in ‘The Hobbit.’ (8/2022). And now from Bilbo to Frodo, who is tasked with throwing it back into the fires in Mordor where the thing was made. But the story is small here: it's the lessons learned on the way. From page 69 of my 1977 “Authorized Canadian Edition” after Frodo says Gollum deserves death for what he has done Gandalf retorts: “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” On page 294 after the grim Council of Elrond we hear from Gimli: Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” There is so much more texture here with endless descriptions that sound like paintings and long histories that make you want to draw out family trees. This is a big book that, if you're me and my son, you spend a long time with. I don't recommend reading it out loud but I do recommend reading it. Maybe the just-under-23hrs version on Libro or Audible! (I have no affiliation with either but use Libro since Latanya and Jerry of Bronx Bound Books told us about it. I like that you can steer the audiobook profits to the indie bookstore of your choice.)
2. The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions Of People Can’t Stop Talking About by Mel Robbins (b. 1968). I love Mel Robbins. I’ve said this maybe … 90 times? … in the 9 years since I met her back at Caesar's Palace. That’s not a lot considering how many times I’ve heard others saying it: giant ballrooms full of people standing after a big motivational speech, people scrolling in headphones beside me on airplanes smiling at one of Mel’s sassy Instagram pep talks, or even my mother-in-law who took Mel’s suggestion years ago to sign up for the ‘Growth Day’ app and who still faithfully checks in with it every morning for inspiration. Mel has this old-friend-at-your-kitchen-table knack for stirring the 1000 most common English words into something that feels akin to a slap-in-the-face followed by a hug. She never says she’s invented the tools she shares but breaks them down, down, down into simple, almost molecular, lessons which she brings to life with stories. Like the time she bought her son’s date a corsage for high school prom and after he said he didn’t want to take it and after Mel’s older daughter whispered to Mel that they didn’t really know each other super well Mel just, y’know, decided to hide the corsage in her purse, take it to the prom photo shoot, and … give it to the date anyway! While telling the date that her son didn't want her to do this. Ummm. Is your face contorted into something between crying and laughing? Mine too. Mel continues: “And that’s when I noticed she had made her own corsage, which she was already wearing on one of her wrists. [My daughter] Kendall rolled her eyes. [My husband] Chris shifted. If I could have evaporated in that moment, I would have.” And then you’re back on her team. Because can’t we all relate to a bunch of stupid and humiliating things we did? Of course we can. After the photo shoot it begins pouring and Mel is horrified at her son’s clothes getting soaked and the fact he and his friends don’t have reservations and want to take their dates to a cheap Mexican spot. When she begins to interfere again her daughter chimes in: “Mom, if Oakley and his friends want to go to a taco bar for pre-prom, LET THEM … (“But it’s too small for all of them to fit in and they’ll get soaked”) … LET THEM get soaked … (“But his new sneakers are going to get ruined!”) … LET THEM get ruined.” And now you know the Let Them Theory! But what seems braindead obvious isn’t necessarily. I mean, how often do you find yourself overly involved, worried, stressed, or upset at something somebody else said or did? Pretty damn often, right! Me too. Everyone too! So we’re meant to use this internal two-word mantra to practice acceptance, let the world keep moving, while then practicing the follow-up mantra—“Let Me”—to affect, change, or improve our own behavior instead. (On page 70 she says “Let Me is an opportunity for you to put your time, energy, and values at the center of your life.”) Like when Mel’s mom's friends all go on a vacation without her and she finds herself doomscrolling in “full stalker mode” she has to remind herself: Let Them. And then Let Me show up and reach out as a better friend than I’ve been over the past few years. Simple, right? Vintage Mel. That’s her straight talking, vulnerable friend-to-millions conversation. She talks openly about the fear of being worried what other people would think (like when she was doing keynote speeches for free but didn't want to post about them) and how to use the theory (and a great tangent called ‘frame of reference’) to work with people especially close to you. She writes about how she grew to understand her mom’s early unhappiness with Mel’s marriage because of what happened to her after she got married—namely moving away from all her family and friends to be with her hubby. I am not surprised this book just became the fastest selling non-fiction book in publishing history. It's talking to people. For scale reference ‘The Book of Awesome’ was a New York Times and #1 international bestseller for 3 straight years ... and Mel's book sold more copies in 3 straight weeks. (That would be over 800,000!) Last month I couldn’t even find a copy at any bookstore:
And then when the book came flooding back in-stock the stores had it everywhere. Front displays, front tables, every single cash register:
Why? Because we’re lonely. We’re scared. We’re anxious. We’re imperfect. We need Mel’s guiding, supportive, empowering spirit. She creates such a karmic imbalance in the world by offering so much of herself. You can almost mainline her on Instagram or YouTube. Millions do! After it didn’t work out being a life coach or CNN radio host or TV Talk Show host she’s found her Big Megaphone with The Mel Robbins Podcast (often the top-ranked podcast in the world), her Instagram feed with its 8.2M followers, and her series of rallying books. You can honestly flip this book to any page, read a couple minutes, and feel like you just got a personal pep talk. It looks so easy you don't realize it's hard. Mel Robbins: a voice for the rest of us on hard days. P.S. If you want to fall down a Mel rabbit hole here are “7 Leadership Lessons I Learned from Mel Robbins” which I wrote 5 years ago and our live 3 Books podcast together in Bryant Park 2 years ago.
