Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
It’s getting harder and harder to take a pause, take a breath, and just take inventory of where to point our attention these days.
I’ve felt my own reading slipping as streams and algorithms get louder. But that’s why I value this conversation – a book sharing club – to keep us focused on improving our reading habits.
Also: Big thanks for ten straight weeks of Our Book of Awesome clocking in on international and national bestseller lists. Our little dollop of awesome in the angry frying pan. If you don’t have a copy yet just click here.
If you know someone who wants to read more books just forward them this note so they can sign up right here.
Now let’s hit the books,
Neil
1. Breathe In, Breathe Out: Restore Your Health, Reset Your Mind and Find Happiness Through Breathworkby Stuart Sandeman. (L/I/A) Growing up I’d sometimes wake up early and head downstairs to discover a thin bright light under the closed basement door in the dark hallway. I’d tiptoe downstairs to discover my dad, on his shins, pumping his fists into his stomach, while snorting like a horse. “What the … ?” My adolescent brain was, of course, not open to his always-at-the-ready tutelage in the ways of pranayama – the ancient yoga practice of breathwork. (“Prana” means “vital life force” and yama means “to gain control.”) Of course, as often happens, we circle back to wisdom from our parents later. My dad is 77 now and I’m 43 and, well, guess who’s the weird dad doing breathing exercises in the basement before sunrise now? Two things have been helpful for me recently: this extremely accessible book and the Othership breathwork app. The book has already paid for itself many times over but the most life-changing two pages for me were 102-103 where Stuart outlines a 10-second “nose unblocking technique” I wish I knew decades ago. If you’re a “one nostril plugged all day” person like me this is massive. Basically: 1) Take a normal breath in through your nose and out through your nose, 2) Gently pinch your nose while now holding your breath, 3) Tilt your head slowly all four directions – left, right, forwards, backwards, 4) Get back to looking straight and unplug your nose before breathing in a gentle breath. Did it work? If not, do it again. This has, no joke, completely unblocked my nostrils every single time I’ve done it. Stuart, where have you been all my life? Written in incredibly accessible “blog-posty” style prose this is a wonderful come hither to the land of breathwork. Highly recommended.
2. Demianby Herman Hesse. (L/I/A) I was in Boston last year for my school reunion and went out for breakfast with my friend Erik to Trident Books and Café. Both? Yes! You come in, you sit down for some huevos rancheros, you browse books – all in one place. I love how small bookstores force incredible curation, too. 200 million books in the world! Now pick 1000 to sell! Tough job but Trident did it masterfully. Erik and I played the game of “I buy you one of my favorites, you buy me one of your favorites.” I think I got him East of Eden by John Steinbeck – my favorite book of 2017! – and he bought me this and added the inscription “Enjoy opening this window.” I was excited as I hadn’t read anything by Herman Hesse except Siddhartha (which I loved). This book opened with a heart-pounding scene of ten-year-old Sinclair getting into trouble with the local tough and it builds into an atmospheric “bildungsroman” (fancy phrase for “coming of age” story) tracing the life of Emil Sinclair as he navigates adolescence and attempts to figure himself out. The pacing got slower and slower which made it (to me) a nice before-bed read – but I also struggled to catch all the symbols and allusions flying around. Solid overall but thinking maybe it’s time I get to Steppenwolf. PS. If you’re into bildungsromans, or think you might be, here’s a great list on Goodreads ranking some of the best. How many of the first 25 have you read? I’ve read 11. Lots to go!
3. Hot Combby Ebony Flowers. (L/I/A) When I was a little kid I read an interview with Bill Gates and he said something like “Whenever I go to a magazine stand I always buy a magazine I’ve never read before. There’s a lot more to learn in those ones.” I’m paraphrasing but the sentiment stuck with me. Algorithms push, cajole, and classify us into 1s and 0s but there’s nothing like browsing a local bookstore (speaking of which, check out Chapter 99 of 3 Books where I interview self-described bibliomaniac Doug Miller in his own bookstore!) and stumbling upon things that would never have been recommended to you. Like, for example, this raw, scratchily-drawn, emotionally braided-together memoir of high intensity essays telling the story of Ebony as she moves from a trailer park into a black neighborhood outside Baltimore – all somehow told through … hair. Well, not just hair! It’s really about life. And about messages and stories we hear growing up. Themes include ‘acting too white’, casual racism, motherhood, drug abuse, and, in an especially painful essay, boundaries and mental health – when, after her little sister’s hair becomes an object of interest to her softball team she begins twisting and pulling it all out. Doctors, psychiatrists, and pills are called in to help and the final page will just break your heart. Published by Drawn & Quarterly, which has to be the best comics and graphic novel publishing house in the world. Highly recommended.
4. Jacob Two-Two Meets The Hooded Fangby Mordecai Richler. (L/I/A) When I feel my reading pace turn sluggish or my reading attention starting to fracture I turn to page flippers to lasso myself back in. Graphic novels, young adult, and, recently, middle-grade fiction. I found this classic in a Little Free Library and it had the same pumpkin-orange cover I remembered as a kid. Richler wrote it in 1975 and it’s a triumph of children’s literature and storytelling. It opens: “Once there was a boy called Jacob Two-Two. He was two plus two plus two years old. He had two ears and two eyes and two arms and two feet and two shoes.” Turns out he says everything twice because nobody listens to him the first time. After a run-in with a grocer down the street, he’s sentenced to a horrible prison run by the Hooded Fang. This book gets into the thorny parts of the typical nightmares of young kids and has a wonderfully unique “superkid superhero” tone. Btw: If you don’t know Mordecai Richler I highly recommend Barney’s Version. That one's for adults! One of the funniest and fastest-paced books I’ve ever read.
5. A Fraction of the Wholeby Steve Toltz. (L/I/A) “Funny and fast-paced.” Let’s stick on those four words for a minute. I use them a lot with booksellers. “What kind of book do you like?” “Funny and fast-paced.” I like it as a filter because a) there just aren’t that many books funny and face-paced (and, you know, good), and b) when you hit a good one … well, you can dine out on it for years. To wit: A Fraction Of The Whole. By far the funniest, fastest-paced novel I have ever read. The sprawling, multi-generational, multi-national, multi-layered, multi-structured head trip that is Steve Toltz’s magnificent Booker Prize-nominated 2007 debut. It kind of makes sense that before he wrote it he was a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter. Take a taste test to see if it’s for you with the first four sentences: “You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue. My lesson? I have lost my freedom, and found myself in this strange prison, where the trickiest adjustment, other than getting used to not having anything in my pockets and being treated like a dog that pissed in a sacred temple, is the boredom. I can handle the enthusiastic brutality of the guards, the wasted erections, even the suffocating heat.” I love this book so much. Highly recommended. And here's my recent chat with Steve Toltz on the podcast. PS. If you have a favorite “fast-paced and funny” novel, please reply and let me know!
6. Around the World in 80 Birdsby Mike Unwin. Illustrated by Ryuto Miyake. (L/I/A) I never really had grandparents. I mean, three were gone when I showed up and the one who was alive didn’t speak English and lived across an ocean so I saw her maybe five times. I’ve been really lucky in marriage many ways and one is that I’ve inherited a set of “grandparents in law” who’ve shared so much love and wisdom. My wife’s grandmother Donna and I played Scrabble, watched the Blue Jays, and, yes, talked birds. She gave me this book as a Christmas present just eight weeks ago … and died two weeks ago. I read it thinking of her. Flits and swoops into birds you may have heard of around the world – quetzals, kiwis, flamingos, oh my! – together with little behavioral or historical anecdotes that bring them to life. Plus: honestly the best bird illustrations I’ve ever seen. (Sorry Audobon!) I say: Buy it for the pictures! That’s why I laid the book face down in the picture above. Pinch in! That level of stunning art graces every single page. Ryuto, you nailed it. Great book for birders or birders-to-be. Maybe avoid if you’re already “advanced” as this may seem kind of surface for you. Highly recommended. (PS. Little synchronicity with Herman Hesse book above -- the poem / song Beim Shlafeneghen by Herman Hesse was sung by Donna’s niece at her funeral. Wonderful English lyrics here.)
7. I Am Brownby Ashok Banker. Illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat. (L/I/A) I found myself crying in the library last week after I started flipping through this book after spotting it on display. A wonderful self-affirming book for brown-skinned kids that I wish I had when I was younger. It opens slow and gentle ("I am brown. I am beautiful. I am friendship."), works its way to food ("I eat noodles, tacos, biryani, jhat muri, steak"), tackles stereotypes ("I am a doctor. I am a lawyer. I am an athlete. I am an electrician."), addresses beliefs ("I pray at... a temple, a church, a synagogue, a gurdwara, nowhere"), and does it all in a joyful, bouncing, inclusive, loving way.
8. The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds – Not Crushes – Your Soulby Brad Stulberg. (L/I/A) Nourishing! That’s my one-word summary for this book. Pretty sure I first heard about Brad on The Rich Roll Podcast and he’s got such a gift for distilling research and wisdom into helping us live intentional lives. In the Introduction he shares feedback from coaching clients on burnout, "heroic individualism", and how a newfound diagnosis of OCD helped him write this book where he shares six thoughtful principles of "groundedness": 1) Accept Where You Are To Get You Where You Want To Go, 2) Be Present So You Can Own Your Attention and Energy, 3) Be Patient And You’ll Get There Faster, 4) Embrace Vulnerability to Develop Genuine Strength and Confidence, 5) Build Deep Community, and 6) Move Your Body To Ground Your Mind. Each chapter blossoms into a deeply evidence-based summary of “everything out there” and Brad’s skills as a "success-synthesizer" are on display as he drip-drip-distills so much, so quickly. For example, in his chapter on community, he opens with a nature metaphor, goes deep on loneliness research, quotes Sebastian Junger's (wonderful) book Tribe, shows how this quote connects with self-determination theory (and explains what that is), ties this into work by Jonathan Haidt, jumps into another research study, and then ties all that into takeaways from a 1941 book from Eric Fromm that hit you hard in the chest -- like "To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration, just as physical starvation leads to death." And this all happened in 6 pages. The whole chapter is 31. If you like your self-help highly thoughtful and concentrated, this book is chock full of wisdom for you.
9. Bronzeville Boys and Girlsby Gwendolyn Brooks. Illustrated by Faith Ringgold. (L/I/A) Yet another reason to love independent bookstores? Their ability to arrow-point your attention into the dark-tunneled history of your local community. We’re getting so much more global now. And, you know, there’s the risk of leaving behind where we came from in this forever-two-dimensionalizing mélange. I was wandering around downtown Chicago last year when I stumbled on the after-words independent bookstore on East Illinois Street. Right on the front table was a massive display of this children’s book. “BRONZEVILLE!” It just screamed at me. What’s Bronzeville? Well, it’s a Chicago neighborhood that was (in the early 1900s) called the “Black Metropolis” when it became home to thousands fleeing oppression in the south. A massive amount of cultural history took place here like the Pekin Theater (the first black-owned US theater built in 1905) and the Wabash YMCA (known as the first “Black Y” in the US and built in 1911.) Btw that Y is also where Black History Month comes from. What else? Well, as the title of this book suggests, a lot of boys and girls lived here. And Gwendolyn Brooks – the first black Pulitzer Prize winner ever! – distills their pains and pleasures into these emotionally hard-punching little poems. Like one called Otto which reads: “It’s Christmas Day. I did not get / The presents that I hoped for. Yet, / It is not nice to frown or fret. / To frown or fret would not be fair. / My dad must never know I care / It’s hard enough for him to bear.” Or Rudolph Is Tired Of The City: “These buildings are too close to me. / I’d like to PUSH away. / I’d like to live in the country, / And spread my arms all day. / I’d like to spread my breath out, too -- / As farmers’ sons and daughters do. / I’d tend the cows and chickens. / I’d do the other chores. / Then, all the hours left I’d go / A-SPREADING out-of-doors."
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
First off: Thank you!
Our Book of Awesome came out two months ago and you’ve helped it get off to a roaring start. We’ve clocked onto seven bestseller lists and are now six weeks in a row on The Globe’s International Non-Fiction list. To me this just means the book is slowly finding its people – even despite the confusing cover which is making a lot of people say “Didn’t I read this ten years ago?” If you don’t have a copy, please grab one here. And here’s a little Love page I threw online with loads of interviews, podcasts, and features that have come out from the likes of NPR, Maria Shriver, and The Current.
Also! I like to kick off Januarys by reminding you I have four email lists: this monthly book club, a lunar podcast update, an every-other-Wednesday bit of inspiration, and, yes, a daily awesome thing delivered every single night at midnight. All my emails remain 100% ad, sponsor, and commercial free as I aim to fill both our lives with good vibes. Click here to adjust your dosage.
Now let’s get to the books!
Neil
1. Fahrenheit 451by Ray Bradbury. (L/I/A) I didn’t start this book club newsletter 75 months ago with the intention of becoming a books evangelist. And yet here we are! 57% of Americans read zero books for pleasure last year. Zero! TikTok is eating our brains and our ability to concentrate on deeper pleasures. I feel it, too. And see it everywhere. I just finished a bunch of Costco book signings and books square footage feels down 50% since before the pandemic. Airport bookstores are telling me they’ve shrunk book displays in favor of candy and phone accoutrements. We have to fight for books! Am I overreacting? Well, maybe, but I did just read Fahrenheit 451 – the mesmerizing 158-page love letter to books and the surprisingly-close-feeling dangers that mass echo chambers pose for society at large. Quick plotline: A book-burning firefighter grows further apart from his Airpods-wearing wife and encounters a curious teenager on his street who jars something loose. Thus begins a frenetic story with our hero skirting the law in favor of finding out what life is like outside the algorithm. Heart-thumping, abstract, evocative, with a pulsing story that ends somewhere near where The Road begins. I had never read it before and recommend this 60th (!) anniversary edition featuring an Introduction from Neil Gaiman. Blow billows on your reading habit. Highly recommended.
2. How To Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Timesby Chris Bailey. (L/I/A) I met Chris Bailey six or seven years ago in a hotel lobby in Ottawa and remember seeing him just full-body-lying-down on a fancy purple velvet couch reading a thick hardcover. With the first page ripped out and stuffed inside as the bookmark, a somewhat horrifying habit he's had for years. Chris exuded a bubbly energy and we began a friendship where I’ve been lucky to see him continuously evolve his craft. His first book came out in 2016 and was called The Productivity Project, and it catalogued his ludicrous year testing out every productivity hack he could. (If that style of self-help-searching is up your alley I’d recommend bookmarking this Guardian archive of “This Column Will Change Your Life” by Oliver Burkeman.) Chris followed up that book with Hyperfocus in 2018 -- which has done outstandingly well. And now he returns, post burnout and anxiety attack, with a simple guide to calming your mind. So how do you calm your mind? Well, I might suggest avoiding non-fiction altogether (LOL) and just getting into nature, calling someone who loves you, journaling, or getting into your body with a long walk or a yoga class. Chris says many similar things: get off phones, get outside, lower dopamine, increase analog -- but he leads us there with a great dose of left-brain-scratching research and a, yes, calm tone that makes this a perfect read for right now. A generous offering for the overwhelmed.
3. Cinema Speculationby Quentin Tarantino. (L/I/A) What’s the best way to make things happen? Lean in. That’s it! That’s the secret. Just lean in. Try. Give it a shot. Naval Ravikant says “The real performance enhancing drug is giving a damn.” Might flop, might fail, but at worst … you’ll learn. And, at best, surprises and delights you never would have expected fill you up and serve as nitro to keep going. I leaned into podcasts in the max zone of “everyone doing a podcast” a few years ago. I knew nothing about podcasts! (You can hear firsthand in Chapter 1.) All I knew was I loved books and wanted to use them as some kind of pole to vault up into the world of talking wisdom. My goals for the show were more than realized after Quentin Tarantino came on to chat about his 3 most formative books before his first novel came out – the highly-addictive and wildy fresh novelization of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood which was one of my Best Books of 2021. And now, a few years later, he just put out his first non-fiction book and, get this, even wrote about coming on 3 Books … in the book! (See what he wrote here.) Now, if you’re a 70s movies nerd, this book is basically written just for you. But even if you’re not Tarantino’s writing is rocking and rolling as always and this book will give you the gift of listening to your nerdiest movie nerd pal on an epic late-night geekout. We need more people with this kind of energy in the world. The energy of being far, far away from social media and then just laying eggs of solid gold every now and then. Tarantino has famously and repeatedly said he’ll only make 10 movies which means we have precisely 1 remaining. But as long as he keeps writing books we’ll be enjoying his artistic output for years. Listen to my chat with Quentin Tarantino here.
4.Bridge to Terabithiaby Katherine Paterson. (L/I/A) A touching story about first friendships and first loves. This book has been “almost picked” a few times by 3 Books guests so I picked it up to see what the fuss was about. A vivid tale of sixth grader Jess growing up in rural Virginia in the 1960s between four sisters and his evolving friendship with Leslie who moves next door. I found it a bit stilted but it did explore many themes ahead of its time – gender, death of a child, first affections. And did so in an honest and unblinking way. The ending felt neutered and there were a lot of loose ends I wished were expanded to make this a richer meal but, all in all, if you want to escape to a farm in the 1960s for a couple hours – this does just the trick. Thom Yorke sang “I wish it was the 60s, I wish I could be happy” in "The Bends". Well, we can’t transport our bodies but we can transport our minds. Do you have a favorite 60s or 70s novel you might suggest? Just reply and let me know!
5. I Always Think It’s Forever: A Love Story Set in Paris as Told by An Unreliable but Earnest Narratorby Timothy Goodman. (L/I/A) Timothy Goodman grew up with a single mom in an all-black neighborhood in Ohio in the 1980s. He started painting homes after high school and discovered a love affair with the craft. He moved to New York for design school and has evolved into a suddenly-everywhere “doodle artist” who designs everything from hotel lobbies to garbage trucks to Kevin Durant’s new shoes. His very first book – this one! – comes out in three days and is a graphic memoir sharing an earnest story about millennial love. What’s remarkable about the book is his attention to detail: endlessly-rhyming couplets, pop-pop-pow staccato artistic interruptions, and a fun flip through the heart and mind of an introspective and philosophical expressionist artist. There's a deep sea swirling in this man's beautiful heart. I love Timothy’s work and am excited to share he'll be my next guest on 3 Books on the exact minute of the next full moon. When’s that? Look up to the sky! Subscribe for free on Apple or Spotify.
6. The Common Goodby Robert Reich. (L/I/A) I am revisiting this book as I think about trust in society. How much we’ve lost. How we can get it back. How much we're going to need it in the years to come. Think of a beautifully safe small town where nobody locks their doors. Now imagine the first person who comes through breaking and entering. Pretty easy pickings! Nobody locks their door! Now trust plummets. Arms race erupts. Locks! Security systems! Video cameras! This type of trust evaporation and arms racing has happened everywhere and Robert Reich gives an incredibly lucid portrait of exactly what happened when to get us where we are now. I call it trust, he calls it the common good, but either way, this is a vital read to help understand the world we live in. Highly recommended. (Sidenote: If this area interests you, check out my 2019 SXSW talk “Building Trust In Distrustful Times.” )
7. How To Be Love(d): Simple Truths for Going Easier on Yourself, Embracing Imperfection, & Loving Your Way To A Better Lifeby Humble The Poet. (L/I/A) Kanwer Singh, aka Humble the Poet, has had a fascinating path over the past few years. He went from public school teacher to reaching the upper echelons of Internet stardom – amassing millions of followers around inspirational posts on self-love, body acceptance, and social justice – and yet he’s managed to hold onto all of it with a very loose and humble grip. This book continues his gift of sharing with deep vulnerability – check out his book launch post! -- as he continuous to seek and share. I really admire him. Here's a sample quote from Page 164 under the Chapter heading "Be What You Love, Not What Loves You": "Humble The Poet the creative made dope shit, but Humble The Poet with the big social media following got paid to wear clothes, use technology, and attend movie screenings. Creating was nutrition for my soul but being famous paid the bills and was junk food for my ego.... I was no longer doing what I loved, I was doing what made people love me." (PS. Humble’s 3 most formative books are Death Blossoms by Mumia Abu-Jamal, God's Debris by Scott Adams, and The Greatness Guide by Robin Sharma.)
8. Tiny Buddha's Inner Strength Journalby Lori Deschene. (L/I/A) Way back in the Pleistocene era of blogging, there was a noble brood of 14.4-modem-bauding pilgrims trying our darndest to just, you know, put stuff out there. Social media hadn’t hoovered up all the content yet so blogs like 1000 Awesome Things, Cake Wrecks, Stuff White People Like, Fail Blog, or I Can Has Cheeseburger were where you went for an afternoon laugh or little jolt of inspiration. Most blogs from that era are extinct! Gone the way of the stegosaurus. And yet … some persist. (It’s perhaps like I wrote in You Are Awesome: "What we often think of as evolution 'destroying and replacing' the past is actually 'transcending and including'.") Which blogs are still here? PostSecret, The Bloggess, Marc and Angel, and, yes, Tiny Buddha. Lori Deschene is one of those original mighty bloggers who wins serious props for longevity. Now she's adding this Inner Strength Journal to her offerings. It's a handy toolkit of questions to serve as a little guiding force when you hit the bumps. She writes in the Intro "As someone with a history of PTSD, depression, and bulimia, I've questioned not just my will to go on but my capacity." She then explains that she put together this journal to help manage strong emotions and prioritize self-care. Simple ideas, habits, and exercises to help channel and find inner strength.
9. Gilgameshby Herbert Mason. (L/I/A) Chapter 99 of 3 Books is one of my favorites. Me, you, and a motley crew of book lovers hanging out with the singular Doug Miller inside the piled-to-the-sky used and rare Book Mecca that is Doug Miller Books. Jingling doors, surprise phone calls, floors creaking as people walk through -- it’s an aural escape into cozy bookstore land if you have a long drive or walk coming up I invite you to join us. One of Doug’s pearls of wisdom is that bookstores let us find what we aren’t searching for. The power of browsing, the surprise of the unexpected, that still doesn’t truly exist online. (Maybe we're even getting further away from it?) That’s what led me to finding this $2.99 copy of Gilgamesh -- the four-thousand-plus-year-old epic -- recaptured and distilled fifty years ago by Harvard scholar Herbert Mason. A quick poetic read offering wonderful insight into our oldest elements of storytelling and neverending human struggles around grappling with death, longing for friendship, and our desire for mystical guides. Storytelling has evolved but ones surviving thousands of years are worth checking out.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
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.
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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.
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Hey everyone,
Another pack of fresh book recommendations for you. Missed last month? Here you go. Know other book lovers who might like this? Here you go.
To the pages!
