Neil . Pasricha

December 7, 2023

Reading

The Very Best Books I Read in 2023

Neil . Pasricha

December 7, 2023

Reading

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

P.S. Interested in more of my reviews? Click here to join the Book Club email list.

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 did for 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 Saunders writes 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 the right 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…

Interested in more of my reviews? Click here to join the Book Club email list.

Neil . Pasricha

December 6, 2023

Ideas

7 quotes on the power of reading from Charlie Munger

Neil . Pasricha

December 6, 2023

Ideas

Hey everyone,

Charlie Munger died last Tuesday at age 99. If you don't know him, I recommend this New York Times obituary or (to go deeper) the book Poor Charlie's Almanack which was one of my top books of 2020. I was texting my friend Shane the day his death was announced and he told me had a meeting scheduled with Charlie. That day! They were going to discuss Charlie coming on Shane's podcast. He got a cancellation from Charlie's assistant a few hours before the news. But think about that: At age 99 the man was ... still working. I love that. You know my views on retirement which I expand on heavily in The Happiness Equation.

One quote I love which I got from this 2005 "Never Retire" NYT Op-Ed by Bill Safire is: "When you're through changing, you're through." Maybe that's the real pearl of wisdom. Not to keep gunning till you die but to simply always strive to change — to grow — to learn. Curiosity! Staying connected! Being tapped in! I hope when I'm 99 I have a meeting scheduled with some plucky Canadian podcaster 50 years younger than me. Why? Because I know I'll learn something from that. And I hope that after the call I pick up a book.

Charlie Munger's wisdom is captured in many places — including this great repository Shane created on his blog — but today I want to just share a few of my favorite quotes about reading. He was a reading evangelist! And I love him for it. Because sometimes, when I'm on, you know, the tenth hour of writing up my monthly book club or twenty hours into prepping to interview somebody about their formative books I stop and think "Wait, does anybody even read anymore? Who's reading books? Why am I focusing all my time and energy on something potentially shrinking when I should really be learning how to use The Tik Tok?"

Ah, but then I read quotes like these and remember. Wisdom, learning, growing, changing — really living, that's what I'm after. I think that's something we share. And I know I have found nothing offering more compressed wisdom nor a wider range of experienced emotions than reading books.

Thank you, Charlie. Rest in peace. And may we all enjoy a lifetime of reading. A few of my favorite "Charlie on reading" quotes below!

Neil

1. “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.”

2. “As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.”

3. “We read a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.”

4. “Warren (Buffett) and I do more reading and thinking and less doing than most people in business. We do that because we like that kind of a life. But we’ve turned that quirk into a positive outcome for ourselves. We both insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.”

5. "Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.”

6. "It's been my experience in life if you just keep thinking and reading you don't have to work."

7. “If it’s wisdom you are after, you are going to spend a lot of time sitting on your ass and reading.”

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with an article I’ve written, or one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

7 books to calm your mind before bed (instead of watching the news!)

Neil . Pasricha

November 24, 2023

Ideas

Hey everyone,

Time for my Black Friday door-crashing special! Just kidding. I'm not doing that. I just want to talk about reading books. Why? Well, do you fall into late-night doomscrolling rabbit holes like I do? Makes sense! Billions of dollars of research have fine-tuned the hijacking machine that pulls us forever deeper into news and social media funnels. Especially when we're tired and unable to mentally pull away. I've started locking my phone in a Kitchen Safe every night -- I bought the Mini version from this website (no affiliation and not an ad!) -- and then head up to read.

Here are 7 books to help calm your mind before bed,

Neil

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Let's start with some children's literature! Hypnotic autobiographical description of growing up in rural Wisconsin in the late 1800s. From shooting panthers to smoking meat in hollow tree trunks to playing catch with pig bladders. There is no plot. There is no crisis. There’s just 238 pages in 18-point font of vivid memories weaved into a captivating tableau that makes you feel like you’re living another life. And one that's far, far away from this one. Masterful escapism and the first book in the famous “Little House” series. Originally written in 1937 and still perfect today.