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl (1916–1990). I’ve been on a read-aloud roll with my third kid. We did ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ (4/2024), ‘Little House in the Prairie’ (8/2024), ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ (8/2024), and ‘The BFG’ (11/2024). Leslie’s been having fun reading him ‘Marge In Charge’ and so I felt it made sense to turn to ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ next which has to be one of the sharpest, tightest stories in the Dahl canon. Mr. Fox steals food every night from Boggis, Bunce, and Bean (“one fat, one short, one lean”) who, you know makes sense, grow frustrated and wage an escalating war on Mr. Fox and his family. Twists, turns, with wonderful illustrations from Donald Chaffin in 1970 or Quentin Blake in 1995:
Thank goodness the 2023 Puffin censors didn’t get their way in their bizarre attempts to remove the word ‘black’ as a tractor descriptor, taking out any references to height and weight, and changing Mr. Fox’s son to a daughter. An absolutely wonderful book and, I will add, I also recommend the 2009 Wes Anderson stop-motion film of the same name. 93% on RT!
4. Marge In Charge by Isla Fisher (b. 1976). Since I just mentioned ‘Marge’ and have never read it but always hear them giggling and laughing about it I thought I’d shoulder-tap Leslie for a review. Over to you Les: “I’m always looking for opportunities to laugh with our kids. Nothing clears the cobwebs and greases the gears of our relationship like a good laugh (other than also a good cry and snuggle!) and so ‘Marge In Charge’ by Isla Fisher is one of my all-time favorite read-alouds! Not only does it get kids as young as 4 laughing out loud but I find myself cracking up alongside them and it just feels so darn good. Isla Fisher, comedian and actress, wrote these books after having told the stories to her children at bedtime and you can just feel the love, creativity, and spontaneity laced through them. Marge is a rainbow-haired and retired duchess (or so she loves to say!) who falls asleep on the job babysitting Jemima and Jakey. She always somehow finishes all of the jobs on the mom’s list but in the most fantastical hilarious ways. Like when she convinces Jakey, who refuses to wash his hair, to wash his hair in the bubble-flooded bathroom and clean it all up before the parents get home. It’s light and fun and entertaining and I dare you not to laugh with your kids while reading any of the wonderful four books in the series.”
5. 1000 Hours Outside: Activities To Match Screen Time With Green Time by Ginny Yurich. Ginny Yurich wasn’t enjoying motherhood. It was September 2011 and the Michigan mom of three felt exhausted, trapped, pinned down by 12-hour stretches of “crying, screaming, diapers, noses, sweeping, one-handed cooking, and the minutia that accompanies life with little ones.” A friend mentioned that education guru Charlotte Mason says children should spend 4-6 hours outside a day. “No way,” Ginny thought. “How can anyone do that?” But she didn’t have anything to lose so figured she’d give it a shot. She packed sandwiches and took her kids to a field one morning along with that same friend. “That day changed my life,” she told me. “They played and played. They invented new games. They jumped off logs. They weren’t fighting. And I had my first adult conversation since having kids.” (She found out later this Charlotte person lived in the 1800s!) Anyway, the energy from that day powered Ginny and her husband Josh’s “1000 Hours Outside” movement which has grown from a focus on homeschooling their five kids into a viral Instagram feed, popular 1000 Hours Outside podcast, and even little coloring sheets to help the sticker-chart people among us (hi) track our progress. Which is? 1000 hours outside a year. Simple! Almost 3 hours a day. Tiny compared to our roots but massive compared to the 10-minutes-outside-a-day culture we’ve evolved into. Where does the book come in? Well, it’s a full-color, 287-page flipper offering 136 ideas for outdoor family activities conveniently organized into Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall. From “Hot Chocolate Hikes” (what it sounds like) to “Snow Hot Tubs” (putting on your bathing suit and filling a kiddie pool with hot water in the winter) to “Fairy Doors” (painted cardboard and popsicle stick ‘doors’ to put at the base of tall trees), this is a simple reminder that nature has deep powers and encourages all of us to peel ourselves off the screens.