Neil
1. How to Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People by Public Speakingby Dale Carnegie. (L/I/A) I’ll come right out and say that if you speak publicly in any way you need to grab this 96-year-old classic. Warren Buffet was in the middle of his Masters at Columbia when he spotted an ad in the paper for the Carnegie Public Speaking course. He paid the hundred bucks and to this day calls it the best investment he’s ever made. Pretty big claim from a guy who own $100B of Apple? “I don’t have my diploma from the University of Nebraska hanging on my office wall and I don’t have my diploma from Columbia up there either – but I do have my Dale Carnegie graduation certificate proudly displayed,” he says. It’s easy to see why. Carnegie's thoughts on public speaking are priceless. He wrote his first three books ever on the topic and delivers great messages with folksy charm. On Page 54 Carnegie teaches you how to end with an appeal for action, on Page 76 he teaches you how to write your speech down as a series of pictures to memorize, on Page 90 he explains the importance of writing out a pre-speech ritual, on Page 119 he talks about the benefits of standing versus sitting. I take so many elements from this book when I craft a speech and as live events return with a bang – thank goodness! we’re social apes! – I find myself revisiting this classic to see what I can improve. There's always a lot. Highly recommended.
2. My Side Of The Mountainby Jean Craighead George. (L/I/A) Jean Craighead George grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a family of naturalists who spent a lot of time in the bush. Her first pet was a turkey vulture! Hope it didn't puke on her mom's front rug. (Anyone else kind of love that the primary defence of turkey vultures is, no joke, vomiting?) Jean's dad taught her how to make fires and fish hooks and find edible plants and even climb trees to study baby owls. Owlets, I should say. (Distracting sidenote! Here are 123 owlet GIFs!) Her brothers even ended up becoming two of North America’s first falconers but, thankfully for us here in the next century, Jean carved her own path and become a writer. She wrote over a hundred books! Alie Ward, host of top science-pod Ologies, tipped me off to this 1959 classic and I found myself entranced by it. It’s a bit clinical but you really will feel like a 12-year-old boy who has run away from home to live alone in the forest. He climbs a tree to snatch a Peregrine Falcon chick and trains it to hunt. He traps, gets attacked, and then befriends a weasel that he calls The Baron. He makes deerskin clothing and preserves grains and tubers. It goes on and on and on. But it's written for kids! So it's super complicated but... for kids! A great way to learn. I like this New York Times book review from Sunday, September 13, 1959 which calls it “a delightful flight from civilization, written with real feeling for the woods.” If you want a delightful flight from civilization, if you want to slice your carving knife through our sometimes-suffocating techno-wrap, well then I have just the book for you. Run away to the woods with this one.
3. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861by Henry David Thoreau. (L/I/A) In that review I just mentioned they call Jean Craighead George a “Third Avenue Thoreau” which is a nice little moniker for her rugged individualism. It was Austin Kleon, a man who draws on doodling to design and dream, who asked me to pick up Thoreau’s journals. A wonderful phone book to leave beside your bed for anxiety-releasing late-night mental walks beside a master of observation. You can literally flip to any page for a tiny little nature microdose. I'll do it right now. Two actual real-time flips? Here we go. Fliiiiiiip. March 28, 1851: "My Aunt Maria asked me to read the life of Dr. Chalmers, which however I did not promise to do. Yesterday, Sunday, she was heard ... shouting to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf, 'Think of it! He stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn't read the life of Chalmers." Fliiiiip. October 10, 1855: "You now see in sprout-lands young scarlet oaks of every degree of brightness from green to dark scarlet. It is a beautifully formed leaf, with its broad, free, open sinuses, --- worthy to be copied in sculpture." This book scrubs mental plaque with every page.
4.Good Insideby Dr. Becky Kennedy. (L/I/A) And now it's time for this month's Leslie's Pick -- a book recommended by my wife Leslie: "The underlying thesis of Dr. Becky Kennedy’s parenting philosophy is that we are all -- all parents, all kids -- good inside! In this new book, Dr. Becky describes 10 parenting principles in a way that is engaging, easy-to-read, logical, empathetic, and to-the-point. I find myself turning my light back on to keep reading! Two of my favourite ideas from the book are the principles two things are true and know your job. Two things are true is a reminder that both your perspective and your child’s perspective are true; it means that you can be a fun parent and also a sturdy parent, that you can take care of your child and also your self, and that you can have firm boundaries and be very loving, and on and on. Know your job is the idea that systems work better when we all know our jobs. She describes that it is a parent’s job to empathize, validate, and set boundaries and that it is a child’s job to feel the whole range of emotions. If we use our “good” to support their “good” then they will grow into adults able to regulate their emotions and thrive as adults. Definitely a new favourite!”
5.Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionairesby Douglas Rushkoff. (L/I/A) What was the last book you read cover-to-cover in one sitting? This is mine. A loud whirring engine powers this book and to me it demonstrates why Douglas Rushkoff might be the world’s leading practitioner of the rant -- as an art form. I listed his Team Human in my Best Books of 2021 and he was kind enough to join me on 3 Books to talk divisive duality and designer deaths. Now he’s back with a blazing manifesto that opens in a luxe desert hotel where he’s giving a lecture to a roomful of billionaires. He shares how they veer the conversation towards one of security, protection, and bunker-management. Douglas takes this anecdote and peels it open to talk about trends towards distrust, alienation, surveillance, wealth inequality, and more. If you walk a lot of urban streets or talk to a lot of strangers you know, you can feel, that all is not well. Rising anxiety, depression, loneliness, addiction, and suicide are just some of what ails us these days. Douglas emerges a Robin Hood-type with his arrow aimed straight into the heart of Big Tech. (Is there a heart in the center of Big Tech?) The man is sharp. Killer sharp. Reading his book feels like watching twirling gymnastics over a fire pit. He braids blistering screeds with scientific studies and takeaways from books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. A couple out of context quotes? How about this one: "Studies show the more power a person has the less ‘motor resonance’ or mirroring they do of others.” Or this: "… better for the algorithms streaming us the picture of the world we want to see, uncorrupted by imagery of what’s really happening out there. And if it does come through, just swipe left and the algorithms will know never to interrupt your dream state with such real news again.” If you enjoyed How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell you’ll love this one. Highly recommended.
6. The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)by Katie Mack. (L/I/A) Were you one of those kids who felt just stunned when you first started to comprehend the size and vastness of the universe? I feel like the “Where are we? What are we doing here? What does it all mean?” questions hit a lot of us when we’re eight, nine, ten years old. Everyone responds differently, of course. If you’re 8-year-old Alvy Singer in Annie Hall you might respond like he does in this hilarious 56-second clip. Or, you know, maybe you just sort of shove it away. Bury it! Maybe ascribe to a belief system that calms or sets things down in a digestible order. Maybe you turn a bit nihilistic … or fatalistic … or optimistic? Or … maybe you just point your curiosity at these questions your whole life. Katie Mack did the last one. Growing up in California in the late 80s and early 90s she read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and then pursued an undergrad in Physics from CalTech followed by a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton … before starting even more fascinating work doing things like -- no big deal! -- building a dark matter detector. And then, yes, writing a truly mind-bending book about how the universe will eventually … end. Because there is a finish line. I warn you: There is a steep learning curve in this book and, if you’re like me, you’ll need to flip back pages a lot to digest it. A lot may fly over your head. It did mine. But Katie goes to great pains to make this accessible and I think she did a better job than Stephen Hawking did. Every chapter pushed my mind farther and farther out. Much like ... the universe? The universe is lucky to have an engaging, generous, and funny teacher like Katie Mack. Btw: My 3 Books conversation with Katie drops on the new moon tomorrow at 5:54 pm. I'd love you to sit down with us to talk big puzzles, time, living on Mars, the possibility of alien life, and, as always, formative books. Join us on Apple or Spotify. And, if you're up for helping me spread the messages and books from Katie and other amazing guests, please consider leaving a review. It really helps.
7. The Collected Essex Countyby Jeff Lemire. (L/I/A)This is one of the most emotionally rich, textured, and satisfying graphic novels I’ve ever read and I put it up on the high mantle with books like Maus by Art Spiegelman or Berlin by Jason Lutes. On the surface it’s a simple story of a young boy sent to live with his mom’s brother at his small-town farm after she dies of cancer but it starts with that seedling and goes deeper and deeper into, well, almost everything. His relationship with his father, how we handle feelings of regret and loss, the history of generational trauma in a small town, and all kinds of twisting family stories that weave together across generations. This is a truly masterful storytelling feat. If you like sweeping family sagas like East of Eden or Anna Karenina or, well, any of these, then you’ll love this book. I found myself crying at two in the morning several times while reading it and, weeks later, I keep thinking about it. A masterpiece. Highly recommended.
8. I Am The Subwayby Kim Hyo-eun. Translated by Deborah Smith. (L/I/A)That was a pretty heavy list of books! Let's close off with a wonderful palette cleanser. The Seoul subway is often considered the longest in the world and carries over 7 million people a day. As you can tell from the cover above the book features the most incredible artwork and is told from the POV of ... the subway. A hypnotic ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum echoes through the book. Hugely bestselling book in Korea and newly translated into English. They stamp an Age 3-7 on it but, as always, perfect for all ages. No book shame, no book guilt.
9. You're at the end! Here are a few loot bag treats: The CBC asked me to publicly thank someone on the air and they found and we surprised my sixth grade teacher. I am often asked how to encourage young readers and one surefire way is to hand them some Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books. Deep New Yorker piece there and my interview with 90-year-old CYOA creator Edward Packard right here. We should be seeing the world through the eyes of children more often. And a nice piece citing great research to remind us, once again, that experiencing awe cultivates happiness and lowers stress. "You don’t need to visit the Grand Canyon or witness the birth of your child to experience awe. The awe-inspiring is all around you.... 'You can have your mind blown in mundane, minuscule ways...' Turns out we've been onto something this whole time!
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Reading books is an act of resistance!
Screens sexier, algorithms grabbier, and the dreamy escape of falling into a book becomes a little more difficult. As always, I’m talking to myself here, as I have noticed that I’m trying to read more than I used to. One thing that helps? This book club. “Make a public commitment” is one of eight things I suggest to 10x your reading rate. If those eight resonate, then here’s a follow-up I wrote with eight more.
Enjoy the last few days of August and I’m excited to keep reading beside you in September.
And now … to the pages!
Neil
1. Finite and Infinite Gamesby James Carse. (L/I/A) This book is 101 very short essays that slowly and iteratively build on each other to ultimately pull off a wild thought experiment. What’s the first essay? It’s on the cover! “1. There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” Simple, right? James Carse is just warming you up. Carse, btw, was an NYU history and religion professor who died in 2020 and somehow sprung this 149-page magic trick onto the world way back in 1986. I recommend it for anyone struggling with overwhelm or what I’ll call ‘life prioritization.’ The illumination is that most of what’s worth living for can be called an infinite game. Parenting, learning, loving your close friends well. Nice pairs with Clay Christenson’s famous How Will You Measure Your Life (which started as a talk and article) For me, most of the value in this book came in the early pages and, actually, the metaphor felt like it might collapse like a wet chocolate cake in the middle. But what I’m saying is: the first 50 pages of this book are worth way more than the ticket price. That’s all you need to read! Highly recommended.
2. The Rights of the Readerby Daniel Pennac. (L/I/A) One issue with infinite games? They’re a lot harder to play. In chapter two of The Happiness Equation I wrote about getting addicted to blog stats and bestseller lists in my late 20s and early 30s. I shared research on how extrinsic motivators actually hide intrinsic motivators from our brain and result in ultimately lower quality results. But they’re so much more visible, tempting, and, yes, finite. I started 3 Books in my late 30s – almost five years ago – and I really wanted to steer myself away from these temptations. I made sure I couldn’t access my own podcast stats. I decided to publish on the (at least) 30,000 year old lunar calendar instead of the 500 year old Pope Gregory calendar. I don’t accept guest pitches and stay focused on inviting people on who are interesting – whether or not they can offer big swirls of traffic from their own ‘platform’. And, lastly, I never spend or receive a dollar on advertising. (“Gratis being the only currency in art,” writes Daniel Pennac.) So I was hoping 3 Books would become a ‘word of mouth’ show – growing from reader to reader, teacher to teacher, friend to friend. Now, the extrinsic stuff always shows up – the show won Apple’s “Best Of” Award and I get pitches from people who point at stats showing it’s one of the top 0.5% podcasts in the world -- but just by focusing away from extrinsic allows intrinsic to bubble up. Then I feel more priceless (and measureless) bits of love get more visible on the surface. Like this book. I got it with a handwritten postcard from 3 Booker Jen Penn of Sandwich, Illinois, who wrote “Neil, you’re so generous in sending books to your 3 Books listeners – I thought it might be nice for you to receive a book! Thanks for enriching my reading life.” I had never heard of Daniel Pennac before! Or this book! It was written in French in 1992 and translated to English in 2006 and it features wonderful drawings throughout from (Sir!) Quentin Blake. Swervy, conversational, engaging, poppy, and, ultimately ending with a wonderful 30-page pronouncement called “The Rights Of The Reader.” What are the rights? (1) The Right Not To Read, (2) The Right To Skip, (3) The Right Not To Finish A Book, (4), The Right To Read It Again, (5) The Right To Read Anything, (6) The Right To Mistake A Book For Real Life, (7) The Right To Read Anywhere, (8) The Right To Dip In, (9) The Right To Read Out Loud, (10) The Right To Be Quiet. A lot overlap with the 3 BooksValues! And, more than anything, the book serves as an accessible and non-judgemental invitation to further deepen your (so very obvious) love of books.
3. Spoiler Alert: The Hero Diesby Michael Ausiello. (L/I/A) I mentioned a couple months ago that Book Clubber Casey Coleman replied to my May Book Club suggesting I read more queer literature. I asked for suggestions, he sent a huge list, and then I started with Lot by Bryan Washington. I loved it and featured it in my June Book Club. Now we’re in August. And my wife Leslie got to another book from Casey’s pile. So here she is: “After finishing Scarborough I had that ‘I will never love a book again’ feeling and was reluctant to read the first page of this when I saw it in one of Neil’s (many) piles looking for something to read before bed. And, honestly, I fell right into it. Maybe it’s just a Rebound Book, cause there’s something about it that feels a bit trashy or gossipy but, at the same time, that’s why I love it. Some nights I read maybe one page. Some nights I read a lot more. And Michael Ausiello gets me laughing minutes before I’m tearing up with his descriptions of awkward situations and vivid details that describe the mixed, dimensional, complicated emotions that unite us as humans. From around age 30 to age 43, Michael was in a long-term relationship with photographer Kit Cowan. This memoir chronicles their relationship including the sad and final last year of Kit’s life (which is also the first year of their marriage) after he was diagnosed with a rare and brutal type of cancer. Get the Kleenex ready.” (PS. Dan Savage helped write the screenplay and the movie is coming out from Focus Features in December.)
4.Keep Goingby Austin Kleon. (L/I/A) Austin Kleon has +100 Internet Karma points. Opening his weekly newsletter feels like flipping open a barnacle-covered treasure chest. His website AustinKleon.com offers deep swims through pools of wisdom. Now, if you know Austin’s books, I’m guessing you know Steal Like An Artist. Biggest, most popular, the one you see everywhere. But this one, published seven years later in 2019, is the one I find myself picking up lately. Full of Austin’s endlessly pithy and often counterintuitive advice it’s a War Of Art-like kick in the pants to creatively keep on keeping on. “Forget the noun, do the verb,” he writes on Page 62, a great reminder to eschew labels in favor of focusing on the practice while allowing for natural creative sidesteps. What does he mean? “If you only aspire to be a ‘creative,’ you might simply spend your time signaling that you are one: wearing designer eyeglasses, typing on your Macbook Pro, and Instagramming photos of yourself in your sun-drenched studio.” On the difficulty of changing our minds today? “Social media has turned us all into politicians. And brands. Everyone’s supposed to be a brand now, and the worst thing in the world is to be off-brand.” On focusing on intrinsic instead of trying to monetize everything? “Let the low-hanging fruit fall off and rot.” Part of the magic of Austin’s work is that you can see his process. He uses social media as public journals, he shares what he’s thinking in a glue-in-a-scrapbook kind of way. And he’s always creating! He told me how Henry David Thoreau and David Sedaris taught him the magic of constant creation. I flew down to Texas and had lunch with Austin at Mi Madre’s in East Austin recently so, yes, look up to the sky! When our coming Harvest Moon is fully plumpy – September 10th, 5:59am! – my chat with Austin will drop as Chapter 111 of 3 Books. (Need a creativity jolt before then? Check out Brad Montague or IN-Q!)
5.The Inevitableby Kevin Kelly. (L/I/A) Remainder bins are full of five year old books written by ‘futurists’. Kind of a lose-lose scenario, writing those. Either you got it right … and now there’s no reason to read your book. Or you got it wrong … and now there’s no reason to read your book. Plus Faith Popcorn kicks you off her Christmas card list. Well, Kevin Kelly is not a futurist. (“We’re living in a long now,” he says.) But he does tell you what’s going to happen. In his 2010 book What Technology Wants he posited a fascinating tech-determinism theory that is equal parts brilliant and (depending on your seat in the theater) scary. In this 2016 book he shares 12 thirty-year trends. And the best part is reading this book today, six years post-pub, you really can just feel them all happening. Like Flowing ("depending on unstoppable streams in real time for everything"), Cognifying ("Making everything much smarter using cheap powerful AI from the cloud"), and Tracking ("employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers"). It makes sense why the David Pogue blurb inside says “Anyone can claim to be a prophet, a fortune teller, or a futurist, and plenty of people do. What makes Kevin Kelly different is that he’s right.” A Boggle-like brain shake from the septuagenarian former editor of WIRED and The Whole Earth Catalog. The book tilts very optimistic as Kevin “…celebrates the never-ending discontent that technology brings because this discontent is the trigger for our ingenuity and growth.” I was very lucky to sit down with Kevin Kelly for 3 Books. Our chat dropped at 4:17am this morning, which was the exact minute of the new moon. You can listen on Apple or Spotify. (Or check it out on YouTube - I experimented with filming this one.)
6. Lullabies for Little Criminalsby Heather O'Neill. (L/I/A) This is the kind of book where if you’ve read it and you meet someone else whose read it I suspect you both just quietly nod and let out a long, slow deep breath. (Like A Little Life maybe? Though I haven’t read that.) Immersive, piercing, troubling, shocking. Heather O’Neill says in an interview “I knew I was going to take readers to places they’d never been before.” So what’s it about? Baby was born to parents who were 15. Her mom died a year later and the story begins in a first-person sort-of-journal-entry style when she’s 12 and being raised by her dad Theo in downtown Montreal. Theo is addicted to heroin and she bounces between foster homes and apartments with him while mostly living on the street. Eventually the local pimp Alphonse takes interest in her and, well, it goes from there. Not as fifth-gear as A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, but if you loved that (and I did), then I think you’ll love this, too.
7. The Monocle Book of Gentle Living. (L/I/A) Back in 2015 I was at a lunch with a graphic designer and web developer and they were both toting copies of Monocle magazine. “Monocle magazine?” I asked. “Isn’t that the $25 magazine full of Rolex ads for rich people in airports?” Well, they said, sure, but it’s also a real pinnacle of design. I learned Monocle is a globally based brand run by Tyler Brûlé, a Torontonian living in Zurich. I started reading and the voice was powerful – like some kind of enlightened, pithy, smartass? They call themselves a ‘briefing on global affairs, business, culture, design and more’ for a globally minded audience. They have 24,000 magazine subscribers and (unlike almost every magazine in the world) it’s growing. Plus their own little shops in Zürich, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Toronto, and Tokyo. This is a side-project coffee table book series and it’s well worth buying to flip through. Captivating photos, literary captions, and an air of authority. Feels like having a leisurely lunch at the Four Seasons rooftop with your jet-setting pal. The advice is solid, though, with suggestions on everything from simple gardening gear to get back into nature (and how to pull off an incredible garden on an apartment balcony) to spotlights on local bakeries and bookstores. Fun!
8. Everybodyby Elise Gravel. (L/I/A) “EVERYBODY is unique and different. But we are more similar than we think. EVERYBODY has fears. EVERYBODY makes mistakes … Ow! … and everybody can learn from them.” These are the opening lines of this wonderfully rendered 40-page picture book about empathy and emotional self-acceptance. Elise Gravel’s illustrations are what I’d describe as a wonderful bright-pastelly, psychedelic, bizarro McDonaldland-type aesthetic. Pairs well with Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder.
9.The Hobbitby J.R.Tolkien. (L/I/A) According to this slightly dubious table on Wikipedia, The Hobbit is one of only six books in the world that have sold over 100 million copies. I hadn’t read it until this summer. My oldest son has taken to flying through a few thin chapter books a night so The Hobbit served as a healthy form of reading quicksand. I read 10 pages to him a night and he sung all the songs in the text. (There are lots!) You probably don’t need me to tell you it’s a wonderfully rollicking quest with a soft glowing magic emanating off the pages from its endless voices, wordplay, and twists. This beautiful clothbound version was published in 2013 and features new illustrations by Jemima Catlin who was asked by Christopher Tolkien via Harper Collins to add her flair to the book. (Here are some samples.) My son’s life has changed a lot in the past couple months. He changed his name. He’s going to a new school. He's made new friends and lost old ones. He’s felt in place and out of place. And he’s navigating his own personality as it quickly congeals. I feel, I hope, like 10 pages a night of The Hobbit offered a consistent grounding force. I know it did for me. Highly recommended. (PS. If you want to see inside, here’s a YT video.)
10. There is no ten! But you made it all the way to the end so here are a few stocking stuffers. Kevin Kelly's TED Talk "The future will be shaped by optimists", Bangkok-and-Singaporean-based design agency Anonymous created a wonderful little resource called Books Read By, a whale shark having a bite to eat, half a million swallows set off weather alerts, Ryan Holiday's "11 ways to be happy and productive", and Oliver Burkeman offers a cure for those struggling with "personal knowledge management."
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Hey everyone,
Hope you’re doing well.
I saw a tweet the other day that read “I’m tired of living in unprecedented times.” Who can relate? Sometimes things are a bit too bumpy. Endlessly addictive feeds run by algorithms that have long outsmarted us continue steering us farther and farther away from our naturally gray zones towards thinking in blacks and whites … zeros and ones.
As always, books offer an escape from the matrix. We are what we eat and we are what we read, after all. Here's to pushing back against the tiny boxes we're constantly ushered into and slipping back into an embrace of our all-over-the-place-ness ...
