Hey everyone, The weather outside is frightful and, my dear – it's time to read. I've shared an annual "Best Of" reading list in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 so that suddenly makes this the 7th Annual. I put these lists together to throw a log on our collective reading fire and, of course, to inspire gift-giving. All book titles link to "link-splitters" that offer a rotating list of indie bookstores to choose from – or, of course, the big guys. I get zero kickbacks from any of them but, as I said in my birthday advice, I feel like there is a relationship between how much you buy local and how nice the flowers are in your park. (Here's a helpful online "indie bookstore finder.”) Also! Below each book I've given a "Perfect for" list of readers who may enjoy it. And, if you're looking for non-book gift suggestions, check out my unconventional holiday gift guide. And now: here are the very best books I read in 2023. Thanks, as always, for reading, Neil
20. Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris. A torridly-paced high-flying business book that reads like an action movie – all told from a fascinating fly-on-the-wall perspective taking you deep into the trenches during the epic battle between Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. But that’s just the battle. The book zooms out into the long-term war between these two relatively ancient companies and covers ground like Nintendo’s culture of consistency over 100 years, the story of Atari taking off and then flaming out, fascinating risky strategies like Sega opening their first and only Sega store – complete with huge billboards all over town – right outside Bentonville, Arkansas Walmart Home Office after Walmart said they wouldn’t carry the Genesis, and the history of the ‘Sega Scream’ at the end of those “Welcome To The Next Level” commercials. We follow along into Nintendo’s monopolistic >90% market share position with the NES (and hear the real Mario Brothers history) and then track Sega’s emergence through marketing, communication, and business strategies Nintendo would never touch. Over the course of the book, Sega goes from less than 5% market share to over 55% when Mortal Kombat comes out. Blake did over 200 interviews and the results are obvious – an unmissable case study on business, strategy, and life. Perfect for: gamers and grown-up gamers, corporate team leaders, and anyone looking to learn more about business strategy without reading cases or textbooks… 19. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. A mesmerizing 158-page love letter to books and the surprisingly close-feeling dangers that mass echo chambers pose for society at large. Good reading for an era where the majority reads zero books per year. 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 read this 60th (!) anniversary edition featuring an Introduction from Neil Gaiman but, of course, this would make a great gift from any used bookstore, too. (See #6 on my holiday gift guide.) Perfect for: people saying "I want to read more but just don't have the time", book clubbers, and anyone who enjoys classics… 18. Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers. When I was a little kid I read an interview with Bill Gates and he said something like “When I go to a magazine stand I always buy a magazine I’ve never read before. There’s more to learn in those ones.” The sentiment stuck with me. Algorithms push, cajole, and classify us into 1s and 0s but there’s nothing like browsing a local bookstore and stumbling upon things that would never have been recommended to you. Like, for example, earlier this year when I picked up 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 a 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. Perfect for: coming-of-age fans, graphic novel aficionados, people who have struggled to fit in or find their way… 17. The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods by Julia Butterfly Hill. A first-person true story of a woman who climbed into a thousand-year-old tree in the late 90s slated for logging … and lived there for two years until the logging company agreed not to chop it down. Despite the trumpet flourish at the end, this isn’t an inspiring story but a devastating one. A portrait of a century-old trust-based organization getting bought out by a stealthy junk bondsman who discovered it’s much more profitable to endlessly break laws – such as those against clear-cutting and replacing old-growth forests – and just pay the fines which add up to pennies on the dollar of profits. Limp laws, toothless politicians, and corporate intimidation add up to a crucible of growth for Julia – but at an enormous price. Her descriptions of climbing up and living in the tree are so vivid you’ll feel like you’re up there with her. A deep and intimate connection with nature – flying squirrels, black bears, lightning strikes, and more. A nice escape from “today” and a connection point into the larger, broader energies I think many