Hey everyone,
I started writing this book club 8 years ago.
So it’s been 96 straight issues till this one. Just getting started! I’d love to do 1000. I was born September 1979 so that means I’ll hit the final issue March 2091 at a spritely 111.
We’ll still be emailing, too, me and you. We won’t let it go. Everyone will be telling us to just blink it to each other’s storage, but those are the same people who told us we should “really get on TikTok.”
Anyway, I’m joking. But thanks. For the sanity, for the conversations, for the safe space, for the never-ending chatter about books. I love your endless suggestions and replies and love this secret hiding place we can duck away from everything for a while.
Neil
PS. Invite others to join us here.
1. We The Animals by Justin Torres. For the last few years a haunting spectre loomed at the front of bookstores. I am of course speaking of the “Trending On #BookTok” table with its seeming never-ending foisting of Colleen Hoover and James Clear. No offense to Colleen and James—love those guys—but after 5 years it just felt … boring. That’s why I was excited to walk into the holiday-bedazzled downtown Toronto flagship Indigo and see they’d collapsed the #BookTok table for some new ones:
The Signed Editions table! The Ann Patchett Picks table! The Yuval Noah Harari table! I walked up to the New York Times ‘100 Best Books of the 20th Century’ table and felt immediately smug for having read a few on display like ‘Cloud Atlas’ (6/2019) by David Mitchell, ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ (10/2023) by Gabrielle Zevin, and ‘Lincoln In The Bardo’ (4/2018) by George Saunders. Then I did that un-smug thing of looking for something new. A silhouette of three young boys Peter Panning across the sky caught my eye and I picked up this flimsy quarter-inch 2011 debut novel by Justin Torres (b. 1980) and flipped to the first paragraph where it fishhooked my eyes:
We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.
Light, fire, energy, intrigue. The first of the nineteen short, unnumbered chapters sets a near-impossible high bar for pace and a certain sepia-tinged-electricity but the rest of the book keeps punching up and smacking it. Steve-Malkmussy-titled chapters like “We Wanted More,” “Wasn’t No One To Stop This,” and “Big-Dick Truck” confuse then reveal in little tales all carefully strung together. Take the 4-page “Big-Dick Truck” which shares the story of the family car breaking down and Paps finally heading to the city while the boys wait outside “snapping the yellow dandelion heads off their stems and streaking them down our arms, painting ourselves in gold, waiting for him to return.” Paps shows up in a brand new truck and thrills the neighborhood kids with its “bench seat,” “skinny, two-foot-long gearshift that came up from the floor,” and “massive side mirror jutted outward like elephant ears.” But then there is trouble:
Ma came out and stood on the stoop, looking tired and pissed. Her eyes were red and her mouth was set, puckering in on itself. She held her boots in one hand, then let them drop in front of her and sat down on the first step.
“Well, mami?” Paps asked.
“How many seats does it have?” she said, picking up a boot and jerking at the laces.
“It’s a truck,” Paps mumbled. “It don’t got seats, it got a bench.”
Ma smiled at the boot, a mean smile; she didn’t look up or look at anything besides that boot. “How many seat belts?”
The neighborhood kids started to climb down and sneak away, all the excitement receding with them like a tide.
“Why you gotta be like that?”
“Me?” Ma said, then she repeated the question, “Me? Me? Me?” Each me was louder and more frantic than the last. “How many fucking kids do you have? How many fucking kids, and a wife, and how much money do you make? How much do you earn, sitting on your ass all day, to pay for this truck? This fucking truck that doesn’t even have enough seat belts to protect your family.” She spat in the direction of the driveway. “This fucking big-dick truck.”
Damn. Again and again he pulls this off. And you gasp and laugh and shiver and wince and feel pressure in your chest and wetness in your eyes. You are right there with the boys in fistfights, empty fields, cold basements, and inside sleeping bags on dim polished office floors. Exquisite, haunting, enchanting, lyrical, tough, raw, pure. Highly recommended.
2. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. This is one of those books I have been hearing people talk about for years and which was sitting on some dusty shelf in my brain with a label like “The OG Book on Loneliness” or “That Dissolution-of-Community Book.” But I didn't really know much about it until now. And I have to say: it’s kind of what I thought but something much more statistical and inconclusive, too. The book reads like a lovable supernerd decided to spend a year of their life in the mid-90s chasing down a phone book’s worth of endless stats about anything that could, might, or might not affect what we think of as community, connection, and culture. And then he read it all and made graphs and maps and takeaways and added his own sort of uniquely proffered insights in a hand-stitched-together way. The conclusion comes early on page 27:
For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.
Statistics are fast and furious from there. I felt buried in statistics! Like “By 1965 disrespect for public life, so endemic in our history, seemed to be waning. Gallup pollsters discovered that the number of Americans who would like to see their children ‘go into politics as a life’s work’ had nearly doubled over little more than a decade” and “The proportion that agreed that ‘most people can be trusted,’ for example, rose from an already high 66 percent during and after World War II to a peak of 77 percent in 1964.” and “In the mid- to late 70s...the average American entertained friends at home about fourteen to fifteen times a year. By the late 1990s that figure had fallen to eight times per year, a decline of 45 percent…”. But the book was written in 2000 so I kept thinking “What about now! What about now!” And while most of the data is from the past few decades (70s, 80s, 90s, really) Putnam does manage to zoom up into a century long view where the whole thing is less of a decline and more of a U-curve. As in: We didn’t used to live like this, then we did, now we don’t again. So community and loneliness... cycles? And it’ll come back? Or it's gone forever? The far-past and far-future are dark and blurry! I did love the stats, though. I felt like a trivia hound with a stack of dog-eared Trivial Pursuit cards on a futon at the end of a party. Like on page 137: “… people who trust others are all-round good citizens, and those more engaged in community life are both more trusting and more trustworthy.” And “….people who trust their fellow citizens volunteer more often, contribute more to charity, participate more often in politics and community organizations, serve more readily on juries, give blood more frequently, comply more fully with their tax obligations, are more tolerant of minority views, and display many other forms of civic virtue.” The book is useful and important! Annnnnnnd also a bit outdated and unhelpful. To his credit this 20th anniversary edition includes a 2020 'Afterword' on page 415 where he asks “Has the Internet reversed the decline of social capital?” He gives a history of phones and social media, tells us he rejects techno-determinism (the idea that technology controls us, which, because of Kevin Kelly's 'What Technology Wants', I somewhat buy), buries us in another pile of statistics, and then offers… not much. He does cite a research study showing having more IRL friends skyrockets your happiness while having more online friends … does not. But this is 2020 and the research is 2013 and the world feels unrecognizable between then and now. The moral and ethical questions facing us now hit much deeper. AI, bots, apps, online everything. The book is a fascinating and valuable piece of detailed human history on the rise of loneliness in the second half of the 20th century but I wish we had someone to tell us what's going on right now.
3. The Long Walk by Stephen King. I was in the Dallas airport. It was just after lunch on a Friday. I was speed-walking from security to Gate E3 where my flight was boarding. I had flown there last night, given a speech that morning, and had dress-shirted to sweat-shirted on the highway to catch my flight home. I felt like zombieing out to Netflix on the flight. No shame in that. But then I pictured myself Ubering from the airport to dinner with my family all glassy-eyed and headachy. I felt like … reading. Something! Anything! I race into the Hudson thinking I have 30 seconds to grab a book or I’m hanging with Demetri. I see about 30 books on two low shelves and they are arranged in … bestseller list order? Fiction #1, Fiction #2, across the top, Non-Fiction #1, Non-Fiction #2 across the bottom. Ulgh. Meaty Pulitzer prize winners, Presidential memoirs, YA fantasies. No book guilt and no book shame in any of those but they were 700-page bricks. Like getting a Fred Flintstone rib-eye when you wanted a Slim Jim.