Keep turning the page,
Neil
1. The Hidden Lives of Owls: The Science and Spirit of Nature’s Most Elusive Birdsby Leigh Calvez. (L/I/A) “As an engineer, I marvel at their adaptations that allow them to do what they do,” says an owler named Jamie early in this book, “From special feathers that channel sound into their ears, to their eyes that see so much better in low light than ours, to feathers on their leading primaries that break up the airflow into small turbulences to reduce noise. Even their talons are arranged to support maximum efficiency.” A wonderful book following science writer Leigh Calvez as she slowly wades into the 67-million-years-and-counting evolutionary history of owls. Chock-full of endlessly fascinating owl insights and the history of the thousands of years long human-owl relationship. Broken up by species by chapter, the book swivels 270 degrees towards Snowy Owls, Burrowing Owls, Great Gray Owls, and eight others. By the end it starts veering more memoir and less field guide but ultimately it opens up a world we all live beside and, for the most part, just ... never know. I saw the first owl of my life a couple years ago and since then have been growing enchanted with these near-mystical creatures. Beautiful illustrations by Tony Angell throughout. Highly recommended.
2. Scarborough: A Novelby Catherine Hernandez. (L/I/A) Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America after Mexico City, New York, and Los Angeles, and is made up of five boroughs. Scarborough is likely the most diverse of the five -- culturally, ethnically, racially – and this book folds every corner of the sprawling community into a raw and mesmerizing read. When Leslie and I first started dating she was a Kindergarten teacher in a low-income neighborhood in Scarborough and the book feels like it could have been written by a handful of kids from her class. Every chapter alternates viewpoints, Babysitters Club Super Special-style, and the result is a portrait of deep poverty, urban blight, and soaring and (often) sinking hearts in the Kingston-Galloway neighborhood of Scarborough (where 41% of residents live in subsidized housing and 29% live in poverty). The fine point detail in this book is stunning and if you're from Toronto or have visited you'll get a double-whammy. Stories are loosely held together by the narrative of Hina, a young woman who runs the local literary center, as she jousts with decision-makers far from the community she serves. A poetic masterpiece. Highly recommended. (Also turning into a movie!)
3. Bug Boysby Laura Knetzger. (L/I/A) Charming, strange, heartwarming graphic novel series aimed at 7-10 year olds featuring two sensitive beetle friends named Stag-B and Rhino-B as they grow up in Bug Village. After buying a book from old Dung Beetle they find a strange map. What is it? They can’t ask old Dung Beetle because he was eaten by a bird (cue a tiny interrupting frame popping in with a beetle with a long white beard and a cane in a bird’s beak screaming “Avenge me!!!”) so instead they visit the Great Chrysalis, which has been around since before Bug Village was formed, to wish for success in finding treasure. This is just the first two pages. All the little stories are unpredictable, meander in interesting places, and offer endless childlike wonderings, all wrapped inside an insect wonderland. Non-conformist, emotionally available, and lots of fun.
4.Cultish: The Language of Fanaticismby Amanda Montell. (L/I/A) In 1975 Sam Walton heard the employees at a Korean tennis ball factory open their day with a company cheer and when he got back to Bentonville he tried the idea out at Walmart. It stuck and became one of the ‘cult-like culture’ totems profiled in Built To Last, the 1994 Jim Collins mega-hit. Jim said companies who succeed often have cult-like cultures featuring fervently held ideologies, indoctrination, tightness of fit, and elitism. Now, in today’s hijacked mind era, most tribes, communities, and organizations follow many of these cult-like principles. This book takes a modern blog-post- style approach to examining how everything from SoulCycle to Trader Joe’s to Instagram influencers wield elements of cult conditioning. I would have really loved a detailed Table of Contents. Amanda's voice sounds like a close (and very articulate) friend long-texting you in real time. Pairs well with How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino.
5.How Animals Understand The Worldby Ed Yong. I fell in love with the prolific Ed Yong during the pandemic. As The Atlantic’s Science Editor I found his articles clear, research-based, and always spot on. (Here’s the archive.) I wasn’t the only one! He won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his covid work. What's he up to now? Well, the current issue of The Atlantic features his cover story, adapted from his brand new instant bestseller An Immense World, about how human noise and light is crashing all kinds of ecological systems globally. As just one example, the annual 9/11 “Tribute of Light” where New York City flashes two beams of light up where the twin towers stood … kills millions of migratory birds. This article taught me the wonderful word umwelt and is yet another baby-step towards helping us see outside our species. Highly recommended. Click here to read the full piece and click here to check out his book which has a much wider scope than this piece.
6. Where I Belong: Small Town To Great Big Seaby Alan Doyle. (L/I/A) The very last province to join Canada was Newfoundland – a great big island way out in the Atlantic Ocean. The culture in Newfoundland is unique with its own 30-minutes-off-everything time zone, endless small fishing towns, a deep sense of community and kindness (Come From Away wasn’t an anomaly!), and, of course, the tradition of having visitors ("mainlanders") get ‘screeched in.’ I tell you as someone who got screeched in recently that it turns out kissing a cod isn’t as bad as it sounds. Big thanks to book club reader Marj Mossman for recommending I pick up this wonderful Newfie memoir by Alan Doyle. Alan was born in Petty Harbour in a big, poor, happy family, and he’s probably best known as the lead singer of Great Big Sea. Have you ever wanted to read a whole chapter on how to chop out cod tongues? Now you can! Wrapped in endless warm storytelling and Newfie charm. A great book to read if you're curious about Newfoundland or planning to visit.
7. Birds of Newfoundlandby Ian Wakentin and Sandy Newton. (L/A) And I can’t talk about Newfoundland without recommending my favorite bird book if you’re going. Newfoundland has such a unique combination of thick boreal forests, wide-open tundras, and soaring cliffs for nesting sea birds like Atlantic Puffins and Northern Gannets. Back in the early 1940s the Dominion of Newfoundland (pre-Canada!) began a ten year project called The Birds of Newfoundland and invited famed ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson to come take a look. He ended up watercolor painting an incredible series of plates (including the one on the cover) and they’re featured throughout the book. A wonderful guide.
8. Penthouse Letters: The Down and Dirty Lustby the Editors of Penthouse Magazine. (L/A) According to a 2018 study 98% of men and 73% of women (or 86% of respondents total) report using Internet pornography in the past six months. Combine with the fact that algorithms have outhacked us at this point – reducing content down to its most addictive bits to keep us endlessly clicking -- and it means our broad, vast, multi-dimensional sexual curiosities and imaginations are often neutered at the source. How do kids learn about sex these days besides endless two-minute hardcore clips? Down in Key West Judy Blume and I talked about the virtues of learning about sex from books. I’m not sure a steamy Sidney Sheldon scene is going to cut it now but … what about Penthouse Letters? I picked up a copy at a bookstore – figuring hey, anything in its 48th edition must be doing something right. Less screens, more imagination, and a literary boost back into the wide world of sexuality. On this and other sex topics, Leslie and I sat down with Rebecca the Sex Educator recently and we’ll be dropping the chat on 3 Bookson the next full moon.
9.We Learn Nothing: Essaysby Tim Kreider. (L/I/A) I think one of the best New York Times Op-Eds of all time is The Busy Trap by Tim Kreider. I finally got around to picking up the book of essays containing it and it features wonderful writing exploring all kinds of unexplorables. “What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn’t change you?”, “Why do we fall in love with people we don’t even like?”, “How do you react when a childhood friend suddenly abandons you?” The essays have a David Foster Wallace sense of wildness – and cynicism. Judd Apatow says the book is “Heartbreaking, brutal, and hilarious” and that seems about right. Sometimes they were too harsh, unrelatable, or naval-gazey for me but that’s what I like about a book of essays – it's easy to skip to the next one.
Also, I was standing in a parking lot in the Bronx a couple weeks ago when Latanya and Jerry of the amazing Bronx Bound Books Bus started telling me about Libro.FM. I fell in love with it! And used it to listen to half of the new David Sedaris this month. Basically: It's an audiobook company where profits go to the local indie bookstore of your choice and where you own your audio files completely. Why switch from Audible? They made a whole page to explain. I get nothing for telling you about them -- just loved it and wanted to share.
Last thing: If you'd like a daily one line awesome thing through the summer (no ads ever), just sign up here. I began writing the pandemic edition of 1000 Awesome Things in April, 2020 and we have 196 days left. (I'll also be making a big book announcement on that list after the summer.)
Okay! Let's get to the books,
Neil
1. Beyond the Gender Binaryby Alok Vaid-Menon. (L/I/A) Alok ("A-loke") Vaid-Menon was born in College Station, Texas in 1991 to parents from India and Malaysia. When they were young they’d dress up in their mom and sister’s clothes and dance around the living room to Bollywood hits for all their extended family, including their Auntie Urvashi (a gender non-confirming lesbian of color and national activist). The entire room would clap and cheer them on over syrupy bowls of gulab jamon. But when they performed a similar routine onstage at the school talent show at age six ... they got laughed at by the entire school. Thus began a shame-filled odyssey of pretending to live as a boy -- or, at least, male-presenting -- for many years. And it also began an astounding conversation about gender which they're helping to lead globally today. This book firms Alok's place as a dynamic, powerful, and clairvoyant voice. I folded the corners of at least 20 of this slim 58-page book and found myself underlining quote after quote. (Here are some popular quotes from the book.) I grew up the son of Indian immigrant parents in Canada with male and female binaries and the accompanying blue and pink clothes in blue and pink nurseries. Gender divides only deepened with age and, looking back, I know they caused me to self-censor sides of myself. Painting my toenails to hide them in my socks, buying The Babysitter Club books “for my sister”, and quitting figure skating once I became the only boy at the rink. This book helped me remember, see, and accept a bit more of myself. And who is Alok? They created the global #DeGenderFashion movement, headlined the 2021 New York Comedy Festival, graduated at the top of their class twice at Stanford, and have lectured and performed in over 40 countries around the world. This is a complete riptide of an essay. Highly recommended.
2. Happy-Go-Luckyby David Sedaris. (L/I/A) It kills me to say this but I … didn’t like this book. Ugh. That sentence feels wrong – shocking almost. I was sure (positive!) I would love this book. I loved Calypso, his last one, and ranked that just below NakedandMe Talk Pretty One Day on the lofty Sedaris medals podium. I’ve loved nearly everything David has written for decades. Twenty-two years ago I took a three-hour train ride from Kingston, Ontario to the big city of Toronto to have dinner with Jay Pinkerton. Jay was the former editor of the school comedy paper I was about to help run and I was looking for advice. He gave me lots and when I left handed me a copy of Naked by David Sedaris and said “Read this.” An opening essay, “A Plague of Tics”, about his growing obsessive compulsive disorder was captivating. I went back and discovered essays about working as an Elf at Macy’s, living in a dorm at Kent State University for disabled students, and hitchhiking across the country. They were like nothing I’d read before and it was a huge thrill four years ago to hang out with him and get an up-close masterclass in writing. Flash forward to today and David’s essays cover topics around how he and his sister Amy both bought apartments above theirs in Manhattan during the pandemic and his snap purchase of a $3000 jacket that didn’t fit him. I don’t judge him for these things. The honesty is refreshing. (How many rich people pretend they’re not?) But they seem more out of place than usual, wrapped in a sharper anger, a vitriol, and a not-quite-but-almost disorienting strangeness. His wit remains sharp and cutting, and there are certainly gems like his cataloguing of walking barren New York streets at the start of Covid. But: something’s off. David says near the end of the book these essays didn’t get the gift of getting fine-tuned by audiences as his endless touring came to a halt during the pandemic. “It’s not just the applause I’m listening for but the quality of the silence.” Maybe that’s it. He’s still deliciously anti-PC and his incredibly attuned eye remains well-braided with the beautiful-ugly side of self-examination. Halfway through the book I switched to listening to it on Libro.FM and that gave it new energy and life. I still really love David and am sure (positive!) I will love his next one.
3. Lotby Bryan Washington. (L/I/A) I got an email the other day from Casey which read: “Way back in college (11ish years ago) you were on the Today Show and I had the chance to cross paths with you! 1000 Awesome Things was one of my favorite blogs in college. I was navigating coming out and it helped me prioritize my mental health and realize how much joy there was in the world.” (Here’s a picture of us!) Casey and I kept in touch and he wrote back to my May Book Club with a long list of suggested queer literature. I bought the first one on the list – this one! – and read it this month. Wow. What a stunner. A debut collection of short stories all tangentially telling tales of down-and-out Houston through (mostly) the lens of a half-latino-half-black teen working at his family restaurant and navigating distant siblings and a disappearing dad all while coming to grips with being gay. Crackling popping prose that reminded me of Junot Diaz. The accessibility and zing here makes this a great book to study the art of writing. Came out in 2019 and won a slate of fancy awards plus made Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Highly recommended.
4.Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanationby Natalie Henrich and Joseph Henrich. (L/I/A) Maybe a year ago I read chunks from The WEIRDest People On Earth: How The West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Stuffed to the gills with fascinating charts, ideas, and theories, I traced back the author’s other stuff and came upon this one which I thought might help illuminate some of the bigger issues around our dive-bombing trust levels. It’s a decent book but unfortunately only the first couple chapters offer much. The definition of cooperation feels off (“Cooperation occurs when an individual incurs a cost to provide a benefit for another person or people”) and then most of the book is actually a deep academic field study about an insular group of middle-class Iraqi Christians (called Chaldeans), living in metro Detroit, exploring their kinship relations, ethnicity, and traditions and trying to use that as a barometer for cooperation through generations.
5.The Big Bath Houseby Kyo Maclear. (L/I/A) Kyo is a magical (and magically underrated!) author. We love her The Good Little Book so much at our house and Birds Art Life is one of the most delicate and whimsical memoirs I’ve ever read. (Made my Best of 2019!) I am starting to fall into her orbit. This is Kyo’s newest work – a children’s book recounting her early childhood memories of visiting her grandmother in Japan and visiting bath houses. The book offers a rare acceptance and comfort with all body types, a vision of a world with less strictures and more acceptance between us, and, as my kids will joyfully tell you, a whooooooole lot of full-frontal. Publisher says for age 4-8 and offers this one-liner summary: “A joyful celebration of Japanese cultural traditions and body positivity as a young girl visits a bath house with her grandmother and aunties.” MatthewP on Amazon gives it 1-star and says “Great, lets normalize naked adults bathing with children. This is a dangerous book!” But others in our build-your-own-echo-chamber world call it a “Best Book of the Year” (like the New York Public Library, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, and The American Library Association.) My kids loved it, Leslie and I loved it, and we didn’t feel it was dangerous in any way. Sure, the vision it depicts feels a long ways off but books are magical and being a dreamer is great fun. Kudos to Kyo for helping us find something we maybe didn’t know we lost. Pairs well with the wonderful Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder.
6. All About Loveby bell hooks. (L/I/A) We are in our fifth year of our epic 1000 formative book countdown and it’s fun to see patterns emerging. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and (you guessed it) All About Love by bell hooks are some of the most frequently chosen books on our list. (Recipients of the rare double asterisk!) bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, was an author and social activist with a flair for the pen. She wrote over 40 (!) books and this is her most popular. It stretches and peels open the word ‘love’ to reveal an active verb that most of us are likely practicing without much of a manual. Well, here it is! “How do we operationalize love because professing it is so easy and so cheap?”, Brené Brown asked us last year. Each chapter of this book is so deep, so rich, so sumptuous that, for me at least, it had to be read very slowly and sporadically. Want a few choice quotes to see if it resonates? “Our national spiritual hunger springs from a keen awareness of the emotional lack in our lives. It is a response to lovelessness.”, “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”, and “The most precious gift true love offers is the experience of knowing we always belong.”
7. Raising Your Spirited Childby Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. (L/I/A) And now it’s time for this month's Leslie’s Pick, a book personally chosen and loved by my lovely wife. Enter Leslie: “Do you feel particularly challenged parenting your child and wonder if there might be something ‘wrong’ with you, or ‘different’ about them? Something that makes parenting harder for you than for other people? Do you have a child with lots of energy, an insatiable desire for attention, intense emotions, a louder voice, a more keen sensitivity? If so, you must pick up this book. It’s literally ‘a guide for parents whose child is more intense, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, and energetic’ and it gets right to the point, makes you feel less alone, and helps you accept your spirited child just as they are, and celebrate the characteristics in them that both makes parenting them challenging and ultimately very rewarding.”
8. The Writer’s Libraryby Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager. (L/I/A) Nancy Pearl is a Superhero Librarian. (I mean, she’s actually been turned into a superhero.) She is wise and witty and well-read because, as she says, “I have chosen in this life not to do anything, basically, except read.” It comes as no surprise to me that she and Jeff Schwager took on a project very similar to 3 Books -- figuring out which books influenced some of the greats. We have only one overlap so far -- Dave Eggers! -- and this book features wonderfully long interviews with authors like Donna Tartt, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Andrew Sean Greer, etc. (Here's my interview with Nancy.)
9.Abel’s Islandby William Steig. (L/I/A) A seemingly simple tale of a posh, urbane city mouse named Abelard navigating a lonely island after getting washed away in a rainstorm. William Steig, where have you been all my life? I had vaguely heard his name years ago as the author of the picture book Shrek but that’s about it. I learned Steig lived from 1907 to 2003 and didn’t start writing these wonderful children’s books until his early 60s. He wrote Shrek in his 80s! Someone gave us a little board book of Pete’s A Pizza a while back which is beautiful -- a father rolling his son into a pizza to cheer him up on a rainy afternoon -- and has long remained in our weekly rotation. Now I've read and really loved this layered and nuanced story told with accessible literary precision and offering a quiet contemplation on inner strength. If you (or someone you know) liked Hatchet, this is a great one.
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Hey everyone,
The percentage of Americans who read for pleasure is at its lowest level ... ever. There’s a giant study called The American Time Use Survey which looks at 26,000 Americans and they found that over a 15 year period pleasure-reading was down 29-40%. (They call it "29% for women and 40% for men" but it feels archaic to think gender and reading are related.) Gallup also found the number of people who do not read a single book in a year has tripled from the late 70s to the latest data a few years ago -- now a full 57% of Americans don’t read a single book a year. I mean: How could we when we’re spending more than five hours a day on our phones?
I guess I’m just in a bit of a “book activist” mood this month but I wanted to lay that on the line and start talking more about the importance of reading: as community-connector, empathy-builder, and compassion-fountainhead. “Books are magic,” Kevin the Bookseller told us back in Chapter 44. And he’s right. I want to get better at being a book evangelist.
Also, I'll now pause to offer the somewhat-obligatory virtual back-pat to you for taking your education seriously, for planting seeds in your inner garden, and for, you know, hanging out with me each month to talk about books.
What are some ways we can better coalesce, celebrate, and share the joy and rewards of reading? Or: Is there a book-loving community you're a part of that you recommend? Just reply and let me know.
And now, as we’ve done for 68 straight months, let’s get to the books...
Neil
1. Exactly What To Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impactby Phil M. Jones. (L/I/A) I am a bit wary of slim business books with clickbaity titles (says the guy who wrote The Happiness Equation, I know). But this book delivers. I would even say it’s a must-read if your job involves sales of any kind. (Dan Pink would say that would be all of us.) Phil is a master linguist, negotiator, and influencer. Influencer in that original "debate-winner” sense not the current “tanning my oily chiseled abs by the beach drinking a disgusting sugary drink you should all buy so they re-up my contract” sense. He opens the book by saying: “The worst time to think about the thing you are going to say is in the moment you are saying it. This book prepares you for nearly every known eventuality and provides you with a fair advantage in almost every conversation.” Intrigued? He spends 2-4 pages going deep on 23 powerful phrases you can drop into conversation. “I’m not sure if it’s for you”, “I bet you’re a bit like me…”, and even simple-sounding phrase swaps like powerfully shifting “Do you have any questions?” to “What questions do you have?”. If you're one of the 30 million people who read How To Win Friends And Influence People, this book might function as an ultra-concentrated distant cousin. I guess there's a reason for the 10,700 reviews on Audible. Highly recommended.
2. How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asiaby Mohsin Hamid. (L/I/A) I think Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented novelists alive. And his zig-zaggy path to, uh, novelizing is fascinating in and of itself: Born in Pakistan, emigrated to California age 3 so dad could do Stanford PhD, whips back to Pakistan age 9 with a sharp severing of all American friendships, heads back to US at age 18 to attend Princeton (where he takes a formative writing class from Toni Morrison who helped shape his first novel), and then graduates into a 20-year business trajectory (!) at McKinsey followed by executive brand management roles ... all of which he does while writing three massively award-winning novels on the side: Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and How To Get Filthy Rich Is Rising Asia(2013). That doesn't include Exit West (2017) which is probably his most popular. Okay, so let's back up to this book: It's written in second person and tells a gripping tale of you – a poor boy from a poor family in a poor unnamed country – on your rise to riches. I have to put this book in my top ten novels of all time. Here’s Page 1. Let's see if it hooks you like it did for me: “Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books, too. Some might even say it’s true of religion books. But some others might say that those who say that should be pinned to the ground and bled dry with the slow slice of a blade across their throats. So it’s wisest simply to note a divergence of views on that subcategory and move swiftly on. // None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry. // This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. And to do that it has to find you, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot one cold, dewy morning…” Pretty good, right? That's just the first page. Highly recommended.
4.Dinner At The Homesick Restaurantby Anne Tyler. (L/I/A) I have never read a novel quite like this before. Let’s see: It’s about … nothing. In that Seinfeld sense of endlessly twisting plotlines about the minutiae of four people’s lives nothing. Less jazz riffs, less laugh tracks, more melancholy, more heart-scratching. There is a deep sadness between the covers of this book which tells the story of a single mother in Baltimore seventy years ago who simply never tells her children their father left them. What happens to this family from there? Well, that, my friends, is what you pay your ticket for. This is a deeply feeling book with remarkably vivid characters and incredible detail all offered through a how-does-she-do-it style of almost shockingly accessible prose. This book offer a three-dimensional hologram of a family you’ll feel like you are living beside … and I’d be interested to see if you miss them or glad to lose them by the end. Five stars. (Thank you to 3 Booker Cindy Sherrick who phoned me at 1-833-READ-A-LOT to recommend I invite Superhero Librarian Nancy Pearl onto the show. Well, I did, and Nancy asked me to read this first. Conversion drops on the Strawberry Moon.)
5.Glork Patrol Takes a Bathby James Kochalka. (L/I/A) James Kochalka (ka-chall-ka) may be the single greatest cartoonist most people have ... never heard of? He turned 55 this week and has been making indie comics and punk rock since he was a teenager. This book is a wild Being John Malkovich-like head-twisting waterslide of a book for the 4-8 set. It tells the jumpy story of a space-based family that skewers our own sensibilities and values as it celebrates creativity, storytelling, and love. I personally would expand that age range from 4-8 to something more like 2-100. I should give fair warning that Leslie didn’t like this book so I'll offer this screen: If you like, let’s see, three or more of theeeeeese... then you'll like this book: Super Mario Brothers 3, early Coen Brothers movies, Jason Shiga books, The Night Riders (one of my Best of 2019!), Rushmore, or Everything, Everywhere All At Once. Love this book, even. I did. A truly wonderful piece of art.