of us need to tap into right now. Perfect for: Biography fans, environmentalists, and anyone wanting to run away and live up in a tree for a while… 16. Foster by Claire Keegan. Economy! Tight, fast, shrink-wrapped writing that doesn't waste the reader's time. George Saunders talks a lot about this in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (my favorite book on writing) (06/2021). You want economy? Here's a 92-page Irish epic sharing the story of a young girl moving in with foster parents for a year. And I do mean epic. Who says epics have to be long? Ben-Hur? No, they just have to be broad! Vast! Sweeping! Before a long flight, I stopped by to ask Kyle at Type Books if he could recommend some short books. Slip-in-that-tight-front-pocket-of-the-suitcase books. This was the first he grabbed. Check out the first page: "Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexword towards the coast where my mother's people came from. It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh where my father lost our red Shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew where the man who won the heifer sold her shortly afterwards. My father throws his hat on the passenger seat, winds down the window, and smokes. I shake -- " and then you just have to turn the page. Because who's talking? Where are they going? And that vivid detail painted with so few words continues throughout. Even the title's economical! Foster could easily have been, you know, That Wild and Magical Year I Spent With My Irish Foster Parents! I admire David Mitchell's economical cover blurb too: "As good as Chekhov." Indeed! Perfect for: anyone who needs a non-intimidating kick back into reading, people who like slow and subtle films with substance (like, say, 'Past Lives', 'Win Win', or 'Away From Her')… 15. Around the World in 80 Birds by Mike Unwin. Illustrated by Ryuto Miyake. My wife's grandmother gave me this book last Christmas and passed away not long after so I am afraid that my personal emotional connection here slightly inflates my opinion of this book. And yet: There is something unmistakably captivating about it. It's not quite a coffee table book, not quite a thoroughly researched factoid book, but more of a poetic offering. Flits and swoops into birds you may have heard of around the world – quetzals, kiwis, flamingos, oh my! – together with behavioral or historical anecdotes that bring them to life. Mike Unwin's writing is a joy to read but the real offering here is the art. Buy it for the pictures! That stunning art graces every page and brings out the arresting visual beauty of some of our planetary co-habitants. Perfect for: nature lovers, world travelers, and, of course, the bird-loving or bird-curious… 14. How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar. Have you heard of Dunbar's Number? It's 148, more casually rounded to 150, and is the "suggested cognitive limit for the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships." The number came up in Chapter 101 with Daniels, during our discussion of Sex at Dawn (04/2022) and afterwards I fell into a rabbit hole looking into Dunbar's Number which led me to this wonderful book. Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford and he has that rare Feynmanny gift of being smarter than everybody else but still speaking to you like he's sitting next to you on the train. "We share a history, you and I," he begins in Chapter 1. "A history in which our respective stories snake back through time, edging ever closer to each other until finally they meet up in a common ancestor. Perhaps our lineages meet up only a few generations back, or maybe it was a thousand years ago. Perhaps it was so long ago that it predates history -- though even that could not have been more than two hundred thousand years ago, a mere twinkle in earth time. For we modern humans all descended from a common ancestor who roamed the plains of Africa a mere ten thousand generations ago, ten thousand mothers giving birth to ten thousand daughters ... no more than would fit in a town of very modest size today." From this underpinning he goes on to discuss the 'expensiveness' of our giant brains, how they're unbelievably good at coordinating social relationships and connections – but only up to a point. Then we start talking about Dunbar's Number. Robin Dunbar says one good definition for Dunbar's Number is the number of people who would feel an obligation to you and would turn up for you. (He shares how it's no coincidence that data on wedding size shows that, for years and years, it's been 150.) But 150 is just one in a series of numbers. He uses a metaphor of a stone being thrown into a lake that causes a set of ripples -- as the ripples go out they get bigger but the amplitude gets gradually smaller. 