I have like a 2-hour flight home so I’m suddenly thinking maybe it’s better to just watch family videos on my camera roll or have a scotch and soda and a nap. All viable! But then I see it! At the end of the rack! Something smaller. STEPHEN KING on the cover. “45th anniversary edition!” screams a blurb. 45? That's an odd anniversary. I am 45! I pick up a book, check the copyright, and sure enough—1979. Just like me. Why are they reprinting this book I wonder? Is it a movie? No. Is it about something timely? I crack open page 1: “An old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run.” This is ‘The Road’ (2/2017) meets ‘The Hunger Games,’ except written before either of those. The gist: 100 sixteen-year-old boys apply to be selected to begin walking on a specific day of each year and any time anybody stops for longer than a couple pauses they are immediately shot and killed and dragged off the road. And the entire book is that walk with ‘Stand By Me’ clubhouse-like teen conversation written when Stephen King was 30. The plot races and darkens but it’s always more terse than terrifying. “The crowd cheered monotonously. Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit.” The plot seems as morally bland as a canvas but King's writing pulls off a magic trick that allows you to endlessly, and perhaps accidentally, project your own morals onto it and then feel them bouncing back to you for interpretation. The book is told in a seductive first-person-y third-person where we follow Ray Garraty—pride of Maine, where the race starts!—the long, long way. There’s nothing grotesque in the book—nothing gruesome, nothing jumping out of the forest. It’s not scary but haunting, thrilling. Highly recommended.
4. ADHD IS Awesome: A Guide To (Mostly) Thriving With ADHD by Penn and Kim Holderness. This is a book about ADHD written by a person with ADHD (Penn) and designed for an ADHD brain. I loved it. It’s like a giant color expandable instruction manual full of tiny color drawings, bits of research, personal stories, boxed-in asides (from the loving and supporting partner to a person with ADHD, Kim). Distracting and messy and factual and philosophical and jumpy and funny and empathetic and illuminating and it … somehow … all just works. This is the new ADHD classic! Penn and Kim Holderness are perhaps most famous for winning The Amazing Race and creating viral videos like my favorite June 2020 “Hamilton Mask-up Parody Medley.” Did you like ‘Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader’ as a kid? This is like the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader of ADHD. Like a mashup parody, Penn doesn’t soar through 19 chapters with titles like “Charge Your Battery,” “Master Your Daily Routine,” and “Taking Care of Caretakers” pretending to be the who’s who and what’s what of ADHD. He doesn’t profess unique academic insights gleaned from years of study nor proffer clever acrostics featuring the “7 benefits of ADHD.” He’s just a curious wide-eyed, wide-minded ball of energy who’s taken a deep amount of time to understand his over-20-year-old diagnosis of ADHD. He has done this through interviews with leading researchers, sharing insights from his own readings and experiences at home, and clearly done a lot of self-examination. The result is an ADHD Almanac. A collection of all the stuff we know about ADHD that could help you and your loved ones. (Including, fun fact, that ADHD itself is horribly titled—that both Ds are wrong and it’s neither a deficit nor a disorder—so researchers including Edward Hallowell, who wrote the 1994 ADHD book ‘Driven To Distraction’ as well as the foreword here, are trying to change it to VAST for ‘Variable Attention Stimulus Trait’). I have ADHD in my family (some official, some unofficial) and this book has been a wonderful read on many levels. In the Introduction there is a warm-hearted “Note from People Who Have ADHD to People Who Don’t Have ADHD” with points like “1. We love you—even if it may not always look that way to you. and 2. The easy things are sometimes the hardest things for us to do.” In chapter 1 Penn writes that “a typical person with ADHD will have challenges with listening, completing tasks, and keeping track of time (and possessions). They’ll be restless, always ‘on the go’, talkative, and impatient.” Sound like anyone you know? On page 42 in the chapter titled “Inside the ADHD Brain” Penn tells us that “At its core, the ADHD brain is wired to seek