6. Pereira Maintainsby Antonio Tabucchi. (L/I/A) I would never have heard of this book if Mohsin Hamid hadn’t just picked it as one of his three most formative. We’re working on a 3 Books chapter to release on the Sturgeon Moon and, of course, that means I gotta spend a few moons reading his formative books. (I’ll save the other two as a surprise for the show.) Thin, sparse, slow, with a deeply beating heart, this novel functions as a precise self-consciousness awakening of an elderly Portuguese widow (who talks to a photo of his dead wife every morning) who runs a small irrelevant culture section in a local Lisbon newspaper ... and who eventually learns that he really does have power and really does need to use it if he wants to help challenge the totalitarian regime. Takes place during the 40-year reign of Portuguese dictator António Salazar. Warning: Despite the 150-ish pages, the book is slow. That'll either annoy your or help you catch a vibe that helps you slow down.
7. A Kid's Book About School Shootingsby Crystal Woodman Miller. (L) And now this months Leslie’s Pick, a book personally hand-chosen by my wonderful partner: “This is a book every parent wishes they never had to read to their child. It's available online for free - download here. A Kids Company About is a place to “find books, podcasts, and apps to help spark important conversations” about things like mental health, death, war, poverty, racism, and…school shootings. Written for an adult and child (or teenager) to read together. If your child is asking about the recent school shootings (being young and in Canada ours are not) this book may be helpful. The focus is on validating emotions the child may be having, reassuring them that school shootings are very rare, and explaining that being prepared by having lockdown drills is part of an effort to keep them safe. I would say this book is best for children 8 and up but could be used as young as 5 or 6 if the child is worrying about school shootings. There is room for conversation between the adult and child about the child’s questions and suggestions on what action kids can take but probably not enough explaining why school shootings happen (e.g., that owning a gun is allowed in the United States and that if people are hurting, they are hurting, etc.) If you need inspiration for conversations that go along with this book, I made up the acronym CHATS when having compassionate and courageous conversations with children. C - Child-led - Let the child’s questions guide the conversation, H - Human - You don’t have to say the perfect thing, just be human and real with your child, A - An Invitation - See each small question by your child as an invitation to connect deeply and an opportunity to show them they can come to you about anything, T - Tools - Use books, websites, toys, art, laughter and role play, S - Support - (perhaps most importantly) Get support for YOU so you can be there for them”
8. WHAT IT ISby Lynda Barry. (L/I/A) I was lucky to have lunch with Austin Kleon last week at Mi Madre’s in Austin, Texas. Our server Veronica told us her parents started the restaurant back in 1990 and that they’re slowly making it through the pandemic. Over nachos, guacamole, and enchiladas resting on a teal-painted metal table, with a garden in a claw-foot navy-blue bathtub beside us, while swatting at screechy Great-tailed Grackles, Austin told me how this book shaped his life. Easy to see from this viewpoint! A deeply heart-forward collage artist-slash-memoirist-slash-nearly-unclassifiable artist? Could be either of them! I strongly recommend this book for artists of all stripes – and, maybe especially those seeking to inch their art closer to the drawing, illustration, or visual side of things. An entirely hand-drawn feast that will take time to slip into the rhythm of – this is a penetrating The War Of Art-cousin book for those more visually led.
9.Read Like An Artistby Austin Kleon. Speaking of Austin, he passed me a copy of these limited edition zines he made in support of indie bookstores last month. Thankfully for all of us he’s posted the whole thing online here. I love his bibliomania. His is a deeply book-loving community right there. You can follow that link to sign up for his Substack or newsletter, too.
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Hey everyone,
Hope you’re doing well.
I had a blast this month interviewing Daniels. Catching artists in the middle of a shooting-star moment feels very lucky. We sat down just after their movie Everything, Everywhere All At Once had just been named the top-ranked film of the past decade on Rotten Tomatoes … but before the movie was widely released. A few books below comes from them and you can listen to our 3 Books conversation on Apple, Spotify, or right on the site.
Speaking of 3 Books, we hit Chapter 100 this month. I’m proud that in this endlessly screaming world, our award-winning podcast remains ad-free, sponsor-free, commercial-free, and interruption-free. Been shaking up the Boggle board a bit with a new logo, new intro, and other surprises. Let me know what you think anytime by calling me at 1-833-READ-A-LOT.
Now: Are pandemic fogs lifted where you live? Or are you in an eleventh wave with new mask mandates? For 753 days in a row I’ve shared an awesome thing every day through the pandemic. I debated stopping now but we’re too close to call it quits. 247 days to go! If you want one every day in your inbox just click here. (Or join 100,000 people who get it on Facebook if you prefer.)
As echo chambers deepen and reality starts wobbling, let’s keep using this monthly conversation about books as a little air bubble of space to stay connected -- heart-to-heart, human-to-human. I’m reading right beside you and, of course, as always, just reply anytime with a comment, question, or suggestion.
And now onto the books…
Neil
1. Sex At Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationshipsby Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. (L/I/A) When Daniels picked this book I hadn’t heard of it despite it being in its fortieth printing with over 30,000 reviews across Amazon and GoodReads. “Hmmm,” I thought, “I wonder why it has a couple different covers … and a couple different subtitles” but before I could think on that I peeled open the cover and got punched in the nose by the Kahlil Gibran epigraph: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” That line had stayed with me since The Prophet and it sort of did that epigraphy thing of piquing interest in some yet-to-be-determined way. From there the book takes off like a rocket with sharp, whip-smart prose zooming you through an astounding millions-of-years-evolutionary-history of human sexuality. Nothing is off limits! Like Daniels themselves, the book delights in tackling taboos and challenging topics head-on while presumably knowing they’ll make a few mistakes along the way but hey? Is there any other way to really live? Zesty. There’s my one-word review. This book is zesty. You can almost hear the authors gleefully spiking volleyballs into Charles Darwin’s and Jane Goodall’s foreheads while bouncing between topics like the type of porn we watch to our species’ relative penis size and, of course, why those things matter. Sure, some chapters are skippable as they have a tendency to go on massive veering asides (pot, kettle, I know) and, I will say, like a multi-million year evolutionary history of anything, there are undoubtedly plenty of things wrong. I just think this isn’t the type of book to read with the brakes on. Rather, go all-in on the ride and then pause to stew, process, and discuss. Stew, process, and discuss, you will! Pairs well with Mating in Captivity and paperback features a great Q&A with columnist Dan Savage, too.
2 & 3. Calvin and Hobbes and It’s A Magical Worldby Bill Watterson. (L/I/A & L/I/A) I got an email from 3 Booker Bo Boswell from Nashville, Tennessee mid-pandemic where he shared that reading Calvin and Hobbes was calming and grounding for him. I wouldn’t have thought of it naturally but … yeah. There’s something deeply soul-fueling about reading Calvin and Hobbes, especially if you grew up in the strip’s Beatles-like ten-year run from 1985-1995. Daniels gave me a really fun way to revisit it, too: Read the very first Calvin and Hobbes book (published in 1987) and the very last one (published in 1996). Skip treasuries, box-sets, and remixes! Start at the beginning and end at the end. How novel in The Era of The Algorithmic Playlist. When you do it this way the amount of character, format, and theme growth is bewildering – transmogrifying, even – as the strip tackles many social issues long before they became “labeled things” – nature deficit disorder, surveillance capitalism, unschooling, and it goes on. Takeaways for artists: We can change more than we think, there are always more and less constraints than the surface reveals, and saying what you want to say the way you want to say it just never goes out of style. Btw: What’s Bill Watterson up to these days? Oil painting, apparently. That’s what he said in a 2014 interview in this book where he (also) denied being a recluse. But … isn’t that just what a recluse who wants to be left alone would say? Keep inspiring us, Bill!
4. Upstream: Selected Essaysby Mary Oliver. (L/I/A) I bumped into this book of essays in the bookstore and felt like I found some hidden gem. “Mary Oliver has essays!?” She’s one of the most prominent poets of all time and I have shared some of her poems, like "Wild Geese", in my bi-weekly Neil.blog emails. Leslie even keeps a copy of Devotions beside the bed. But: I am sorry to say I found the book … surprisingly unfulfilling. Did you follow Michael Jordan’s baseball career? I did. It was a huge story! Here comes the greatest basketball player to make his mark on baseball. And? Swing and a miss. I know the world always wants us to stay in our lanes so I applaud trying new things but here the essays seemed to sort of linger on their subjects both too long and too lightly at the same time. The book felt like somebody had done a Google search for all Mary Oliver writing over 500 words and then just copied and pasted it all into one document. Maybe I’m being too harsh. She does have a deep gift for dropping incredible pearls of wisdom. Three lines I underlined were: “Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion.”, “Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?”, and “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” I'll give it a solid two and a half stars.
5.After Babel: How Social Media Dissolved The Mortar Of Society And Made America Stupidby Jonathan Haidt. Having an actual paper magazine subscription has became an act of protest because you’re voting for so many things suddenly in the minority: print over digital, curation over endlessness, investigative journalism over talking airheads. I’ll tell you this: My annual subscription to The Atlantic paid for itself in one fell swoop with this rubber-mallet-to-the-forehead 8000-word essay of essays by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt is the NYU professor and prominent TED Talker behind The Righteous Mind and The Coddling Of The American Mind and this article reads like the seed kernel of his next big cob of a book. Do you feel your anxiety spiking on social media? Can you just not stop doomscrolling even though you know it’s not good for you? This article takes us on a detailed 10-year history of social media with deep research, studies, and references all building towards its boil: “If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse.” Bit bold? Sure, but it’s hard to argue against what he puts forward here. Haidt manages to stay on the razor-thin center line – puling off that South Park move of trashing everyone equally – and it’s almost impossible to read this piece and not feel like big changes need to be made right now. What changes? Raising the age of children’s access to social media from 13 (set in 1998!) to at least 16 (which still feels early given spiking anxiety and depression rates), modifying ‘Share’ functions on Facebook to require “copying and pasting” as an extra step which is very content-neutral but forces thinking-pauses (much like Twitter added a little “Do you want to read this first?” pop-up when you retweet an article now), and, more broadly, asking the tech giants to, you know, maybe verify their users are actually users. Banks do it, insurance companies do it, but tech companies? Nope! Go ahead bot, troll, algorithm, start up hundreds of millions of accounts that swerve the public discourse and understanding of what’s real. I say read this article, pause and then copy-paste-and-share this article. Jon Haidt is doing critically important work for our world. May his voice be amplified! (PS. I’m delighted to share that he will be our guest on 3 Books shortly.)
6.Time To Recharge, Harper!by Kelly Leigh Miller. (L/I/A) Harper is a robot who does not like to charge! Because charging is a waste of time! Harper is very busy and has so many things to do and he can’t do anything while charging! (“Sleep is boring, being awake is fun” Tim Urban) Harper starts getting a low battery and insists on staying awake despite feeding the canvas and painting the fish. Harper keeps making mistakes until he finally crashes. My wife Leslie says this book is potentially about me and the kids have started saying “Time to Recharge, daddy!” Works pretty well. Get this for anyone in your life who has trouble turning off.
7. The Wonder Weeks: A Stress-Free Guide to Your Baby’s Behaviorby Hetty van de Rijt and Frans X. Plooij. (L/I/A) When one of our kids goes through a prolonged period of crankiness, clinginess, or fussiness Leslie and I always say to each other “Oh, it’s a leap.” Somehow that phrase together with its immediate follow-up -- “Yeah, their brain is growing” -- helps frustration walls crumble and empathy walls build back up. How can you be upset with someone whose brain is growing? (Doesn’t always work / everyone is human, etc.) But we got the phrase from an app called Wonder Weeks that Leslie downloaded years ago. The app helpfully / eerily seemed to predict – almost to the exact day – when our little ones would be going through periods of ‘independence regression’. How is that possible? Well, fifty years ago Frans and Hetty finished up their PhDs in educational psychology, physical anthropology, and behavioral biology and went to hang out with Jane Goodall in Tanzania. After a couple years they had so much data on baby chimps and their mothers that they began researching if the same ‘leaps’ they observed occurred in humans. Spoiler Alert: They did! The book (and app) chronicles each leap – the behavior that happens during and after – and what types of activities may be fun or helpful to try during the period. Originally came out in Dutch in 1992 and is now in its sixth edition in English. One watchout: I disagree with the phrase “stress-free” in the subtitle. The risk of the book is that it brings out the “gold star on their homework” side of parents and sort of trades in some deep intuitive wisdom for some checklisty could dos and should dos. To be taken as an aid more than anything.
8. Warbler Waveby April Pulley Sayre. (L/I/A) My friend Fred texted me last week asking if my love for birding was “a bit.” I asked him what he meant. “I just don’t know anybody under 70 who actually goes birding,” he replied. No! It’s a not a bit! There’s a reason I started The Next 1000 with #1000 Being suddenly really into birdwatching. It was because I was … suddenly really into birdwatching. Here! Take this pop quiz: If you like 3 or more of these things, I’m pretty sure you’ll love birding: Hiking in forests, puzzles and mental challenges, nature photography, environmentalism and enviro-activism, long walks outdoors, and list-making. How do you get started? Simply three things: 1) Get a pair of binoculars and leave them somewhere handy, 2) Download the totally free Merlin ID app, and 3) Raid the children’s book section of your local library. Why children’s books? Because they’re just so wonderfully colorful and educational and unpretentious. Over fifty species of (mostly) tiny, singing, insect-eating warblers have been migrating from South and Central America up to Canada and the US for millions of years. What time of year? Now! Soon! Get ready! This book taught me a wonderful new word: Zugrunruhe (“ZOO-guhn-roo-uh”) which is migratory restlessness. Can you relate? Like if you keep a warbler in a room with no change in light or temperature they will hop and flutter in the direction of their migration. Unlike geese, warblers aren’t ‘taught’ how to migrate from their parents – they presumably use the earth’s magnetic field or the stars. The book’s poetry is light but the photos are stunning and the info in the back on what’s hurting them (the relatively modern inventions of cell towers, skyscrapers, and outdoor housecats) and how to help them (planting fruit trees, setting up birdbaths, leashing dogs) provide great info.
9. Breakfast of Championsby Kurt Vonnegut. (L/I/A) Meta metaverses, self-and-circular references, breaking the fourth wall, endlessly disorienting sideways jump cuts. TikTok videos? Of course. Piece of early 70s contemporary literature? That too! This is the strangest novel I have come across in a long time. The plot is so hard to follow I had to read the Wikipedia Plot Summary entry three times. Wild, byzantine, X-rated, confusing, strange. If this sounds like your cup of tea, pick up a copy! Based on a very unofficial ranking based on number of Goodreads reviews, this is Vonnegut’s third most popular book after Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. I have only read this and Slaughterhouse Five (for my chat with Elan Mastai, Executive Producer of This Is Us and author of the wonderful All Our Wrong Todays) and so far … neither did it for me. Did I start with the wrong Vonnegut? I will say I loved and treasure If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? which is just a collection of Vonnegut’s commencement speeches. I also fell in love with his old New Yorker obituary / poem "Enough" which his wonderful trustees were kind enough to let me use in The Happiness Equation in exchange for a donation to some of Kurt’s causes. So: love the man! Still wading through his art.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
I recently hung out with self-described bibliomaniac Doug Miller and a book-loving brew of customers in his stacked-to-ceilings shop in Koreatown. You know those old candy machines where you put in a quarter, spin the metal dial, and a handful of peanut M&Ms rolls out from the giant bin? Well, Doug’s bookshop is the handful and the bin is his 500,000-plus (!) book collection housed in a stack of train cars outside town. Just in case you think your book addiction is hitting new levels! The conversation really filled my soul and if you're looking for some book-lover connection I'd love you to come hang out with us right here.
Also, this month: I’m excited we're hitting Chapter 100 of 3 Books. This little podcast that could really began as an outgrowth of this book club back in 2018. It’s been four years and the train isn't scheduled into the station until Chapter 333 in 2031. I hope we can keep talking about books until then.
Okay, now onto the books!
Neil
1. Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Wholeby Susan Cain. (L/I/A) Susan’s first book Quiet came out nearly a decade ago and has stuck on bestseller lists pretty much since then. Together with her famous TED Talk “The Power of Introverts” Susan gave rising voice, power, and language to a new movement. And now ... she does it again. Susan spent years tackling the ephemeral idea of what it means to hold a bittersweet outlook on life. “Why do I crank Leonard Cohen songs in college?” to “Why do people love sad movies?” to “How do we transcend 'enforced positivity' in some workplaces?” to “Should we try to ‘get over’ grief and impermanence?”, the book is a feast for curiosity junkies as it navigates the world through Susan’s unique lens. Every paragraph feels almost wholly fresh and while the chapters are strung along iteratively you can jump back and forth between ones that may catch your eye without losing place. Although Susan’s books may casually get places in “Business” they’re really almost genre-less – sort of Jon Ronson-buddy-beside-you-on-the-bus-style – and you simply open the book and ride along as she moves from person to person, place to place, study to study to slowly peel open the onion. The book begins with a Bittersweet Quiz where you find out where you sit on the concept of bittersweetness – described as ‘a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty.’ With our culture careening forward at an increasingly frenetic pace and echo chambers become dizzying it can be easy to lose touch with subtler or heavier emotions we feel inside but don't see reflected in our algorithmic feeds. This book gives shape to so many of the deeper stirrings of the soul. Check out her newly released TED Talk "The hidden power of sad songs and rainy days" for a teaser. I highly recommend this book and hope you'll join Susan and me (virtually!) in a live event celebrating her book with Magic City Books in Tulsa, Oklahoma on April 14th. Every ticket includes a copy of the book and you’ll be supporting a wonderful indie bookstore. Tickets here.)
2. Desperately Seeking B**ksyby Xavier Tapies. (L/I/A) Banksy is arguably the most popular street artist in the world – perhaps with credit to the 2010 documentary, Exit Through The Gift Shop, his outlandish stunts like “Girl with the Red Balloon” getting frame-chewed, or maybe from his viral Instagram account. For relative Banksy amateurs (like me) this is a little reference guide attempting to catalog every Banksy work that still exists – plus many that have since been buffed or painted over. It’s not exhaustive nor unbiased but there are plenty of images you likely haven't seen and it’s nicely cataloged by date, location, and current status with an attempted interpretation of each one.
3. Chirri & Chirra Under the Seaby Kaya Doi with translation by David Boyd. (L/I/A) Back in 2004 this whimsical picture book came out in Japan featuring a “Night Riders-esque” tale of two young Japanese girls on bicycles ringing their bells (“Dring-dring! Dring-dring!”) and riding through a tunnel before suddenly dropping into a mystical underwater journey where they pedal through coral and discover a secret lounge where they sit on conch couches and seashell sofas before enjoying "sea-spray parfait à la conch" and "marine soda jelly topped with pearl cream." Brought to them by a crimson octopus with long eyelashes, blue eyeshadow, and a hotel maid’s outfit on, of course. Now, more than fifteen years later, David Boyd, Assistant Professor of Japanese at University of North Carolina, partnered with Brooklyn-based indie children's book publisher Enchanted Lion Books (treasure trove!) for a magical English translation. Like seeds for fertile imaginations I highly recommend this for all ages. To see the evocative images inside, check out this YT video.
4. No One Belongs Here More Than Youby Miranda July. (L/I/A) Sixteen short stories in two-hundred pages mean these stories come in nicely digestible Alice-Munro-sized nuggets. But while Alice Munro’s stories sort of sail down twisting rivers these ones blast into different dimensions. Paragraphs leap between times and views, a sudden sexual turn surprises, and (if you’re like me) you’ll find yourself flipping back a page or two a lot to sort of re-place yourself inside the story. Deep in each one are rich veins of nearly inarticulatable emotions running underneath. Brené Brown’s new book gives structure to 87 different emotions but if you believe there are thousands and thousands more, well – this is the book for you! A unique stirring happens when you read about (for example) Deb’s sudden relationship with the child of old-college-friend parents (both openly cheating on each other) and how it then morphs into that of second-mom and then three-parent family and then three-parent-family-going-to-therapy. Does it end there? Not even close. I won’t ruin the many surprises left including the shocking finish. This all happens in a dozen pages! Surprises wait behind every corner, sentences are always fascinating (Opening line of the book: “It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious.”) There is nothing “hard” about the writing – no big words, I mean -- but the emotional cliffs are very jagged and steep.
6. A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003 – 2020by David Sedaris. (L/I/A) I woke up on June 11, 2018 and knew it immediately: Today was the day! One of the biggest of my interviewing life. I met David Sedaris’s publicist and limo driver in the roundabout of a posh downtown hotel and slipped into the leather backseat and hit record. (You can listen to the moment I pushed record and what happened after.) David invited me to join his interview at the CBC and we ended up carrying on holding mics in the green room and hallways and then back in the car on the way to his book signing. Many times while we spoke he pulled out his famous notebook and jotted down a quote or a phrase. At one point he asked the CBC interviewer and me for our mailing addresses (two weeks later a postcard arrived from Wisconsin) and, honestly, it felt like a connection. So, of course, when I cracked open the next 17 years of David’s diaries I flipped immediately to June 11, 2018, eager to read what I was sure would be at least three pages dedicated to what a prominent dent I’d made on his life. Certainly I’d rattled a few closely-held beliefs ajar, I knew that for sure. So I flip to page 464 and – crickets. In fact his entire Canadian tour was missing. I knew he’d signed books for seven hours in Ottawa the night before, got up early, walked 20,000 steps (master Fitbitter), then flown to Toronto for a day of media before another packed bookstore with a seven-hour line. But the entry before was May 20th: “On the train to Sussex I was struck by how green everything was. At one point I noticed a fellow passenger, a young man in a black coat that fell to the ground. It had a band around the waist that was slightly different texture, and when the guy stood to disembark, I asked him about it. ‘That coat is really something,’ I said. ‘Is it part of a uniform?’, ‘I’m, um, a priest,’ he told me. ‘Right,’ I said.” The next post was June 20th in Albuquerque where he tells the story of a woman in his book-signing line telling him about a pug who ate his own eyeball. “I made all the appropriate noises and facial expressions – horror, delight, horror again – and the woman said, ‘I knew you’d love that story.’ She got that right.” Longer, slower, less rehearsed than his books of essays these are perfectly flip-open-and-flip-through books whenever you want to go somewhere else for a minute with a true master of perception and observation. I'm not anyone uses the phrase X-rated anymore, but just a heads up that a lot entries... are. For more Sedaris's subtle brilliance here are three that aren't: 1) June 17, 2004 in Houston: “The host of last night’s show had problems reading his notes and announced in his introduction that I’d gotten my start with the National Public Rodeo.”, 2) July 17, 2010 in La Bagotiére: “Hugh started proofreading Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk this morning. ‘What are you laughing at?’ I called from the bed. ‘The Migrating Warblers,’ he said. Then I heard nothing. ‘Why aren’t you laughing?’ I called.”, 3) November 17, 2017 in San Diego: “After checking into my hotel, I walked to the harbor front, where I passed a store called America’s Heroes. The men’s T-shirts in the window read ARMY or USMC while the women’s pictured a shapely female silhouette above the words BOOTY CAMP.”