How To Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times by Chris Bailey. Little more head on but a great book Chris wrote post-burnout and post-anxiety attack as a simple guide to calming his / your mind. So how do we calm your mind? Get off phones, get outside, lower dopamine, increase analog -- and Chris 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. Great offering for the overwhelmed.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris. Really anything by David Sedaris could go here. A long time ago my friend Shiv told me she read a Sedaris essay every night before bed. Something sounded off about that. But then I tried it. And she’s right! There’s something so soothing about his slow, peaceful pace. The rhythm feels like hanging with a friend. And the laughs wash away stress, too. Here’s “It’s Catching” by Sedaris in The New Yorker if you want a sample from this collection. I still love Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day, too.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Set in a small Iowa town named (yes) Gilead in the 1950s the book is a letter from a septuagenarian pastor to his first and only child, a young boy, with everything he wishes he’d be around to tell him when he got older. Sound tearjerking already? Just wait. There are layers beyond layers here and yet they’re all baked into a pastry that somehow feels light. I already feel like I need to read it again. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. I wrote a lot about ikigai in The Happiness Equation which is perhaps why Hector Garcia mailed me a copy of this book when it first came out. It has gone on to become a massive international bestseller. And for good reason: The book triangulates and expands elements of Dan Buettner’s famous Blue Zones studies and TED Talk into a well-researched, wide-ranging, well-organized handbook with everything from sharing Okinawan antioxidant-rich food to lessons on practicing qigong. Helps us pull away from the stress of today.

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and The Art of Living by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. A wonderful collection of excerpts from the Stoic greats -- Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and their pals -- with a contemporary expansion from Ryan. Nothing beats getting out of the moment like reading something over 1000 years old. (That's one of my seven ideas for sleeping better.) This is Ryan Holiday's bestselling book for good reason.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. James Frey told me he finds solace in the Tao Te Ching -- one of his three most formative books. A lot of little poems or words of wisdom resonated with me from that book so I looked for a copy. What’s the biggest problem finding a “book” written over 2500 years ago? Picking a translation. The used bookstore near my house had about a dozen. I kept opening and looking for one where I could make sense of what I was reading and finally settled on a translation by David Hinton. You can find some good options to pick from here. Wonderful to read a few pages before bed. Sometimes they rattle around my brain, sometimes I feel like I’m lost in a zen koan, and sometimes I feel like I pull something beautiful from them. Here’s a sample: “7. There’s a reason heaven and earth go on enduring forever / their life isn’t their own / so their life goes on forever. / Hence, in putting himself last / the sage puts himself first, / and in giving himself up / he preserves himself. / If you aren’t free of yourself / how will you ever become yourself?”

We live in overwhelming times! I hope one of these books helps you pull yourself back from the overwhelm. As always, just reply and let me know which ones you resonated with or any others you recommend. Hang in there, everybody.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with an article I’ve written, or one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

How to Tell Yourself a Different Story with Seth Godin

Neil . Pasricha

October 11, 2023

Ideas

Hey everyone,

A few moons ago I began testing a new short-and-sweet style release on my 3 Books podcast feed. I’m thinking of the entire show as one big book! And, as you know, every full moon I drop a new Chapter. The goal is 333 Chapters total for 1000 formative books all the way up to 2040.

Well, now I’m trying out Pages. A Page is a 333-second (or less) excerpt from a Chapter dropped at 3:33am between Chapters. Bite-sized! Meant to drop a little morsel of wisdom — or a book recommendation or an interesting viewpoint — into your feed. For short commutes, little walks, or just a podcast palette cleanser between longer listens.

Today I’m pasting the transcript of the most popular Page so far: Page 31 from Seth Godin called “How to Tell Yourself a Different Story.” You can download all Pages by subscribing to the show on Apple or Spotify. 100% free and 100% ad-free — as always.

Have a great week,

Neil

Page 31: How to Tell Yourself a Different Story with Seth Godin

Page 31 here | Full chat with Seth here

Seth: I think almost all help is self-help. If you were drowning, it's really unlikely that someone will pick you up and take you out of the water. It is way more likely that someone will throw you a life buoy. Or, reach out with a long stick. Or, try to help you swim to shore. But if you don't want to do it, you're probably not going to get saved. And that, what we seek to do when we want to do better, when we want to feel better, or when we want to make a better difference, is help ourselves, is commit to moving forward. And that's all a self-help book does, if it's doing a good job, is open the door for you to fix yourself. The author can't fix you. The diet book can't make you skinny. A book on goal setting can't make you successful. What it can do is open the door.

And so, if you say, 'I don't like self-help books, they're always trying to do this and this and this.' You might be saying, 'Well actually I don't want to help myself get out of this spot I'm in because I'm comfortable being unhappy. I'm comfortable being stuck.' And that the problem with reading a book like this is that it might work. And if it works, then I'll have to change. And if I change, that might be uncomfortable.