6. All Fours by Miranda July (b. 1974). When Leslie and I first moved in together I assumed we would merge bookshelves. I had a paltry 20 or 30 but she had at least a hundred so I thought we could just sort of … sift them together. “What?,” I remember Leslie asking when I mentioned this in passing, “That would be like merging brains. That’s like—who we are. You can’t merge brains. You can't merge bookshelves.” Whoa! Time for a new Billy. But, also, looking back: props. I just hadn’t had that enlightened thought but now I definitely see the importance. Our conjoined shelves are now like vines creeping out of their pots slowly unfurling for extra space anywhere We have bookshelves on two of four walls and now it’s time to build more over the windows and down the other sides behind this picture … I mean, when you start losing the floors you know it's time:
One thing that’s fun when you have two people’s bookshelves in the same room is seeing which books you have ‘doubles’ of. Like pre-merger or post-merger you both decided this book was too important to not to individually own. Right now we have doubles of ‘A Million Little Pieces’ by James Frey, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ by Anne Frank, ‘Influence’ by Robert Cialdini, ‘How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk’ by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, and yes, as of last month, ‘All Fours’ by Miranda July. I admit my copy remains pristine as I got the pleasure of reading Leslie’s copy with her underlines and Post-It notes pasted in it (read Leslie's 8/2024 review). The book came to us in different ways. She saw it recommended in Cat and Nat's email newsletter and I bought it after getting one of those GoodReads “New Books Out This Month From Authors You Loved” emails and they both arrived before we discussed. Right away I loved the cover blurb from George Saunders: “A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force.” George runs the wonderful Story Club Substack (I’m a member!) and I love the way he describes ultimate prose as ‘undeniable.’ Like you just could not imagine a sentence or string of sentences being better. Crisper, funnier, zingier? No! You cannot. Because the prose … is undeniable. I’m telling you today that Miranda July may be second only to George himself at the non-existent awards The Undeniable Prosies. She begins wooing us with the first four sentences: “Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a good opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled like this.” Jarringly self-aware, flamboyantly unhinged, unapologetically sexual, subversively funny. The book is a study in how to write a book. The way she constantly unveils our unnamed 45-year-old protagonist’s character to us is astounding. Like when on page 13 she steps away from a chat with her husband and another couple at a party and then … suddenly joins a dance floor?
There was a small group of people dancing in the living room. I moved discreetly at first, getting my bearings, then the beat took hold and I let my vision blur. I fucked the air. All my limbs were in motion, making shapes that felt brand-new. My skirt was tight, my top was sheer, my heels were high. The people around me were nodding and smiling; I couldn’t tell if they were embarrassed for me or actually impressed. The host’s father looked me up and down and winked—he was in his eighties. Was that how old a person had to be to think I was hot these days? I moved deeper into the crowd, shut my eyes, and slid side to side, shoulder first, like I was protecting stolen loot. Now I added a fist like a brawler, punching. I made figure eights with my ass at what felt like an incredible speed while holding my hands straight up in the air...
LOL. And the plot? The narrator starts off from LA on a two-week road trip to New York and back but then stops in a suburb half an hour outside town where she remodels a motel room with a young designer and then seduces her husband who is a hip-hop dancer who works at the local Hertz ... before tipping back into what this all means for her and her marriage. There are scenes in this book I could not believe I was reading. I wasn’t shocked. Too tight a word. More like I found myself out in the middle of a swinging bridge between cliff edges and had to steady myself to stare into the suddenly blinding sun and galing wind. The book swings, sways, shocks, skewers. It's titillating and tantric. I suggest starting with ‘No One Belongs Here More Than You’ (3/2022), her nearly 20-year-old collection of short stories, which was one of the collective formative books from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Sheinert, filmmakers behind ‘Turn Down For What’ and ‘Swiss Army Man.’ Miranda July writes like nobody else. A strong, fierce, rubber-band brainslap of book.
7. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (b. 1970). This book has been spying me from bookshelves since it came out in 2015. You too? That hawk—glowering from the shelf!