7. What Strange Paradiseby Omar El Akkad. (L/I/A) A child washes up on a foreign shore after his crumbling migrant boat falls into the sea. Told in a wonderfully paceful style of alternating “After” chapters (the day of the child opening his eyes, running away, and seeking safety), with “Before” chapters (departing and the boat ride) before it all culminates in a final chapter simply called “Now.” I went to school with Omar and from days working together on college papers it was easy to see his keen penetrating curiosity and it’s really been remarkable to see how it’s informed his incredible career as an award-winning journalist (covering Guantanamo Bay, the war in Afghanistan, and much more) and now his next career as an award-winning novelist. What Strange Paradise is his second novel and just won the Giller Prize (!) and his debut novel American War won the Oregon Book Award for fiction. Many scenes in this book will move and shake you. Pairs well with the Seven Stories graphic novel Zenobia.
8. All We Want: Building The Life We Cannot Buyby Michael Harris. (L/I/A) “There is an enormous difference between the adulthood that consumer culture promised and the one we inevitably inherit,” Michael writes on Page 127 of this tight 152-page journey exploring how we might write new stories of meaning that include forms of Craft, the Sublime, and Care. Michael is a truly wonderful writer and just hanging out with him and his frequently-cameoing husband Kenny is time well spent. So: how do we build the life we cannot buy? I feel like communities like this are a great place to start. This is a wonderful book mixing memoir, psychologist interviews, and long simmers in the bigger questions. Susan Orlean calls Michael "humane, insightful, and clear-eyed” and I highly recommend his work. I think my path to getting here was reading “I Have Forgotten How To Read” in 2018 The Globe and Mail and then picking up and absolutely falling in love with Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World. (Not quite it but if loneliness is ‘alone and sad’ then solitude is ‘alone and happy.’) and then hanging out with 3 Bookers and Michael in his Vancouver apartment. If you haven’t read Solitude, I might start there and then come this next. And, I think if you like Susan Cain's books, then you'll really like his, too. At minimum All We Want will insert healthy pauses before the next push of the vending machine button depicted on the cover.
9. Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder: Who Cut The Cheese?by Jo Nesbø. (L/I/A) Here is a pick from my seven-year-old son who loves this book: “The doctor is a doctor who invents a lot of stuff but he doesn’t invent really useful things so he’s basically just like an older kid and that’s why he’s neither rich or famous. And his friends are Nilly and Lisa and they’re trying to save the world from a lot of evil moon chameleons who look like baboons and can camouflage to look like anything including people or trees. And the moon chameleons eat intelligent stuff and humans are the most intelligent stuff in the galaxy so you know how some scientists think there are Martians on Mars? There are not! But there used to be! And then the moon chameleons ate all of them. And the book is very funny and about how Nilly and Lisa and the Doctor team up to save the world.” Jo Nesbø is the most popular Norwegian author of all time and, I just discovered, this book is part of a 4-book series that can be apparently be read in any order. For ages 8 to 12 or anyone long-intrigued by the idea of inventing a powder that gives people rocket-launching farts.
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Hey everyone,
Hope you and your family are safe and well and I hope reading may be offering you comfort and connection these days.
I will say my reading has become more jumpy. I was critical of myself when I first started noticing it – I'm addicted to social media! I have officially fractured my attention! – but also maybe ... it's just how I prefer to read. I think many of us are the same and yet we feel guilty saying it. Some books below I started years back and didn't like -- but then picked up years later. Others, especially non-fiction, I read maybe half the chapters and then pop in and out of others to see if I want to spend time inside.
THERE ARE NO RULES TO READING.
That's what I'm saying. Reading offers massive payoffs but also requires a massive time investment. Since reading a big book takes so long it can start feeling like a chore or something you "should" do more. (Hence a title like this goes crazy viral). So let's take a little pause to say: Read whatever makes you love reading and keep reading. Let's remove yet another layer of book shame and book guilt -- "I must read this entire book in order or I am a bad reader" -- and make room to just read what fills us up.
To the pages!
Neil
1. Atlas of the Heartby Brené Brown. (L/I/A) I think this might be Brené Brown’s best book. I don’t say that lightly! It is somehow rich as a dense chocolate cake and light as the whipped cream on top. After a wonderful introduction the book opens up into essentially … a dictionary. Brené and her research team catalogue 87 emotions that you think you know … but would probably benefit from a little private catchup with Brené. Sadness, for example. You know sadness, right? Who doesn't! But Brené colors it in when she says “Sadness and depression are not the same thing” and “Sadness and grief are not the same thing” and then explaining the research shows we enjoy sad movies because “We like to be moved. We like to feel connected to what it means to be human, to be reminded of our inextricable connection to one another. Sadness moves the individual ‘us’ toward the collective ‘us.’" Red underlined 100 emoji, right? Maybe three of them? Brené pulls off this magic trick on much trickier and nuanced emotions, too. On Anguish: “… powerlessness is what makes anguish traumatic. We are unable to change, reverse, or negotiate what has happened.” On Hope: "... We experience hope when we have the ability to set realistic goals ... we are able to figure out how to achieve those goals ... and we have agency..." Peppered with deep research, powerful quotes (“Boredom is your imagination calling to you.” Sherry Turkle) and Brené’s home-cooked Texan wit, this atlas deserves a place on your shelf and, yes, in your hernia -- heart! Heart, I meant heart. You know what I meant. (PS. Leslie and I sat down with Brené last year. Join us on the basement couch.)
2. Beautiful Oopsby Barney Saltzberg. (L/I/A) Leslie or I try to read three books to our kids every night before bed. I pick one, they pick one, everyone's happy. Over time standards for those books have gotten higher. Must be short! No time for Beatrix Potter here, sorry. But must also be good. Kids lose interest, that's trouble. Must be ‘cozy’ enough that they can sleep with it. (For some reason my kids love sleeping with books after we read to them. Sorry, big sharp Winnie-The-Pooh Treasury.) And, yes, in a totally perfect but rarely achieved world, the book might drop a little value-discovering or -reinforcing of some kind. Like I said: tall bar. But even with that tall bar a book that makes it in at least once a week is Beautiful Oops. Leslie used this in her classrooms before we had kids so it’s been “in the rotation” for over ten years. The thick, plastic-coated pages have real-looking rips and stains that are revealed to be the basis of yet another creative idea. “Every spill,” a page begins, before you flip up the spilled paint from the can – “has lots” -- flip up – “and lots” -- flip up -- “of possibilities” – with each flip revealing doodles that continue to render the oops beautiful. Welcome balm for perfectionistic high-achieving tendencies in this increasingly anxious world. Magical and highly recommended. (PS. Has anyone ever seen a Jamie Lee Curtis blurb on a book before?? This book has just one blurb and it's from her: "Beautiful OOPS is funny and fun and is the best gift to give anyone, any-age, anywhere, anytime...") (PS to the PS. Did you see Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the stars of the upcoming Everyone, Everywhere, All At Once. I can't wait for this movie and am excited to share that genius directors Daniels will be on 3 Booksthis spring.)
3. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. (L/I/A) The Road came out in 2006 and is Cormac McCarthy’s most popular book. It was the only one of his I’d read coming into this. (I put it on my 25 books to read during the pandemic ten years ago in March, 2020). That book was like nothing I’d ever read with extreme sparse language (no commas!) and rope-tight poise and control. His second most popular book is No Country For Old Men which came out in 2005. But this book? He wrote it well before those two blockbusters. 1985. Much slower pace, at times a wider plot, but same ridiculously impressive act of mind-boggling economy. Here are the first few sentences for a taste: “See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. His lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.” Me again. You can maybe tell the difference? Reading this book is like watching a master become a master. There isn’t a single misplaced word in the book. Deep, deep penetrating meditation on the role of violence in the history and (maybe) future of our species. Takes place in the very wild western USA and Mexico two hundred years ago and doubles as a writing masterclass. Warning: Extreme, extreme graphic violence throughout.
4. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Thinkby Hans Rosling. (L/I/A)I had this book recommended to me for years and finally picked it up when Chris Hadfield picked it. It’s essentially a long slideshow featuring a lot of “a ha” and “gotcha” type statistics proving why human quality of life is dramatically better now than it has ever been despite our neverending feeling that the world is about to end. I agree with a lot of the arguments but three things: 1) the tone is delivered with a bit of a “sipping martinis at the Davos afterparty” tone, 2) I thought Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker was a better book on the same topic. (I put it on my Best Books of 2018), and 3) I feel like the sheen on some of these books is starting to wear off with “Black Swan” sort of counter-arguments like this one.
5. Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communicationby Vanessa Van Edwards.(L/I/A)Vanessa calls herself a “recovering awkward person” and has a popular YouTube community with advice like “use more hand gestures” and “never pick up the phone in a bad mood.” Bit obvious? Easy to dismiss? I know it’s easy to be cynical. I was cynical, too. But as my old professor Gunnar Trumbull (best name ever) used to say, “It’s much harder to agree with something than disagree.” This book is really a stunning masterclass on body language. Vanessa does “detail by detail workshops” of fascinating moments like the famous first televised presidential debate in 1960 (where people who listened on the radio thought Nixon won and people who watched on TV thought Kennedy won … you’ll read why) and even famous flubs on Shark Tank by incredible entrepreneurs who years later built unicorns. Will most of us know most of what Vanessa discusses? Yes. But will everyone who reads this book will pick up at least a few gold nuggets / satoshis of bitcoin? I do. Highly recommended.
6. I’m Up!by Antoinette Portis. (L/I/A) An absolutely joyous board book to give to new parents or tired parents. “The sun is up, so I am up. / The tree is up. / The bird is up. / And I am up! / So where is everybody? / Mama, wake up! / Daddy, wake up! / See! The sun is up. The park is up. The birds are up and up and up … /” The book manages to empathize with the pure torture of interrupted sleep while also simultaneously celebrating the sheer awe of infant wonder and the love between parents and children. I personally liked it better than Go The F**k to Sleep. Highly recommended. (PS. Check out Antoinette's other great books here.)
7. The Maid by Nita Prose. (L/I/A) A really strange and wonderful thing just happened in the publishing world. One of the industry’s most successful editors, Nita Pronovost, who has edited books like Milk & Honey, Girl On A Train, and yes, You Are Awesome, just put out her debut novel under the name Nita Prose. (What's it called when it's not a pseudonym but not a stage name either? Like the Gary Vaynerchuck to Gary Vee thing is called... someone help me out.) I pre-ordered a handful of copies to support Nita and passed them around when the book pubbed last month. Did my copies help? No! Not at all. The Maid has become an instant #1New York Times bestseller after Good Morning America made it their Book Club pick. It already has 11,339 reviews on Amazon. IN LESS THAN TWO MONTHS. I'm on Page 50 myself and enjoying a Rosie-Project-ish vibe. And I just got this email from my mom who finished it: "Dear Neil : Thank you for your Gift of the Maid. I found myself quite immersed with the naive lead character in the Book. It was a very relaxing book, just what I needed during these tense times. An easy, fast, comfortable, read which I will certainly share with my Book Club. I was quite amused at the references to the Olive Garden being her favorite restaurant. It brought back some memories of my own. Thank You for your gift." Thank you Nita for your gift. And massive congratulations. Well deserved. (Maybe one day Nita will give me permission to share the first 'feedback letter' she gave on an early draft of You Are Awesome ... which I read in the car off my phone while Leslie drove and we had to pull over because it was making us cry.)
8. The Couple’s Comfort Book: A Creative Guide for Renewing Passion, Pleasure, & Commitmentby Jennifer Louden. (L/I/A) Speaking of Leslie, she is not currently crying nor driving. She's right here! Time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick: “John Gottman says that for a relationship to thrive it requires five positive interactions for every one negative. Between parenting our four children, busy work schedules, overflowing garbage bins, and our one-year-old up in the night and then ready for the day at 4am, it’s easy for most of Neil's and my interactions to be logistical, quick, and tactical: “Can you set the table?”, “He needs to poo!”, “Who’s going to get gas?” We’re lucky and grateful they’re not overly negative but by the time the kids are asleep we’re exhausted and there’s little time for those five positive interactions we want and need. The Couple’s Comfort Book by Jennifer Louden is full of ideas on how to nourish a relationship. A whole section called “But There’s Nothing To Do!” with lighthearted ideas like “Play hide and seek around your neighbourhood”, deeply emotional suggestions for “Nurturing during Crisis and Loss” and suggestions on “Releasing Resentment” and “How to Have a Nurturing Fight”. Such a delight to read with an endearingly quirky sense of humor, accessible to pick up and tuck away a tidbit, and a book I know I will come back to again and again.” (PS. Me again. Cormac McCarthy. Leslie will be joining me for some back-to-the-basement reflection and visioning in Chapter 100 of 3 Books. Do you have a question or something you'd like us to discuss? Post it here. Chapter 99 will be a bookstore hang. Chapter 98 will be with IN-Q. Come hang out.)
9. Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative Peopleby Debbie Millman. (L/I/A) What was the first podcast you listened to … ever? I think mine may have been Design Matters with Debbie Millmanwhich has been running for eighteen (!) years. Debbie is truly peerless. She is a former senior branding executive (designing campaigns for Burger King, Haagen-Dazs, and Star Wars), cofounder of the world's first graduate program in branding, author of seven books, and, here's the best part, just found true love and got married during the pandemic. This book is a wonderful transcript of her best interviews over the years including Chris Ware, Allison Bechdel, Ira Glass, and Brené Brown. Features lovely cameos (Forewords, Afterwords, Intros, oh my) from Tim Ferriss, Roxane Gay, and Maria Popova. A very dense cinder block of wisdom I will treasure. Highly recommended. (PS. Hang out with me and Debbie here.)
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Hey everyone,
Well, well, welcome to the seventh year of Neil’s Monthly Book Club. Some of you are new here and others have been hanging out with me since insanecommentsthreads back on 1000 Awesome Things.
I am so grateful to hang out with a city of people just talking about books every month. It’s becoming harder to foster digital communities outside social media but I like to think we're successfully pulling it off. Thank you for this relationship.
Also, every January I remind y’all I have four email lists: a daily awesome thing, a lunar podcast drop, a biweekly poem or speech, and this monthly book club.
I hope you are safe, healthy, and, although it’s not easy, practicing positivity.
Let’s make it a wonderful year.
Onto the books!
Neil
1. Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How To Think Deeply Againby Johann Hari. (L/I/A) Back in Chapter 49 of 3 Books I sat down with Dr. Andrea Sereda who is on the front lines of the safe supply movement in the opioid epidemic. (She once flippantly told me: “I give drugs to drug users.”) One of her most formative books was Chasing The Scream by Johann (“Yo-han”) Hari. The book transfixed me, expanded my views on drugs, and I put it in The Very Best Books I Read in 2019. Three years later Johann is back with a very different offering. Like most of us, he noticed his attention fracturing but, unlike most of us, he decided to decamp for Provincetown, Massachusetts without his phone for six weeks to explore the issue. What emerges is a big feast of a story about many things happening at once: rises in speed and switching, increased algorithm manipulation (with an incredible spotlight on the Center for Humane Technology), crippling flow states, and the death of free-range childhoods. This is a battle we are all fighting today. Reading this book to be better equipped in the trenches. Highly recommended.
2.Up In The Treeby Margaret Atwood. (L/I/A) Margaret Atwood’s dad was a forest entomologist and she grew up in the backwoods of northern Quebec. I imagine her wandering under white spruce and jack pines letting her imagination fester. She started writing poems and stories at six years old and didn’t start full-time school until she was twelve. When she arrived at the University of Toronto in the 1950s she had a dozen years of poetry under her belt and started up a serigraph poster-making business. She ran it off a ping-pong table and the business helped her master lettering and drawings. These histories feed all the way into the playful profundity of this whimsical children’s book she wrote, lettered, and illustrated in 1976 – many years before her big hits like The Handmaid’s Tale. “We live in a tree, way UP in a tree. It’s fun in the sun And a pain in the rain, But we both have umbrellas, Way up in the tree.” A magical treat that feels like a lost book but was graciously republished in 2006 by House of Anansi Press in beautiful new hardcover. 32 pages of simple rhymes with deep soul. A trip you'll be glad you took. Publisher says it's for ages 3-6 but I say ignore that. You do you.
3. The Apollo Murdersby Chris Hadfield. (L/I/A) I stepped into astronaut Chris Hadfield’s kitchen last month. His tiny dog New Henry was jumping at my knees and he had a stack of hundreds of Christmas cards on his marble kitchen table. I was nervous and while setting up my microphones I told Chris I was on page 188 of his book but that I’m reading slow because it’s so technical. “Space is technical,” he deadpanned back. This paceful potboiler (and debut novel) made me feel like a kid reading Tom Clancy books like Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Chris is a teacher at his core and this spy thriller doubles as an accessible education of the US and Russian space programs throughout the 50s and 60s. Like Tarantino did in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Chris weaves dozens of real people and real histories into the fiction. As you blast off into a non-existent Apollo 18 mission to the moon half the fun is trying to figure out what really happened and what didn’t. (For my conversation with Chris on 3 Books go to Apple or Spotify.)
4. The Art of Roughhousing: Good Old-Fashioned Horseplay and Why Every Kid Needs Itby Anthony T. DeBenedet. (L/I/A) And now it’s time for the Leslie’s Pick – a book chosen by the woman I’m lucky to be married to: “The kids say I’m not as good at wrestling as Neil, that I’m more of a cuddler. So I’ve been reading up on roughhousing to get them laughing, working out their angst, learning about consent and boundaries, and greasing the gears of our relationship. Full of amazing ideas ranging from simple to complex, for six-month-olds to teenagers, from as easy as ‘lie on the couch and pretend to sleep’ and ‘build a pillow fort around yourself and don’t let your kids touch you’ to full-on gymnastics-inspired physical stunts to do with your child. Warning: Yesterday we shattered a vase! But I’m proud to report the boys are beginning to accept mom as a wrestler.”
5. Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerfulby Darryl Cunningham. (L/I/A) One of the very few mementos I have of my friend Chris Kim is his tattered copy of Maus by Art Spiegelman. He handed me this “graphic novel” about a dozen years ago in his Boston apartment and insisted I read it. I opened to discover a cartoon-drawn cat-and-mouse tale of … the Holocaust? The book is still controversial but it blew me away and I tumbled into the graphic novel hole -- falling in love with works like Persepolis, Summer Blonde, and The Park Bench. I find the format so compelling for communicating twisting stories and detailed histories on a slightly tilted emotional valence. The graphic novel universe continues to expand. Billionaires is marketed as “comics journalism” and reads like a detailed and well-researched biography of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and Jeff Bezos. Cunningham doesn’t just take the simplified position of “billionaires are bad” but rather wades through denser reads like Dark Money by Jane Mayer, The Everything Store by Brad Stone, and Dial M for Murdoch by Tom Watson and sort of shakes out enough provocative facts and stories to stitch together their lives. Not a definitive read in any way but a great catchup on some of the most powerful people of our time.
6. Otto: A Palindramaby Jon Agee. (L/I/A) And the expanding graphic novel universe now also includes what I’m assuming is the first ever … palindrama. That is: an Alice-on-an-acid-trip style story of a little boy named Otto hypnotically falling into his soup. The book is told entirely in palindromes and opens with Otto sitting in his room reading his comic book LOL beside a bookshelf of toys including Mr. Alarm and Tuna Nut. His mom and dad are downstairs tasting the soup they’ve just made (“Mmm”) and then start calling him. He runs down but starts playing catch with his dog Pip and then his dad yells “Not now Otto – wonton!” He looks up from his bowl of soup to encourage Otto to “Nosh, son!” It gets way weirder from here.Instant classic. Highly recommended!
7.Carrying The Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeyby Michael Collins. (L/I/A) Say you were one of three people selected to blast off on Apollo 11, the first ever mission to land on the moon, but then just before you go they bring the three of you into a room and sit you down. “Neil, Buzz, you two will go down to the moon, walk around, plant a flag, give a speech to the world, talk to the President. Michael? Uh, yeah, well, we need someone to stay up on the ship. Sorry!” Michael takes the bummer in stride and seemingly absorbs every aspect of the experience and channels it into this poetic first-person account of the space program. Part of the beauty is that fifty years ago astronauts were a little less … specialized. Michael Collins is a wide-ranging thinker who writes in a wise, literary style. The book came out in 1974 and is still in print today and part of what's magical in here are the seemingly endless forwards and prefaces. Get this: Charles Lindbergh, who flew the first ever solo transatlantic flight in 1927 (a harrowing 33-hour hour trip from New York to Paris!) writes a completely breathtaking introduction that captures the human spirit towards flight. Lindbergh died the year the book came out so the foreword doubles as a baton from our attempted voyages into the air back in the 1800s to the Musk / Bezos space flights of today (which are discussed in the latest foreword written by Collins in his late 80s.) A wonderful book that deserves a spot on your shelf. And speaking of baton-passing, if you want to explore that idea a bit, you can watch my TED Listen from a few years back which has “What is your baton?” as its central theme.
8. Klara and the Sunby Kazuo Ishiguro. (L/I/A)A slow-paced future dystopian spine-tingler told in first person by Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF) available for purchase by parents looking to give their kids a leg-up on the tutoring scene. I thought the first act with Klara’s experience of the world staring out the window of a retail store was just gripping and the smooth, precise world-building is mesmerizing. I had never read anything by Ishiguro before (no book guilt, no book shame) but when I knew he’d won the Pulitzer Prize and the Booker, I was getting my dictionary handy. Turns out you don’t need it! The language is deceptively simple and runs like poetry. I will say the book’s pace really dragged in the wide, wide middle. And I wish I could say there was a huge payoff at the end but … I didn’t feel it. Two or three scenes had electric energy and I found myself going back to reread them but maybe my internet-burnt brain was bogged down by too many long, slow turns. My biggest takeaway it that I’d like to go read one of his older books like Never Let Me Go or TheRemains of the Day.