My story is that I was unsuccessful and unhappy. I had a narrative in my head that things weren't working and every time something didn't work I would go 'Ah, there it goes again!' But the door was open and I said, you know what, your problem is not the outside world. Your problem is the story you're telling yourself about the outside world, and that story is a choice. And if you're not happy with the story, tell yourself another story. Period. That simple. And most people will hear what I just said and not change anything. Because I'd been telling myself a story that made me unhappy. And if I wasn't happy with that story I should tell myself a different story. The outside world wasn't the problem. I mean I won the birthday lottery. I grew up with great parents, upper-middle class, with privilege, going to a famous college, and I was healthy. So every story I was telling myself was this made-up story that I didn't have to tell myself. I could've told myself a different story. And that choice is at the heart of almost every self-help book. And it's at the heart of what a non-fiction author has the chance to do. Now notice, when you read a book, the voice is your voice -- not true when you listen to an audiobook. Your voice, in your head, saying something that you didn't believe until you read it. And maybe, just maybe, the author can use the tension and the leverage and the moment to create a little bit of magic that gets you to open the door you could've opened all along. All of us could tell ourselves a better story.

Neil: What happened after that? You said everything changed?

Seth: My life completely changed. I stopped whining. I stopped looking for reasons to whine. Shortly thereafter I applied for an on-campus job and became co-founder of the largest student run business in the country. We started a travel agency and a ticket bureau and a concert agency and a coffee shop and a laundry service and a birthday cake service, every week or two we started a new business and -- so many things happened because I chose to tell myself a different story. Shortly after that I met the woman who became my wife, which was a great decision on my part, and so all of those factors happened, not because the outside world got better, but because I chose to tell myself a different story.

Neil: That is so beautiful.

Listen to all Pages on Apple or Spotify. Full chat with Seth here.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with an article I’ve written, or one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

The Nature of the Fun by David Foster Wallace

Neil . Pasricha

September 26, 2023

Ideas

Hey everyone,

'The Nature of the Fun' by David Foster Wallace (DFW) is one of my favorite essays.

It's purportedly about writing fiction—and wrestling through the fears and emotions around the process—but I think it applies to a lot more. Like how to find, and especially re-find, the fun at the heart of whatever challenging thing you're doing. Especially after you've had some success. Beware market winds or they may blow you senseless!

This essay originally appeared in 'Fiction Writer' in 1998 and is available today as part of the absolutely phenomenal DFW essay collection 'Both Flesh and Not' (Library, Goodreads, Amazon). The copyright is held by the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. (DFW very sadly died by suicide in 2008.) I have bought 'Both Flesh and Not' (Library, Goodreads, Amazon) as a gift for people many times and highly recommend it. This essay is worth owning in print and the title track on Roger Federer is likely the best essay on tennis ever written. Many, many gems in there.

On a personal note I talked about 'The Nature of the Fun' back in Chapter 1 of 3 Books as it was a big part of my inspiration to start the podcast. I reread it often and use it as a helpful artistic centering force.

I hope you like it too,

Neil

The Nature of the Fun

Written by David Foster Wallace | (Library, Goodreads, Amazon)

The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo's Mao II, where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (i.e., dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer's trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebrospinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it'll get: the writer's complete attention.

The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he's working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it—a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception—yes, understand: grotesque because imperfect. And yet it's yours, the infant is, it's you, and you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebrospinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left because you haven't done laundry in like three weeks because finally this one chapter or character seems like it's finally trembling on the edge of coming together and working and you're terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because if you look away for a second you'll lose it, dooming the whole infant to continued hideousness. And but so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it; but also you hate it—hate it—because it's deformed, repellent, because something grotesque has happened to it in the parturition from head to page; hate it because its deformity is your deformity (since if you were a better fiction writer your infant would of course look like one of those babies in catalogue ads for infantwear, perfect and pink and cerebrospinally continent) and its every hideous incontinent breath is a devastating indictment of you, on all levels... and so you want it dead, even as you dote and love and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when it seems like its own grotesqueness has blocked its breath and it might die altogether.

The whole thing's all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it's also tender and moving and noble and cool—it's a genuine relationship, of a sort—and even at the height of its hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and awakens what you suspect are some of the very best parts of you: maternal parts, dark ones. You love your infant very much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged infant to go out and face the world.

So you're in a bit of a dicey position: you love the infant and want others to love it, but that means you hope others won't see it correctly. You want to sort of fool people: you want them to see as perfect what you in your heart know is a betrayal of all perfection.