stimulation… While the typical understanding of ADHD suggests that people who have it are overstimulated, the ADHD brain is actually chronically understimulated.” He then quotes YouTuber Jessica McCabe (who runs the viral channel How To ADHD) who says that ADHD brains are attracted to “1. Novelty, 2. Challenges, and 3. Things of personal interest.” The book bounces along and offers magazine-like asides and tangential columns. On page 61 Penn offers his “personal tweaks I’d suggest to make life more ADHD-friendly” and he includes suggestions like “restaurants don’t take reservations”, “schools have 20-minute class periods”, and “every product comes with a warranty that covers straight-up losing it”. On page 82 he shows that most ADHD benefits are not teachable (creativity, hyperfocus, intuition, determination) while its downsides are manageable (inattention, impulsivity, hyperactivity). He openly shares his own experience with ADHD medication, why it didn’t work for him, while completely supporting your own path and showing there are many. Perhaps the best advice of all comes in Chapter 19’s “Listening: The Best Hard Habit” where Penn accurately writes about the pains of interruption and teaches mental games and 'escape room phrases' that ADHD brains can play to observe and improve their listening skills. ‘ADHD is Awesome’ is awesome. Highly recommended.
5. The BFG by Roald Dahl. I’m on a read-aloud roll with my just-turned-6 year old. He loved ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ (4/2024), mildly enjoyed ‘Little House on the Prairie’ (8/2024), and then loved ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ (8/2024). So what next? Leslie is currently reading ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ with him (her first time!) and I felt like it might be good to do another Roald Dahl. But which one? ‘James and the Giant Peach’? ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox?’ I think ‘Matilda’ (3/2020) and ‘The Twits’ (7/2020) seem too old. Then it hit me! ‘The BFG’! I don’t think I’ve read it since I was a kid and I’d forgotten how spooky the opening scene was with tiny Sophie waking up in the middle of the night and walking to the cold second-story window of her orphanage before spotting a TWENTY-FOOT TALL GIANT down the street, a giant which proceeds, in painful, terrifying chapter after chapter, to peek through her window and snatch her up. (“If you can think of anything more terrifying than that happening to you in the middle of the night, then lets hear about it,” Dahl jovially intones on page 17.) After being kidnapped Sophie discovers nine other giants who all run all over the earth to snatch and gobble down kids for dinner every night. And if they saw her she’d be eaten immediately! Her bones violently crunched! But, luckily, she partners with the Big, Friendly Giant to concoct a secret dream mixture which they then run over to Buckingham Palace and pour in into the Queen’s ear while she’s sleeping and then the Queen wakes up and orders all the scary giants captured and dropped into a big hole! Funny, suspenseful, full of fear and cheer. I’m adding it to my new Best Read-Aloud Books List. Now: What do you suggest we read next? Just reply and let me know.
6. Revenge of the Librarians: Cartoons by Tom Gauld. If you love books you’ll love this book. A couple hundred pages of book-themed, writer-themed, reader-themed big rectangle-page-long cartoons that are like some literary blender brew of ‘Herman’ and ‘Bizarro.’ On page 21 he splits his single panel into five thin vertical frames titled “Waiting For Godot To Join The Zoom Meeting” which closes with them agreeing to go before the final caption “They Do Not Leave The Meeting.” He offers “Novels Edited and Republished For The Time-Pressed Modern Reader” featuring “One Hundred Minutes of Solitude” and “20 Leagues Under The Sea.” A single panel frame offers a silhouetted person in a bookstore asking a silhouetted pony-tailed bookseller “Can you recommend a big, serious novel that I can carry around and ignore while I’m looking at my smartphone?” And, of course, there’s his “Advice On Caring For Your Books That Also Works For Parenting” including “Take special care not to damage the spine,” “Do not let too many pile on top of one another,” and “Only lend them to reliable friends.” Published in 2022 it includes many pandemic related strips that made me shudder in memory but overall a wonderful slew of book-themed cartoons that I loved.