9. Inhabiting the Negative Spaceby Jenny Odell. (L/I/A) Something happens to my brain after I fall deeply in love with a piece of art from any artist. I tell myself I must soak in their entire body of work in order to, I don’t know, better merge DNA strands or something? That means I’m still listening to new Radiohead albums and I watch every Charlie Kaufman movie. Does the strategy pay off? Well, it’s like panning for gold. For every “King of Limbs” there’s an “In Rainbows”, for every “Synecdoche, New York” there’s an “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." The panning for gold phase of following an artist has lows but also gives some of the richest pleasures as the artist (often) fine-tunes their voice and laser focuses on that one exact specific thing they – not “the market” – want to focus on. So that’s kind of why I picked up this Jenny Odell “book.” Book in quotation marks because it’s just the speech transcript for the Commencement Address Jenny gave virtually during covid to the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. This is only for superfans of How To Do Nothing, which I'd highly recommend starting with first.
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Hey everyone,
We’re closing in on another year.
As Toronto nights get colder and darker I’m really noticing the toll of the past two years. Living inside the pandemic’s emotional envelope has been draining and heavy. Some days just feel like molasses.
It was in that goopy emotional state that my distant college friend Mat texted me out of the blue last week to tell me his dad Andy had suddenly died of a drowning accident. Just horrible news. I've never met Andy but felt like I had. He was a member of this community since the beginning and often wrote back to my Book Club emails with feedback, suggestions, and recommendations. Later in our exchange Mat wrote "He felt strangely close to you via email" ... and I paused on that. Because, well, I feel strangely close to all of you, too. I guess if you've read my books or emails for a while, you already knew that.
The obituary Mat and his sister wrote made me cry. If you feel like briefly connecting with a stranger who read every single one of these book club emails up to this one, you can read it here.
It’s the post-Thanksgiving swoon down south and as a Canadian I’ve been enjoying all the gratitude flying around Twitter. Normally Twitter is a rabbit hole of endless emotional pain but this time of year there are some really nice strings like this one.
What am I thankful for?
This community.
I really have no idea why you’re reading this. Did you get The Book of Awesome as a Christmas present ten years ago? Give one to a teacher? Are you a Cover To Cover Club member of 3 Books? Hear my Google Talk on The Happiness Equation? Get You Are Awesome in your company’s orientation package? Watch me on the news two days ago? Or maybe your great Aunt Linda forwarded you this email because she forwards you three dozen emails a day and you just started reading it and you really have no idea where you are right now.
Well, however you got here, let me just say you made it to the right place.
Thanks for hanging out for a monthly chat about books.
This month’s book club is dedicated to Andy Balez.
Neil
1. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Do you realize in the late 90s it was apparently not uncommon for a magazine to send a freelance journalist to just, you know, climb Mount Everest? And come back and write a story about it? It happened! Outside Magazine sent Jon Krakauer to climb Mount Everest and report on the growing commercialization of the mountain. He ended up being intimately close to one of the greatest Everest disasters of all time with eight people – including the leaders of both tour companies he was following – dying over a dramatic few hours at the summit. Jon wrote a massive 17,000 word article in the September, 1996 issue of Outside (check out thegripping cover) and then expanded it into this book the next year. An extremely straight-faced thriller (I don't think there is a single exclamation mark in the book) with twists and turns and plenty of provocative questions around decision-making under stress and leadership in crisis. I know a business school professor who uses it this book in class. And, it really does feel you’re climbing Everest when you read it. Highly recommended.
2.Book of Longingby Leonard Cohen. There’s a wonderful music shop in Toronto called Sonic Boom and they have a small masterfully curated book section in the corner. (I once walked out of there with Lincoln in the Bardo, The Tao of Wu, and a Choose Your Own Adventure. You can check out their online bookstore here.) Anyway, I was there last week glancing at this book on a table. A twenty year old book of Leonard Cohen poetry? I knew nothing about it. But then the two women browsing next to me looked at my book and started gushing. “Oh, I love that book!”, “Oh me too, it’s one of my favorites!” I was surprised but even more surprised when they actually started quoting some of the poems. I learned Kendall was marrying Kennedy’s brother and they’d flown in from Vancouver and Calgary for wedding dress shopping. I got intrigued with the poems and asked them to dog-ear all their favorites and I suddenly ended up buying a book with a couple dozen poems marked by two strangers. As we say in our Values: Good things happen in bookstores. How are the poems? Strange, sharp, occasionally confusing, often delightful. (I agree with a New York Times blurb on the book saying: “Book Of Longing has exceptional range. It is clear yet steamy, cosmic yet private, both playful and profound.”) Here’s the poem Thousands – one of my favorites so far:
Out of the thousands who are known, or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts trying to look like the real thing. Needless to say I am one of the fakes, and this is my story
3. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Bodyby Roxane Gay. (Trigger warning: This review talks about sexual abuse.) I was very nervous to interview Roxane last year. (I'm sure you can tell.) I prepare for my interviews by setting myself an unachievable goal: read everything the person I'm interviewing has ever written plus read everything that’s ever been written about them plus read their three most formative books. I love living in somebody else’s psyche for couple weeks but rarely make it further than where ten or twenty hours takes me. But when I interviewed Roxane I spent much, much longer and came up much, much shorter. Where do you begin? Her thousands of Goodreads reviews (where she’s often the most popular reviewer on the whole site), her trove of Medium articles, her “Work Friend” New York Times column, her prolific Twitter feed, or, you know, her actual books. So many books! She’s written novels and edited poetry and even written Black Panther: World of Wakanda. I read and really enjoyed her essay collection Bad Feminist last year but it took me a lot longer to finally start Hunger. And once you start this book? There is no turning back. An incredible window into a young Haitian-American woman from an upstanding family coming of age in 70s and 80s Omaha, Nebraska ... and feeling many kinds of hunger throughout. In the beginning the book appears to be about food and weight. She opens Chapter 3 by saying "At my heaviest I weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches tall” but then we are taken deeply into her horrifying teenage rape and many zig-zagging challenges that follow. She has an economical “Hemingway on Twitter” style of writing that reads very fast and addictive once you fall into it. I often talk about research showing that fiction completely absorbs us into another identity and helps grow empathy, compassion, and understanding. This book absolutely does the same. Here’s a paragraph from the last third of the book: “Sometimes, I get angry when I think about how my sexuality was shaped. I get angry that I can draw a direct line between the first boy I loved, the boy who made me into the girl in the woods, and the sexual experiences I have had since. I get angry because I no longer want to feel his hands on my desires. I worry that I always will.” Emotionally shaking, highly recommended.
4. The Birds of Americaby John James Audobon. I found this massive book of bird paintings in a used book store last month and left it on the coffee table where it’s great flipping through with the kids. Completely mesmerizing realistic hand-drawn paintings of hundreds and hundreds of birds. I know little about James Audobon and the Audobon Society and it seems his life really only still getting colored in. The book is stunning – costing over two million dollars in today’s money to make and taking over fourteen years of field observations and drawings in the early 1800s. The copy I found was a 1950s reprint. A feast for birders with often ‘life sized’ paintings of hundreds of birds. Contains at least a half dozen birds that are now extinct including the Carolina parakeet, Passenger pigeon, Labrador Duck, Great Auk, Heath Hen, and Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. (Or is the Ivory-billed extinct???)
5. The Americansby Robert Frank. After World War II Robert Frank emigrated to America and spent time in the early 50s travelling across the country capturing an outsider’s view of his new homeland. The Guardian describes this book of simple black-and-white photos as ‘perhaps the most influential photography book of the twentieth century.’ There is a photo of three skinny black men in black suits, bow ties, and straw hats leaning on a shiny black car in a grassy field with the simple title “Funeral – St. Helena, South Carolina.” There is a poofy-haired middle-aged redhead in a sleek one-shouldered dress leaning over a craps table in a dark room under a bright hanging light with the title “Casino – Elko, Nevada”. There is a long black-and-white marble counter with stools crammed full of twentysomething white men sipping drinks underneath giant cardboard ‘Orange Whip 10 cents” signs over their head with the title “Drug store – Detroit.” So much more than meets the eye in every picture and a book you’ll flip through again and again. Jack Kerouac writes in the introduction: “Anybody doesnt like these pitchers dont like potry, see?”
6. The Camping Tripby Jennifer K. Mann. I think I was probably twenty-four when I first went camping. Overnight camping, I mean. I’d been to camp sites, I’d been to camp grounds, I’d even stayed in the occasional cottage in the bush and roasted marshmallows for the full, you know, camp-like experience. But I never really went camping. My Indian immigrant parents weren’t much help on the outdoors. My dad never built a fire, my mom never pitched a tent. Who had time to go camping between extra clarinet practice and math club? (I can see my parents laughing while reading this. Actually, my mom laughing. Pretty sure my dad deletes all my emails. Hi mom!) Anyway, you might see why I loved this book sharing the story of (younger than twenty-four-year-old) Ernestine going camping for the first time. I could relate to her fear of fish in the lake, feeling like her feet are hurting on hikes, and being scared and up all night in the tent. I could also relate to the awe of seeing the biggest tree you’ve ever seen, making your first campfire s’mores, and the awe of staring into the endless stars at night. A wonderful book.
7. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry. Dave Cheesewright was my boss for four years when I worked at Walmart. He's the retired former CEO of Walmart International and maybe the most exceptional corporate leader I’ve seen in action. (He was the basis of many, many stories in The Happiness Equation although I couldn’t name him at the time.) He told me The Little Prince was one of his three most formative books and I just had fun revisiting it. The book is short! Only 16,534 words on 125 pages. And I discovered it is the third top-selling book of all-time! (Go ahead and guess which two books you think are above it and then click here to see if you were right.) An astoundingly dense mass of accessible wisdom with drawings Saint-Exupéry did himself throughout. Incredibly tragic-ironic (what’s the word for that?) that the opening scene of this book – a pilot crash-landing his tiny plane in the desert – was essentially replicated by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry himself who crash landed in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Occupied France July 1944. His body was never found and a remnant of his plane only discovered in 2003. The Little Prince has been translated into 300 languages for good reason and, if you’re still not convinced, here’s the entirety of one of my favorite chapters in the book -- Chapter 13 – coming to us courtesy of some dodgy 1994 Angelfire page. That’ll give you a taste of the rest.
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Hey everyone,
I’m writing this from an airplane for the first time in a year and a half.
When I launched this monthly book club back in October 2016 I was doing most of my reading and writing on planes. Giving like fifty or sixty speeches a year meant lots of time in the skies.
As the pandemic fogs start lifting I know I’ll never go back to that level of airplane time again. Why? Well, the adages are true: Time is irreplaceable. Kids never grow younger. We are what we do. And our days really are our lives.
And yet here I am. Back on a plane. And, to just suddenly pop out the other side of the hedge here, there do seem to be aspects of traveling that are just so precious … and maybe even irreplaceable? Like a deep five hours of being lost in a good book before landing somewhere with palm trees. The way I could completely tear apart a chapter of a book and put it all back together again under a lonely dim light with a hundred people sleeping around me. And the endless natural zoomout that comes from looking out little windows and reflecting on the endless beauty of the world around us.
Thank you deeply for another chat across time and space. Wherever you are, wherever you may be, I’m excited as always to hang out at the end of the month and chat about books. This is a real joy and I always love your responses with comments or suggestions anytime.
Lots of love to you and yours,
Neil
1. Frankensteinby Mary Shelley. Somewhere near the beginning of the pandemic David Mitchell reminded us: “If a book is in print a hundred years later there is a very good reason.” How many books over a hundred years old do you read? Vast swaths of our cultural history all annexed into stories with the same fears and dreams and struggles and hopes we’re all still wrestling through today. The sheer number of ways this two-hundred-year-old book touched me is impossible to count. The story is well known: The well-educated Victor Frankenstein spends years away at college passionately building what becomes a monster who escapes and haunts him to his final days. Simple, right? But this book is broken into three and... that’s just book one and three, really. Book two hits something like The Empire Strikes Back with the entire book a 1700s gilded British gentry type monologue from ‘the daemon’ (who isn't named the entire book) to Victor himself when they meet in one of the most incredibly vivid scenes I’ve ever read – on any icy summit high up in the Alps. That flips all the overtrodden narratives about Frankenstein on its head and buries the final book under an infinitely complicated tapestry of emotionally wrenching scenes, moral questions, and scarring moments that hit deep. This book is what fiction is all about. I can’t recommend it enough. After reading the book I read up on Mary Shelley a bit. Wow, she suffered immense loss in her life. Her mother (also a writer!) died giving birth to her in 1797. In 1815, she gave birth to her first daughter who died two weeks later. That daughter was never named. In fact, it was a dream she had where the baby was simply warmed by the fire and came to life before being snatched away by a hideous demon which -- yes, seriously -- inspired this book. To say there is real pain baked into the pages would be an understatement. Mary's pain kept going and she gave birth to four more children ... all of whom died before the age of three. Many relatives also perished from suicide. And a brain tumor took Mary's own life in her early 50s. Heartbreaking. Heartmelting. Heartwrenching. And beautiful. (One fyi: I just accidentally ended up with the 1818 first edition. That's where the link above goes to on Project Gutenberg. Here's the more popular and well-known 1831 third edition. And here's a list of the differences.) Add this to your bucket list! A must-read feast for the senses.
2.Hell Yeah Or Noby Derek Sivers. Nobody beats to their own drum more than Derek Sivers. Tim Ferriss calls him a ‘philosopher-operator and poet-recluse of the highest order.’ He lives all over the world with his nine-year-old son. He journals hundreds of pages and distills them down into 100-word bits of poignancy … and absolutely brilliant 3-minute TED Talks. (I used “the first follower” in my Walmart leadership development classes!) What’s his secret? Well, he says in that glib-but-honest Derek-Sivers-way, “It helps making a million dollars first.” He started CD Baby in that little blink after people started buying stuff online but before Napster and mp3 takeovers. (Anyone else have a favorite Winamp skin?) Since then? He’s sold the company and essentially dedicates his time to being a full-time … learner and giver. That’s it! And we are all greater for it. He reads so much, posts honest reviews, shares wonderfully accessible essays, writes and sells his own books at cost (from only his own website, to only his readers.) He’s very Dave Eggers when he says he doesn’t really even believe in .. apps! Or games! Or social media! He’s simultaneously extremely off-grid but yet his Web 1.0 online offering has that Berkshire-Hathaway-Annual-Report-feel of being just absolutely teeming with wisdom, written on a piece of paper by an eight year old. This book’s title is one of Derek’s most famous principles: Hell Yeah or No! For every offer you get in life make sure it’s a “Hell Yeah!” or else? Automatic no. (I wrote about it, too.) A wonderful compact collection of wisdom. I am very happy to share Derek gave 3 Books a “Hell Yeah!” and will be our next guest on the upcoming new moon. For release date? Look up to the sky. Ow-ow-owooooooooo!
3. Miss Nelson Is Missingby James Marshall. Okay, those were two pretty long reviews to kick this thing off so let me just say that this was one of my absolute favorite books as a kid and I want to say thank you to downtown Toronto indie bookstore Queen Books for putting it in their front window and giving me a huge nostalgia jolt. I ran inside, bought a few copies, and it filled me with delight. Click here to order from Queen Books yourself or click here to have Mrs. Wrightsman, a first grade teacher, read you the book right now on Youtube. Lie on your stomach on a dirty green carpet for full effects.
4. Foreverby Judy Blume. I am getting addicted to outdoor podcasts. I love that aural tapestry that comes from skateboarders rolling past, birdcalls in the background (anyone remember this post I wrote on 1KAT???), and strangers walking right up to ask questions. Last month I chatted with Zafar the Hamburger Man on a street bench outside his burger joint and pulled up metal chairs in Bryant Park in Manhattan with Mel Robbins on her pub day. One of Mel’s three most formative books is Forever by Judy Blume. When she was in middle-school the girls kept a contraband copy on top of the circle sink in the bathroom and told each other which passages to read with the steamiest sex scenes. It became the book that introduced her to sex. Our kids should be so lucky! Sure, the book has vivid sex scenes. Sure, some of them are ... strange. (They name his penis ‘Ralph’ and Mel said she thought all guys called their penis Ralph for a long time). But we need to teach sex – the feelings and emotions of sex -- through reading. Do we not? Or am I just a father of boys who is very afraid of the Internet? Do you have a sex-scene-filled book that you might actually pass along to your kids? Reply and let me know. I’d love to share a few over the years. As Judy Blume told us way back in Chapter 6, "Bring back sex scenes in books!"
5. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdomby Jonathan Haidt. The subtitle is a lot more accurate than the title here. It’s not really about happiness! And, actually, there’s not that much “finding”, either. More exploring. Exploring modern truths through ancient wisdom. Who would buy that, though? This is one of Jonathan Haidt’s earliest books -- published fifteen years ago -- but it holds up incredibly well. A great place to start hanging out with him. Fifteen years ago, Jonathan was a guy with a slew of degrees teaching an intro psych course at the University of Virginia. And he was a big reading nerd who had spent years seeking wisdom through deep readings of the Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Old and New Testaments, the Koran, Carnegie, Tolstoy, Proust, and thousands of others. To me this book feels like one of the world’s big thinkers issuing himself a throwdown: Could he ferment and codify some of his own thinking based on all the classics he’d read while making sure it all braided together into the modern research he was doing? “What should I do, how should I live, and whom should I become?” That’s actually the book’s first line. And what follows are not “easy answers”– no clever 2x2s or pithy one-liners – but rather a very deep introspective dinner conversation about life’s biggest truths and how we might explore them today. Adversity! Divinity! Love! Virtue! You will leave with more questions than answers but it’s such a privilege and joy to consider them. If the world serves you too much stock, simple, and shallow, this is a wonderfully philosophical door that opens straight into the deep.
6. The Look of the Bookby Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth. Zoom in on the picture of this book at the top of this email. There are little snippets from 14 different book covers. How many do you recognize? I think I got maybe seven or eight. This book doesn’t even pretend to denounce the phrase “You can’t judge a book by its cover” – it just glorifies that the opposite is true, takes us on a vivid and wonderful history of book covers, and lets us mentally explore the specific power that book jackets provide. Especially in this new day and age of icons-and-one-inch-avatars-for-everything. (Do not get me started on Memojis.) Veers a bit too fiction-only for my tastes and the organization is scattered like a messy desk. But if you like messy desks and want to stroke your inner book nerd, you will find great joy in this book.
7. Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition: A Theory of Judgmentby Howard Margolis.Thinking about thinking really has become a huge trend. The original popularity of “life hacking” or “lifestyle design” blogs. The rise in psychedelics and consciousness exploration. The somewhat originally-meta-but-now-commonplace-podcast-trope of asking people how they’re thinking about everything they’re thinking about. WE SURE ARE DOING A LOT OF THINKING THESE DAYS. But, uh, how do we actually think? Like ... what even is thinking? How do our brains, you know, work? I recommend this dense, academic University of Chicago publication which offers an extremely articulate and well-argued answer: patterns. That’s it! Now you know. We think in patterns. We don’t think like computers. Even though that’s what most people believe. Inputs, outputs, dusty hard drives, all out of RAM when we’re looking for the remote. No! The first chapter shows a number of mental models that seem simple on the surface but stump our pattern-based brains. From there the book gets perhaps a bit too heavy – okay, definitely too heavy – but it hammers home this wonderful point that helps you see things like ‘the stories you tell yourself’ or ‘the tribes you’re part of’ or ‘the cultures you believe in’ or ‘the habits that mould your identity’ as much, much more malleable than they appear on the surface.
8. Skunk and Badgerby Amy Timberlake and Jon Klassen. My friend Michael Bungay-Stanier, author of the million-copy (!) bestseller The Coaching Habit, gave me this book for my birthday. I am glad he did. I thought it was a kids book! It looks like a kids book! It’s marketed as a kids book! But it is not a kids book. Badger lives alone in his distant aunt’s row house when the doorbell rings and Skunk informs him she’s given him permission to live there, too. What follows is a complex portrait of friendship which pulls off The Little Prince-like acrobatics of smacking you in the head with sentences that seem simple on the surface but reveal much deeper truths. Jon Klassen is the atmospheric award-winning artist behind popular picture books like This is Not My Hat and his work – featured in full color shiny illustration-only pages!!! – really brings the story to life. Last thing: when I say this book isn’t for kids I don’t mean kids can’t read it. There’s nothing objectionable. I just thought it was written at a pretty advanced level and the themes went really deep. Or maybe I’m just dumb! One of the two.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
It’s been a long September and I try to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last.
I have now passed 500 straight days writing one daily pandemic awesome. I post them daily here and you can get them over email, too. I also released a podcast with my two-year-old and one with incredible puzzler Jason Shiga whose mesmerizing book I revisited below.
And now let's get to the books...
Neil
1. Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint For Work That Makes You Come Aliveby Jonathan Fields. Podcasts were exploding in 2016 when I went on book tour for The Happiness Equation. Knowing nothing about podcasts except “they’re popular!” I said yes to every request I received. I did maybe a hundred podcasts and burnt myself out. I was running way too fast and now when I look back the only podcast I actually remember doing was Good Life Project with Jonathan Fields. It was live! That was the first difference. I went to an address in New York and was surprised it was … residential. I was welcomed in by a gentle, mild-mannered, deep-eyed guy named Jonathan who made me a cup of tea and then invited me into his studio. We went deeper and further than I had in other interviews. Jonathan is that kind of person. Deep, far -- and always serving. He has a wonderful big-hearted community and, perhaps because of the wisdom he exudes, the question he's been asked by them, more than any other, is 'What should I do with my life?' Well, he’s spent years thinking about it and put together a new assessment tool called Sparketypes which is designed to help people ‘find the work that comes alive.’ The book just dropped and it’s a really beautiful aid for people looking to find their best self at work. It's got the 'key takeaways!' part of a traditional business assessment tool (like MBTI or StrengthsFinder) but there's a lot of heart and soul in it embracing the grey. Here's a cool trailer Jonathan put together and his chat on The Rich Roll Podcast just came out, too. And, maybe most importantly, here's the link to the free Sparketype assessment online. (I'm a Maven / Maker. What are you?) Highly recommended.