Or else you don't want to fool these people; what you want is you want them to see and love a lovely, miraculous, perfect, ad-ready infant and to be right, correct, in what they see and feel. You want to be terribly wrong: you want the damaged infant's hideousness to turn out to have been nothing but your own weird delusion or hallucination. But that'd mean you were crazy: you have seen, been stalked by, and recoiled from hideous deformities that in fact (others persuade you) aren't there at all. Meaning you're at least a couple fries short of a Happy Meal, surely. But worse: it'd also mean you see and despise hideousness in a thing you made (and love), in your spawn, in in certain ways you. And this last, best hope—this'd represent something way worse than just very bad parenting; it'd be a terrible kind of self-assault, almost self-torture. But that's still what you most want: to be completely, insanely, suicidally wrong.

But it's still all a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong. As to the nature of that fun, I keep remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school when I was about the size of a fire hydrant. It takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that. It seems there was this old farmer outside a village in the hill country who worked his farm with only his son and his beloved horse. One day the horse, who was not only beloved but vital to the labor-intensive work on the farm, picked the lock on his corral or whatever and ran off into the hills. All the old farmer's friends came around to exclaim what bad luck this was. The farmer only shrugged and said, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A couple days later the beloved horse returned from the hills in the company of a whole priceless herd of wild horses, and the farmer's friends all come around to congratulate him on what good luck the horse's escape turned out to be. "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" is all the farmer says in reply, shrugging. The farmer now strikes me as a bit Yiddish-sounding for an old Chinese farmer, but this is how I remember it. But so the farmer and his son set about breaking the wild horses, and one of the horses bucks the son off his back with such wild force that the son breaks his leg. And here come the friends to commiserate with the farmer and curse the bad luck that had ever brought these accursed wild horses onto his farm. The old farmer just shrugs and says, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A few days later the Imperial Sino-Korean Army or something like that comes marching through the village, conscripting every able-bodied male between like ten and sixty for cannon-fodder for some hideously bloody conflict that's apparently brewing, but when they see the son's broken leg, they let him off on some sort of feudal 4-F, and instead of getting shanghaied the son stays on the farm with the old farmer. Good luck? Bad luck?

This is the sort of parabolic straw you cling to as you struggle with the issue of fun, as a writer. In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavor's about fun. You don't expect anybody else to read it. You're writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don't like. And it works—and it's terrific fun. Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually get to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the AM subway by a pretty girl you don't even know, it seems to make it even more fun. For a while. Then things start to get complicated and confusing, not to mention scary. Now you feel like you're writing for other people, or at least you hope so. You're no longer writing just to get yourself off, which—since any kind of masturbation is lonely and hollow—is probably good. But what replaces the onanistic motive? You've found you very much enjoy having your writing liked by people, and you find you're extremely keen to have people like the new stuff you're doing. The motive of pure personal fun starts to get supplanted by the motive of being liked, of having pretty people you don't know like you and admire you and think you're a good writer. Onanism gives way to attempted seduction, as a motive. Now, attempted seduction is hard work, and its fun is offset by a terrible fear of rejection. Whatever "ego" means, your ego has now gotten into the game. Or maybe "vanity" is a better word. Because you notice that a good deal of your writing has now become basically showing off, trying to get people to think you're good. This is understandable. You have a great deal of yourself on the line, now, writing—your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing: a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it at all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal. At this point 90+ percent of the stuff you're writing is motivated and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked. This results in shitty fiction. And the shitty work must get fed to the wastebasket, less because of any sort of artistic integrity than simply because shitty work will make you disliked. At this point in the evolution of writerly fun, the very thing that's always motivated you to write is now also what's motivating you to feed your writing to the wastebasket. This is a paradox and a kind of double bind, and it can keep you stuck inside yourself for months or even years, during which you wail and gnash and rue your bad luck and wonder bitterly where all the fun of the thing could have gone.

The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to work your way somehow back to your original motivation: fun. And, if you can find your way back to the fun, you will find that the hideously unfortunate double bind of the late vain period turns out really to have been good luck for you. Because the fun you work back to has been transfigured by the unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you're now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery that disciplined fun is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not all paradoxes have to be paralyzing. Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.

The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you'd first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn't any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of strangers' affection is as dust, lint.

Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:

Every other week, I send an email out with an article I’ve written, or one of my favorite speeches, essays or poems. No ads, no sponsors, no spam, and nothing for sale. Just a dose of inspiration or beauty!

44 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 44

Neil . Pasricha

September 15, 2023

Ideas

Hey everyone,

Today is my birthday!

Last year I shared a list of birthday advice. Now it's time for this years! Two in a row makes it a tradition, I think. For the list just scroll down!