7. Stitches: A Memoir by David Small. I don’t think I have ever come across a graphic novel before with one of those little metallic stickers saying “National Book Award Finalist.” I tore through this fifteen-year-old 329-page masterpiece in a breathless 45 minutes. And then before the end of the month I’d picked it up and done it all over again. “I was six” and “Detroit” are the only four words found on the 17 panels spread over the first six pages. The frames zoom in and out, fast and emotionally jarring. It’s an autobiography told in a few trauma-laced stories. There are his mom’s “furious, silent withdrawals” and his dressing up as Alice from ‘Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland’ (4/2019) to sing on the school playgrounds before bullies find him as well as visits to his horrifying grandmother’s house (“You durn little fool!”). Endless emotional clashes that leave you lurching from shame to fear to joy to, well, back to shame again. But the thrilling ride is worth it. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… the man who never reads lives only one” reads a quote from Jogen in ‘A Dance with Dragons’ by George R. R. Martin. Reading this book, and reading it again, certainly feels like living another one. Thank you David Small for this exquisite and soulful deep share. Highly recommended.
8. The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance by W. Timothy Gallwey, with a foreword by Pete Carroll, then-head football coach at USC. I have heard this 1974 classic referred to as the original book on sports psychology. But it’s really just about psychology. Your inner voice. Your inner critic. Taming that inner demon. I first spotted it on the remainder table at BMV Books and then read it on a flight to Memphis back in 2017. It’s a great pick-it-up-again book. On page 1 Gallwey sets down his thesis—that everybody talks about playing sports without talking about the *inner* game—the one that “takes place in the mind of the player, and it is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt, and self-condemnation.” He shares that the “secret to winning any game is not trying too hard” and that “too much instruction is worse than none.” How do you do that? By practicing non-judgmental awareness—separating what happened from what you think about what happened. He goes on about this for a while but the examples and stories really bring it to life. Near the end, on page 120, he reminds us that: “Winning is overcoming obstacles to reach a goal, but the value of winning is only as great as the value of the goal reached. Reaching the goal itself may not be as valuable as the experience that can come in making a supreme effort to overcome the obstacles involved. The process can be more rewarding than the victory.” Indeed! I said 5000 words ago that I wanted to do 1000 of these monthly book clubs up to age 111. If I make it? Great! If I don't? Well, the process is more important than the victory. The book taps back into the way most people used to play sports and also serves as a gentle reminder that the person who has the most fun wins. Highly recommended.
9. There is no 9! Just our regular loot bag of links. Australia just banned social media for people under 16. Librarians are burning out. Colorectal cancer is on the rise so ask your doc about doing an at-home (non-invasive) FIT test to help with early detection. Ugh, and potentially related, more terrible things about forever chemicals. Over the pandemic cycling skyrocketed in Toronto and the city was covered in a fresh lattice of bike lanes. Now the province is trying to quash the City of Toronto's wishes & scrap them! I donate to CycleTO and shared bike lane thoughts on the ever-toxic Twitter. (Btw: Is BlueSky any better? I just opened a BlueSky account to find out...). George Saunders tipped me off to this cool “personalized book reading list with donation” offer from literary mag n+1. Jonathan Haidt was on CBS talking about how technology is changing society. Speaking of, I thought Rich Roll did a great job interviewing Yuval Noah Harari. I enjoyed this NYT profile on “Lindyman” Paul Skallas and he writes the eye-opening The Lindy Newsletter, too. I was Michael Bungay Stanier's last-ever podcast guest on 2 Pages—talking about ‘A Fraction of a Whole’ (2/2023) by Steve Toltz. And, finally, the publisher has just done a fresh reprint of my shiny golden book ‘The Book of (Holiday) Awesome’—click the pic below to grab a copy.
photo by @thebookbagblog