2. The People In The Trees by Hanya Yanagihara. Mrs. Dorsman sat us down on the green carpet on our first day of third grade. “Where did you go this summer?,” she asked. "I went on a road trip to California and I went to Rome and I went to Tokyo … and I went to Antarctica … and I went to the moon!” Puzzlement set in before the big reveal a couple seconds later. “THROUGH BOOKS!" Did your third grade teacher say something similar? I think most of us have heard a variation of ‘books are places’ but I admit I hadn’t thought about it in a long time until I read The People In The Trees. An absolutely stunningly detailed visual feast of a novel that completely transports you into the dense jungles surrounding a lost tribe on a remote South Pacific island. The novel reads completely like non-fiction. I flipped back to the front a couple times to confirm it was a novel. It opens with some Reuters and Associated Press wire articles explaining how 71-year-old Nobel Prize winning scientist Norton Perina has been charged with sexual abuse of a minor. You then meet the first narrator – Norton’s buddy Ronald – who explains he’s painstakingly collected Norton’s handwritten memoirs from jail – the shocking true story! -- and is publishing them for you here with his added preface, epilogue, and detailed footnotes throughout. There are a lot of things happening in this book all at the same time which results in a kind of fast-pulsing-beats-over-slow-strings type quality. Narrator reliability, big questions around globalization, science, and anthropological ethics, and sharp prose that constantly guts and illuminates. When Norton heads into the jungle he says “A creature, its malachite-dark back diamonded with scales, skittered across my feet, a wraithlike monkey shrieked from a tree…” Then: “Around me the jungle hummed, a low, ceaseless buzz, as if the entire island were some sort of mysterious appliance plugged into an enormous yet invisible energy source.” Later: “There were so many shades and tones of green – serpent, aphid, pear, emerald, sea, grass, jade, spinach, bile, pine, caterpillar, cucumber, steeped tea, raw tea." Illuminating, right? But it's gutting, too. After revealing his mother died of a brain aneurysm he writes “… I pictured it often, all but heard the soft explosion as the artery burst, saw the coil of soggy, flaccid tissue, the black blood staining the brain the shining, sticky red of pomegranates.” Haunting, hopeful, smooth, sharp, tender, fierce. A long and slow big deep breath of a book.
3.The High-Five Habitby Mel Robbins. Five years ago I flew into Vegas early and caught the speaker onstage the day before me. It was Mel Robbins. I was amazed watching her zap the room like a lightning bolt. I mean, she had a big room full of accountants in crisp dress shirts laughing, crying, and standing up in their chairs. Accountants! It was magic. She distills messages down to their most simplified versions imaginable – and then somehow simplifies them again. She's not a pretender and serves from a place of deep humility. That's one of her many superpowers. (Here’s a few of her others.) Since I met Mel she’s gone on to host a TV show, become Audible’s most listened to audio personality, lead a massive online community, and now has her first book coming out in five years. What’s it about? High fiving yourself in the mirror. No, I’m not joking. Actually high-fiving yourself in the actual mirror. Sounds beyond trite, trivial, and eye-rolly. But, the weird thing is, it actually works. Have you heard the research around smiling when you get up? Saying I love you to yourself? Making eye contact for thirty seconds? There’s a lot out there and, sure, many of us have Stuart Smalley sketches floating through our heads but, I say, in this day and age, with an endless barrage of spam designed to bait and hook our attentions while simultaneously making us feel horrible about ourselves and emptying our wallets, well, all we really have for sure is ourselves. So we better figure out how to treat ourselves well. This book helps you do that.
4. Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book chosen by the teacher, community leader, and mother of four boys I am lucky to be married to. Over to Leslie: “A mentor of mine once told me that it’s impossible for the human brain to be curious and judgmental at the same time. Maybe it’s partly for this reason that Neil and I have always agreed that one of the most important values we want to foster is curiosity. Bodies are Cool does just that. It really is the best book I’ve read encouraging all types of body positivity and inviting children and parents into a safe space to connect over curiosity of different bodies, discuss their own personal preferences, and (maybe) better understand their own expressions of themselves. Catchy rhyming text and popping illustrations with incredible body diversity leads to endless launching points for discussion. It’s hard not to dream of a world where every child grows up thinking this way about their body and everybody else’s!"
5.The Righteous Mindby Jonathan Haidt. I think it was my friend David Cain, author of one of my favorite blogs Raptitude, who first suggested I read Jonathan Haidt. Since then I have picked up three of his books, listened to him on a lot of podcasts (Dax Shepard, Joe Rogan, Jonathan Fields, Sam Harris) and have come to see him as one of the most fascinating and fearless thinkers around. When I picked up this book I had no idea what the title meant and the first few phrases in the book – moral psychology, moral minds -- didn't help. But eventually my slow brain started catching up and I began vibing on Jonathan’s (very quick) wavelength. Things started falling into place. Part 1 of the book explores the idea that "intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second" (he has a wonderful 'elephant and rider' metaphor around our conscious and subsconscious minds -- little video here), Part 2 that "there's more to morality than harm and fairness", and Part 3 that "morality binds and blinds." This is a big book which zooms way up and over the majority of conversations we are having today. It reads something like the source code behind a lot of society's ugly social ills and it's no wonder Jonathan's formed wise thoughts way back down the ladder rungs on things as diverse as income inequality, peanut allergies, and social media. As Jonathan said in an interview with Ezra Klein: “We’re trying to build a diverse, secular, tolerant, peaceful society.” This book is a big cinder block dropped into the foundation of that build. Challenging, eye-opening, and well worth the effort. I know I'll be revisiting it again and again.
6. Meanwhileby Jason Shiga. When I was a kid ‘game books’ were massive with Choose Your Own Adventure books selling almost half a billion copies. They were so simple, enticing, and a wonderful complement (and antidote) to video games. Well, this is a wild contemporary book by pure mathematics whiz and puzzle genius Jason Shiga. You play the role of a small boy going out for ice cream but soon your day slips into all kinds of splintered pathways involving mad scientists, time travelling machines, and all with (of course) the fate of the world at stake. Chances are very good you will die. Chances are also very good you will enjoy dying and then just start again. Head-twisting, frenetic, wonderfully wild. I really feel like this book really deserves a wider audience. Especially if you have any hard-to-wrangle-into-reading people in your house. Jason Shiga was also my guest in Chapter 87 of 3 Books which just dropped on last week’s Harvest Moon.
7. Planet Omarby Zanib Mian and Nasaya Mafaridik. A fairly new middle-grade chapter book series featuring Omar, his older sister Maryam (who knows 28 surahs of the Qur’an by heart), his little brother Esa (who mortifies his brother by blowing his toy whistle during dead silence at the mosque), his mom (a scientist who wears a hijab and drinks a lot of coffee), and his dad (also a scientist, rides a motorcycle). The book is a simple story about moving to a new town and being nervous about going to school but laid across a thoughtful and generous introduction of Muslim culture and practices. It’s over 200 pages but magical design makes it a fun and fast read. The book came out as The Muslims in the UK three years ago and has won a slew of awards.
8. 111 Places In Toronto That You Must Not Missby Anita Mai Genua, Clare Davenport and Elizabeth Lenell Davies. Are you starting to rediscover your hometown? Maybe even getting on planes again? It’s good to get back out there as things open up. I feel like tourist books are a nice re-entry point. I confess I’d become a bit of a Toronto snob – knowing where to go, what to do, what to see. But no! I have been humbled by the many gems in this wonderful book that were new to me. In an era of infinite choice the value of curation skyrockets. And this book is masterfully curated towards “accessibly odd” -- from a residential home covered in dolls to leftover brick walls of our notorious insane asylum to the oldest tree in the city to original Banksy's now entombed in plexiglass downtown. Do you have a really good “accessibly odd” guidebook to your hometown? I feel like the good ones are really good in this little sub genre so please reply and let me know.
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Hey everyone,
How is almost September 2021?
Are your pandemic years starting to blur, too?
Well, I hope you are safe and hanging in there and I hope you get a chance to squeeze some loved ones tight this fall. Consider these emails a virtual squeeze from me. I won't rub my scratchy beard on your face but I do have nine book reviews and recommendations for you this month.
Btw: This is our third month of sending book links to indie bookstores. If you have the resources to support a great bookshop, thank you for considering clicking a title below and ordering a book or two from the wonderful independent bookstore Books & Books of Florida. 3 Bookers will recall Chapter 6 with Judy Blume, Chapter 9 with Dave Barry, and Chapter 16 with award-winning bookseller Mitchell Kaplan were all recorded in their magical stores! They ship internationally with a lot of love and just put out a list of essential Afghanistan reading which I'm checking out. (Btw: I have also heard from many of you that you really like when I link to author / publisher pages so I put those in a bracketed asterisk after each title, too.)
And now -- onto the books!
Neil
1. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals(*) by Oliver Burkeman. For many years Oliver Burkeman wrote the wise and witty column for The Guardian called “This column will change your life” which examined the wide world of self-help. (He even wrote about me eleven years ago!) Well, he’s stopped the weekly columns now -- his final offering was masterful -- and now he's here, today, with us, offering a wonderfully deep and thoughtful examination of real time management. Not the Inbox Zero whack-more-moles-per-minute variety but the much more intentional month-by-month, year-by-year kind. Wisdom is seeping out of this book like a sponge you just pulled out of deep water. Spending time in Oliver's company made me feel less anxious and more calm -- about almost everything. He is a soothing wizard. I can’t recommend it enough. If you liked books like How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton or In Praise of Slow by Carl Honoré then you’ll love this book. He has a wonderful newsletter you should sign up for, too.
2.Connected Parenting: Transform Your Challenging Child and Build Loving Bonds for Life(*) by Jennifer Kolari. It’s been a couple months since we had a Leslie’s pick so over to my wonderful wife for this one: “When a baby cries getting out of the bath our instinct is to say something like ‘Ohhhh, sweet baby, you’re so cold! It was so nice in your bath and now you’re shivering!’ This ‘mirroring’ helps calm and grow the brain. But when our children start to talk it seems something shifts and when they cry or whine or yell we say things like ‘Stop crying. I told you the bath was only going to be five minutes and now you’re not listening to me. Stop!’ In this book, Jennifer Kolari uses stories and humor to teach parents how to mirror with our children as they get older to calm them, build connection, and set limits with empathy and love rather than anger and frustration.” (For more of Leslie listen to our recent chats with Brené Brown and Kristin Neff.)
3. How To Pronounce Knife: Stories(*)by Souvankham Thammavongsa. The most prestigious book award in Canada is The Giller Prize and every year the winner takes home a cool hundred grand and a trophy that looks like a trippy pile of ice blocks. Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Mordecai Richler are all past winners and this year the prize went to Souvankham Thammavongsa for this book. (She's the one holding the trippy ice blocks.) Souvankham was born in a Lao refugee camp and moved to Toronto as a child. The short stories (most no more than five pages!) all illuminate different shades of the immigrant experience. Often the Laotian immigrant experience. The stories can be dark but they're written like little smalltown gossipy page-flippers. You can really feel the influence from Alice Munro. I loved the book and read it cover to cover. For a sense of her breezy-with-a-bag-of-hammers style check out her short story "Good-looking" published a few months ago in The New Yorker. If that one hits you, you'll love this book.
4.The Midnight Library(*)by Matt Haig. This is the first book I have ever seen with over 100,000 Amazon reviews. Millions and millions sold. A quick read about a down-in-the-dumps protagonist named Nora Seed who seems to go through life with a tuba blatting after every scene. She’s fired from her job. Her cat is hit by a car. It goes on and on. She cannot live with herself so she attempts to take her own life but ends up in a -- cue maroon stage curtain squeakily rising -- midnight library instead. What happens there? Well, she meets a kind of brittle Yoda character who gives her options to something like backwards-butterfly-effect her life by ... pulling different books off the shelf. Okay, I am clearly in the very small minority here but the book ... didn’t resonate. A lot of the “what if?” scenarios felt much too cliché – she becomes an Olympic gold medalist, she becomes a world famous rock star – and the early underlying theme of “Every choice is imperfect, value what you have, and seize the day!” is fine but seemed too surface for the murky swamp I feel like we're all swimming in these days. (Does this tweet resonate with you, too?) Maybe Souvankham Thammavongsa had me thinking about things on a deeper level? Was I snacking on a tub of popcorn right after driving into a farm fresh cob loaded with salt and butter? I don't know. What I do know is that whereas many of the 4-5 page stories in How To Pronounce Knife made me gasp or tear up or stare at the ceiling for a couple minutes after, this 300 page book didn’t give me any feeling. Other than an urge to get to the next book. U could have just hit it at the wrong time.
5. Maybe You Should Talk To Someone(*) by Lori Gottlieb. Do you listen to The Moth? It’s been one of the highest rated podcasts since podcasts were invented sometime in the early 80s alongside MTV, Michael Jackson, and Fruit Roll-Ups. They make excellent books too – like this one and this one – which are perfect for our Enlightened Toilet Reading series. One Moth story I’ve loved for years is called “The Whole Package” by Lori Gottlieb. (Click "Listen now" halfway down this page to hear it.) That story has nothing to do with this book but does give you a flavor for Lori's voice and her wonderfully twisting storytelling ability. Maybe You Should Take To Someone (what a perfect title) tells twisting stories of five people in therapy – including Lori! – and does a great job of illuminating the therapeutic process in a dramatic, edge-of-your-seat way. Pairs wonderfully with her Dear Therapist column in The Atlantic and her Dear Therapists podcast, too. Does she ever sleep? It appears not because she even made time to be my guest on Chapter 84 of 3 Books. (Listen on Apple or Spotify.)
6. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe(*)by Jane Wagner. What’s your reading nitro? When you hit an inevitable slow patch, when it feels like you are twenty pages into five different books and can’t seem to find one that’s sucking you in, what do you do? How do you get going again? My go-tos are middle-grade books I love (like Sideways Stories From Wayside School), graphic novels, and, yes, scripts. Movie scripts, theater scripts, just something with a quarter of the "words per page" of my usual books so I feel that nitro charge me back up. This is a wonderfully wacky script of a Tony Award winning one-woman stage show starring Lily Tomlin. (And it's one of Jane McGonigal's most formative books, too.)
7. The One and Only Ivan(*)by Kristina Applegate. A cousin just told me she read and loved a book written in “first-dog” and I recommended the “first-horse” Black Beauty back to her. For those looking for more first-animal books, I’d highly recommend this “first-gorilla” YA book by a strong, stoic, but melancholic gorilla in a dreary dead-end mall who starts wondering what life is like beyond the bars. There is a lot of scene-setting here but if you get past the first fifty or so pages the book takes off. Nicely introduces themes of animals rights to the 10-and-older-and-occasionally-much-older crowd. Highly recommended. (Just a warning: There are a couple absolutely brutal and devastating animal abuse scenes.)
8. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas(*)by John Boyne. It’s Berlin in 1942 and Bruno arrives home to see the contents of his house packed into crates. His father has just had dinner with The Fury and now the whole family is being transferred to Out-With where his father is taking on some kind of important new management position. Away from his friends and city life, he’s got nothing to do but aimlessly walk away from the house down a long chain linked fence. He meets a boy in striped pyjamas and they begin a memorably devastating friendship. Completely transfixing parable about the horrors of the holocaust packaged through innocent nine-year-old eyes. Also dark, also highly recommended.
9. The Wretched Stone(*)by Chris Van Allsburg. Are you staring at a wretched stone right now? I wouldn't have thought to call my cell phone a 'wretched stone' but thanks to Arpi and Al who both sent me recommendations to read this book after I shared the poem "Television" by Roald Dahl. Diary entries from the captain of a ship whose crew abandons reading, telling stories, and singing together in favor of staring all day at a strange glowing stone they find on an island. Bit heavy handed – I mean, the crew literally turn into monkeys looking at the thing – but for the anti-cell-phone community (shoutout! shoutout! shoutout! shoutout!) it will go down smooth. Speaking of getting rid of these bright, wretched stones we all keep in our pocket, I’m going to put mine away right now and get back to reading books. I hope you’ll do the same. Shall we hang out same time, same place next month? I'll talk to you then.
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Hey everyone,
How was your July?
I had a pretty Tarantino-y month. I rewatched five of his movies, read his new 400-page book (review below), read a couple of his formative books (one review below), listened to every podcast he’s been on, and fell into a lot of three-hour YouTube rabbit holes. I felt nervous leading up to the interview – like losing sleep and texting friends at three in the morning kind of nervous.
All that to say: I worked myself into a tizzy. It happens. I kind of like the occasional tizzy. Anyway, I’ve been told it’s my best interview. Yes, that was by my wife, and yes, I may have been fishing for a compliment. Listen yourself and let me know. Here are links for Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. (If you want to read a lot people trashing me -- which is always lots of fun -- I'd recommend YouTube!)
Also, one last housekeeping item: last month you’ll remember we sent all orders for my favorite writing book A Swim In A Pond In The Rainby George Saunders to indie bookstore Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee. Thank you! You sold them out many times over so this month I thought we’d shower some indie love on Nowhere Bookshop. They’re a San Antonio indie bookstore run by blogger and author Jenny Lawson. (Here’s my chat with Jenny.) If you want to buy any of the books below and would like them shipped to you from an indie bookshop, just click the title and you'll end up there. Btw, I take no cuts -- all profits just go to a bookstore we love. (PS. This is all an experiment! Let me know if it's working and also if you want to suggest another indie bookstore with a great site that carries widely and ships far, far away!)
Okay, are you ready to spend some of your Sunday afternoon or Monday morning together? I am! Grab a seat on the closest sofa, beach chair, or toilet and let's talk about books...
Neil
1. Once Upon A Time in Hollywoodby Quentin Tarantino. I have so much to say about this book I don’t know where to start. I will resist my urge to talk about the story and instead tell you three other things. First: the reading setting. The setting? Yeah, I mean where you are when you’re reading. This is a 400-page drugstore paperback movie novelization of an R-rated movie. So I have to say when I read it I felt like a teenager in the 70s reading something exciting and vulgar and thrilling and sultry and wild in the wee hours before turning off the nightlight. Because can I ask: When was the last time you read a drugstore paperback movie novelization? Forty years ago? Never? And yet: it totally worked to mentally transport me on another plane. (For those of you in bookselling or publishing you get the gall and gumption required in putting a book in this format at $9.99.) It felt so classic Tarantino to reinvent yet another form. I think we can add movie novelizations to the list of gangster movies, Blaxploitation films, Kung Fu sagas, and spaghetti westerns. Might this book singlehandedly lift up an entire genre? Could we all be buying movie novelizations of our favorite films in December? Maybe! Second: No moralizing. It seems like these days we often see morals placed above story. Was the person good? Did they do the right thing? Or can they become good? Can they learn to do the right thing? We live in such a “you gotta do it this way” society that if you say the wrong thing you’re quickly outcast. Well, there’s no moralizing here! And it’s so refreshing. Tarantino is a master storyteller writing in service of story alone. Characters say horrible things, character do horrible things, and they don’t necessarily grow at all – or, at least, in the ways you might expect. Some scenes may make you wince, others cause your heart to fly, but if you’re like me you’ll keep flipping because the story is just so propulsive. The swerves and curves feel like riding a waterslide. Third thing: Total geekfest. Are you a bit of nerd? Do your friends think of you as the person who could easily geek out on some inane topic for twenty minutes at the party? I feel like the answer is yes since you’re 389 words into a book review right now that you're presumably reading just for fun. (Who does that?) Well, if I'm right, you will love this book for the sheer quantity of lore. I’ve always considered myself a movie fan but after reading this book I feel I can elevate that label a little notch towards aficionado. Quentin manages to share a wobbly mirrored mix of factual and revisionist history of cinema and half the fun is trying to spot the difference. It might feel like you're being read Trivial Pursuit questions by Vladimir Nabokov. For those who’ve seen the movie, the book is different. For those who haven’t, you don’t need to. And for both, I’m going to come right out and say that, in my view, the book is better. (Don't worry: You can still picture Brad Pitt if you want to -- and he gets a lot more than topless in the book.) This is a fun and wild book I highly recommend. And I just feel so excited as a reader and book lover that Quentin Tarantino says he will spend his time after making his tenth and final film "becoming a man of letters... that's how I want to spend my twilight years." This was a very long review but if you want even more, I share my five favorite quotes from the book and get Quentin’s live reaction on them here.
2.What It’s Like To Be A Bird: From Flying To Nesting, Eating To Singing, What Birds Are Doing And Whyby David Sibley. A Northern Mockingbird swooped near my head a couple times while I was writing on a park bench this spring. It was a tough first day but I kept writing on the same bench and our friendship deepened. He walked up to my feet, performed incredible songs, and, after the first few visits, came to say hi on a low branch near me whenever I sat down. I wasn’t sure if this relationship was just in my head until I read in this book that Northern Mockingbirds actually recognize individual humans! Wow, I thought, what we had was real. Longtime readers may remember three years ago when I shared the Jonathan Franzen National Geographic cover story “Why Birds Matter.” Since then my love has deepened and David Sibley has become my birding friend. I carry his wonderful Sibley Birds East in my backpack and now I have this big, beautiful hardcover to flip through. There are so many delights in this incredible feast. Birders and aspiring birders, hear my song: Grab this book and let yourself fall even deeper in love with birds.
3. Monaby Pola Oloixarac. (Translated from Spanish by Adam Morris). I picked up this book because of the cover and then read the first paragraph on the inside front flap and got interested: “Mona, a Peruvian writer living in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior. She likes drugs and cigarettes, and when she learns that she is something of an anthropological curiosity – a woman writer of color treasured at her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings – she pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on identity.” I really, really loved the first half of this book and recommend it for that alone. The story motors, the writing is gorgeous, and we follow and relate and root for the cynical and cerebral Mona as she travels to a snooty literary festival in Sweden. A great first half! Sometimes that’s what a book offers and you know what? Sometimes that’s enough. We don't always need a good ending. Sure, I personally felt like the final act of this book finds the gushing plot starting to splinter into all kinds of little brooks and streams in different directions and a lot of the power was lost. But, again, it was a killer opening half and that's more than good enough. I'm excited to read other books by Pola Oloixarac which, I might add, is a pretty killer name.
4. This Is My Bookstore. This isn’t a book but rather a collection of 100 postcards of bookstores. I bought it in a bookstore because I missed bookstores and wanted to feel like I was travelling around the world hanging out in bookstores. About a quarter of the cards aren’t great – just boring exterior shots or weird close-ups of a random bookshelf – but the rest were so immersive. If you love bookshops, buy this and leave it somewhere in your house for a mental escape. I think if I was locked up in prison and could only take a sackful of items, I’d throw this in my sack. Allow your mind to wander the shelves of many magical bookshops around the world. (PS. I’m not mailing these to anyone. Purely for flip-through travelling.)
5. When The Lights Go Downby Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael was the ‘witty, biting, highly opinionated’ movie critic for The New Yorker from the late 60s to the early 90s. This book is a dense 600-page collection of all her reviews from 1975 to 1980. (She’s got a pile of other books with her other reviews.) When Quentin Tarantino was a little kid he’d go to the movies by himself and then head to the B. Dalton’s bookstore to flip open The New Yorker and see what she thought. “At the end of the day Pauline Kael is my favorite writer,” he told me. “I find her voice completely captivating … I kind of adopted her view as my own.” In an obituary for Pauline Kael (she died in 2001), Roger Ebert wrote that she "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades." There is something addictive about her reviews and many of them made me want to rush out to watch or rewatch classics from forty years ago. Hundreds of movies are reviewed in this book including biggies like Carrie, Rocky, Taxi Driver, Jaws, and Star Wars.