I had seen that cover so much but finally talon-snared it off the front display at Doug Miller Books in Koreatown. Looking closer on the cover I see it’s a painting by Chris Wormell and it’s not just a hawk either, but a Eurasian Goshawk— “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier.” A couple years ago I was birding with my birder pal Jody out in Edmonton and he was telling me about getting attacked by a Northern Goshawk. Just swooping hard and fast at him down a forest clearing to the point he had to dive out of the way. “Really?,” I asked. “Oh yeah,” he said, bending over to focus his scope on 1000s of migrating American Avocets on a distant shore. “Goshawks are vicious, man. A friend of mine used to count their eggs for research. He looks like he’s lost a couple knife fights.” So what would compel a Cambridge professor to … raise one? To become a falconer? To master that ancient 4000 year-old art of taming your own bird of prey and training it to hunt? Well, after their father dies Helen falls into deep grief and revisits their childhood desire to become a falconer. They come up with the idea to train a goshawk as a way to, perhaps, be “feral”—to be free, to be ferocious. To come closer to life and examine it with intensity from many sides. On page 85: “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.” On page 110: “…in all my days of walking with Mabel [the hawk] the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks… ‘We are outsiders now, Mabel’, I say, and the thought is not unpleasant.” They let the hawk take over their life. On page 123: “I can’t go to Berlin in December, I’d thought, appalled. I have a hawk to fly. Ambitions, life-plans: these were for other people.” The book is a detailed literary journal that can be ominous and even spooky but is always somehow light enough to be death-examining without being a downer. Emotional lifts and tumbles left me in tears. And the entire book feels like a double-tunnel back in time a century ago as everything is paired with a Maria Popova-esque examination of T.H. White’s 1939-written (1951-published) ‘The Goshawk,’ which today may stand even higher than his other books like ‘The Sword In The Stone.’ Macdonald quotes White’s personal journals from the time which caution of a world heading to war all because “masters of men, everywhere, who subconsciously thrust others into suffering in order to advance their own powers.” History rings through this deep, exotic, mind-transplant to wet forests as you, yourself, become a falconer. And, maybe-hopefully, metabolize a bit of grief, doubt, or sadness you forgot you still had stuck inside.
8. Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams (1952–2001) and Mark Carwardine (b. 1959). I must have subconsciously been on a death-examining bender this month because here comes another one! (I guess I tend to do that?) Fact is: None of us know how long we have … as individuals nor as species as a whole. Douglas Adams left us in 2001 at 49 (ugh), long after bequeathing us his series of comic masterpieces including ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ which came out in 1979. I’d read and loved that book as a teen and knew of his other fiction but I had no idea he spent a chunk of his late 30s criss-crossing the world with a zoologist pal looking for the world’s most endangered species. Komodo dragons of Indonesia! Kakapos of New Zealand! Blind river dolphins of China! White rhinos of Zaire! Originally broadcast as a radio show on the BBC, the written result is a zippy 218-page travel diary that is by turns fun … aggravating … and poignant. Perhaps like travel in general. In the first chapter while looking for Komodos he writes:
It is then quite an education to learn that two cats fighting can make easily as much noise as forty dogs. It is a pity to have to learn this at two-fifteen in the morning, but then the cats have a lot to complain about in Labuan Bajo. They all have their tails docked at birth, which is supposed to bring good luck, though presumably not to the cats.
In the second chapter in Zaire he writes “I wasn’t disturbed so much by the ‘Oh Lord, we thank Thee for the blessing of this Thy day,’ but ‘We commend our lives into Thy Hands, O Lord’ is frankly not the sort of thing you want to hear from a pilot as his hand is reaching for the throttle.” The book is mostly journey, not destination, but Adams’ sharp and curious mind always takes us down endless rabbit holes. He tells the story of the southern white rhino’s presumed extinction in the mid-1800s and then how a group of 9 (!) of them were found fifty years later and then taken care of so their population grew to 5000. When Douglas and his group are 40 yards away from the rhino he remarks on how its “nasal passages are bigger than its brain” and then tells us that:
The world of smells is now virtually closed to modern man. Not that we haven’t got a sense of smell—we sniff our food or wine, we occasionally smell a flower, and can usually tell if there’s a gas leak—but generally it’s all a bit of a blur, and often an irrelevant or bothersome blur at that. When we read that Napoleon wrote to Josephine on one occasion, ‘Don’t wash—I’m coming home,’ we are simply bemused, and almost think of it as a deviant behaviour. We are so used to thinking of sight, closely followed by hearing, as the chief of the senses that we find it hard to visualise (the word itself is a giveaway) a world that declares itself primarily to the sense of smell.