Btw some background if you're still reading the top part: I've been wisdom-collecting for years. In my 20s I took hundreds of flights and always made it my goal to ask the person I was sitting beside for a piece of life advice before getting off the plane. (It helps that my 20s were before airplane internet and giant headphone cocoons.) I'm sure a lot of these come from those chats. And then, after last year's list, I made a little file on my phone called "44" and have been planting, snipping, and pruning it all year -- treating this list like some kind of little plant I'm ready to finally put on my porch.

And remember: Lists like these are preachy by nature! Take what you like and chuck the rest in the bin.

Here we go:

1. The best sunblock is the one you use.

2. If you don't know if it goes in the dryer, it doesn't.

3. Let your kids catch you reading books. Don't let them watch you scrolling social media.

4. 3 E's of a great speech: Entertain, Educate, Empower.

5. Dating tip: You meet interesting people in interesting places.

6. Add a silent mental "...yet" to any sentence you catch yourself starting with "I can't", "I'm not", or "I don't." "I can't speak Hindi ...yet", "I'm not a runner ...yet", "I don't eat oysters ...yet."

7. Mood follows action.

8. Time you spend with your kids when they're young correlates with time they spend with you when you're old.

9. Stock tip: Buy the haystack, not the needle.

10. Never buy a couch before taking a nap on it.

11. Remember the 'End Of History Illusion': We all know our pasts were bumpy -- yet never expect our futures to be.

12. Ideas are the easy part. Doing it is the hard part.

13. No cell phones in the bedroom. If you need waking up, buy an alarm clock. If you get emergency calls, get a landline.

14. There's nothing wrong with ending a sentence with of.

15. Easy way to entertain toddlers: Lie face down in the middle of the floor.

16. Grapefruits that look best often taste worst and grapefruits that look worst often taste best.

17. Wrap floss around middle fingers not pointer fingers.

18. Most people read zero books last year. 2 pages of fiction a day helps build back the habit. 'Foster', 'Animal Farm', 'A Christmas Carol', 'The Little Prince', and 'The Old Man and The Sea' are all <100 pages.

19. You can't make new old friends.

20. Addiction is when something that takes you from normal to good starts taking you from bad to normal.

21. Beware the 5 greatest regrets of the dying: i) I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself ii) I wish I hadn't worked so hard iii) I wish I had the courage to express my feelings, iv) I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends, and v) I wish I had let myself be happier

22. Don't post your kids faces online. They might sue you.

23. Divorce is not a death sentence.

24. Strapping things to your body to measure things in your body makes you less connected to your body.

25. Between jobs remember: The longer you hold your breath underwater the more interesting place you come up.

26. On making decisions: Low time, low importance? Automate. High time, low importance? Regulate. Low time, high importance? Effectuate. (Just do it!) High time, high importance? Debate.

27. If you don't deal with your shit, your shit deals with you.

28. When sending meeting options in multiple time zones put their time zone first.

29. Stitches vs Bandaids Test: Aim to say yes to kids trying things that cause bandaids and no to things that cause stitches.

30. You don't have to finish the book.

31. Ikigai: A reason to get out of bed in the morning. Write one down on a folded index card and leave it on your bedside table.

32. To pay more attention in video meetings: Hide Self View.

33. Blender breakfast I've used for 15 years: water, cinnamon, turmeric, protein, frozen banana, frozen greens, powdered greens, nut milk, nut butter, yogurt, avocado.

34. Guaranteed way to get good: Do it for free for ten years.

35. You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

36. Funeral Rule: If you're not sure if you should go, go.

37. The Lindy Effect: Longer something's been popular, longer it'll stay popular. Helpful for finding books, restaurants, ideas.

38. Cut the cord between guilt and pleasure.

39. Social Media Paradox: More you're posting about it less you're doing it.

40. There is a relationship between how much you buy local and how nice the flowers are in your park.

41. Changing your mind is a sign of strength not weakness.

42. There is a tiny arrow on your gas gauge that tells you which way to park your car at the pumps.

43. Quickest happiness hack? Lower expectations.

44. You only earned what you spent and enjoyed.

-

I'm sure I stole all of these but some specific credits: Rich Roll (7), Daniel Gilbert, Jordi Quoidbach, and Timothy Wilson (11), Paul Graham (20), Bronnie Ware (21), Sarah Silverman (27), Joey Coleman (29), James Clear (35), and my dad (44). Bad paraphrases all mine, of course. Click here to read last year's list.