6. Kusama: The Graphic Novelby Elissa Macellari. (Translated from Italian by Edward Fortes.) A few years ago the art exhibit “Infinity Mirrors” by Yayoi Kusama came to a downtown Toronto art gallery and generated massive buzz. Like, lineups down the street at the crack of dawn every day kind of buzz. I went to see what the fuss was about and was blown away. (Here are a few pics.) I didn’t know much more about the artist until picking up this graphic novel. On one hand, it’s a wonderfully accessible way to get to know Yayoi (currently age 92!) and learn the history of her art in relation to her mental health challenges. She reveals, "I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live." It also details her rise to prominence in the 1960s New York City avant-garde scene. (Avant-garde as in she painted naked hippies with polka dots and ran away from the police a bunch of times.) But, on the other hand, the book only left me wanting more – the book is too light and is presented in a non-linear way with big gaps so I was left reading her Wikipedia profile afterwards and hoping for another travelling exhibition one day.
7. Fox 8by George Saunders. This is a tiny 49-page short story presented in a little hardcover for George Saunders completists. A dark, comic little fable told in first-fox by Fox 8 who has learned to speak “Yuman” and goes on an epic quest to save his pack after the “danjer” of a new shopping mall threatens to cut off his food supply. The joy of this book is the writing. How would you write a book as a fox? Well, you’d open it like this: “Deer Reeder: First may I say, sorry for any werds I spel rong. Because I am a fox! So don’t rite or spel perfect.” Short dose of magic.
8. The Prophetby Kahlil Gibran. I was simply not prepared for the sheer weight of this book. Yes, I’d heard about it forever. Yes, it’s been on my wife’s bookshelf for years. Yes, I sort of assumed that a book that’s been in print for a hundred years straight has gotta be a pretty good book. But still the “density of wisdom” in here was nearly unbelievable. A collection of twenty-six prose poems on topics like love, marriage, friendship, and time, all (fairly poorly) folded into a plotline something like “A prophet is getting on a boat to leave his hometown and a group of villagers corner him before getting on to ask him his views on twenty-six things.” Not all the poems are gems but many are and the ones that hit you will probably require you to reread them immediately. And then maybe reread them again. (If you get my Neil.blog email, you may remember I sent out a poem about parenting recently. If you don't, sign up here.) The book isn’t religious per se but it sort of feels religious and – for interest sake – when I read up on Gibran, I learned he was broadly influenced by Sufism, Islam, Baha’ism, and Maronism.
9. Beezus and Ramonaby Beverly Cleary. Did you know Beverly Cleary died this year ... at age 104!? Did you know she wrote for 50 years? Sure, Ramona only aged four years in that timespan but she holds up. I can’t say the same for the new cartoonish drawings, though. (What’s wrong with the 1950s? There’s no way Ramona’s mom has a trendy bob cut!) Don’t buy the new version for your kid like I did. It’s worth sifting through the used bookstores for a classic dog-eared version with the original drawings. So like, this version over this version is what I'm saying. And now I suddenly feel like I am book shaming people who like movie or new cartoon covers and that's kind of the opposite of our first core value so now I have no idea what to tell you.
10. Birds of Instagramedited by David Sibley. I probably wouldn’t have bought this book if my boyfriend David Sibley hadn’t written the Introduction and edited it. But, despite the title, I’m glad I did. A sumptuous feast of bird photos for people who prefer to stay off small screens. Wonderfully organized and arranged by David and a great gift for someone who’s just getting into birds. I will also point out that this book is much more global than What It’s Like To Be A Bird which focuses on birds of North America only. So prepare to be visually stunned by many of the pics.
11.The Handbook to Lazy Parentingby Guy Delisle. I’ve recommended a couple of graphic novels by Guy Delisle before, including Jerusalem and Pyongyang, but I had no idea he’s been putting out a smaller series of cartoons that can best be described as “honest tales from the front lines of parenting.” I really don’t like the title of the book but if you’re a parent, or married to a parent, who is feeling overspent, overworked, and overtired right now, grab them this book. Little cartoons include tales like when he forgot his daughter in a store, when he interrupted their homework to make them watch something on TV, or when he took over his kid's class field trip with his relentless questions. You will feel seen. (If you’re interested in talking parenting a bit more, check out Chapter 32 with Cat and Nat or Chapter 46 with Dr. Laura Markham.
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Hey everyone,
Are you vaxxed? Are you double vaxxed? Are you triple vaxxed? We’re always socially distanced in this Monthly Book Club anyway.
Leslie and I just got double vaxxed up here and I’m starting to get excited to see some of you in person. So far I have trips to Nashville, Des Moines, San Diego, and Palm Springs on the horizon. Do you have a suggestion for a 3 Books guest I should interview live from any of those places?
If you aren't on the 3 Books podcast train yet, I invite you to hop aboard. We're having fun geeking out about books and the lives we’re building on top of books. I'm keeping the show 100% ad, sponsor, and commercial free (like my newsletters and blogs) so it's a place to hide from the overwhelm. Upcoming guests include Lori Gottlieb, my two-year-old son, and Quentin Tarantino. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Hope you’re hanging in there and let's get to the books,
Neil
1. The Master and Margaritaby Mikhail Bulgakov. Have you read any Russian literature? Have you read a lot? Have you read none? I had read none until 2020. Without ever flipping open a page I always considered books like War and Peace and Anna Karenina to be laughably long and assumed the writing would be thorny and impenetrable. Turns out I have made an ass out of you and me. Last June, I recommended The Duel by Chekov to you and wrote, “if you haven’t read much classic Russian literature (ditto) then this isn’t a bad way in ... it has a slowly building crescendo that will keep you flipping if you can make it through the opening dizziness." David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) gave us that suggestion back in Chapter 58 before I asked him to give us a newbie guide to navigating the Russians. He protested at first ("My knowledge is as deep as a piece of paper”) but went on to say The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov is a wonderful stepping stone into the nineteenth century Russians. Well, I bought the book right away and let it simmer and cool on my bedside table for six months. A few weeks ago I started reading it and found the first two chapters … thorny. It opens with a provocative scene in a public park in 1930s Moscow but then skips back two thousand years earlier in Chapter 2 where you're suddenly privy to the judge deciding the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. I was … thrown. When the novel settles back into Moscow it gets into its groove it starts flying. The plot summary is something like: The devil shows up and all hell breaks loose. I recommend reading the plot summary first here.
2. Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hookedby Adam Alter. Are you addicted to the Internet? Maybe a little? Maybe a lot? There is an Internet Addiction Test early on in this book which is very similar to this free one online. I scored a “Mild Addiction”. I may only be mild because I bought and read this book when it came out and heeded its call. (As an example, Leslie has hidden my cell phone, at my request, for the past week. One of many ways I try to stay off the drug.) I think we need to ratchet up our collective awareness of the zillion invisible attention hooks being stabbed into our brain by our phones all day. If you liked books like Influence by Robert Cialdini, I think you’ll like this. This was my second time through so I pulled my favorite pages and will be posting them on Instagram. (I just did this for Steal Like An Artist and The Art of Living). George Saunders told me “I feel like a circus monkey writing for social media.” He ended up deleting his accounts. I am apparently still a circus monkey which is ironic considering the book itself. Need to get that Mild Addiction down a couple more notches.
3. Tell Me About Sex, Grandmaby Anastasia Higginbotham. Gloria Steinem has a blurb on the back of this book which reads “I love that it’s Grandma giving advice. Some Native Americans say the very young and the very old understand each other best, because each is closest to the unknown.” I feel the truth in that. This non-fiction “sex ed” style book is written as an innocent, curious cut-and-paste conversation between a child (of presumably purposefully unclear age and gender) and their grandmother. Consent, sex positivity, and body curiosity are themes explored with the undercurrent motto that ‘each person’s sexuality is their very own to discover, explore, and share if they choose.” This book hit me in the gut and I think many adults will find the same. I agree with the Kirkus reviewer who wrote: “If I were independently wealthy, I’d buy a small plane, fly across the country, and drop off copies of this book to every elementary-school health and sex educator out there.” Good pairing book with C is for Consent by Eleanor Morrison or How Mamas Love Their Babies by Juniper Fitzgerald.
4. Return the National Parks to the Tribesby David Treuer. My thought process when I picked up this latest issue of The Atlantic and read the cover: “Wow, that’s a provocative story” and then “Or it’s probably that I think it’s provocative because I don’t know anything about the real issues” and then, as I started reading, “Wait, this is the history of American National Parks?” and then, once again, “I know so little about so many things” and on and on and on. I get to that place a lot. (I love that Rich Gibbons quote from Chapter 14 along the lines of "The more I know, the more I know I know nothing.") A wonderful article going deep into the bloody history and background of American National Parks to help crack open an important discussion. Right now in Canada we are having our own deep reckoning with the discovery of even more unmarked indigenous graves last week (after another discovery last month). Do you have an indigenous / first nations / first people book you suggest I read? I haven’t read much but enjoyed (and highly recommend) Halfbreed, Heart Berries, and There, There.
5. Innocent Eréndira and Other Storiesby Gabriel García Márquez. I loved this tiny, vulgar, powerful, magically real 1972 novella whose full title is The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother. (That makes up a big chunk of the book and is all I read – the rest is a bunch of his early short stories.) The magically real Yuyi Morales was assigned this book to read around age thirteen at her high school in Xalapa, Mexico. And, she perhaps shouldn’t have been? I mean, the plot deals with a heartless grandmother pimping out her twelve-year-old granddaughter to repay a debt and it doesn’t really let up. And yet: it is magical. People do things in their sleep. Oranges picked off trees reveal jewels inside. And many strange connections are made. This is the book that got Yuyi into the world of books. Just ... maybe read the plot summary first.
6. Lost In Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the Worldby Ella Frances Sanders. Whenever I trip and fall on the sidewalk my wife looks at me with big, empathetic eyes and says “pole” (prounced like 'polay') which is a Swahili word that apparently means “I’m sorry for your pain.” When she told me that I was like “What do you mean we don’t have a word for that? Come on, English! We must have this covered, right?” But, can you think of one? Probably not in one word, anyway. Well, this book is a list of dozens of words like that. The Brazilian word for running your fingers through a lover’s hair, the Italian word for being moved to tears from a story, the Swedish word for a third cup of coffee. It’s less educational and more whimsical and trivia-style but it’s lots of fun regardless. Good reminder of the language prisons we often find ourselves caged up in, too.
7. Notesby Eleanor Coppola. I am always preaching to people the way books help open up the mirror neurons in your brain responsible for empathy, compassion, and understanding. To paraphrase George Saunders – that guy keeps coming up! -- books are “empathy training wheels.” Here's Exhibit A. The book is non-fiction but reads like vivid fiction in its daily diary format. You are Eleanor, the artistic, wealthy, humble yet high society wife of Francis Ford Coppola, as well as mother of three young children, and you are living for a few years in the jungles of the Philippines while your husband shoots a gigantic movie that is stressfully running over time and over budget and which is draining and growing your family in a thousand ways. What’s the movie? Apocalypse Now. A truly formative life experience and we have Eleanor’s diaries to read throughout. I loved this book. It may be out of print but I found a used copy online and I think you can do the same. This is one of Dave Eggers’ three most formative books. (I just released my chat with Dave where we discuss life without smartphones, how to get boys to read, making art in an algorithmic society, and a lot more. Listen on Apple or Spotify.)
8. The WEIRDest People In The World: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperousby Joseph Henrich. I discovered a new type of Book Relationship this month whereby you buy some gigantic, dense, information packed tome that’s just chock full of wild ideas, mind-expanding charts, and (in this case) deep anthropological insight and you … adopt it as a pet. What do I mean? Well, my friend Brian texted me a picture of this book and said “You need to read this!” and I bought it immediately. I trust Brian. He has good book recommendations. And I learned that WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. But then the book arrived and it was the size of a phone book with teeny font and I was just overwhelmed. I knew the chances of me reading the book were small. More likely it would sit on my shelf forever. But, instead of either, I adopted the book as my pet. I put it front-facing on my shelf, I left it on my desk, sometimes it had a nap beside me on my bed, and a few times (no joke) I left it under my desk, by my feet. And what did I do with my pet? Did I read it? Well, not exactly. I … petted it? This metaphor may need work. Basically, I used the giant Index as my guide and kept skimming till I found a word or topic or theme or person I found interesting and then I flipped into the book and read those four or five pages. There is a lot in here about evolutionary biology, how we live, and giant macro trends around community, friendship, and kinship. In total I probably read like 10% of the book but I pulled out so many ideas, notes, and quotes already. 10% doesn’t sound like much! But it’s a lot more than nothing. Good doggie.
9. The Social Life of Forestsby Ferriss Jabr. The sub-headline on this New York Times Magazine cover story caught my eye: “Underground, trees cooperate with one another. What signals are they sending?” Sounds like a movie poster line, right? Something like 800 million years ago life sort of split into plants, animals, and the mushy middleman of mycelium. This article veers deep into the science but helps course correct that false third grade dictum that ‘trees compete with one another for sunlight in the forest.’ Turns out trees actually talk to each other through the underground network of mycelium (commonly but somewhat incorrectly called 'mushrooms') and help each other out. “Hey Big Shade! Hit me with some Vitamin D, brother!” Mycelium takes a cut for playing middleman and then what happens is … and, cut! This review is just the trailer. Read the article. It’s a roller-coaster thrill ride that will leave you on the edge of your seat. Two thumbs up.
10. A Swim In A Pond In The Rain: In Which Four Russians Give A Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Lifeby George Saunders. After a couple cameos we’re going to close out by zooming into a full feature on George Saunders. Can you tell by the picture above I lost the gorgeous, rubbery purple book jacket that this book was wrapped in? How embarrassing. Now, this is the fourth George Saunders book I’ve recommended this year alone. And it’s a doozy. Basically: Are you a writer? Do you want to be a better one? Then you must grab this book. You must! I place it on mantle alongside other writing favorites including: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Ernest Hemingway and Larry W. Philips. George Saunders has been professor of Creative Writing at Syracuse University for 24 years and he’s essentially distilled his course on Russian Masters into this book. The book contains seven short stories by big sluggers like Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol and then after each one is George’s color commentary. He writes in this fast and flippy tone that’s such a rush to read. I might even call it addictive. His MacArthur Genius mind offers such deep love, kindness, and empathy for writers and readers of all stripes. It all adds up to a bit of a bible for writers. I admit I have kept it by my pillow for months now. The New York Times wrote “One of the most accurate and beautiful depictions of what it is like to be inside the mind of a writer that I’ve ever read.” The book has a 4.8 out of 5 on Amazon with 979 out of the 1164 ratings are 5-star. You will notice I didn’t link to Amazon in that previous sentence. Why? Well, I don't link to Amazon so that we can support local and independent bookstore. In my chat with George on 3 Books he said his favorite independent bookstore was Parnassus Books in Nashville, which is run by novelist Ann Patchett. I thought it’d be fun to send Ann and her team a whole whack of orders of this book. Should we have some fun? Can you wait a couple weeks before getting the book? Then click here to buy yourself a copy. Again, click here to buy this book from Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee! Looks like Ann has 10 copies in-stock right now. Let's clear her shelves a few times over.
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Hey everyone,
How’s your reading life?
I was thinking I've been slugging in mine -- dipping, sipping, going a finger deep into handfuls of books which makes me feel like I’m nowhere in anything. But then 3 Booker Jen Penn of Sandwich, Illinois kindly mailed me a copy of The Rights Of A Reader(summary poster here) by Daniel Pennac which lists “The right to skip" and "The right to dip in" on the back cover. I loved those and have since modified it to a new Value for us called "It's okay to sip, it's okay to dip." Goes well with “No book shame, no book guilt” and “Quit more to read more", I think.
So that's my message this month: Be easy on yourself. Jump around. Skip chapters. Embrace tsundoku. Let piles pile. And just get your head out of the way to keep enjoying what you love ... however you love it.
Here are my book recommendations this month,
Neil
1. Letters from a Stoicby Seneca. I know I've harped to you before about On The Shortness Of Life by Seneca and still keep a copy of the Penguin Classics version in my suitcase to help calm my mind when late-night time-zoney travel makes me anxious. (If you're also someone who feels anxious when arriving at a hotels at 3am brain-time I also recommend a lacrosse ball for wall backrubs and some eucalyptus oil for your pillow -- more sleep ideas here.) But if you want to go deeper than that essay into one of the greatest minds of all time I highly recommend grabbing this book. The fact that it’s in print and the dude lived two thousand years ago should give some indication to the quality. (Something tells me The Book of Awesome won't be talked about in the year 4000.) To give a little aperitif, here are three quotes I just pulled out from the first couple pages: 1) “Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.”, 2) “It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more.” and 3) “Similarly, people who never relax and people who are invariably in a relaxed state merit your disapproval – the former as much as the latter. For a delight in bustling about is not industry – it is only the restless energy of a hunted mind. And the state of mind that looks on all activity as tiresome is not true repose, but a spineless inertia … A balanced combination of the two attitudes is what we want; the active man should be able to take things easily, while the man who is inclined towards repose should be capable of action. Ask nature: she will tell you that she made both day and night.” Not bad, right? I can't recommend Letters From A Stoic enough. (2000 years ago = out of copyright, so if you'd prefer it in digital cut-and-pastey form, here you go.)
2. Sideways Stories From Wayside Schoolby Louis Sacher. When Louis Sacher was a Berkeley student in the late 70s he came across an eight-year-old girl handing out flyers. He had never seen an eight-year-old handing out flyers before -- most bake sales are shoddily advertised as we know -- so he grabbed one out of curiosity. It was a local elementary school asking for college students to help at the school in exchange for college credits. He thought “No homework? No studying? I’m in.” And good thing he did. Because the students at that school inspired him to write this book. A gonzo tale of a school accidentally built sideways with each chapter dedicated to one student’s completely absurd view of the world. The book didn’t get popular until the late 80s (he worked as a lawyer for a decade till then) and that popularity timed just perfectly with me being a lonely nerdy at Sunset Heights Public School in Oshawa, Canada. (I looked like this at the time.) My librarian took pity on me and shoved this book into my hand and to this day I credit it with singlehandedly opening me up to the world of books. It's the book I’ve bought more for kids than any other. I know my own books and offshoots like this email or my podcast probably wouldn't exist without it. I feel like I met my childhood idol when I just got to sit down with Louis Sacher. Here’s a link to our conversation.
3. Mindset: The New Psychology of Successby Carol S. Dweck. “The growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.” Want to develop one? Read this book. It'll help nudge you down the path from fixed to growth as it did for me. I’ve been revisiting books I love a lot lately – the right to sip, the right to dip! -- and have decided to set a new challenge for myself. I will flip back through a book I love, pick out my favorite pages, and post them as a series on Instagram and Facebook. A way to see more deeply inside the books I love which I can’t really do over email. (I’m guessing you don’t want a dozen photos attached to every note I send.) I admit my brain goes pretty dark when I’m on social media – I even went on the news saying cell phone addiction is the biggest issue of our time – but in my mind this is one way to focus on something positive on there without getting sucked into algorithms convincing me I’m a loser at everything. I am publicly committing here to make sure I do it. Here’s the one I recently posted for Mindset.
4. Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness To Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thriveby Kristin Neff, PhD. Yes, the word ‘women’ is in the sub-title but I feel this book could apply to anyone. Let’s take a big step back, though. Kristin Neff is the world’s foremost authority on self-compassion. This is her second book after Self-Compassion which came out years ago and has turned into a modern classic. Kristin was first to define and really empirically research self-compassion from her home base as a professor at the University of Texas in Austin and her work has been cited by other studies over 30,000 times. (!) She divides self-compassion into two buckets. “Tender self-compassion harnesses the energy of nurturing to alleviate suffering, while fierce self-compassion harnesses the energy of action to alleviate suffering.” My wife Leslie is a huge fan of her work and if the subject sounds intriguing you can go deeper on Kristin’s website here. Leslie and I also just sat down with Kristin and she’ll be our guest in Chapter 80 of 3 Books which drops on the new moon. As always: for the release date ... look up to the sky.
5. How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talkby Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish. Speaking of Leslie, here comes her monthly pick: “This timeless classic has my Mom’s name inscribed in the front. I remember seeing it on her bedside table when I was growing up. It was her parenting bible and is now mine. It is accessible (with cartoons drawn throughout), compassionate (I know my ultimate goal as a parent is to communicate to my children one interaction at a time that they can come to me forever and ever with any emotion, problem, question and I will be there for them), clear (chalk full of scripts and strategies to implement now) and best of all, the teachings REALLY work!” – Leslie
7. Inquire Withinby IN-Q. Have you ever been to a poetry slam? If so, you know how electric and intoxicating they can be. IN-Q is a National Poetry Slam champion and I’ve been diving deep into his work lately. If you get my bi-weekly Neil.blog emails you’ll have just seen his wonderful “Do You Believe In Superheroes.” That’s one of about a hundred wonderful poems in this book covering themes of love, loss, forgiveness, transformation, and belief. Some of my favorite poems include "Dear White Americans", "Citizens United" and "Look Closer." Highly recommended.
8. A Christmas Carolby Charles Dickens. How did you learn the story of A Christmas Carol? Mickey Mouse on Disney? Alvin and the Chipmunks? I picked it up from a dozen cartoons as a kid and honestly, I wish I’d just read the original. It's so much better. There’s a reason this 178-year-old (and only 89 page!) story is so heavily mimicked, parodied, and referenced. It is gut-punchy, slapstick, and will leave you in tears. One of my favorite ever first sentences, too: “Marley was dead: to begin with.” Here is a link to the full text on Project Gutenberg but I highly recommend picking it up in book form with the original drawings if you can. (PS. This is one of George Saunders’ 3 most formative books.)
9. Dreamersby Yuyi Morales. 3 Booker Karen Weissert sent me this wonderful video last year featuring a woman I'd never heard of before named Yuyi Morales reading a thank-you letter to Nancy, her old librarian in San Francisco. Turns out Nancy helped welcome Yuyi and her two-year-old son Kelly into the world of books when she became stranded in the US and didn't know anyone or speak the language. I was captivated by Yuyi, I showed it to my kids, and I bought some of her books. Most recently, I just sat down with her on 3 Books. Well, Karen, it took almost a year but we pulled it off. Thank you. I am so beyond words grateful to this incredible book-loving community and our regular literary lovefests. If you're reading this, we're friends, and I love and appreciate you.