15 are "shoulders to cry on" friends, 150 are friends, 500 are acquaintances (maybe coworkers, maybe people who send happy birthday messages on Facebook), and then, finally, there's a 5000-person layer which is the total number of faces you can recognize. Beyond 5000? Strangers. The book is full of endless anthropological trivia – why gossip is good for you, the benefits of nepotism as it relates to connection, how 200 million men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, and on and on. A particularly fascinating chapter near the end called "Be smart... live longer" shares lines like how there's "a direct link between IQ at age eleven and your chances of celebrating your eighty-fifth birthday" and how "beautiful people are, on average, more intelligent." I've just skimmed a few of the juicier arguments he puts forward in this fascinating book. Perfect for: community builders and leaders, people who liked Sapiens, history buffs… 13. Bronzeville Boys and Girls by Gwendolyn Brooks. Illustrated by Faith Ringgold. Yet another reason to love independent bookstores? Their ability to arrow-point your attention into the dark-tunneled history of your local, or even hyper-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-flattening … mélange. I was wandering around downtown Chicago 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 screamed. The whole table was just this one book. What’s Bronzeville? A Chicago neighborhood referred to in the early 1900s as the “Black Metropolis” as it became home to thousands fleeing oppression in the South. A massive amount of cultural history occurred here including the Pekin Theater, the first black-owned US theater built in 1905, and the Wabash YMCA, originator of Black History Month and built in 1911. What else? Well, a lot of boys and girls lived in Bronzeville, of course. And Gwendolyn Brooks – the first black Pulitzer Prize winner ever! – distills their pains and pleasures into a series of 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." Perfect for: Midwesterners, fans of children's poetry like Shel Silverstein or Dennis Lee, anyone looking to learn more about black history… 12. The Library Book by Susan Orlean. I got a reply to my book club email in June (06/2023) from longtime 3 Booker Bo Boswell. Bo said he was browsing r/suggestmeabook when he came across the enticingly-titled thread “What’s your field or study (hobbyist or professional) and what’s a cornerstone beginners book for that topic/field?" The 164-time-upvoted top reply by Caleb_Trask19 says: "Librarian here, Susan Orlean’s Library Book is at first glance a true crime book about tracking the arsonist who set fire and burned down the main library in Los Angeles, but it also gives a comprehensive glimpse into contemporary libraries and their issues, especially updating a view of them if you haven’t been inside one since you were a kid." Bo then added his recommendation – saying "the amount of research and bizarre detail Orlean puts into her work is so engrossing" – and this all gave me the push to finally crack it open this year. And now I am here today, at the end of the year, to say that, yes, The Library Book really is as good as everyone says. It’s some kind of breezy magic trick, too. Reading it really feels like wandering shelves of a library – falling down tunnels, following curiosity trails. Sure, the book kind of centers on that massive 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library but it flares wildly from there. Every chapter feels exciting because you don’t know which way fiery Orlean will flicker. On Page 61 she writes about the library shipping department: “When I first learned that the library had a shipping department, I didn’t know quite what that meant, because I couldn’t think of anything a library needed to ship.” Fair enough. But then she goes on to explain that thirty-two thousand books are shipped around L.A. five days a week and then poetically slips in “It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.” There’s a simultaneously inspiring and comic chapter where she shadows the city’s head librarian as he tries to make landscaping decisions on distant, uh, branches. She interviews the family of the (deceased) man accused of the fire and paints a sun-starched portrait of his troubled life. There is an entire chapter on library fires through history (you may weep) and another on eccentric Charles Lummis, a guy who walked 3507 miles to Los Angeles from Cincinnati in 1884 to take over the library in a massive controversy after the previous head librarian was fired for not being a man. She shares the history of the US library system: how it used to be country clubbish – charging for library cards and appealing to elites – to the fresh challenges it faces today as pillars of progressiveness. (“Libraries?,” scoffs Haley Dunphy in an old episode of Modern Family, “I thought that was a bathroom for homeless people.”) A big, overstuffed jack-in-the-box of a book with multiple threadlines braided beautifully together with Susan’s own story – which’ll likely remind you of yours. (It didfor me.) Guaranteed to deepen your reverence of books, libraries, and reading and increase your love for community, connection, and the way we have all shared and will need to share wisdom through the ages. Through the pages. Perfect for: library lovers, true crime fans, and anyone whose brain enjoys jumping from one deep-dive nerdy geek-out to another… 11. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel by Ocean Vuong. A first-person coming-of-age story of a gay Vietnamese boy in Hartford, Connecticut finding and losing love in fleeting glances. Maybe that’s what the one-line movie summary of this book will say in TV Guide. But if they make this into a movie – and it sure feels like they will – then it may lose its heart. Because this is a 240-page poem where “The room is silent as a photograph” and “The bus’s lights make it feel like a dentist’s office gliding through the wet streets” and where “… a handful of straggling stars were biting through the sky’s milky haze.” I mean, maybe if Terrance Mallick does it in some Tree Of Life way – maybe. But it’s a poem. I found it both a fast read – no giant halting words sort of thing – and a slow read – with at least one sentence per paragraph jumping out of the page to say "You need to read me again, immediately!" The novel is written as a long confessional letter by a now slightly older protagonist to his non-English-reading mother. Telling her everything. About beauty, overdoses, graphic sex, grief – everything. I’ll just add: The book opens very abstractly. Like I had no idea what was going on. But once you push through the first few chapters there is a more chronologically meaty middle. An absolutely exquisite tap-dancing-down-a-tightrope novel. Perfect for: experimental fiction fans, anyone who liked Brokeback Mountain, poetry buffs… 10. Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life by Bryon Katie. I've been spending time this week making our 6th annual "Best Of" episode of 3 Books – which will drop on the exact minute of the December Solstice, as always! – and, while doing so, I got pulled back down the rabbit hole that was Chapter 123 with Suzy Batiz. Suzy grew from a horrifyingly abusive childhood up through the ayahuasca-laden jungles of Peru to become the founder of the billion-dollar brand Poo~Pourri. And, like every guest on the show, 3 crucial, formative books helped shape her. The very first book being this easy-to-read Byron Katie stage script describing a four-question process to help you see what’s bothering you and (hopefully) let it go. The four questions are: 1) Is it true?, 2) Can you absolutely know that it’s true?, 3) How do you react when you believe that thought?, and 4) Who would you be without the thought? It sounds lite – almost trivial – but the questions are brought to life with on-stage dialogues and, I think, when asked of yourself, slowly, with the guidance in the book, it really can be helpful and perspective-creating to separate what’s happening from your interpretation of what’s happening … and then seeing your interpretation as something you can release. Will it always work? Does it apply in every situation? No, of course not. But the model is still helpful. Perfect for: people with strong negative self-talk, Eckart Tolle fans, and anyone open-minded enough to read a somewhat-cheesy-looking 20-year-old self-help book… 9. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly. You know how Spotify sends those end-of-year listening reports that everyone geeks out about for like 12 hours? Well, if I had a report like that for “links you’ve texted” I am pretty sure “1000 True Fans” would be in my top three. Kevin has an incredible ability to distill unwieldy and complex things into tiny sentences placing him on a high mantle with Seth Godin and Derek Sivers. That’s why I crushed on the KK.org blog post titled “68 Bits Of Advice” that he released on his birthday in 2020. (Even copying his format exactly for my birthday advice this year and last year.) He's since taken down the post but there's a video if you want the Old Man On A Rocking Chair version – and the top YouTube comment has them all listed. After you’ve read them, don’t you just want Kevin to be your dad? Well, he kind of … could be? He’s omnipresent. Like an apparating Obi-Wan. He just sort of appears and starts telling you what to do. He blogs constantly and posts constantly and emails constantly. He writes wonderful books and now he has compressed his birthday compressions into the kind of book every writer wishes they wrote. A few of my favorites: “Make others feel they are important; it will make their day and it will make your day.”, “Buy used books. They have the same words as new ones.”, “Most effective remedy for anger is delay.”, “For best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.”, “Unhappiness comes from wanting what others have. Happiness comes from wanting what you have.”, “The rich have money. The wealthy have time. It is easier to become wealthy than rich.” Perfect for: bathroom readers, wisdom junkies, and people craving deeper directional lines for living in this world full of pop-up-and-yelling heads… 8. Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan. “This is a book about Nick Cave’s inner life,” says the jacket and that’s about as understated as it could be given the book reads like the ultimately well-crafted podcast. A long, meaty, thoughtful Q&A conducted over many phone calls by expert British journalist Seán O’Hagan, along with Nick Cave, who just has one of the vastest, deepest, tidal-wave minds. I didn’t know much about Nick Cave before reading this book – beyond the fact that I loved “Into My Arms” years ago and occasionally had a “Red Hand File” email from him shared with me – so it was gratifying discovering this book was less memoir (they don’t talk about his upbringing, really) and much more 65-year-lived philosophy examining our relationship with, amongst other things, creativity, doubt, grief, religion, family, and resilience. Nick has had giant artistic success, deep personal tragedy (including his 15-year-old son falling to his death off a cliff), and a truly vast style of living (geographically, relationshippy, religionny, creatively, etc) and, yeah, the way he navigates them is almost … otherworldly? Sort of how George Saunderswrites about writing. On the creative impulse: “You have to operate, at least some of the time, in the world of mystery, beneath that great and terrifying cloud of artistic unknowing. The creative impulse to me, is a form of bafflement, and often feels dissonant and unsettling. It chips away at your own cherished truths about things, pushes against your own sense of what is acceptable. It’s the guiding force that leads you to where it wants to go.” On certainty: “The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority.” On skepticism: “I think of late I’ve grown increasingly impatient with my own skepticism; it feels obtuse and counter-productive, something that’s simply standing in the way of a better-lived life. I feel it would be good for me to get beyond it. I think I would be happier if I stopped window shopping and just stepped through the door.” And it goes on. Perfect for: creative souls, people navigating their own relationships with spirituality or loss, and anyone who loved Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny, Beautiful Things (10/2020) 7. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich. So, if Sex At Dawn (Best Book of 2022) is the long evolutionary history of sex then this book is the long evolutionary history of dancing – or, more generally, “collective effervescence”, as Émile Durkheim calls it, which Barbara Ehrenreich cites, in this thorough, iterative, pace-by-pace introspection of our human compulsion to moooooooooove. From "Dionysus to the Grateful Dead", as the cover blurb says. “Why should humans be rewarded so generously for moving their bodies together in time? We are also pleasurably rewarded for sexual activity, and it’s easy to figure out why", she says on Page 26. But ... dancing? Why do we feel the need to dance? To share in collective body-moving joy? In the “She Don’t Use Jelly” encore, in the drumbeats before the playoff game, or even in the galvanizing closing words of a speaker at the end of a supply chain conference. We’re up, we’re crying, we’re cheering, we’re moving, we’re doing all this – why? Well, back to Barbara, “to be ‘outdanced’ is to risk reproductive failure” for the simple reason that for much of our history “early humans probably faced off predatory animals collectively – banding together in a tight group, stamping their feet, shouting, and waving sticks or branches.” We still sort of do this. Bear swings by, we’re told to exaggerate our height – swing sticks, make ourselves big! "Predators might be tricked by synchronous behavior into thinking that it faced – not a group of individually weak and defenseless humans – but a single, very large animal.” Could today’s dancing be part of yesterday’s evolutionary success story? Yes, says Ehrenreich! And then for much of the book, she goes on to share how the higher-level we – structures we created around church, governments, and civil structure – sought to stamp out “collective effervescence”, because it’s hard to control and helps the masses accomplish massive things, only to have our endlessly "must keep dancing" ways blow back and back and back again. Ehrenreich shares how “ancient Greek elite did not abandon the old ecstatic rituals but simply took them underground” with sixth-century BCE groupings that “drew on social elites, whose members gathered periodically for secret rites apparently aimed, above all, at engendering collective ecstasy.” From there through the advent of the church to the “riots” of 50s rock-and-roll to the “carnivalization” of professional sports, this is a well-strung-together cultural portrait that feels something like walking down a long wall reading a thoughtful museum exhibit. For the rest of our days may we all seek to organize, participate, and join in-person "collective effervescence." Perfect for: cultural history buffs, anybody who works with really big groups, fans of joy… 6. Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler. Richler wrote this book in 1975 and it’s a real 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 such a unique “superkid superhero” tone. Perfect for: anyone who wants to feel like they're back sitting on a pebble-filled green carpet in third grade with their eyes popped open while listening to their teacher read them a book from their rocking chair… 5. Paradais by Fernanda Melchor. The most well-paced, three-dimensional, raw emotional spasm of a book I have ever read. A 112-page novel with a jarring red cover of a ... blue apple? But it hits like a riptide. Surprising, pulling, tornado-twisting from-the-ground view as a half-serious-half-not plot slowly hatches by two desperate teen boys. Polo is the gardener at the luxury Mexican housing complex Paradais and an omniscient Polo-shadowing narrator tells the story of his relationship with Fatboy, with “eyes vacant and bloodshot from alcohol and fingers sticky with cheesy powder.” Fatboy’s parents are nowhere, his grandparents have their eye off the plot, and he’s in carnal-teen love with Señora Marián, a resident at the complex, who is married to a Mexican TV host. On the first page, Fatboy’s “gelatinous body wobbled in a crude pantomime of coitus” and the book’s endless twisting phrases are just beginning. (Read the entire first page here.) Yet this book, amazing given how short it is, doesn’t just dwell in the present. There are two deep backstory asides told with a suspenseful visual clarity that brings to mind the final episodes of Breaking Bad. 112 pages that will leave you feeling 112 emotions. Perfect for: Tarantino fans, people unafraid by "gritty and raw", and anyone who could use a good short book… 4. The Home Place: Memoir of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham. This seems like a simple autobiographical-type memoir broken into three parts (Flock, Fledgling, and Flight), but the writing, wow, the writing – it’s so vivid, transportive, and meditative. Lanham’s ‘love affair’ with nature is contagious and this book will awaken your inner forest-dweller. Just listen to this paragraph as the book opens when he’s describing his home county of Edgefield, South Carolina: “Droughty sands hold onto remnant stands of longleaf pine and stunted turkey oaks in the southern and eastern extremes where the upper coastal plain peters out. In the soggy bottoms of many of the rivers and creeks, rich alluvial soils grow splotchy-barked sycamores and warty hackberries to girths so big that two large men joined hand to hand couldn’t reach around them. A few buttressed bald cypresses draped in Spanish moss sit in tea-stained sloughs. Between the extremes of wet and dry, high and low, even the sticky clay nourishes a surprising variety of hardwoods; slow-growing upland oaks and tight-grained tough-as-nails hickories grow alongside fast-rising tulip poplars and opportunistic sweetgums.” See what I mean? Just wait. He takes us into his fantastical upbringing on ‘the home place’ with the unforgettable Mamatha, weaves natural lessons into gentle reflections on race and the state of America, and, more than anything, stirs up the rich alluvial soils in the soggy bottoms of our hearts. Perfect for: Southerners, memoir lovers, and, once again, birders… 3.Tough Boris by Mem Fox. Yes, I'm going to throw a 30-year-old picture book in my bronze medal position this year. Doug Miller of Doug Miller Books rooted this out of tipsy piles on his counters and handed it to me saying it was his all-time favorite picture book. "Once upon a time, there lived a pirate named Boris von der Borch", it begins, with grizzled, beady-eyed, fierce-looking Boris looking at a treasure map on a sandy beach. "He was tough," it continues, with Boris leering over a group of pirates pulling a treasure chest out of the sand. "All pirates are tough." "He was massive," it continues with Boris laughing and holding his parrot onboard the ship deck. "All pirates are massive." Momentum builds: "He was greedy.", "All pirates are greedy.", "He was fearless", "All pirates are fearless", "He was scary", "All pirates are scary" – and then a screeching halt: "But when his parrot died, he cried and cried." A suddenly emotional scene of tough Boris crying over his dead bird before sadly placing it into a fiddle-case casket and throwing it into the ocean. Before closing with "All pirates cry." and then, finally … "And so do I." A surprisingly heart-stirring tale somehow told in only 71 words. Complete picture book mastery. A wonderful and simple book to help slowly-solidifying children keep cracking – and to value that. Perfect for: five-year-olds, pirates, and anyone who needs a reminder to embrace their sensitive side… 2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. The very first sentence of this book had a magnetic, pulling "WTF-I-want-to-know-more" effect. See if it does the same for you: "Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur – a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds – and for most of his youth, he was Sam, S.A.M. on the hall of fame of his grandfather's Donkey Kong machine, but mainly Sam." The curtain lifts! And suddenly we have identity and growth and change and ego and 80s video games and maybe that oh-the-camera-is-about-to-pull-back feeling. That's what I got, anyway. There is a lot to chew on here – a lot of movement, a lot happening – but Gabrielle Zevin, or her omniscient occasionally-clacky-tongued narrator, I should say – holds us tightly. She describes scenes in high-def, folds characters in that shock and surprise (like the unforgettable Dov), and keeps the plot jumping. The story pinballs between decades, characters deepen, and every door opened up is graciously closed. So, uh, what's it about? Well, it's a multi-decade back-and-forth story of Sam and Sadie, who evolve from childhood friends who meet playing Super Mario Bros on NES in a hospital common room in LA to eventual video-game-creating partners to … well, I'm not going to blow things. I will say I found myself surprise-crying at many emotions surfacing from the past … coming-of-age anxieties, social disconnections, self-judgment, and unrequited love, just to name a few! Fast-paced, warm-hearted, and a wonderful scratch for your inner 90s gamer, too. A book to fall into and a true joy to read. Perfect for: John Green fans, people who liked The Social Network, and nerds… 1. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. Okay, number one. I have to say this is the book I have thought about and thought back to more than any other this year. It starts as a massive indictment of Google and Facebook and the grotesque form of mutant capitalism they spawned. Surveillance capitalism is ‘a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.’ Sound big? It is. The book is very wide-arms-around-everything – enticingly, wondrously, intoxicatingly so. As an example, that ‘new economic order’ line is one of eight definitions Zuboff offers in the opening pages – right between the arresting 14-line epigraph from W.H. Auden and the 2-page Table of Contents – which, btw, is not to be confused with the detailed six-page Table of Contents from Page 536-Page 541. Here’s the thing: You will want to read it all. All! You’ll want to eat it all. All of it. The whole thing! To soak this book in through every pore on your skin like some kind of healing cream. It’s that good. That entrancing opening is a slow-arcing bump for the ten-fingered set that follows. A captivating 18-page Introduction awaits where Zuboff lays out the starting grounds (‘The digital realm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a chance to ponder and decide’) and then outlines her premise: “… rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it. What does this sea change mean for us, for our children, for our democracies, and for the very possibility of a human future in a digital world? This book aims to answer these questions.’ And then … it is on. She goes deep, fast, but with care, without ego, and all is revealed in a winking-socratic-professor style that leaves you feeling almost intoxicated by learning. She reminds us “until the last few minutes of human history, each life was foretold in blood and geography, sex and kin, rank, and religion. I am my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s son. The sense of the human being as an individual emerged gradually over centuries, clawed from this ancient vise” before pushing to say “The new harms we face entail challenges to the sanctity of the individual… including theright to the future tense and the right to sanctuary” and then concluding that “My aim here is to slow down the action in order to enlarge the space for such debate and unmask the tendencies of these new creations as they amplify inequality, intensify social hierarchy, exacerbate exclusion, usurp rights, and strip personal life of whatever it is that makes it personal for you or me. If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so. We will need to know. We will need to decide. We will need to decide who decides. This is our fight for a human future.” Does it feel like you’ve just read the book? But that’s just the end of the Introduction! Now you’re on Page 62 and the book is about to go 20,000 leagues under the sea. Fear not! The treacherous and dark terrain is covered with a buoyant lightfootedness that is stunning. The number of doors Zuboff opens– pulling out long-kept-in-the-dark documents and tying together loosely-held news headlines over decades – are some kind of top-tier detective work. Most of the 18 chapters in this book make for long-podcast style listens, too, if you want to grab the audio version and listen simultaneously like I did. An absolutely wondrous book. Perfect for: anyone who liked 'The Social Dilemma', people craving a more screen-free existence, and anyone who likes deep investigative journalism…
